Words are such a problem. In February, The Prime Minister made a speech describing the failure of multiculturalism. The speaker being David Cameron, I naturally assumed whatever he was saying would be odious, short sighted and wrong, and I wasn't far off the mark. However, I was surprised to find that on the point about multiculturalism, the National Secular Society agreed with Mr Cameron.
My surprise hinged upon my understanding of the word multiculturalism. You see, when I say "I live in a multicultural society", I mean that every day I encounter people with a broad range of skin colours, faiths, social backgrounds and behaviours, which may or may not originate in one part of the world or another, and - importantly - those differences don't really matter: people are people. I naïvely thought multiculturalism was kinda the opposite of racism.
From a political point of view, that is not the case at all. Multiculturalism is originally a racist, right wing idea: we have our culture and they have theirs, and if we keep 'em seperate it'll be easier to send 'em back where they came from. It is based on the prejudice that each person belongs to a fixed cultural group and each group should be treated seperately.
In the UK, multiculturalism is not so hard line but is nevertheless based upon discrimination between specific cultural groups. Johann Hari explains the problems of multiculturalism better than I could, but one example I can give is the pernicious notion of the faith school. The idea that a child belongs to a specific faith group and should be educated in a specific faith school is prejudiced, nonsensical and discriminatory, and can further segregate communities - if you doubt this, ask yourself why there is no such thing as a catholic fire station, which is allowed to discriminate in favour of catholic fires.
At its nicer, fluffier end, multiculturalism is an earnest attempt to address the needs of minority demographics. It is essential to acknowledge non-cultural minorities: the blind, or wheelchair users, for example. It would be reasonable to think that should extend to cultural minorities too. The problem comes when identifying our cultural group. We start to make assumptions, to label people and seperate them. When this becomes government policy, our laws and public institutions begin to discriminate based on these labels and drive wedges into the community. Hardly the way to promote tolerance and cohesion.
Mr Cameron is right: although this is a happily multicultural society, multiculturalism is the last thing we need. What we do need is called secularism. Secularism may originally relate to religion, but essentially it is about respecting and protecting each individual's right to their individual culture, and ensuring that the state is not biased or discriminatory towards any individual because of that culture. It is the very opposite of multiculturalism, which labels everyone according to some narrow definition and then purposefully discriminates between those labels.
In a country where so many cultures meet and mix, and statements of identity are never simple, secularism is surely the best way to ensure fair governance and intercultural understanding.
Postscript: the National Secular Society campaigns for secularism in the UK. I wish they were a bit less atheistic in tone because that obscures the aspect of secularism which protects freedom of religion: a campaign against religious privilege is not a campaign against religion; it is a campaign for fairness, for people of all faiths and none.
Ranting humanist.
Monday, 2 May 2011
Tuesday, 15 February 2011
Videogames or Sewage?
In response to IGN article 'Stacking Up Facebook Games', 1st Feb 2011 suggesting that social networking games make more money than most traditional videogames.
What makes more money: Tom Clancy or Hello Magazine? McDonalds or Heston Blumenthal? Videogames or sewage processing?
Social networking games are all the rage. Analysts, like the writer at IGN, are keen to make a comparison to traditional games, and it does indeed seem that social networking games, generating Monthly Active Users figures with many, many enviable digits, are going to be very profitable to those who can dominate that space; perhaps much more profitable than traditional games.
But what should the industry do with this information? Should developers all start to make social networking games, or at least include more social networking features, if that's where the biggest profit lies?
Change the context. If sewage processing makes more money than videogames, should games developers switch to sewage, or start to include more of the features of sewage in their games? Or, vice versa, if videogames make more money, should our sewage plants all become game developers and not bother treating sewage any more?
Far from being metaphorical sewage, the best social networking games are really good. They are creatively designed, extensively tested and honed, beautifully presented and clearly quite captivating to their players. I cannot criticise them for their content, although they are not the kind of game which interests me.
Nevertheless, I believe the success of social networking games to be bad for videogames in general. The problem arises because the good qualities I list above are not the reason for the games' success: the real reason is cynical user manipulation. Social networking games operate by engendering three behaviours in the players: (1) keep playing; (2) encourage your friends to play; (3) give us money. Every element of the game has to be engineered to optimise these behaviours, and whilst this does not necessarily preclude the creation of cultural value, it doesn't exactly encourage it. Citizen Kane doesn't compel you to watch it every day, drip feeding its story to a frenzy of mouse clicks. Hamlet doesn't stop mid-soliloquy until your friends also come to the theatre. The Mona Lisa doesn't charge you to upgrade her smile.
Social networking games are here to stay, at least for a while, because whether or not they are of cultural merit, they can be highly profitable. There is nothing wrong with profit - if it don't make dollars, it don't make sense - but there is more to life than the bottom line of a spreadsheet. If profit is our only aim, we may as well work with sewage.
What makes more money: Tom Clancy or Hello Magazine? McDonalds or Heston Blumenthal? Videogames or sewage processing?
Social networking games are all the rage. Analysts, like the writer at IGN, are keen to make a comparison to traditional games, and it does indeed seem that social networking games, generating Monthly Active Users figures with many, many enviable digits, are going to be very profitable to those who can dominate that space; perhaps much more profitable than traditional games.
But what should the industry do with this information? Should developers all start to make social networking games, or at least include more social networking features, if that's where the biggest profit lies?
Change the context. If sewage processing makes more money than videogames, should games developers switch to sewage, or start to include more of the features of sewage in their games? Or, vice versa, if videogames make more money, should our sewage plants all become game developers and not bother treating sewage any more?
Far from being metaphorical sewage, the best social networking games are really good. They are creatively designed, extensively tested and honed, beautifully presented and clearly quite captivating to their players. I cannot criticise them for their content, although they are not the kind of game which interests me.
Nevertheless, I believe the success of social networking games to be bad for videogames in general. The problem arises because the good qualities I list above are not the reason for the games' success: the real reason is cynical user manipulation. Social networking games operate by engendering three behaviours in the players: (1) keep playing; (2) encourage your friends to play; (3) give us money. Every element of the game has to be engineered to optimise these behaviours, and whilst this does not necessarily preclude the creation of cultural value, it doesn't exactly encourage it. Citizen Kane doesn't compel you to watch it every day, drip feeding its story to a frenzy of mouse clicks. Hamlet doesn't stop mid-soliloquy until your friends also come to the theatre. The Mona Lisa doesn't charge you to upgrade her smile.
Social networking games are here to stay, at least for a while, because whether or not they are of cultural merit, they can be highly profitable. There is nothing wrong with profit - if it don't make dollars, it don't make sense - but there is more to life than the bottom line of a spreadsheet. If profit is our only aim, we may as well work with sewage.
Thursday, 23 December 2010
The difficulty of making any kind of argument about anything whatsoever.
Turns out there is a problem with the meaning of words like 'logic' and 'faith'. In point of fact, there is a problem with the meaning of words generally, and even with meaning itself.
The trouble is, you can only define the meaning of words using other words, or perhaps by pointing at an object of reference, but no word or object can be taken as a consistent and clearly defined thing: everything changes constantly. If you want to be really pedantic about it, you can argue we can never know the exact state of all the subatomic particles kicking about the place, so we can never define once and for all where one thing stops and another begins. Eventually, no two people can ever be sure they mean the same thing, nor that anything really exists at all. Maybe we're all living in the matrix. Red or blue pill - take your pick.
This makes it very easy to spend a long time circling around an argument without ever addressing the central issue. You can pick at the precise meaning of words, or - in a tight corner - you can always take the tack that the argument cannot be proven because, subatomic particles being what they are, you can never really prove anything. QED OMG LOL.
Such nit picking is a fine pastime, but it doesn't add much to a discussion. It just takes a long diversion until everybody has established exactly what they are arguing about, so we can be more clear why we disagree. It is ultimately unproductive; after all, just because an argument is made badly doesn't mean its premise is false.
If you argue the world is round, I could argue that 'the world' doesn't mean the same as 'the planet Earth' which in any case is not a perfect sphere but an oblate spheroid with all sorts of bumps, and the assertion that you can know the true shape of an object is unprovable. But that would be a waste of time.
Perhaps we could forgo the dictonary bashing if we were allowed to make one fundamental assumption: that other people mean well.
The trouble is, you can only define the meaning of words using other words, or perhaps by pointing at an object of reference, but no word or object can be taken as a consistent and clearly defined thing: everything changes constantly. If you want to be really pedantic about it, you can argue we can never know the exact state of all the subatomic particles kicking about the place, so we can never define once and for all where one thing stops and another begins. Eventually, no two people can ever be sure they mean the same thing, nor that anything really exists at all. Maybe we're all living in the matrix. Red or blue pill - take your pick.
This makes it very easy to spend a long time circling around an argument without ever addressing the central issue. You can pick at the precise meaning of words, or - in a tight corner - you can always take the tack that the argument cannot be proven because, subatomic particles being what they are, you can never really prove anything. QED OMG LOL.
Such nit picking is a fine pastime, but it doesn't add much to a discussion. It just takes a long diversion until everybody has established exactly what they are arguing about, so we can be more clear why we disagree. It is ultimately unproductive; after all, just because an argument is made badly doesn't mean its premise is false.
If you argue the world is round, I could argue that 'the world' doesn't mean the same as 'the planet Earth' which in any case is not a perfect sphere but an oblate spheroid with all sorts of bumps, and the assertion that you can know the true shape of an object is unprovable. But that would be a waste of time.
Perhaps we could forgo the dictonary bashing if we were allowed to make one fundamental assumption: that other people mean well.
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