American Fun (52 page)

In the
digital assault on American fun,
video games pack the biggest wallop. Video games, which can be the
products
of extraordinary creativity, replicate high levels of risk and participation (warfare, car crashes, zombie invasions) when in fact the players—like
Build-A-Bear customers—fashion their avatars from the designers’ choices and spend hours, years, within prescripted worlds that demand nothing obvious in the way of personal stakes. Most deceptive may be the so-called interactive games—
Wii (with its no-impact, weightless, plastic pantomime of rackets, bats, clubs, and jump ropes);
Guitar Hero
and
Rock Band
(whose would-be rock stars spend hundreds of hours becoming “expert” at punching colored buttons in sequence); and the cynically named
Dance Dance Revolution
(whose would-be
Vera Sheppards, Shorty Snowdens, and B-boys tap out buttons instead of executing gravity-defying moves). Are the thousands of hours Americans clock with their thumbs and forefingers … fun? Or does the fun soon corrode into compulsive behavior? An endless rat maze of binary decisions?
The video-game proponent
Jane McGonigal, one of
BusinessWeek
’s “ten innovators to watch,” argues that video games are what she calls
“hard fun,” a term she coins from the phrase “hard work,” because they create “positive stress” for the gamer
and a sense of accomplishment. In particular, they generate an “emotional rush” of “pride,” which game designers call by its Italian name,
fiero,
and which is “one of the most powerful neurochemical highs we can experience.” This habit-forming rush of “hard fun,” she argues, can motivate gamers to inhabit “alternate realities,” to have “fun with strangers” under disguised identities, and ultimately, she believes, to reengage with fellow citizens in the real world. She even argues that video games will make us “
dance more.”

All while staring at a television screen. The student of American fun,
real
fun, has to ask “Why?” Why would a vigorous and youthful and (to consider the costs of such equipment)
prosperous
population sacrifice its enjoyment to the screen? To the habit-forming tricks of a game designer? Clearly, as with any kind of fun, the
pleasure
of gaming is a reason in itself, possibly the only reason. But what sort of nation does this amusement foster? What sort of “global happiness”? A twitchy one, to be certain, and sedentary. Even for all of the vaunted worldwide connectivity of multiplayer systems, for their celebrated “fun with strangers,” gaming fosters physically isolated citizens, an atomized citizenry that finds it harder, not more inspiring, to break free from their screens and to engage face-to-face. To the student of American fun—of lively, risky, rebellious action that has set people free for four hundred years—it all just looks so
safe
.

When in fact it isn’t. McGonigal, in describing the neurochemistry of
fiero
(the gamer’s emotional benefit), locates the sensation in the “
reward circuitry of the brain … which is most typically associated with reward and addiction.” As McGonigal only passingly acknowledges,
fiero
’s relevance to addiction is real, and a serious problem among game-playing youth. Sure,
fiero,
as a neurochemical fact, is a thrill that arises from any accomplishment, from an ace serve in tennis to scientific triumphs (cut to NASA’s astrophysicists wild-partying over a Mars landing, particle physicists popping champagne over the Higgs boson discovery), but the mind-blowing humbug of video games is to deliver higher and stronger
fiero
for lower levels of accomplishment, and to keep it coming in rapid doses. What is more, the effects that enhance this often violent experience make it larger, and larger than life. Games have
amplified television’s habit formation by making it minimally interactive and by overpowering the brain’s reward center: after winning the World Cup, or
World War II, or saving the world from aliens or zombies, gamers lose interest in real accomplishments. Or they become intimidated: after spending months in front of the television, perfecting your free throw becomes a distant achievement. Like the lethal “Entertainment” in
David Foster Wallace’s novel
Infinite Jest,
video games dead-end their players’ willpower into a cul-de-sac of absolute withdrawal.

Tom Bissell tells a harrowing tale in his brilliant book
Extra Lives:
his
video-game addiction led to a
cocaine addiction that allowed him to play more video games.
A recent Google search for “Video Game Addiction Treatment” yielded 207,000 hits and treatment centers around the world.
The
American Psychiatric Association has the condition slated for inclusion in its next edition of the
Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders,
but the research is in its infancy. Video gamers feel the thrill of reward, but what “rewards” do they actually reap after hours, days, and years of “hard fun”? And what rewards does the nation reap? McGonigal acknowledges such hazards, and she also mentions an industry-specific anomie called “
gamer regret,” but in downplaying them she rather games the facts, hailing a new generation of games that “
go beyond flow and
fiero
” and “provide a more lasting kind of emotional reward.” This may be so, but such nutritious fare doesn’t account for video games’ runaway popularity; first-person-shooter junk food does. She also says that “
very big games represent the future of collaboration,” and she may be right. The student of fun thinks it’s too soon to celebrate.

IN
2010, the Supreme Court’s
Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission
ruling declared that corporations merit the free speech of any legal citizen and thus are allowed unlimited political broadcasts. That same year, the “American” corporation General Electric earned $14.2 billion worldwide, $5.1 billion of that in the United States, and paid $0.00 in U.S. taxes. GE even claimed a $3.2 billion tax benefit. When these figures hit the news, the public was outraged, but GE’s spokesperson was unflappable: “
We did not owe any,” she said. According to the Supreme
Court decision, corporations deserve all the rights of citizens, including a bully pulpit for electing government leaders, but at the same time their immense collective power—especially when they assume “multinational” identity—lets them shirk the citizen’s basic responsibilities. This fact spells despair for the nation’s vitality—if its “vitality” (as the word denotes) rests with actual human beings. Hence, in March 2011, when
GE recanted and announced that they were returning their $3.2 billion “refund,” the
Associated Press immediately published the story. What great news! GE revealed that it had the conscience of an everyday citizen! But the press release was a hoax, of course.
It was the latest coup of the ingenious
Yes Men, a pair of trickster citizens who have been calling out corporations since the 1990s. In this case, all the nation got back from GE’s staggering profits was congregated—if bitter—mirth.

Our nation’s vitality doesn’t rest with corporations. It rests with people—not only as voters but as active citizens with the potential energy of “physical bodies,” as
Saul Alinsky, legendary activist extraordinaire, writes in his classic
Rules for Radicals
. Bodies are the agents of political action, especially among those whom he calls the “Have-Nots,” those whose resources are “no money” and “lots of people.”
His advice for activating the citizens’ bodies might as well be a recipe for American fun: “Use the power of law,” he suggests, “by making the establishment obey its own rules. Go outside the experience of your enemy, stay inside the experience of your people”—or, in other words, if you’re an American colonist in the 1760s, bewilder the British by parading your freedom and acting like
Samuel Adams’s “True Patriots.” Alinsky goes on: “Emphasize tactics
that your people will enjoy.
The threat is usually more terrifying than the tactic itself”—emphasize tactics, that is to say, like the decades of fun on
Pinkster Hill and, a century later, in the
Savoy Ballroom, enjoyable tactics that may have threatened uptight contemporaries but ultimately harmed nobody. “Once all these rules and principles are festering in your imagination,” he concludes, “they grow into a synthesis.” And that synthesis—that prank, that party, that hoax, that joke—could plant the seeds of what the moral-sense philosopher
Adam Ferguson called “national felicity,” the rough, raw, and widespread fellow-feeling that can keep a nation feeling young and that can,
in the best cases, unite its citizenry, from the least of the have-nots to the richest of the haves.

Our nation’s vitality rests with people. It rests with prisoners and illegal immigrants; with the homeless, unemployed, and poor; and with the ever-dwindling middle class as well as with presidents and CEOs. Rereading history, where the people are heroes and creativity flourishes in times of greatest struggle, one sees the vitality of American democracy cropping up in some low-down places: trading posts, dockyards, mining camps, taverns. Most remarkably, America’s most original culture, America’s most
durable
culture—now an immeasurable international rhizome of
hip-hop, techno, rock, dance, style, slang, humor, sports, whatnot—got its roaring start in the southern slave quarters, among Americans who valued possibly more than anyone the liberty and equality that they were denied. Among people who held tight to their forbidden African herita
ge while embracing their new American conditions. Among people who were witty enough to tell the joke, nimble enough to get the joke, and tough enough to take the joke.

Doing it yourself is individualist fun. Getting the joke is collectivist fun. Together they foster a strong, smart nation. American democracy hasn’t been fortified by passive citizens, not by the obedient, gullible, or accepting, not by citizens who wait to be governed and not by thugs doing demagogues’ bidding, but by active, resistive, DIY citizens who take pleasure in agency and group definition. It’s a fundamentally American idea: citizens should be defined as much by their
fun
as by their work or service or duty. It’s also a distinctly American phenomenon that these four principles (work, service, duty, and fun) can and should be one and the same—as they were for the “Mohawks” storming Griffin’s Wharf, as they were for the
Yippies showering the NYSE with cash, as they were for the
Yes Men writing GE’s press release. They may not have known it at the time, but when, in 1973, Cindy and Clive Campbell threw their back-to-school bash and urged the crowd to new levels of ecstasy, they were doing the work of exemplary citizens, honoring the past and providing for the future. For all they knew they were just having fun, but they did it with a shrewd and playful creativity that unleashed the people’s constructive power.

Americans in recent decades—gender activists, in particular—have been deliberate in binding these four principles. In 1985, the
Guerrilla Girls, a pseudonymous collective of female artists, took on the overwhelmingly male New York arts establishment with comic posters, a “penis count” at the Met, and other street actions—all executed in gorilla masks. (Their antic movement is still going strong.) Also in the 1980s, New York’s
drag balls, whose heritage stretches back to the
Savoy Ballroom, gained new force and splendor and acceptance, thanks in part to
Jenny Livingston’s documentary,
Paris Is Burning
(1990), and to this day are a spinning disco-ball hub for the nation’s transgender community.

In the early 1990s, B-girls and
Riot Grrrls pushed back
hard
against male-chauvinist
rap and
punk. On Thursday nights in L.A.’s
Leimert Park, for example, at the
hip-hop institution called
Project Blowed, female MCs like Venus,
Tasha Kweli, and the legendary Medusa—considered “the
queen and high priestess” of the L.A. underground—defeated men and women in fierce rap battles and on the floor in break-dance
cyphers. Flashing her double-W hand sign and honoring the long heritage of African-American women, Medusa—like
Bessie Smith, with whom a male competitor once respectfully compared her—also made daring claim to her sexuality, even in rap battles with tough male opponents quick to write her off as a “ho.” But her deft lyricism and ferocious irony put the best of rappers on their back feet. As the hip-hop scholar
Marcyliena Morgan demonstrates, Medusa’s “
crowd-pleasing anthem,”
“My Pussy Is a Gangsta,” flips the street code and
satirizes both men and women: men, by “us[ing] gangsta, a hiphop term associated with misogynistic, predatory, and sadistic men,” to refer to “a woman’s sexual and reproductive organ”; women, by calling out the ones who wield their “femininity,” as Medusa puts it, “to their extreme advantage.”

Also in the early 1990s, when macho hardcore had lost its momentum, giving way to less political (and more commercial)
speed metal, the Riot Grrrl punk scene launched in Washington State and shot across the country. Technically and musically masterful Grrrl bands—spearheaded by the likes of
Bikini Kill and
Bratmobile—revitalized the punk ethos for a new generation of do-it-yourself, up-yours, uncompromising feminists. If NOW inspired the “second-wave” feminists in 1966, rejecting
the counterculture’s cavalier tone in favor of unambiguous anger, then Riot Grrrls energized the young “third wave” with all the irreverence, obscenity, and swagger of the hardcore punk movement. They resuscitated
Lester Bangs’s “Program for Mass Liberation,” rejecting the music industry’s love affair with grunge and running with small labels like Kill Rock Stars; mocking “
beergutboyrock” and needling self-important male rockers who lacked what the band Sleater-Kinney called “
rock ’n’ roll fun.” Riot Grrrls’
new wave of fire-breathing zines (
Fuckapotamus,
Something Smells, Puberty Strike,
Teenage Gang Debs
) sported creativity, power, and comedy and declared independence from male-dominated rock. Riot Grrrl attitude made a comeback in 2011, when women staged “SlutWalks” in seventy-six cities around the world and reclaimed their miniskirts as symbols of power. “
When was the last time feminism was this much fun?”
The Nation
’s
Katha Pollitt asked
.
Riot Grrrl–inspired stunts made world news in 2012, when three members of
Pussy Riot,
Russia’s multicolored-balaclava-sporting feminist punk collective, were sentenced to two years of penal-colony time for performing their anti-Putin, putatively blasphemous “Punk Prayer” in a Moscow cathedral. That same year, oversize-underpants-wearing female “
Volunteers” staged disruptive pranks and playfully resistive feminist street theater throughout the People’s Republic of China.