Its not as easy as it looks

There are some jobs that are typically recognized as difficult. Most people, for example, probably don’t think that they could walk into an operating room and be a successful surgeon. Others, however, are often assumed to be easy. Teaching, for example, is something that many people assume they could be successful at. I’ve also seen musicians criticize those who make electronic music because they are “just pushing buttons.” As with teachers and electronic music artists, assuming that somebody has an easy job devalues the work that they do.  Once in a while, though, people have the opportunity to try something that others make look easy, discovering that it is, in fact, rather difficult.

Enter Super Mario Maker.

Super Mario Maker is a videogame for Nintendo’s Wii U game console. In the game, players are able to create their own Super Mario Bros. levels, share those levels, and play levels created by others. In reviewing the game, Sean Buckley of Engadget summed up his experience nicely, stating:

It didn’t make any sense. I’d dreamed about making Nintendo games since I was 6 years old, but when the company gave me the chance to prove a game design genius lived under my skin, I flopped. It was then that a shocking and heartbreaking realization washed over me: I hate making video games.

My ego didn’t take this realization well. As both a hobbyist gamer and a journalist that covers games, I’ve always humored the little voice in the back of my head that said, “I could do this if I wanted. I could make games.” No, Super Mario Maker has shown me, I can’t — not really. Yes, technically I can construct a stage from set pieces I’ve seen in other Mario games, but I’m not really creating anything. My by-the-numbers Mario levels (a few power-ups to start, some pipes to leap over, maybe a Hammer brother or two and a flagpole at the end) feel more like light plagiarism than original content. Why do I suck at this so much?

Michael Thomsen at the Washington Post focused on how bad others are at creating Super Mario levels, arguing:

“Super Mario Maker” is a bad comedy. Released in coordination with the 30-year anniversary of “Super Mario Bros.,” it indulges players in the fantasy that they’d be good at making video game levels. This sort of self-deception has become common in the age of digital consumption, and while there’s something utopian in “Super Mario Maker’s” appeals to community participation and sharing, the game quickly collapses into a scratch sheet of horrible ideas and levels you’ll regret having played. It’s a tool for the mass production of cultural refuse, single-use distractions that fail to replicate the spirit of the original.

So it turns out that the people who have been making the Super Mario Bros. games all these years actually had talents and skills that most of us don’t have. I think this is great! I wish that we could have other opportunities to try what people do in a simplified manner. Imagine Super Teacher Maker where surgeons are given seven hours in a room with 25 eight year olds and asked to teach them math, or Super EDM Maker where a guitar player (or, better yet, a singer!) is given a computer and asked to create music. Maybe then we would start to recognize that everybody has hard jobs, even if our jobs are hard in different ways.

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David Bowie understood the importance of representation in the media

Following David Bowie’s death on Sunday MTV posted a video from 1983 in which Bowie criticized the station for playing few videos by Black artists. When the interviewer asks what Black artists “would mean to a 17 year old” Bowie quickly notes the implication that he means a White 17 year old and states that he knows what it “would mean to a Black 17 year old” to see him/herself reflected on TV. Also interesting is the interviewer’s frankness about the fact that MTV would play Black artists only if they were popular (and profitable) among Whites.

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Only men can whine

A week or so ago, Alanis Morissette showed up at a Taylor Swift concert to sing her breakout hit, “You Oughta Know.” This prompted Taylor Swift fans to ask, “who the hell was that?”, which prompted Amanda Marcotte at Slate to answer, “Alanis sucked, you’re better off for not knowing.” Marcotte explains:

Alanis Morissette was a singer who, in the mid-1990s, capitalized on a small but growing trend of “angry woman” rock acts, such as L7 and Hole, and made an absolute killing, selling 33 million copies of her album Jagged Little Pill worldwide. But while her predecessors wrote songs protesting sexual harassment and rape, Morissette’s big hit protested guys who break up with you.

Although Marcotte compares Morissette to other “angry women” in the mid-1990s, I think that a better comparison is mid-’90s rock music in general. (I’ll also set aside the direct line from “You Oughta Know” to Taylor Swift’s catalog of songs aimed at people who have wronged her, which suggests that Swift’s fans are familiar with this form of protest with or without knowledge of Morissette.) The ’90s were, for better or worse, a particularly whiny time. From Pearl Jam’s “Black” to less-remembered songs like Stabbing Westward’s “What Do I Have to Do?” lots of men were singing about unrequited love. Hell, Weezer’s Pinkerton, with songs like “Pink Triangle” and “Across the Sea” helped launch an entire genre of music made by whiny men.

In this context, it seems unfair to deny Morissette the ability to whine about a failed relationship just because some of her less popular female peers sang about more serious topics. “Jagged Little Pill” is no “Little Earthquakes” or “Not a Pretty Girl,” but it wasn’t intended to be. That it sold many more copies than all of these other other albums by “angry women” put together speaks to its broader relatability, regardless of its misuse of the word “Ironic.” Marcotte seems to think that the world would have been better off if Morissette had simply said, “boys will be boys” and moved on with her life, though I bet that Taylor Swift and Carrie Underwood disagree.

Whatever you think of “Jagged Little Pill” or Alanis Morissette’s music in general, Marcotte’s criticism seems to be rooted in the relative dearth of female-fronted rock bands, whether in the ’90s or today. As Shonda Rhimes has noted, when there is a lack of diversity in a particular medium, the depictions of those in underrepresented groups are expected to meet a higher standard. A lot of white men in the ’90s could whine because white men made nearly all rock music and, between them, covered the entire range of emotions and topics. If anything, the presence of L7, Hole, Tori Amos, and Ani DiFranco in the ’90s, with their music about serious issues, made more room for Alanis Morissette to talk about things that were less serious, or serious in different ways. To expect every female musician to be all things to all people indicates that there aren’t nearly enough female musicians.

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Hate the sport? Watch We Are the Best! instead of the Super Bowl

If you find yourself reacting to the upcoming kickoff of Super Bowl [insert roman numerals here] with trepidation, and especially if you find yourself reacting to the Super Bowl by marveling at how much money is being spent to televise a bunch of millionaires playing a kids game when that money could be better spent fighting nuclear proliferation, let me suggest an alternative. We Are the Best! is a Swedish movie set in the early 1980s and featuring three girls in their early teens who start a punk band. Their first (and basically only) song is called “Hate the Sport,” and includes lyrics about people dying while others focus on high-jump basketball soccer teams. The movie also includes a brazen attempt to save a Christian with the wonders of punk (though I guess that, as the girls point out, you can’t hang God without accepting that he exists…).

We are the Best! is available for streaming on Netflix and you can see the trailer here:

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Have yourself a snarky little Christmas

Today is December 15, which means that there are 10 more days to gear up for Christmas or, alternatively, ten more days until you will stop hearing “Jingle Bell Rock” everywhere you go. In either case, here are some snarky Christmas-themed posts to pass the time:

2014: Christmas as social control

2013: Christmas at Fox News

2012: Kevin McCallister, murderer?

2012: Toys for rich and poor

2012: Toys for boys and girls

2012: Thoughts on Rudolph the Red-Nosed Reindeer

2011: Holiday advertising gone wrong (a.k.a. the Folgers commercial)

2010: The world’s most offensive Christmas song

2009: Christmas spells relief

Christmas Bonus: A subscription to the Jelly of the Month Club? No, its the Hater’s Guide to the Williams-Sonoma Catalog for 2012, 2013, and 2014

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Easy for YOU to play!

The video above from the “Kids React” series is a great demonstration of the way that people often describe something as “complicated” when they really mean “unfamiliar.” I doubt that anybody who has owned a Walkman (or similar portable cassette player) would describe it as hard to use, but these kids can’t even figure out how to open the door to insert a cassette*. It is also interesting that, for some of them, familiarity with its labels occurs only after they are told that it plays music. In that context, it makes sense that the arrow pointing to the right means “play.” Without that context, they didn’t have a clue. I bet there are also a large number of people who can easily use a Walkman but have no idea how to listen to music using something like an iPhone.

*It is also interesting that they expect to be able to listen to music on a portable device without headphones, since headphones were a requirement until the rise of smartphones after most of these kids were born.

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