On Language Most Foul

It has come to my attention that there's something of a generational gap with regard to swearing, as in those of an older generation seem convinced that folks my age (mid-20s, let's say) just swear all the time for no reason at all and generally don't even give a fuck. I'd like to claim that that's a misunderstanding.

Let's consider some swearing:

Pictured: bad times online

Now, I'm not going to mount a defense of the conduct of "@Soul_James" here. The man is obviously a cretin, and simply out to cause mischief on the line. However, the response by '@infinite8horizo' is something I hear a lot, & this exchange neatly captures the language dispute I want to talk about. Let's break it down:

'@infinite8horizo' (I'm just going to call him Peter) is upset here because '@Soul_James' (I'll just refer to myself in the first person) has sworn at him - eg, used 'offensive language'. In this case, the word 'fuck'. It's a word I use a lot, and most commonly refers to a sex act, the act of fucking. You can check out the etymology of fuck on Wikipedia if research is your thing, but it refers to sex, basically. It's got a lot of diverse, mostly negative or emphatic uses in contemporary English, but it mostly refers to fucking. Let's consider some other exciting modern swears!

• Shit, is another favourite of mine, refers almost exclusively to excrement; faeces.
• Dick, refers to a penis, or the male phallus for those who enjoy classics.
• Arse, or ass for the Americans, refers to your buttocks or anus region in general.
• Cock, penis again.
• Piss, is urine. Not really a swear word in Australia so much anymore, incidentally.

So there's a few. Notice a theme there? All of them are related to bodily functions! That's not a coincidence - swear words are words you're not supposed to say, or at least not in 'polite society'. These words are considered swear words because they refer to unmentionable acts - the necessary functions of the body, the acts that bring out our animal nature. The taboo behind these words stems from an age where we liked to pretend we didn't have to fuck and shit and piss all over the place, so the words describing those terms are taboo (but we can refer to them via their medical euphemisms, like urine, faeces, sexual intercourse, etc).

Now, back to Peter and myself. I mostly use those words as a means of transgression, of calling attention to something other people don't like attention called to. I don't think it's appropriate for people to be ashamed of their bodily functions or avoid referring to them, so to reflect this I refuse to acknowledge social standards of reference to them. I'll talk about fucking and pissing as I wish, & I'll utilise their descriptors in general language as if they're normal words, which they should be. There's nothing intrinsic to those words (or any words) that make them automatically 'bad', it's an association we place upon them as being unacceptable/taboo. I reject that, as obviously Peter doesn't, to the point where he (ostensibly) found my language too pernicious (a fancy word for 'fucked-up') to speak to me.

For a historical example of this sort of thing in action, you can look back to some olde worlde swears, like:

• God damn it!
• Jesus Christ!
• To hell with this!

We pretty much say this sort of shit as we please nowadays, because blasphemy isn't a big deal like it once was. Even folk of Peter's generation, unless they're especially devout, will use these as their go-to for exclaiming irritation & generally expressing the sort of things I use shit and fuck and fuckshit to express. I'll also use these blasphemous options sometimes, but as they lack the transgressive aspect of the earlier examples, they're not as rewarding for me personally.

So having outlined why I say those sorts of words all the time, and why they only really bother prudes who think we should live our lives alienated from our bodily functions as if we're ashamed of being human, are there words I won't say? What are the Swear Words of Tomorrow, if the bodily function ones are out of style? Well, this will vary from place to place obviously, but there are a fair few words I'm very serious about not using, actually. Let's have a look at some, carefully!

• F*ggot, a male homosexual.
• Tr*nny, a transgender woman.
• N*gger, a black person (originally African-American, but has kind of expanded)
• C**n, an indigenous Australian (not sure if this one gets used elsewhere)
• Bu*g, same as above.
• D*ke, a lesbian.
• Go*k, an Asian person.
• Sl*t, a sexually-active woman.

Now, if you don't know some of those words, that's probably good. They're quite common in Australia, though becoming less-so. Obviously, these are mostly concerned not with bodily functions or blasphemy, but with identity. There are a few other words, like b*tch, which I'd be lying if I said I didn't sometime blurt out in a bad moment, but as a general rule I don't say. These are some fucking swear words, because saying them causes actual harm to people. It doesn't just offend them (not that that isn't worth considering), but harms and oppresses them. Just saying those words is a kind of bullying, which isn't true about sex words or poop words. Even if I'm mad at someone to whom these labels apply I won't use them, because I want to destroy them on my own terms, not via reference to some institution that marginalises them. That's chicken-shit behaviour.

This is the point I want to make behind all this: swearing isn't just some generational quirk, or arbitrary collective consciousness, it's a reflection of values. The things you won't refer to or discuss shows the things you're ashamed or for other reasons think ought not to be mentioned 'in polite society'. If someone says to you that's it's fine to call a woman a 'b*tch', & that to say otherwise is 'political correctness gone mad', but they get offended if you call them a 'fucking pile of garbage', then what they're saying is that it's fine to denigrate a woman specifically as a woman, but to refer to sex in their presence is morally unacceptable. If you're like my ancient grandparent who complains about 'so many n*ggers everywhere these days' but acts like you just took a shit on her mat if you say 'god damn it grandma don't say that shit', what you're saying is that you're fine with slavery, but being reminded that everybody poops is an inconvenience you should never have to be exposed to.

So, consider these social ramifications when you choose your words. Despite never being a person who was comfortable with oppressing others, as an aggressive little shit who loves to argue & hurl abuse I found it difficult initially to stop using some of these terms (language habits can be hard to break; f*g, b*tch, and 'gay' as a negative were particularly troublesome to drop entirely). It's not that hard though, ultimately, and you'll be amazed how quickly they disappear from your vocabulary. Just like that, you can stop worrying about inadvertently offending people or making them feel unsafe/unwelcome around you! Your vocabulary will pick up the slack in other ways, believe me.

This guy was actually a lot of fun to talk to and dished it out pretty good.

PS. There's far more that could be said about this subject, obviously, but I just wanted to cover these basics, so don't load me up with comments reminding me about swear words I didn't mention, or the complex linguistic history of taboo language, or side issues like non-verbal swearing (hand gestures etc) unless you have something profound to add. Because otherwise I'll react with scorn.

PPS. I could and will do an entire entry on political correctness, because that's Some Important Shit.

PPPS. Blasphemy is more complicated than I gave credit to here.

Abbott's Green Army: Punitive Civil Service

The LNP has put forward legislation to create a "Green Army" of disadvantaged Australians to engage in assorted environmental clean-up projects, at a pay rate of half the minimum wage. You can read the SMH article about it here.

Australian Labor has stated they will support the Green Army when it comes before the Senate. Read about that here.

What disgusts me about this isn't the vilification of the disadvantaged, which has been an Australian pastime since before the Howard years, or the deliberate erosion of workplace standards & the minimum wage, which has also been an essential element of the Australian political landscape for a while - it's the disservice it does to the very concept of civic participation.

An "environmental workforce" is a noble ideal, not because the environment is important (though it is) but because it represents the possibility of citizens being mobilised peacefully by the state to be empowered as stewards of our environment. Not "the" environment as an ecosphere or vague political abstraction, but our environment; our forests, our streets, our streams, our gutters, our parking lots. The maintenance of these areas by those of us who live in them - & the gratitude & respect that maintaining them on behalf of the polity should afford - ought to be a fulfilling, meaningful activity that our government would rightly be lauded for enabling.

Instead, that very possibility is destroyed by turning the act of taking care of our own environment into a punishment for what a capitalist system considers effluent - those unable to meaningfully take part in the systems of profit generation & consumption. It makes the maintenance & beautification of our world - not in the broad sense, but in the immediate, personal sense - a fucking dunce cap to be placed on the heads of social pariahs. What should be a noble, worthwhile activity is reduced to a brand of humiliation, a clear denoting of failure in the eyes of society.

Paying people doing these tasks a deliberately sub-minimum wage says as clearly as a capitalist society can say anything, "these people, and the task they are performing, are lesser. What they are doing is a job for the shameful, & the situation they are in should be reviled or pitied, but either way avoided." It twists acts of maintenance, of caretaking, of respecting our towns, cities and suburbs into a punishment, an unwanted activity we hand off to the unwanted dregs, and they'll bloody well do it if they want to eat & pay rent. There's no possibility of the barest self-respect in that.

Our society is, and should be, ashamed of the excessive waste it necessarily creates as part of its operation - whether it be inanimate garbage, or the human unemployed. Now Abbott has discovered a means to lump the two together, with the intent of ignoring both. Whatever you think of this as a policy, as a pure means to an end, of far more critical importance is its ideological underpinnings: the conservation of our public spaces, and the offering of assistance to those failed by our economic system, should both & together be considered embarrassments to be shunned, not duties to be willingly & proudly performed by all Australians.

This transforms active participation in civic life by citizens in the interests of citizens into a punishment meted out by those who are supposedly due our respect as worthwhile members of society - those who engage in profit-making for their own ends. The fully-revealed subtext behind this legislation, free of all bombast, is this: working to maintain the beauty & purity of our shared spaces & collective assets is a shameful weakness, & the exploitation of each other to increase our individual wealth is a righteous success.

The Elder Scrolls: The best experiences are passed on by the survivors

People who don't live with me in an enclosed space may not be aware that Skyrim is only the fifth game in the Elder Scrolls franchise. Everyone remembers Oblivion, and I hope many of you at least remember Morrowind exists, but beyond that we're straying into Old School territory.

A brief history lesson, then: back before the world of Tamriel was inhabited by thousands of carefully-crafted NPCs  and exactly four voice actors, it was inhabited by tens of thousands of soundless cookie-cutter NPCs (Non-Player Characters - the video game version of extras) in a game called Arena. I first encountered Arena when I was a child, clutching a massive fifty Australian dollaridoos and searching desperately for something to fill the gaping void left by completing Ultima Underworld II. Arena looked a bit like Underworld 2, and cost exactly fifty bucks, so I bought it without any further consideration or research. Such is the serendipitous hubris of an 8-year-old consumer.

I'm not sure how close I was to puberty then, but the box art may also have had some impact on my decision.

The game had one feature which was as interesting as it was pointless: the various cities of Tamriel could be traveled to on-foot, but travel times were close to real-time. I tested it once, pointing my brave avatar at the nearest town and putting a brick on the mouse before going to bed. Sure enough, ten hours later I had overshot the town by some distance, but was still nowhere near the next. A truly open world, if by 'world' you mean 'recurring wilderness tileset with the odd generated inn or monster'.

This was to my small mind the beginning of the open-world genre, the significance of which was completely lost on me as I raced against my dad to be the first to assemble the Staff of Chaos and defeat Jagar Tharn, Imperial Battlemage slash antagonist. He'd kidnapped the Emperor (not Patrick Stewart, an earlier Emperor,) something about a ghost woman, and ultimately the same plot as every fantasy adventure ever. Those were simpler times, before gritty anti-heroes were necessary, before gaming's Brown Period, back when you could make the player move, look and fight in first person using only the mouse and not get laughed right out of game development forever.

Fallout 3: partly responsible for gaming's Brown Period.

I missed Daggerfall completely, and was significantly into my difficult teenage years when I got Morrowind. I thought I'd forgotten most of Arena until I got into it, swiftly recalling Dark Elves and those weird snake guys (Argonians) and the various other nuances which have become the hallmarks of the Elder Scrolls setting. Now I could wander the world between towns and there was actual content the entire way! And what content! The first time I ventured into the forest and it started to rain, I swear I could smell the rain falling around me. I got lost and staggered into another town what felt like four hours later (because it was four hours later) with one of my legs held on with a bit of twine and only a broken spoon left of my gear. The experience left me exhausted yet enervated, a rare achievement among even the best games.

The formative, powerful excitement I felt exploring these worlds was matched only by my mightily heaved yawn of disinterest upon playing Oblivion. The world felt like an empty shell stretched over the incoherent chaos of dungeons and NPCs generated on-the-fly. Like most, after I'd shut down my eighty-sixth Oblivion gate I put the game on the shelf and only took it down occasionally to frown at it in disappointment, or loan it to someone I didn't like. Whether this was a fair assessment of the game or not is beside the point - for me, the game failed to live up to Morrowind's high standard. Meanwhile, the world of Tamriel was still growing and developing as it had been since Arena, in ways I wouldn't fully appreciate until I journeyed to the frozen homeland of the Nords.

Shaping these to look vaguely like a vagina will only keep me entertained for so long, Bethesda.

It was while playing Skyrim that I became fascinated with the lore of The Elder Scrolls. I'd spend a fair chunk of time in Morrowind reading the various books scattered throughout the world, or discussing history with assorted NPCs. It was while reading A Brief History of the Empire during my travels in Skyrim that it gradually dawned on me that the history I was reading was also history from my own life. The tale of the brave adventurer assembling the Staff of Chaos and freeing the realm from Jagar Tharn? That wasn't just some story, that happened! It was me! I was there! Back when I was a little kid! It was like I'd opened up a copy of A History of the English Speaking Peoples only to be reminded I'd single-handedly won the Hundred Years War. I read on to learn also of my deeds fulfilling the Nerevarine Prophecy up north in Morrowind, and further about my vital role in ending the Oblivion Crisis (which sounded a lot more exciting than I remembered it). These tales fit seamlessly into the reams of history and folklore spun to shape the world of Tamriel, giving me a particular sense of connection to the setting the like of which I haven't experienced before or since.

Anything about me in there? No? Well, maybe next time.

My father read Lord of the Rings to me when I was a kid, and though it was a powerful experience to see that world realised in Peter Jackson's films, it was static; it was the same story I'd had read to me, only in a different (less effective) medium. The world of Tamriel, unlike Middle Earth, has grown and changed along with me. The dim memories I have of my childhood are of-a-kind with the dim, passed-down tales of Jagar Tharn's treachery, recent enough to be remembered, but distant enough for details to be lost. As much as cinematic games like Mass Effect and Red Dead Redemption boast that their worlds “adapt and respond to the player's choices” while you play, The Elder Scrolls is a world built on deeds so long past they're barely remembered – except, of course, by those of us who were there.

While I'm sure this is far from a unique experience in the history of story-telling (I've heard people recount their experiences playing family sessions of Dungeons and Dragons throughout their childhood that sound similar), it is nevertheless an amazing feeling to see as an adult the realisation of a world that grew up alongside you. For all the collision physics and emergent events and grass realism and more than four voice actors, what will really stick with me about Skyrim will always be the time I opened a book of history and read a grand documentation of my own childhood experiences, seamlessly integrated into one of the most detailed settings to be found in a video game. The feeling is given a genuine-ness that can't be faked no matter how impressive a budget your production has, or how talented your developers are. It can only be created by the passage of time turning a child into an adult who has the privilege of experiencing first-hand a setting that has been developing almost as long as he has.

One nerd's gross pixelated mess is another nerd's gross pixelated childhood.

Papers, Please: Games as mental experiences

The Best Games are the ones that give you some approximation of an experience. There's endless talk of emotion in games, with 'realistic' emotional feedback replacing photorealism and even physics as the current pie in the sky of game development. Since LA Noir, motion capture voice acting has become increasingly expected from big titles that are even moderately reliant on dialogue exchanges.

I'm not going to loftily shit on this trend here, but what I will say is it misses what games should be striving for if they seriously want to put a flag down in the entertainment industry or art world. Films are great at showing people's faces moving while they have emotional interpersonal exchanges. Some films consist entirely of just that. As a result, despite being moderately interesting, LA Noir felt like a movie that'd keep stopping unless I pressed buttons to make it go again. This is a fairly shallow criticism of the game which has been made elsewhere, but rather than complaining it's a shit game I'd like to suggest it's a helpful indication that the True Strength of gaming may lie elsewhere; by generating experiences.

What I mean by 'experience' in a video game context is something that changes your mind state to more closely resemble the mind state of someone (or something) else, or an altered version of yourself. This is distinct from, for example, The Last Of Us' attempts to make the player care for Ellie. When Ellie was in danger I felt a real, palpable fear for her safety. That was a great achievement, but 'fear' is a fairly broad mind-state I'm already familiar with - scaring an audience is generally a pretty safe option. Though we may have moved on from 'things jumping at you' to 'things jumping at someone else you have some level of concern for', feeling scared for the safety of a loved one is an emotion most will easily be drawn into. Though this is somewhat new ground for video games, ultimately I was still 'an afraid 20-something straight white guy playing a video game'. That's the experience I was having - fear while using a PS3. I can file that away with 'excitement while using a PS3', 'boredom while using a PS3', and the most-common, 'despairing for the future of my species while using a PS3'.

Papers, Please crafts a very different sort of experience. By engaging with the game's simple mechanics to perform simple tasks, my very way of thinking began to change. I stopped seeing people as people, and instead saw them as a corrupt border official sees them - potential risks, potential rewards, potential punishments. They became a series of traits and facts that had to be sorted. I noticed after a few hours of play that I rarely even saw them as discrete entities any more; they were nothing more than height, weight, and hair colour. Their names didn't even register with me, I was merely comparing the letters on one document to the letters on another. If they matched, I did one thing; if they didn't, I did another. The simple graphics enhanced, rather than hampered, this experience. Refugees would tell me heart-rending tales which I would completely ignore because I was re-arranging my desk to be more efficient. I would pay no attention to things they told me unless they were essential to their processing, at which point I would refer to a transcript because that was faster than listening to them.

I didn't start out that way, of course. As with most games I started out with the best of intentions, but was open to being corrupted. This isn't my first rodeo, after all; I'm familiar with morality in games. Am I going to be a good border official, or an evil border official? But this isn't the kind of non-choice (looking at you here, every binary-morality RPG ever) Papers, Please presents to its players. You are a border official with a live family, or a dead family. "Fuck my family!" I decided on one playthrough, "I'm an evil border official." I opted to let my dead-weight family perish, and as a result, I was fired from my job because the State has no use for a worker who can't look after his family. Well, shit. Next time I was a Good Border Official, who was swiftly gaoled for trying to turn in a group of revolutionary partisans. The game continually undermines any assumptions you might try to form about good and evil. There are naughty and nice decisions to be made - the game bombards you with them - but they're rarely connected to consequences in a predictable way. This creates apprehension not of doing good or doing bad, but instead of violating The Rules. Sure, the status quo may slowly be starving your family to death, but to strike out and accept bribes could bring even swifter, more horrible consequences. Lofty transcendent ideals are painfully eroded in favour of 'what will keep me alive to come to work again tomorrow?'

These design choices leave you with a sensation of specifically bureaucratic powerlessness, the experience of being reified to a bunch of rules combining with pieces of paper. The drudgery of your work carries an ever-growing feeling of desperation as you struggle, and the desperation of others is increasingly swept aside by your own concerns. While I started out sympathetic to the frustrations of these sorry people as they strove to deal with a bureaucratic nightmare, after a couple of in-game weeks those who cracked under the strain and simply refused to leave the border house were an unforgivable cause of lost wages. I couldn't sic the guards on them fast enough, and as they were dragged off to whatever horrible gulag I condemned them to, all I could think of was getting the next 5 credits into the hut so I could feed my family.

This is what I mean by 'creating an experience'. I was, emotionally, fairly flat while playing Papers - at least compared to the edge-of-my-seat nervous wreck I am after a few hours of Last Of Us, or the strung-out ball of tired confusion I was after Spec Ops: The Line. Papers doesn't trade in emotions, it renders them meaningless. It makes you care about paper more than people, about a few minutes saved time over a life extinguished by firing squad. Desperate people plead for a little leeway, just look the other way this once, and you dismiss them utterly and in the most callous fashion. They accuse you of being a power-mad thug of the State, but you feel completely powerless. You actually start to resent them for being unable to understand things from your perspective - the structure of the work itself forces you to be alienated from your fellow man. Even if you could explain to them that if you don't make 40 credits today your niece will disappear forever into the state orphanage system, would that somehow outweigh the needs of their own family? It's hopeless, and that feeling of hopelessness is more profound than 1000 jump-scares, and is created without a second of motion capture.

This is where games set themselves apart from existing media. A film or book can make you empathise with a tired border official, a show like Breaking Bad can make you identify with the worst villains, but only a game can force you to think like one of these characters. You don't struggle to put yourself in their position, you struggle to get yourself out of it, as most people in such a position probably would. This is where the flash and pizzazz of Generic War Simulators fails to be interesting time and again - they're just a bad action movie where you have to press buttons to make the protagonist win. It doesn't tell you anything about war, it doesn't put you in the boots of a soldier, it doesn't give you anything of the experience of combat or even just general danger. Not every game has to attempt to engage their audience this way, but the ones that don't limit themselves to being imitations of other media's strengths.

Papers, Please very smoothly and cleverly offers something games excel at: experience. As someone with more than my fair share of awful bureaucratic encounters, it was enriching to experience first-hand the tense drudgery and combination of boredom & attention to detail required for this kind of work. It was also a welcome reminder of what games are capable of when crafted by clever people with vision, rather than by marketing departments with profit projections and too many lines of coke. Papers, Please knows what games are good at and seeks to utilise those strengths to create something that is unique: simulated first-hand experience. I'm not being hyperbolic when I say I'll never view the assholes who process my welfare applications in the same way ever again.