It is decreed by the Chapo Central Committee that, seeing as Sorkin’s ethos completely and utterly missed the mark and led to a bunch of greasy, half-literate tristate area slobs occupying the decorated halls of the White House, Sorkin should be legally mandated to remake his entire series—same dialogue, same camerawork, same music—but swap out the liberal philosopher kings for people like Donald Trump, Michael Flynn, Stephen Miller, and the Hamburglar.
Sorkin, too, however, is a symptom of a bigger problem.
At the turn of the twentieth century, America had a problem: polio, sure, but, even worse, the lack of opportunities to laugh at the high jinks of a fat guy and his hot wife. Yes, there was vaudeville, but the scarcity of theaters where you could spend an evening chuckling at a portly gentleman and his incongruously attractive spouse as they threatened each other with violence left millions of rural Americans out of the fun. There had to be a better way.
Thanks to the spirit of American ingenuity that never allows a need to go unanswered for too long, that better way was unveiled in 1928 when inventor Philo Farnsworth debuted his all-electric televisual network. “With this miraculous device,” Farnsworth said, “Americans from coast to coast will be able to observe the merry antics of a rotund workman and his comely helpmate from the comfort of their own homes!”
The device caught on among a public hungry for scenes of domestic gaiety between comically mismatched romantic partners, and by the 1950s, the television set was a staple appliance in the American home. Each night, families would settle in and enjoy wholesome programs like The Honeymooners, Texaco Presents: The Oaf and the Dish, and The General Electric Obesity Hour. While situation-based comedies such as these remain a mainstay of television, over time, increasingly sophisticated audiences began to demand a greater variety of programming, such as rigged game shows, blackface shenanigans, and the adventures of horny doctors, horny lawyers, and horny cowboys. None of it was good, mind you, but it wasn’t supposed to be. Real, challenging art was to be found in books and at the theater (the latter is still boring, though). TV was for shutting off your brain and basking in a sea of banal amusement after a hard day’s work. This upset highbrow nerds like FCC chairman Newton Minow, who famously called television a “vast wasteland” in 1961, but most Americans were happy to reply, “Shut up, bitch, Car 54, Where Are You? is on.”
And so, network television existed for decades in a state of tranquil stasis: sitcoms, soap operas, lawyer shows, doctor shows, cowboy shows. The only major changes were that the cowboys eventually turned into cops and networks began to allow actual minorities to appear on-screen. Suddenly, in the 1990s, there was a burst of innovation. Chief among the new types of programs was the “reality show,” which, by the turn of the century, was threatening to consume civilization with increasingly dystopian offerings. The low overhead and huge viewership of lurid, vérité programs like Billionaire Bride Auction and Celebrity Ape Hunt ate into the market share of scripted programming. For a moment, it seemed the networks had found a solution to the rising competition from cable. They seized upon this silver bullet, and it looked as though soon the only things on prime-time TV would be public executions and Regis Philbin. But then The Sopranos happened.
David Chase’s show, broadcast on the pay-cable channel HBO and thus freed from the content and commercial restrictions of the broadcast networks, combined the thematic and character complexities of literature with the mature, stylized visual content of film on the small screen. Narratives stretched across seasons, not just episodes. Clear-cut resolutions were replaced by lingering ambiguities. Characters underwent the sort of personality transformations that would have alienated previous generations of TV audiences, who cherished the soothing familiarity of archetypes. It turned out that television wasn’t just a place to zone out and chuckle at cloddish husbands; it could produce art just as challenging and thought-provoking as any other medium.
Inspired by Chase’s accomplishment, a whole generation of creative heavyweights set to the task of putting their own mark on the tube. The next two Davids, Milch and Simon, empowered by an HBO hungry to replicate the overnight phenomenon that was The Sopranos, created a pair of shows, Deadwood and The Wire, respectively, that failed to match The Sopranos in viewership but achieved posthumous critical canonization. It was AMC, a network that had previously specialized in showing old Hollywood movies to a small audience of nostalgic geriatrics, that really managed to copy the Sopranos formula with Matthew Weiner’s Mad Men and Vince Gilligan’s Breaking Bad. These shows achieved levels of popularity and critical acclaim that had never been seen before, and certainly not on basic cable. Television got so good, in fact, that it wasn’t long before the dominant opinion among cultural tastemakers was that TV had surpassed film as the most vital popular narrative art form.
With books deemed a dying medium and cinema dominated by superhero pablum, it wasn’t unreasonable to seek intellectual and creative stimulation elsewhere—and with TV outlets and streaming services multiplying like toadstools after a rainstorm, the sheer volume of serialized storytelling meant you don’t have to leave your couch to find it.
This line of thought soon calcified into its own orthodoxy, with its own shibboleths: we’re living in the “Golden Age of Television,” don’t you know, and the shows we watch aren’t just shows, they’re Prestige programming. The premise of this cant was to assure people that they didn’t have to bother with challenging literature or indie cinema; television could provide all their cultural vitamins and minerals without their having to strain their eyes or leave their houses.
This Golden Age of Television heuristic was created and enforced by a new class of television critics who got their start in digital media outlets that, not coincidentally, sprang into being just as TV shows started getting “good.” The explosion of Web traffic in the early 2000s led to a huge demand for content, and media reviews were the cheapest, easiest content to crank out. This created a recap economy, in which poorly paid content creators put out instant reviews of television shows hours after they aired, and gave the people who’d just watched those shows space in the comments section to have the conversations about those shows they weren’t having with their nonexistent real-life friends. It was a faulty critical model (books aren’t reviewed by the chapter, films aren’t reviewed by the act), but it was perfect for the audiences of those websites: bored cubicle workers with Internet connections at their desks and no energy to do anything after work but sit down and watch television. Everyone involved in this cycle, from the website owners to the writers to the eager comment-section dwellers, had a vested interest in framing TV as the most important, most thoughtful, most artistically satisfying medium.
It wasn’t long after Prestige TV became a buzzword that the term began to be defined less as embodying any particular standard of “quality” (which, after all, is a mostly subjective concept) and more as a collection of surface-level signifiers. These proved much easier for networks and producers to replicate than the lightning in a bottle that was The Sopranos—so that first generation of prestigious television gave way to a second wave that mimicked the content, style, and mood of its forebear without the point of view or craftsmanship. Shows like House of Cards and Westworld sport the high production values and cinematic atmosphere that signify Prestige but the characters, dialogue, plots, and themes of a tryhard freshman fiction workshop. Even higher-quality shows like Fargo strain so hard to be legible to reviewers by underlining each episode’s themes so that they can be pointed out in recaps that feel contrived and flat. Even the best of them tend to recycle tortured male antihero tropes and rely on genre conventions because audiences love a guy with a gun.
And more enervating than the cynicism and relentless sameness of Prestige TV is the way the concept serves as a brainlessly proud monument to techno-capitalist exhaustion. Viewers, worn down by draining and unfulfilling work lives, socially and emotionally isolated, priced out of expensive movie theaters, attention spans and reading ability obliterated by the informational overload of the Internet, reach for any available confirmation that zoning out on the couch counts as cultural enrichment. Poorly paid content-mill providers are charged with providing that confirmation, treating every new show with decent production values and an angsty protagonist as an Important Commentary on Our Times.
This is ice cream for dinner. Television is an inherently middlebrow medium, and dressing up shows with blockbuster production values and Big Social Themes won’t change that. Aside from surreal ten-minute comedies shown at 4:00 a.m. on Adult Swim and stuff by brand-name weirdos like David Lynch who made their reputations in film, there’s no real TV avant-garde. Movies and books, as one-off, take-it-or-leave-it pieces of art, can challenge and provoke in ways that TV shows, always angling for viewers to tune in to the next episode so they get renewed, simply can’t.
The idea that a thing like Prestige Television exists spreads the poisonous notion that these shows, which at this point are blurry copies of the original article, are sufficient cultural nourishment. We need better than that if we’re going to learn how to live in the burning circus tent we call twenty-first-century America. Instead of taking what’s offered to a demoralized, dispirited population by people whose precarious livelihoods require us to keep watching and sounding off in the comments and calling it “good enough,” we need to demand to live in a world where the burdens and alienations of modern life are lightened, allowing us to watch movies in the morning, read books in the afternoon, and critique TV after supper.
Prestige TV may seem benign, but if we don’t resist its siren song, the grim end result will be something far worse. We speak, of course, of gaming, a growing strain of entertainment that jettisons all pretensions to artistry, theme, or even craft in favor of catering to the basest instincts of an increasingly slothful and sadistic citizenry, a citizenry every day rendered more vile, more hateful, more incapable of basic social function by the mindless b
This is Virgil Texas (Gamertag: Obamacare) speaking. I’ve hacked into the printing press to delete this shameful anti-Gamer tirade written by my revisionist colleagues. In its place is a brief manifesto about the purest, most revolutionary form of art, courtesy of me and Felix (Gamertag: Professor_Headshot).
~~GREETZ~~
Congratulations, you’ve “scored.” You’ve “pounded beers” and “had sex” after “winning state.” Your life has peaked after batting the game-winning slam dunk and fingering the tight end of the opposing sportsball squadron. As you deplete your brain cells and bodily fluids for a few moments of base skin pleasure, engaging in a series of high-five-style hand slaps whilst listening to brain-dead hip-hop about being a “player,” your imagination grows too feeble to anticipate the years beyond your wasted youth when you will slip into an inexorable mental decline from years of brutal bloodsport and testosterone supplement abuse and your nasty children will quibble over who gets your vintage Toyota Matrix. When you reach the end of your finite supply of orgasms, having long since become immobile due to the idiot’s brew, perhaps you might realize in your last few flashes of lucidity that you could have been a different type of person had you spent your peak years in discipline, self-denial, and constant practice. Perhaps you could have been an artist, a nomad, a connoisseur, a genius, a freedom fighter, a warrior. Perhaps you could have taken a name that struck fear into the hearts of strangers in every realm you wandered. Perhaps instead of some mewling crotch spawn left to defile your legacy, your progeny could have been an avatar that would have granted you immortality in the Cloud.
Perhaps you could have been a Gamer.
Being a Gamer first and foremost means being a well-rounded intellectual. A Gamer embodies the classical Greek ideal of a human being: an athlete, an aesthete, a philosopher. Like Jean des Esseintes, the Gamer spurns vulgar bourgeois society to devote their life to total immersion in high culture. From their aerie, the Gamer consumes art that speaks to all of the human condition. The Gamer explores notions of identity and genetics in Metal Gear Solid, destiny and duty in Halo, and speed and sexuality in Sonic the Hedgehog. The Gamer uses controllers and keyboards as keys to the universe, achieving a level of interaction with essential texts that book readers could only ever dream of.
The Gamer does not eschew nongaming social interaction. When not challenging one another in teamchat, Gamers take to the agora of the message board, from which the highest intellectual activity of the past three decades has emerged. They usually debate games as art, sport, and life on the boards, but their wisdom is also seen in famed Off-Topic threads such as “Asshole Parents Won’t Accept Rent in Bitcoins,” “Who Invented Blow Jobs?,” and “Short Men Shouldn’t Have to Pay Taxes.”
The rest of the world anguishes over menial tasks like office small talk and family get-togethers so much that there’s an entire genre of writing dedicated to how they should confront their mean uncle or not humiliate themselves at the watercooler. They mope about fuckbois on Tinder, asexual representation in Riverdale, and whether they should tip their therapist. They’ve created a world of supposed creature comforts that they’re too self-conscious and neurotic to even enjoy, their fleeting moments of leisure alternating between self-flagellation and self-importance.
In comparison, the Gamer exists in his own space, separate from the dirty terrestrial confines his siblings, cousins, and classmates imprison themselves in. One doesn’t need a guide to arguing politics on Thanksgiving if one just shuffles out of one’s room, loads up a plate, and hurries back to Orc Theme Park Tycoon without once making eye contact. Why make an existential crisis out of dating app travails when one could just forgo all romantic ambitions? Why twist oneself in knots over how one comes off to a coworker if one can just avoid a job altogether? While normies toil in the brutal purgatory they’ve created for themselves, the Gamer moves freely between virtual nations, unharmed by a doomed society’s jagged edges.
The first computer game was coded by Ada Lovelace, history’s first programmer, for Charles Babbage’s Difference Engine. Cholera Quest was a modest success in Victorian London and sparked a debate over whether women should be allowed to be computer programmers, a controversy that rages to this day.
Graphical games emerged during the Cold War, when technicians poached from the ruins of the Nazi war machine by the RAND Corporation designed such rudimentary games as Tennis for Two, Tic-Tac-Toe, and Missile Command. The latter was famously enjoyed by John F. Kennedy, arguably our first Gamer president, who used lessons gleaned from Missile Command to defuse the Cuban Missile Crisis, telling Soviet premier Nikita Khrushchev, “The only winning move is not to play.” This, of course, was a lie, as the real moral of the game was to spawn nukes to build up an overwhelming first-strike capacity and take out your opponent’s missile installations before he has a chance to retaliate, a lesson quickly internalized by a young Pong aficionado Gamer named Henry Kissinger.
The video-game gap between the US and the USSR widened in the 1970s and early ’80s, when consumer capitalism produced the Atari 2600 and Pac-Man, a game that simulated rapacious gluttony, while state Communism produced the Autotraktor Konsole and Tetris, a game that simulated the repetitive and futile drudgery of manual labor.
In consumerist societies, pricey home-gaming systems proliferated until the mid-1980s, when overspeculation on health-drop derivatives caused the infamous video-game crash of 1983. Out of the ashes emerged the Japanese, who established the modern video-game console model with the Nintendo Entertainment System. From then on, Gamers were treated to an unbroken string of leading-edge consoles, each more eye-poppingly advanced than the last: SNES, Sega Genesis, N64, Xbox, the fucking Sega Saturn that you got for Christmas when you said you wanted a PlayStation. For an industry driven by the recommendations of the man at the video-game store who said you would want this, gaming has experienced a nearly unparalleled rate of innovation, bested only, perhaps, by gun manufacturing and pornography.
Yet for every two steps forward, gaming has taken a step back. Modern gaming is more immersive, more profound, and more challenging to the Gamer’s intelligence and reflexes than it has ever been. But the industry is blighted by unfair pay-to-win models; loot-box scams; invasive DRM schemes; preorder rip-offs; DLCs substituting for core content; abusive labor practices toward developers, testers, artists, and voice actors; and players getting banned from Xbox Live for total bullshit reasons. Misogyny and racism run rampant in the darker corners of the gaming world. Your opponents are winning because of lag. Scott won’t let me play, even though it’s a two-player game. How should the moral Gamer act when faced with such endemic malignance? How shall we purge these noxious elements so that we as Gamers may finally reach Outer Heaven?
The Gamer acts, first and foremost, by gaming. For all its longevity and cultural impact, gaming as an art form is arguably still in its infancy. As with any virgin mass-media culture, the contours of its evolution will be dictated by a mixture of capital and the expectations of its audience. As a digital medium with many forms and genres—mobile gaming, browser gaming, eSports, big-budget titles, indie games, RPGs, simulations, etc.—gaming is evolving rapidly in several different directions, and the proliferation of developer tools and a relatively low barrier of entry for game creators means new ideas, mechanics, and experiences can be introduced by nearly anyone with a computer and free time. And if the blogosphere, social media, and self-publishing have taught us anything, it’s that most of this new “outsider” content is sure to be spiritually and intellectually uplifting.
Looking forward, virtual reality is the next logical development in human culture. Much like the way you can’t pay your phone bill without going online anymore, one day you’ll handle all your transactions by putting on a VR outfit, walking to a virtual bank, and interacting with a nine-foot-tall Spyro the Dragon as a woman with big breasts. Virtual reality will consume all other art forms. Instead of reading a physical novel or e-book in the meatspace, we’ll suit up and open a virtual tome. Once we’ve fully shed the fetters of our corporeal bodies, we’ll finally be able to attend digital concerts, meet up at digital bars, and make digital love with one another, all on VR servers like xXx_DarthBudBundy_xXx’s Room [FULL Married with Children RP ONLY].
Will this brave new world be any better than our current one? For the answer to that question, you’ll have to buy the second edition of this book. Until then, we at Chapo Virtual House say, “Long live the New Flesh, same as the Old Flesh!”
I. See page 220 (where the Elevator Products section begins).