American Fun

by John Beckman

  In the digital assault on American fun, video games pack the biggest wallop. Video games, which can be the products of extraordinary creativity, replicate high levels of risk and participation (warfare, car crashes, zombie invasions) when in fact the players—like Build-A-Bear customers—fashion their avatars from the designers’ choices and spend hours, years, within prescripted worlds that demand nothing obvious in the way of personal stakes. Most deceptive may be the so-called interactive games—Wii (with its no-impact, weightless, plastic pantomime of rackets, bats, clubs, and jump ropes); Guitar Hero and Rock Band (whose would-be rock stars spend hundreds of hours becoming “expert” at punching colored buttons in sequence); and the cynically named Dance Dance Revolution (whose would-be Vera Sheppards, Shorty Snowdens, and B-boys tap out buttons instead of executing gravity-defying moves). Are the thousands of hours Americans clock with their thumbs and forefingers … fun? Or does the fun soon corrode into compulsive behavior? An endless rat maze of binary decisions? The video-game proponent Jane McGonigal, one of BusinessWeek’s “ten innovators to watch,” argues that video games are what she calls “hard fun,” a term she coins from the phrase “hard work,” because they create “positive stress” for the gamer and a sense of accomplishment. In particular, they generate an “emotional rush” of “pride,” which game designers call by its Italian name, fiero, and which is “one of the most powerful neurochemical highs we can experience.” This habit-forming rush of “hard fun,” she argues, can motivate gamers to inhabit “alternate realities,” to have “fun with strangers” under disguised identities, and ultimately, she believes, to reengage with fellow citizens in the real world. She even argues that video games will make us “dance more.”

  All while staring at a television screen. The student of American fun, real fun, has to ask “Why?” Why would a vigorous and youthful and (to consider the costs of such equipment) prosperous population sacrifice its enjoyment to the screen? To the habit-forming tricks of a game designer? Clearly, as with any kind of fun, the pleasure of gaming is a reason in itself, possibly the only reason. But what sort of nation does this amusement foster? What sort of “global happiness”? A twitchy one, to be certain, and sedentary. Even for all of the vaunted worldwide connectivity of multiplayer systems, for their celebrated “fun with strangers,” gaming fosters physically isolated citizens, an atomized citizenry that finds it harder, not more inspiring, to break free from their screens and to engage face-to-face. To the student of American fun—of lively, risky, rebellious action that has set people free for four hundred years—it all just looks so safe.

  When in fact it isn’t. McGonigal, in describing the neurochemistry of fiero (the gamer’s emotional benefit), locates the sensation in the “reward circuitry of the brain … which is most typically associated with reward and addiction.” As McGonigal only passingly acknowledges, fiero’s relevance to addiction is real, and a serious problem among game-playing youth. Sure, fiero, as a neurochemical fact, is a thrill that arises from any accomplishment, from an ace serve in tennis to scientific triumphs (cut to NASA’s astrophysicists wild-partying over a Mars landing, particle physicists popping champagne over the Higgs boson discovery), but the mind-blowing humbug of video games is to deliver higher and stronger fiero for lower levels of accomplishment, and to keep it coming in rapid doses. What is more, the effects that enhance this often violent experience make it larger, and larger than life. Games have amplified television’s habit formation by making it minimally interactive and by overpowering the brain’s reward center: after winning the World Cup, or World War II, or saving the world from aliens or zombies, gamers lose interest in real accomplishments. Or they become intimidated: after spending months in front of the television, perfecting your free throw becomes a distant achievement. Like the lethal “Entertainment” in David Foster Wallace’s novel Infinite Jest, video games dead-end their players’ willpower into a cul-de-sac of absolute withdrawal.

  Tom Bissell tells a harrowing tale in his brilliant book Extra Lives: his video-game addiction led to a cocaine addiction that allowed him to play more video games. A recent Google search for “Video Game Addiction Treatment” yielded 207,000 hits and treatment centers around the world. The American Psychiatric Association has the condition slated for inclusion in its next edition of the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders, but the research is in its infancy. Video gamers feel the thrill of reward, but what “rewards” do they actually reap after hours, days, and years of “hard fun”? And what rewards does the nation reap? McGonigal acknowledges such hazards, and she also mentions an industry-specific anomie called “gamer regret,” but in downplaying them she rather games the facts, hailing a new generation of games that “go beyond flow and fiero” and “provide a more lasting kind of emotional reward.” This may be so, but such nutritious fare doesn’t account for video games’ runaway popularity; first-person-shooter junk food does. She also says that “very big games represent the future of collaboration,” and she may be right. The student of fun thinks it’s too soon to celebrate.

  IN 2010, the Supreme Court’s Citizens United v. Federal Election Commission ruling declared that corporations merit the free speech of any legal citizen and thus are allowed unlimited political broadcasts. That same year, the “American” corporation General Electric earned $14.2 billion worldwide, $5.1 billion of that in the United States, and paid $0.00 in U.S. taxes. GE even claimed a $3.2 billion tax benefit. When these figures hit the news, the public was outraged, but GE’s spokesperson was unflappable: “We did not owe any,” she said. According to the Supreme Court decision, corporations deserve all the rights of citizens, including a bully pulpit for electing government leaders, but at the same time their immense collective power—especially when they assume “multinational” identity—lets them shirk the citizen’s basic responsibilities. This fact spells despair for the nation’s vitality—if its “vitality” (as the word denotes) rests with actual human beings. Hence, in March 2011, when GE recanted and announced that they were returning their $3.2 billion “refund,” the Associated Press immediately published the story. What great news! GE revealed that it had the conscience of an everyday citizen! But the press release was a hoax, of course. It was the latest coup of the ingenious Yes Men, a pair of trickster citizens who have been calling out corporations since the 1990s. In this case, all the nation got back from GE’s staggering profits was congregated—if bitter—mirth.

  Our nation’s vitality doesn’t rest with corporations. It rests with people—not only as voters but as active citizens with the potential energy of “physical bodies,” as Saul Alinsky, legendary activist extraordinaire, writes in his classic Rules for Radicals. Bodies are the agents of political action, especially among those whom he calls the “Have-Nots,” those whose resources are “no money” and “lots of people.” His advice for activating the citizens’ bodies might as well be a recipe for American fun: “Use the power of law,” he suggests, “by making the establishment obey its own rules. Go outside the experience of your enemy, stay inside the experience of your people”—or, in other words, if you’re an American colonist in the 1760s, bewilder the British by parading your freedom and acting like Samuel Adams’s “True Patriots.” Alinsky goes on: “Emphasize tactics that your people will enjoy. The threat is usually more terrifying than the tactic itself”—emphasize tactics, that is to say, like the decades of fun on Pinkster Hill and, a century later, in the Savoy Ballroom, enjoyable tactics that may have threatened uptight contemporaries but ultimately harmed nobody. “Once all these rules and principles are festering in your imagination,” he concludes, “they grow into a synthesis.” And that synthesis—that prank, that party, that hoax, that joke—could plant the seeds of what the moral-sense philosopher Adam Ferguson called “national felicity,” the rough, raw, and widespread fellow-feeling that can keep a nation feeling young and that can, in the best cases, unite its citizenry, from the least of the have-nots to the richest of the haves. />
  Our nation’s vitality rests with people. It rests with prisoners and illegal immigrants; with the homeless, unemployed, and poor; and with the ever-dwindling middle class as well as with presidents and CEOs. Rereading history, where the people are heroes and creativity flourishes in times of greatest struggle, one sees the vitality of American democracy cropping up in some low-down places: trading posts, dockyards, mining camps, taverns. Most remarkably, America’s most original culture, America’s most durable culture—now an immeasurable international rhizome of hip-hop, techno, rock, dance, style, slang, humor, sports, whatnot—got its roaring start in the southern slave quarters, among Americans who valued possibly more than anyone the liberty and equality that they were denied. Among people who held tight to their forbidden African heritage while embracing their new American conditions. Among people who were witty enough to tell the joke, nimble enough to get the joke, and tough enough to take the joke.

  Doing it yourself is individualist fun. Getting the joke is collectivist fun. Together they foster a strong, smart nation. American democracy hasn’t been fortified by passive citizens, not by the obedient, gullible, or accepting, not by citizens who wait to be governed and not by thugs doing demagogues’ bidding, but by active, resistive, DIY citizens who take pleasure in agency and group definition. It’s a fundamentally American idea: citizens should be defined as much by their fun as by their work or service or duty. It’s also a distinctly American phenomenon that these four principles (work, service, duty, and fun) can and should be one and the same—as they were for the “Mohawks” storming Griffin’s Wharf, as they were for the Yippies showering the NYSE with cash, as they were for the Yes Men writing GE’s press release. They may not have known it at the time, but when, in 1973, Cindy and Clive Campbell threw their back-to-school bash and urged the crowd to new levels of ecstasy, they were doing the work of exemplary citizens, honoring the past and providing for the future. For all they knew they were just having fun, but they did it with a shrewd and playful creativity that unleashed the people’s constructive power.

  Americans in recent decades—gender activists, in particular—have been deliberate in binding these four principles. In 1985, the Guerrilla Girls, a pseudonymous collective of female artists, took on the overwhelmingly male New York arts establishment with comic posters, a “penis count” at the Met, and other street actions—all executed in gorilla masks. (Their antic movement is still going strong.) Also in the 1980s, New York’s drag balls, whose heritage stretches back to the Savoy Ballroom, gained new force and splendor and acceptance, thanks in part to Jenny Livingston’s documentary, Paris Is Burning (1990), and to this day are a spinning disco-ball hub for the nation’s transgender community.

  In the early 1990s, B-girls and Riot Grrrls pushed back hard against male-chauvinist rap and punk. On Thursday nights in L.A.’s Leimert Park, for example, at the hip-hop institution called Project Blowed, female MCs like Venus, Tasha Kweli, and the legendary Medusa—considered “the queen and high priestess” of the L.A. underground—defeated men and women in fierce rap battles and on the floor in break-dance cyphers. Flashing her double-W hand sign and honoring the long heritage of African-American women, Medusa—like Bessie Smith, with whom a male competitor once respectfully compared her—also made daring claim to her sexuality, even in rap battles with tough male opponents quick to write her off as a “ho.” But her deft lyricism and ferocious irony put the best of rappers on their back feet. As the hip-hop scholar Marcyliena Morgan demonstrates, Medusa’s “crowd-pleasing anthem,” “My Pussy Is a Gangsta,” flips the street code and satirizes both men and women: men, by “us[ing] gangsta, a hiphop term associated with misogynistic, predatory, and sadistic men,” to refer to “a woman’s sexual and reproductive organ”; women, by calling out the ones who wield their “femininity,” as Medusa puts it, “to their extreme advantage.”

  Also in the early 1990s, when macho hardcore had lost its momentum, giving way to less political (and more commercial) speed metal, the Riot Grrrl punk scene launched in Washington State and shot across the country. Technically and musically masterful Grrrl bands—spearheaded by the likes of Bikini Kill and Bratmobile—revitalized the punk ethos for a new generation of do-it-yourself, up-yours, uncompromising feminists. If NOW inspired the “second-wave” feminists in 1966, rejecting the counterculture’s cavalier tone in favor of unambiguous anger, then Riot Grrrls energized the young “third wave” with all the irreverence, obscenity, and swagger of the hardcore punk movement. They resuscitated Lester Bangs’s “Program for Mass Liberation,” rejecting the music industry’s love affair with grunge and running with small labels like Kill Rock Stars; mocking “beergutboyrock” and needling self-important male rockers who lacked what the band Sleater-Kinney called “rock ’n’ roll fun.” Riot Grrrls’ new wave of fire-breathing zines (Fuckapotamus, Something Smells, Puberty Strike, Teenage Gang Debs) sported creativity, power, and comedy and declared independence from male-dominated rock. Riot Grrrl attitude made a comeback in 2011, when women staged “SlutWalks” in seventy-six cities around the world and reclaimed their miniskirts as symbols of power. “When was the last time feminism was this much fun?” The Nation’s Katha Pollitt asked. Riot Grrrl–inspired stunts made world news in 2012, when three members of Pussy Riot, Russia’s multicolored-balaclava-sporting feminist punk collective, were sentenced to two years of penal-colony time for performing their anti-Putin, putatively blasphemous “Punk Prayer” in a Moscow cathedral. That same year, oversize-underpants-wearing female “Volunteers” staged disruptive pranks and playfully resistive feminist street theater throughout the People’s Republic of China.

  A look back over the past half century shows a groundswell of ethnic- and identity-based groups whose long-standing parties, conventions, and parades broke the levees in the eighties and nineties. For more than a century “Mardi Gras Indians”—New Orleans neighborhoods and gangs paying tribute to Native Americans who sheltered blacks during slavery—have staged once-violent, now intensely playful showdowns of masquerade and mimicry. For generations a New Year’s Day Mummers’ Parade has strutted and blared its outlandish mummery through the center of Philadelphia. Gay Pride parades, originating in the 1969 Stonewall riots, have grown the world over into weeklong hootenannies. Plus: Chicanos’ Cinco de Mayo, black Texans’ Juneteenth, Trekkie conventions, Civil War reenactments, underground-comics fairs, Coney Island’s Mermaid Parade, San Francisco’s Folsom Street leather fair, Deadhead tribes, sock-burning sailors, grrrl-powered roller derby leagues, and the riotous Sturgis Motorcycle Rally whose participant population every year since 2000 has eclipsed that of South Dakota, in whose Badlands the party goes down. While the nation’s teenagers blow major bucks on the official holidays of Homecoming and Prom, they still fight for their rights to unchaperoned dances, heedless house parties, and, most fun of all (sorry, administrators), Senior Skip Day and Senior Prank.

  And in the long tradition of revolutionary-era broadsides, Washoe newspapers, sixties undergrounds, and punk-rock zines, a DIY bonanza in fun information dominates the Internet. On blogs, YouTube, Facebook, Twitter, Urban Dictionary, people get the joke. These technologies and more—many of them “free,” if not always in the Diggers’ purest sense—have excellent potential for creative fun: they foster public debate and media parody; they get people producing their own films and music and forming networks without corporate sponsorship; they allow strangers to throw spontaneous parties on sidewalks and department-store floors—the site, indeed, of the first millennial flash mob, when some one hundred citizens answered the call to pile onto a rug at the flagship Macy’s. Whether triggering nonpartisan pillow fights in Union Square, or politicized ones at the NYSE, the swarming trends in the millennium’s first decade seemed to marry the nineteenth-century mass hoax with the twenty-first-century mass prank.

  The American ringleader of this global circus, a not-for-profit P. T. Barnum of hands-on high jinks, is the neo–Merry Prankster Charlie Todd. Influenced
by such twentieth-century troublemakers as situationist Guy Debord, comedian Andy Kaufman, his mentors in the Upright Citizens Brigade, and, naturally, Abbie Hoffman, Todd founded an organization called Improv Everywhere—a Web-based collective, based in New York City, devoted to “causing scenes”—or what they called “missions” performed by “agents.” Starting small in 2001 with spoof celebrity sightings and bemusing performances in downtown Starbucks, they stepped up their game in 2006 by swarming a Best Buy with employee look-alikes. Their instructions, which forbade agents to bring cameras (and being spectators), made this caveat: “only show up if you are wearing the proper dress and are ready to participate and have fun.” Eighty agents turned out in khakis and royal-blue polos; otherwise they made for a “really diverse group of agents,” which as Todd recalls “added to the fun.” Harmless chaos ensued. It tickled agents and customers and “lower-level employees” alike. But as Todd had discovered with other retail pranks, “the managers and security freak[ed] out.” (The cops, when called, were superfluous: as usual, their prank was perfectly legal.) In 2007, in Grand Central Terminal, 207 agents froze in place for five minutes, and Improv Everywhere’s name went viral: agents repeated the prank worldwide, morning talk shows wanted replays (Improv Everywhere pranked them for the favor), and commercial interests staged copycat ads—passing the joke on to unwitting consumers.