The Faith of a Heretic

I have been playing ARMA II recently and thought I would relate one experience which summarizes how open ended and strange this game can be. I was playing on a warfare map, in which two sides compete for control of various strategic hamlets across a vast Bohemian landscape. Each side has a commander, and the players are officers, capable of ordering other units under their command. As I was waiting for our commander to get things squared away, I was looking through the list of vehicles you can buy as a player. BRDM… T-72… UAZ… mountain bike! Hrmm I thought, lets take a mountain bike and try to solo capture one of the surrounding towns.

Then I realized, in this photorealistic world, this is what it must be like to bike in an environment where you don’t have to constantly be mad dogged by drug dealers, smell toxic fumes or constantly be preoccupied with dodging cars and a myriad of other filthy objects. Instead of my depressing suburban (and more urban everyday) sprawl, this was the Czech countryside, and it was beautiful. It was as if I could smell the flora and feel the wind on my face. If I knew biking could be like that, I probably wouldn’t be playing ARMA II in the first place. Herein lies one of the values, or if indulged too often, one of the dangers, of playing a well made video game: experiencing something when  it would otherwise be impossible. As long as it does not become a form of escapism, I believe this can only be experienced with such a great degree of verisimilitude through games. Driving around in full tactical gear, with an assault rifle and a rocket launcher strapped to my character’s back, I no longer really thought about combat, I just wanted to ride around aimlessly through the countryside and check stuff out. The developers added a Pee Wee Herman style horn to the bike which produced a pleasant jingle whenever it was used, creating an absurd scene to behold; a man fully clad in weapons, in a paramilitary uniform, tooting on his horn.

I approached the hamlet to be captured after passing through some beautiful fields adjacent to it and zipped through town, it was eerily quiet, and looked abandoned. Then I heard the not so distant thud of an automatic canon and read in the game log that a player on my team had been killed. Obviously, there was some sort of armored vehicle in the hay fields to the north. I rode north and spotted it, a BMP, an armored vehicle with an autocannon, firing with abandon onto a group of allies across the field, every few minutes firing a rocket across my field of view. Luckily, the BMP’s radar only picks up heat signatures of engines, so I quickly sped to a thicket of trees just fifty feet or so from it and dismounted, diving headfirst into the underbrush and brandishing my RPG. The BMP had not visually identified me, too busy firing on my friends, so I inserted a rocket into its rear, and from the massive plume of smoke and debris, several men stumbled out of the vehicle and died on the ground, right before me. I barely made out the fourth and final crewman, running at full speed away from the burning vehicle and out of view. After a tense game of cat and mouse, in which I slowly and carefully found him hiding in a nearby forest, he was dispatched.

I returned to my huffy, which had gotten itself stuck in some bushes and returned to the town toward the commander’s base, as he informed us that the hamlet had been captured and that he was now producing tanks for us to play around with. I heard a vehicle speeding down the road in the middle of town, and expecting it to be comrades also returning to base, I stopped to greet them. Yet what was coming was not friendly. As I waited in the middle of the road, a white 1970s camaro (no doubt commandeered from the local village) charged me, and as I expected it to stop, accelerated and knocked me ten feet off my bike, breaking both of my legs. I laughed so hard, I almost died. The car stopped, and the ENEMY COMMANDER jumped out and hid behind a little house. He poked his head around and popped off a few rounds at me, and as my legs were broken and I could not walk, I decided that the only way this was going to end up was with me dead. Accordingly, I threw a grenade at him, and it detonated mid air just as he came around the corner to finish me off. Not killed by the concussion, I finished him off with a few rounds of rifle fire. I was now stranded approximately 3 kilometers from base, I could not pedal my bike even if i wanted to (the tires were busted), and the car, which was intact when it stopped, had finally exploded after I threw the grenade. I began to crawl on my face back to the road heading to base, hoping to link up with some friends, when I realized that I might as well check the man who tried to kill me.

His gear was the standard US kit. An m-16, an AT-4, but something else caught my eye: green smoke grenade. Perhaps I could persuade the commander to airlift my ass to the MASH I thought, and I could mark my spot with the smoke. The plan was hatched, but as it stood, the commander only could speak broken English, and didn’t understand what I was saying. He was obviously German. After minimizing and translating I NEED A HELICOPTER TO SAVE ME, WILL USE SMOKE in altavista translator, the chap finally got the message, and commanded a player extraction team to get in a transport chopper and extract my feeble ass.  5 minutes later, I was crawling toward a clearing a few hundred feet from the street I was on and pulling myself up into the medivac.

The scope of this game is absurd.

Preserve life without loathing.
Awaken hope within hatred.
Wrest insight from outrage.

My house. The Kitchen.

Reanna: Let me use the fan in your room.

Me: No.

Reanna commences whining, answered by no.

Reanna runs to the window and waves to get her mother’s attention. Anything to get what she wants.

Reanna: Chris won’t let me use the fan in his room!

Something clicks in my head, one of my bananas was missing next to my keyboard. She broke into my room, stole a banana and used my fan when I was out.

I make pistol hand gestures toward her and pop my lips to fire at her, I imagine justice, my brother laughs and walks out to go back to work. He is used to this shit.

Reanna: Don’t do that - I want to be nice to you now [at least has the honest here to admit she is a tyrant usually], will you be nice to me?

Me: I don’t be nice to brats, you earn respect by giving respect.

Reanna: If i’m nice to you will you buy me stuff?

Me: No.

Reanna: Then nevermind… I HATE YOU.

Reanna runs back to watch her television.

Niko Bellic and his magical pockets.

Calculated the total weight that the main character of Grand Theft Auto IV (Niko Bellic) has on his person at any given time. It comes out to over 365 lbs, assuming:

600 rounds of 5.56 ammo, in 30 round standard magazines (.45 kg/ea)

m4a1 rifle (2.7 kg)

50 rounds of m82 ammo, in 5 10 round magazines (1.87 kg/ea)

m107/m82 rifle (12.9 kg)

8 PG-7v rockets (2.6 kg/ea)

RPG-7 (7 kg)

Baseball bat, assumed for a 180 lb man (.73 kg)

25 m67 fragmentation grenades (.4 kg/ea)

1500 .357 Desert Eagle ammo in 166 9 round magazines (.3 kg/ea)

Desert Eagle .357 (1.9 kg)

80 12 gauge buck rounds in 8 10 round bandoleers (.4 kg/ea)

m1014 shotgun (3.8 kg)

1200 9mm rounds in 40 30 round magazines (.6 kg/ea)

MP5 (2.9 kg)

Interceptor Body Armor with SAPI plates (7.4 kg) - this is a likely assumption, but is not represented as such in the game. Niko can carry body armor that is proofed against 7.62 ammunition, and since most of his other gear is US army issue, this would be the most plausible. He could also be using the outdated Flak Jacket, weighing in at 11.3 kg.

———–

165.68 kilograms // 365 lbs

One possible configuration of Niko Bellic’s gear - click on the image to enlarge.

Notes:

• The equipment is not to exact scale in the image.
• Niko can alternatively carry an AK-47 instead of the M4A1, which would add even more of a burden to his body.
• The recommend combat weight of combat gear for US soldiers is 50 lbs, which includes everything a soldier needs, not only weapons and ammo. The most extreme loads are seldom more than 135 lbs (and remember, this INCLUDES food, water, communication gear, camp gear and assorted kit). (source)

Show me a person who is sick and happy, in danger and happy, dying and happy,
in exile and happy, in disgrace and happy. Show that person to me for, by the gods,
I wish to see a Stoic. If you cannot show me such a one, at least show me one who
is forming, one who has shown a tendency to be a Stoic. Do me this favor. Do not
begrudge an old man seeing a sight which I have not yet seen.

Epictetus Discourses, Bk II, chapter 19

The study of the liberal arts is a necessary component in the education of a young person, as they inform the behavior and character of the civic enterprise. In particular, classical literature offers a wealth of wisdom in matters of living life with grace, virtue and authenticity. In an unattributed famous saying of Socrates the issue is elucidated succinctly: “Employ your time in improving yourself by other men’s writings, so that you shall gain easily what others have labored hard for.” Life is the proper laboratory to which we are given our final exam, and in matters of life, we might rightly wound those about us in ignorance of the knowledge of the good; we must caution against acting with imprudence and instead temper our inclinations and will with right principles. The liberal arts provide these principles by exposing us to a wealth of myth to contemplate upon and by offering to us a mental, even spiritual exercise (in the words of Pierre Hadot), by which to experience the spectrum of life and death, the range of human emotions. As a result of considering this mental meter, we are compelled to come to conclusions on the nature of life, and so gain wisdom, guiding our public and private behaviors while before we were naked in reasoning. The liberal arts challenge us, by thrusting upon us the transgressions of Oedipus and the destructive rage of Achilles, so that we might learn from vice, raise ourselves up from the mire and temper our actions with an understanding of consequence.

The question of whether or not the appreciation and training in visual arts should be necessarily educated in children is another issue. For sure, there is a need for visual artists, but there is not a need for all citizens to be visual artists in the same way that there is a need for all citizens to have a knowledge of right and wrong, of consequence and of civic duty. We might wisely offer to students with a love of beauty and form, those who hold some great innate yearning or talent in the arts, separate and specially suited instruction - but to impose on all students an instruction in the visual arts is ineffectual at best, and at worst compels students to revel in superficial and wasteful enterprises, enslaving them to the most superfluous aspects of civilization. For the citizens who have no interest in the arts, let us focus on teaching them how to act well, for action is the blood of life. As a corollary, we might recall that Plato warned against regarding the arts as true to life when in truth they simply mimic life and goodness; while they act as a glimpse at the truth, beauty or justice, they are not the authentic stuff. An obsession with false, pastiche forms is accompanied by a neglect of the most important and rightly apparent duties: the civic behavior. This notion is nowhere better pronounced than in Rousseau’s Discourse on the Arts of Sciences:

As for us, common men to whom heaven has not allotted such great talents and destined for so much glory, let us remain in our obscurity.  Let us not run after a reputation which would elude us and which, in the present state of things, would never give back to us what it would cost, even if we had all the qualifications to obtain it.  What good is it looking for our happiness in the opinion of others if we can find it in ourselves?  Let us leave to others the care of instructing people about their duties, and limit ourselves to carrying out our own well.  We do not need to know any more than this.

The most influential study for me was surely that of Leo Tolstoy’s theory and definition of art, for it is must intelligible to my natural reason. I tend to agree with Tolstoy’s claim that good art communicates the thoughts and emotions of what the artist was feeling, that allows us to empathize with him or her, and to share in a noble meeting of ideas. To task art with a didactic and civic purpose seems to me to be worthy of it, and surely the best pieces of art are those which inspire us to excellence. Coming immediately to mind are the classical epics, Iliad, Odyssey, Aeneid – while technically art by virtue of beautiful use of language, they also depict characters in which we are to empathize and learn from, offering us wise guidance and meter for contemplation. It is this sort of art work, along with more modern examples including the works of Shakespeare and Addison, which I find the most moving and rightfully artistic. The visual arts can accomplish similar effect, although in a sporadic and less cathartic fashion. Those works, if underscored by the chief considerations of Tolstoy and the ancients, serve as wholesome subconscious stuff, ennobling the spirit upon their reflection by filling the mind with allegory, wonder and mystery.

I love Shai Hulud so much:

Be winged, free from the mire of men.
Be winged, leave the dead soil to the dying.
Inherit the wind, soar from the coils that asphyxiate you.
Be winged and climb high, with a wingspan to humble mankind.

[II. THE PERSECUTION OF EVERY NEXT BREATH]

True living and breathing death.
Every breath is surely the last.

But another…

How many more will follow–

And another…

How many more can be endured…

Broken whispers; shy touches to passing flesh.
A twitch of life. A cold shudder.
Defy the instinct to recoil.

Yet another breath…

Ignore your pain
You are not your own,
You are the strength of life and love
To usher in the end.

…

Was I mindful…
Have I suffered…
Am I of warmth…
Worth affection…
Capable of love…
A vessel of hate and bitterness…

In this death so close, beset with travail,
I am aware of my every fault and failure.

[III. GO FORTH OF LIFE]

Now rest;
Leave your venom behind.
May we all have such strength.

In terms of effort, I put as much in as I could healthily afford, balancing the chaos of last semester thesis work and graduate school admissions with the chaos of trying to save a hemorrhaging business. I upheld my oaths and duties and lived up to my standards of behavior. I could have improved my participation by mentally preparing more carefully before speaking, as sometimes I spoke nonsense. This is unlike me, as normally words flow through my mouth with expedient power, but the concepts in aesthetics were frustrating and unnatural to me, and so I was muddled down in the indecision of my thoughts. So let it be said that I could have improved my participation by tempering my thoughts with more prudence instead of wasting the listeners time with unexamined thoughts. Then again, some would say this is the good of philosophy, to work through muddled thoughts with a rational process, yet I always came out of class without a feeling of having contented my mind at all.

I benefited most from the private meditations I was able to have after being exposed to the thoughts of other philosophers. While my original perceptions of the discipline were mostly affirmed, I did gain a small share of new wisdom from several key writings, and this paltry nugget made the class worth it. I particularly found Tolstoy’s theories of art to be intelligible to my natural reason, and I wish the classical ideas that are hinted at in the fringes of his writings could have been explored more through the writings of the actual classical thinkers (i.e. Tolstoy hints at the moral domain of art as Plato would, but we didn’t encounter Plato much other than in terms of historical context). I think I had the most trouble with trying to keep my frustration toward modernism tempered with justice and prudence, as I believe the modern mode of thought is not philosophical or healthy for humanity, but I managed to not make anyone cry so I consider this a success. As far as feeling uncomfortable, I am comfortable everywhere I go, what could possibly happen to me? Death? There are worse things that could happen, no need to feel uncomfortable.

The city breathes so softly
Everything is sleeping
I am at the window silently watching
I can see you standing
Alone against the winter
I can hear you asking, but the streets, they are not giving
Don’t look to the ocean
Restless in its dreaming
Don’t look to the heavens for they will tell you nothing
If living is for learning
Then dying is forgetting
Once we have forgotten then we can go on loving