In my adult life, I have occasionally experienced disapproval or even derision upon admitting that as a youth I once played Dungeons & Dragons. I have always found, and continue to find, such disapproval surprising; for what could be healthier for a teenager than to engage in harmless role play in the company of friends, with the television off, and without (in my and my friends’ case) drugs or alcohol, while exercising our imaginations and our skills at vivid communication? I often think the disapprovers might better direct their criticisms to today’s internet-based virtual-reality sites, such as Second Life and Entropia Universe. It is not simply because they constitute temptations to spend more hours of one’s day in front of a screen, or even to part with hard-earned money. Rather, these sites make its users do what Dungeons & Dragons players were frequently accused of, but never actually did: settle down into a mental space that is in neither reality nor make-believe, but in some unhealthy realm between the two.
An obvious aspect of these sites is that the worlds they present are not completely virtual. Players can purchase specific individual benefits (for example, property) with real money, and then sell benefits (such as access to the property, or tickets to cultural events that take place on that property), again with real money. Since real-money transactions are brought to bear on the play of the game, the virtuality of the world is broken.
When I was a kid playing Dungeons & Dragons, the only way your character could obtain things in the game (treasure, weapons, spells) was by doing things within the world of the game, such as steal the treasure from monsters, buy the weapons with the treasure thus obtained, or acquire spells by a process of “aging” that depended on “experience points” gained only through game play. D&D and other role-playing games were truly closed systems, with no benefits or liabilities transferable to the real world, other than a lingering sense of satisfaction or disappointment when the game was over. If your character did well, you felt good, and if your character didn’t do well, you might feel less good, but you had fun playing the game, and you got your portion of escape from the dreary world of suburban, middle-class America.
Role-playing in Second Life or Entropia Universe, however, is open to constant, continual changing of conditions using real-world equity. Users easily buy what they would like their characters to have and, having accrued profits from their investments, can even withdraw that profit, for use in the real world. If virtual worlds are games, then they are games in which persistent cheating is embraced and built into the rules.
Besides making virtual worlds potential arenas of real-world corruption and manipulation, the ability to import and export real money into and out of these “worlds” makes them fundamentally different from earlier forms of role-playing. The discrepancy is reflected in the language the sites use: they do not call their services games, but “worlds,” participants are not players, but “users,” and the fictional people they control are not characters, but “avatars.” Though this vocabulary has surely been developed for marketing purposes (many adults who use virtual-reality sites would never admit to devoting so much of their time and money to playing games), it is eerily appropriate. For virtual-reality Web sites offer double escape: that is, escape not only from the challenges and limitations of the real world, but also from the challenges and limitations of games.
When the tickets went on sale last spring, I admit I wasn't sure whether to bother. I'd been disappointed by Roger Waters' 2006 tour which featured him singing his "Dark Side of the Moon" parts in front of a staggeringly professional, precise, and unremarkable backing band.
But "The Wall" was fantastic. The music was loud, angry and crystal clear. The current production downplays the personal, Freudian-psychological aspects of the album and its original tour, and ragefully indicts politics, mass media and corporate discourse. The animation behind "Goodbye Blue Sky" featured bombers dropping bombs in the shape of crosses, hammer-and-sickles, crescents, dollar signs, Shell-Oil symbols and six-pointed stars. (The typically reactive ADL has criticized the animation. I wrote that clueless organization yet another angry letter. That'll show 'em.)
"Young Lust" was transformed from a story of a stoned rock star with a prostitute in his hotel room, into a portrait of a global population with its senses drowned in sexual imagery to the point of numbness. Throughout the intermission, and at various points in the show (notably during "Bring the Boys Back Home"), the Wall itself became a mosaic of identity cards of real-life murder victims of war and terrorism, whose names, photos and dates were submitted to Roger Waters' web site by fans from around the world. They included World War I victims, World War II victims, 9-11 fatalities, terrorist victims from
The fascist-rally portion of the show was genuinely frightening. (I visited Hitler's micro city of rally grounds at
After the show, as we shuffled out towards the parking lot, packed in with the rest of the crowd, I caught a glimpse of one of the t-shirts on sale at the merchandise booth. It featured the familiar pair of crossed hammers from The Wall film. Underneath the hammers, in white block letters, were the words TRUST US.
Over at Hey Dullblog, there was a link to a podcast containing an interview with Nik Cohn, about his feelings towards the Beatles' White Album, both almost forty years ago, when he detested it, and today, when he merely dislikes it. It's a great listen, both for the interviewer, Ben Ratliff, and the interviewee, who are both articulate and persuasive about their points of view, and are on opposite sides of the fence about the White Album. I posted the following comment to Hey Dullblog, before deciding to post it here, too. (It's my bloggy and I'll post if I want to!)
Listening to this podcast helped me understand the point of view of critics like Nik Cohn. But it also helped me understand my own point of view towards the White Album, which happens to be nearly identical with Ratliff’s. I am about one year younger than Ratliff, and had a similar experience to his. Though the White Album was not “played in the house” from a young age (my parents had Beatles ’65 and Sgt. Pepper’s), I did have the White Album since around the time I was 11 or 12 (bought with my allowance money), and I listened to it constantly. To me, to listen to the White Album was to enter the diverse community of its images. I still remember a day I was home sick from school, and I listened to all four sides of the album straight through, while reading all the lyrics as they were sung, on the unfolded poster before me on the bed. As an 11-year-old boy in a spiritually impoverished
Nik Cohn’s reaction to the White Album did remind me, however, of how I reacted to trends in pop music a few years later. As virtually every mainstream band succumbed to 80s production values, I felt the whole world of rock music was not only falling away from me, but falling away from its own past, and from taste itself. And it wasn’t just the grooveless sounds of electronic instruments; it was the cheap emotionalism and operatic pretensions of much of the music. Just as Cohn had no patience for the White Album’s “middle-class” conceits, I experienced 80s music as self-important and wimpy.
Cohn may still find Obla-di, Obla-da “not credible,” but I always did, and still do. I know that Paul McCartney believed it when he wrote it, and even if I sometimes prefer to skip past the song, I genuinely hear Paul’s belief in his words and the music that carries them. And his accidental inversion in the lyrics—along with “Cry Baby Cry,” later in the album—give me a more compelling message that adult relationships are not always what they seem than any other pop songs I can think of.
Likewise am I convinced that John Lennon meant it when he sang “the sun is up, the sky is blue, it’s beautiful and so are you” (also criticized by Cohn), not just because I happen to know the story of why he wrote it, but because I feel it in the track. And the fact that this song is followed immediately by “Glass Onion” (the gentle, fading guitar picking followed by the abrupt CLUMP...CLUMP of the bass and drums) shows that Lennon could invoke genuine naïveté and then slaughter it, too.
If you want not-credible, how about Don Henley singing “I can tell you my love for you will still be strong,” or Mister Mister singing “Take these broken wings and learn to fly again, learn to live so free.” Does anyone think that when Simple Minds sang “don’t you forget about me,” they really hoped that someone wouldn’t forget about them? I don’t. I don’t even believe that the Bangles wanted to walk like Egyptians.
One interesting aside: I was excited to discover that Cohn’s medieval-historian father, whom he mentioned in the conversation, was Norman Cohn, who wrote a book called The Pursuit of the Millennium, a study of millenarian religious cults in medieval
