McCain’s other approach of influence has been the employment of a series of stunts designed to change the logic of the system (e.g Sarah Palin, his campaign suspension, etc). Ironically for the arch-conservative Arizona senator, one could analogize this to culture-jamming. McCain’s stunts have not failed because they lack sincerity or substance–neither of which is necessary to stir up the masses. They have failed because both actions are insufficient in and of themselves as game-changers.  Against the drama of the fall of stock market’s fall and the global war on terrorism,  Sarah Palin’s “redneck woman” routine seems like a bizarre sideshow. Likewise, McCain’s staged heroics (a campaign suspension that wasn’t) didn’t have much of an impact. He is going to have to try much harder if he really wants to off-set Obama’s lead.

Gotham, for example, is a dystopia of primary loyalties and endemic corruption. Indeed, Batman’s goal in the film is to give the government legitimacy, without which it cannot defeat crime. Commissioner Gordon struggles to build up the police force with a stable of honest and professional cops. Most interestingly, the Joker is cast as a kind of global guerrilla/super-empowered individual. He targets the moral and political focal points of the city and takes an atavistic glee in the systems disruptions he causes. He terrorizes with the simplest of tools–a knife, an assault rifle, and improvised explosive devices. The Joker also carries out a complex series of manipulations in order to pit the city’s factions against each other.

The closest thing to a coherent belief system that the Joker holds is a theory that every human being is just as savage as he is. That, and a visceral distaste for organization of any sort. The Joker may be a fantasy character, but his love of raw chaos and destruction for its own sake is sadly all too real. We can see in contemporary criminal gangs, militias, and insurgencies a certain core of sadists who will maim and kill for pleasure. They are more Jeffrey Dahmer than Mao Zedong.

In Liberia’s vicious mid-90′s civil war, drugged-out children holding oversized guns battled it out throughout the streets of Monrovia at the behest of commander who went by bizarre non-de-guerres as “General No-Mother-No-Father” and “General Butt Naked.” They marked their territory with severed heads and fetishes. In 1980s Lebanon, war correspondent Coskun Aral recounts meeting a French mercenary sniper who would shoot people crossing the demarcation line and then play Mozart on a nearby piano. And then there’s Lord’s Resistance Army (LRA) leader Joseph Kony, who commands a cult of brainwashed, limb-chopping children.

This is an uncomfortable realization, especially for left-leaning policy elites who believe all terror and violence can be resolved by paying attention to “root causes.” To them, insurgents are uniformly idealistic individuals fighting for justice and honor. Often times, as Paul Collier notes, research shows that third-world insurgent motivations are often far more base–control of diamond mines rather than socialist utopia.

The “strategic corporals” of ethnic militias are often warrior kings like Serbia’s Arkan, men who excel at pillage, rapine, and mass slaughter. These sadistic warriors aren’t anything new–they’ve been around for as long as humans have killed one another. But they are an integral part of today’s world of non-state conflict, where terrorism against civilians is a common tactic. Global guerrilla theory provides a great outlet for Joker types–alienated, intelligent, and ruthless men wanting to bend the world to their personal whims. Systems disruption as a military doctrine seems to be tailor-made for such characters.

So why do I love them? It’s precisely because Squaresoft made so much out of so little. To play any of their mid-1990s games is to see how great ideas can be expressed without powerful graphics engines and massive online multiplayer options.  Though the quality of Final Fantasy storylines are always overrated by gamers, it’s hard not to admire how Squaresoft can get you to care about the fortunes of 32-bit sprites. Sometimes limitations can be a boon for creativity.  The children who play cops and robbers in the backwoods next to their uncle’s house show more imagination, after all, than those who do so glued to a television screen. As primitive as mid-1990s Squaresoft games are, they stand the test of time because of imagination informed by limitation.

A little ways out from the blast site was a small photo shop. Most of the pictures displayed were reproductions of famous news photographs of the attacks, but there were plenty of more obscure photos. I fixated on one picture of a graffiti’d wall–the words “You Are Alive” were spray-painted in black. I bought it on impulse and took it with me back to California. Since then, I’ve thought a great deal about the picture. It is easily the most powerful of all of the 9/11 images, and I’ve never really understood why. The simplicity? The earnestness? The uplifting yet melancholy underlying message? Whatever it makes me feel, I’ve never been able to put it into words.

Predictably, Pitchfork doesn’t like it.

We all, in a sense, play different “roles” for different environments. Many of the blogfriends I met at the 2007 Boyd Conference differed substantially from the mental pictures I had built of them from their writings (as well as our individual private communications). Should I ever (and I do hope) to meet the other writers I’ve had the pleasure of corresponding with, I expect to be similarly surprised. Just because WoW and blogging both involves a process of building an (sometimes elaborate) alternate self doesn’t necessarily make the blog world a MMORPG.

Why? The blogosphere and WoW are at cross-purposes. While the blogsophere (like WoW) is a highly complex and variegated social ecosystem, its currency is opinion. You can’t get anywhere without expressing distinctive, original opinions. Opinions are used to facilitate off-sphere social interaction (on email, facebook, myspace, etc). Opinions are taken as proxies of the author’s personality. And the interaction (and sometimes clash) of opinions produces a greater collective understanding of the issues of the day.

Many pundits have noted that the analog model of the blogosphere is the yellow journalism and political pamphleteering of the industrial age. I reject such analysis as simplistic. High-traffic partisan blogs certainly bring to mind Thomas Paine, but there are many others that work along a more collaborative model–conducting debates and symposiums across a broad political spectrum. Take, for example, WhirledView’s symposium on U.S. nuclear policy. The proper analog model for this is the salon of the 18th century, and to a lesser extent, the cafe society that developed in Europe in the 19th and 20th centuries.

As I noted in a essay published in the Bright Lights Film Journal, videogames evolved out of children’s play–toy soldier battles, cops and robbers, etc. The online communities established in WoW are centered around play. It drives the local economy, facilitates social interaction, and in the case of story-driven MMORPGs like The Matrix Online–propels the plot. Play is the reason for WoW‘s existence, which is why it is so addictive. It tapes into our own desires to return to a state where we can indulge in the process of play, a human need that is not viewed very favorably by organized societies. A world where play is not only valued by rewarded is a seductive one–no matter your ethnicity gender, age, or nationality.

Finally, a blog involves substantial production–in order to stay relevant in the blogosphere one has to consistently produce quality opinion products in a timely manner. There is no guarantee of reward or readership for these tasks. WoW gamers’ play leads to greater in-game wealth, power, and material supply. It is no wonder that bloggers frequently go on hiatus while some MMORPG gamers grow so addicted to the game that they forget about the world outside their computers.

However, it is worth noting that abstract thought, although more valued than play, meets with equal disdain and indifference. To take a typical example, philosophy majors are stereotyped as United States as unrealistic and indulgent slackers in need of a “real job.” Given the role of great ideas in setting the stage for American prosperity, perhaps a little more respect is in order? Morever, isn’t the portrayal of those unemployed philosophy grads and gamers somewhat similar? The stereotypical image you have of a philosophy major is a (male) black turtleneck-clad, pretentious loser drinking wine and composing essays from his mother’s basement. The typical gamer is portrayed as a (male), overweight, socially awkward loser in his mother’s basement, lost in the glow of his Playstation 3. Both are disdained and seen as abnormal because they choose to engage in activities society doesn’t view as productive.

If WoW is a fantasy world where play is rewarded with material success and recognition, the blogosphere is equally unrealistic. It is a place where people are (more often than not) judged by the content of their ideas, rather than their physical appearance, occupation, and life status. I see both as overwhelmingly positive things, because both play and abstract thought are beautiful and essential things.