Ah… to have a weblog where I can pour out my heart and soul to you good people.

First, an update: Supernova Earth 4 is up, along with a counter recruitment PSA, so if you are running counter recruitment ads on your site and would like to use this one as well, by all means do so, but credit me for the spot. You can actually download both of these spots to your computer using your aggregator, or… You can check out the page called “Direct Links to the Show” on my sidebar immediately to the right of this word.

If you all have any questions on counterrecruitment feel free to ask me about it.

Well, the semester is coming to an end and I am winding up for summer. In June, I will be a father, and will get to take time off work, so in between learning about being a dad and sleeping, I hope to get some good video game playing in, and some good internet broadcasting accomplished.

While I’m on the subject of video games, I’ll let you know what game I am playing now. It is called NBA Ballers:Phenom. While the actual game play is reminiscient of NBA Street, it is significantly different enough to merit a different title. It is more of a RPG based in the idealized, bling-bling world of some materialistic basketball player’s fantasy land. It is clearly marketed toward black people, and features many of the things white nerdish video game programmers think black people live for, such as huge diamonds that you can just find by throwing your basketball at things, the stupidest looking street clothing that you have to wear because it boosts your stats, and some unrealistically delivered pseudo ghetto slang. It has a 3-way pager, which you use to check up on all the people “hitting you back”, and this sort of thing.

Basically, it is really reinforcing the stereotypes that white people have of black people, and black people use to construct false consciousness for themselves.

That said, it is still a somewhat fun video game, and since I am not a black man, but play on on my Playstation, I can reflect very easily about the nature of this video game, and its effects on any black person that buys it. On the one hand, I can say, yes it is entertaining: the streetball tournaments where you get 5 fouls, you can do all kinds of amazing tricks that apparently some dude somewhere can do, where you got mad skills etc… On another hand, it is full of stereotypes of the young black male: that he is ultramaterialistic, that he is just a sports jersey monger, that apparently every young black man thinks that his ticket out of the ghetto is through the NBA, that bling is both easy and desirable to find, and that his base motivation is competition. This is the only image of black men most people ever see (the other is the face-down drug dealer running from the cops on television). And if this is the only image people ever see of black people, they actually think black people are like this. Even black people, if they see this image constantly, they may grow up thinking that the black culture they see on MTV is the REAL black culture.

But on the third hand, I can say that the detrimental effects of this video game are so mitigated by the absolute market saturation of this sort of image that it really doesn’t matter how many video games marketed toward black people, or the idealized “black man as up and coming basketball player”there are, it’s not really going to make a difference one way or another in black meta- and reflexive-perception. There aren’t enough games about Angela Davis going around telling honkies to hook her up with some reparations, for instance. But if there were, how many black people would buy them? You really have to question the utility of complaining about false consciousness among black folks these days, especially young black men, just because that nonsense is so deeply ingraned into these guys that it merely becomes an echo chamber. In other words: The reason people buy these games is because they buy the images they present, and the realson why people continue to support these images is because they keep buying the lifestyle these games represent.

How does one break out of this cycle? Well, the answer could be to shut down Playstation and MTV. I’m all for that… But I don’t know really of a solution for overcoming the false consciousness that many black male youths hold today anymore than I have a solution for the false consciousnesses suffered by their white male youth counterparts. Does this mean that there is no solution? Absolutely not. Does it mean we shoudl stop looking for a solution? No; it means we should look harder.

Well, what is to be done until we find the solution? I don’t know. I’m going to keep playing the game fully aware of the images it represents, just like I watch tv so I can get mad at it. Once you have been relieved of ignorance, you can never go back. But every time I play the game, for the sheer purpose of leisure, you can bet I’m going to be practicing meta-perception and be aware of the things I percieve in the game I am playing. It helps me to strengthen my own consciousness and take steps to further relieve me of false consciousness.

Serenely,
W. Doc Stodden
www.supernovaearth.org