Rastaman Vibration

I love reggae music. Actually, I love all the music from the Caribbean islands whether it is merengue, reggae, or steel drum music. Unfortunately, people often mistake the culture surrounding the music with the music itself. I sometimes joke that the most common lyric in reggae is “murder”. Only it’s not a joke. People want to think that the music is all about young black men with dreadlocks smoking dope and doing the limbo into the setting sun. Actually, the music is mostly about violence at the hands of white folk. It’s not coincidence that two of Bob Marley’s most famous songs are “I Shot the Sheriff ” and “Buffalo Soldiers.” Reggae musicians sometimes like to say the music is positive music for positive people. They mean being positive in the face of suffering, like the stories from the Bible the lyrics frequently invoke; they do not mean some hippy Nirvana commune.

They Say It’s Murder

While I don’t seek to propagate violence I am not a peacenik either, I think that point of view is naïve. The truth is that man is killer; it’s what he does, it’s how he lives. This reality is the backdrop to all we do. It’s an important point to remember.

One of the greatest myths of our time is that the way to peace is through interaction, particularly commercial interaction. But once the novelty has worn off, familiarity often leads to contempt rather than admiration. In fact the desire for contact and trade has been responsible for some of the greatest crimes (intentional or not) of our historical period. The first settlements in modern America (such as Jamestown) were founded on trade. And this trade lead to the decimation of the native population of the Americas through smallpox, to which their immune systems could not adapt. Indeed, much of the modern panic about diseases such as swine flu and Elboa is panic precisely because of the interconnectedness of the modern world. One of the reasons the black plague wasn’t as devastating as it could have been was due to the primitive transportation systems that limited it’s spread. In more obvious terms, African people where brought to the Americas precisely because of the slave trade. The reality is that while commerce may mean prosperity for some it frequently means destruction and even death for many others. Reggae music is intimately in touch with this reality.

A River in Egypt

I sometimes think that people who play Warcraft are in denial about what they are doing. We get caught up in the cuteness of our new Druid cat forms and forget that the Druid cat is a melee DPS monster designed for killing. The person who said that the Auction House was just a form of PvP is spot on. And in PvP somebody dies. It may indeed only be a virtual death but it is a death nonetheless.

It’s easy to admire the fact that Gevlon topped out the wealth o’ meter but the truth of the matter is that such wealth was built upon death. Not just the death of millions of virtual monsters that dropped loot but also the outright murder of the time of thousands of players who could have been doing something other than farming if they had gotten better prices on the Auction House. It’s a cogent argument that the “Morons and Slackers” killed their own time and Gelvon simply took advantage of it, but that’s only the difference between a tiger and a vulture. Both feast on death.

One Love

After my post The Good People of Azeroth went live someone sent me a link that lead me to a post from a few years ago about morality in Warcraft. The point of that post was that the morality of Warcraft lies not in the game design but in the social interactions of the players themselves. I agree. But I deliberately did not make that point in my post because I wanted to concentrate on the design of the game itself. The game is not designed to be a morality play (at least for us players). The fact that we choose to make something more out of the game than what the game was designed for does not change the reality of the design. That’s an important fact to remember.

In some ways what our minds do is the exact opposite of an oyster and a pearl. Instead of hiding a thing of great beauty under a plain gray shell we put lipstick on a pig. We employ ourselves with picking pretty flowers, mining rich nodes, crafting great jewels. We collect amazing mounts, curious pets, enchanted items. We help the orphans, get gifts from Santa, and have a jolly time getting drunk during Autumn. Yet behind this veil is one thing and one thing only: war. Vicious, brutal war. That’s an important fact to remember.

It’s an important fact to remember for the same reason that it’s important to remember that despite the groovy beat of reggae it’s music about suffering, oppression. It’s easy to get the wrong perspective on what’s happening if we buy in to the hype and marketing surrounding the product itself. Commerce and capitalism don’t lead to peace; they lead to war. The heart of the World of Warcraft isn’t picking herbs, going to gaming conventions, and collecting pets; it’s war. The Rastaman Vibration isn’t only the triumphant twang of the bedspring; it’s the shaking of the flesh being flayed by the whip, the pulsating heart tattooed by an Uzi.