Either For or Against

I read an interesting article this afternoon on the NYT's Sunday Magazine site about a family vacation to Disney World from the perspective of an academic Generation Y stoner.  The article itself touches on the ruthless ideology and probably illegal backroom dealings required to establish a corporate and social behemoth like Disney World, the disjunction of parenting interests vs. child entertainment, and the neurotic demands of drug addiction and its chemical fulfillment under the auspices of hostile park security.  Under the hood there's an interesting duality of adult vs. child leisure and wish fulfillment, and some parallels between the marijuana consumption culture and the Disney consumption culture, and some notes on the theme of modern parenting.  This is how I read it, and it was engaging on multiple levels.

Above the hood, a reader not looking for nuance would note that the article was about a pothead father who couldn't go two hours without smoking up, and risked his security and the happiness of his children to sate his lazy stoner needs, and that any mention of the history of Walt Disney's political maneuvering is just filler between paragraphs explaining the best locations in the park to blaze.  On a lark, I clicked on the comments thread for the article to gauge the responses, and they seemed to universally fall into two camps:  Pro-weed acolytes who thought this was a lyrical American masterpiece, and uptight parents who were shocked, SHOCKED at both the casual disinterest in the author's/subject's family's wellbeing and that the Times would promote weed culture in any medium but a police blotter.

The duality of extreme pro- and con- has been standard practice in political debate for quite a while now, but it's interesting to see it pop up in so many incidental places.  For example, earlier this week, Arstechnica released their review of the new Duke Nukem Forever game.  While it's been universally panned for poor gaming performance and bad mechanics, Ars writer Ben Kuchera went a step further to decry the tenor of the comedic attempts in the game.  I'm just going to assume anybody who reads this is familiar with the original Duke games and doesn't need to be brought up to speed.  Kuchera goes a step further and calls 3D Realms and Gearbox to task for substituting offensive references for humor.

Just in case you didn't feel like the game had adequately rubbed your nose in its horrific depiction of women, Duke arrives at a point where two nude ladies promise to lose their pregnancy weight from bearing their alien children, and they plead with you to let them live. (These are the same characters who performed fellatio on you during the beginning sequences of the game.)

The only way past this section of the game is to kill both women.

In another scene, a woman sobs and asks for her father. You see, the women in the alien craft are being forcibly impregnated by the aliens, and during your journey, you hear a mixture of screams and sexual noises. After I accidentally blew up a few of these female victims in a firefight, Duke made a joke about abortion.

Funny?  I guess that depends on whether you're a Ted Nugent fan or not.  I've watched gameplay videos, including the above referenced section of the game, and I feel rather safe labeling it as significantly unfunny.  Perhaps it says something about my delicate sensibilities, but I have difficulty finding room for laughs in a mass-alien-rape-lair, even though in the past I've enjoyed other outlets wrestling humor from war, genocide, murder, and torture.  Reading the comments on this article, I apparently fall into the same camp as Kuchera and all the "PC pussies" who need to grow up and learn to love the Duke.  That I apparently don't get the series, don't understand why it's funny, that it's all ok if it's absurd, that over-the-top is inherently belly-aching fun on its own merits.  There's a whole subculture of these folk, the kneejerk anti-PC cult.

Conversely, some posters crawled out from the shadows to defend the author and explain that while the original Duke, with all his objectification of women and glorification of murder, was still amusing, this new Duke is a step too far.  That it's horrific and unfunny and that celebrating it reveals some deep psychological issues on behalf of the game's loudest advocates.

Again, I ended up taking a middle (nuanced, snobbish?) road here, responding to both sides with:

I think what tends to be missed, generally by the segment of the gaming audience that gets off on the anti-PC preening, is that the original Duke Nukem was, in addition to being grotesque and crude, also somewhat clever. It effectively lampooned a major cultural trend at the time, the Hollywood machismo movement. Part of its success is that it was simultaneously over the top AND bitingly subversive.

If Duke Nukem 3D was Scream, then something like Bulletstorm is its Scary Movie, which makes DNF a Uwe Boll sequel: Something that manages to steal superficial elements of previous genre successes and then totally miss the point of the exercise by not having any kind of message beyond id-fueled explosions and masculinity.

In a thread with 300 responses, the only ones that referenced my words were "Well said" and "QFT" without further engagement.  Perhaps searching for deeper meaning in a Duke Nukem game was a fool's errand, but I retire comfortably knowing there were at least two people reading Ars who walked my same moderated middle road, and hopefully more silent ones who similarly refrained from bringing judgment down upon a smoker dad and his summer vacation in a vaguely fascist wonderland.