Uplink 13


The Summer Olympics Issue


September 2008




• Metal Gear Solid 4: Neoliberalism is Powerful, but the Developmental State is Solid


• Cell Gaming Comes of Age


• China's Game Culture


• Gaming and the Semi-periphery



Introduction

First off, apologies to our readers for the delay of this issue. Uplink aspires to quarterliness, but hardware and logistical issues prevented publication until now.

The fireworks of 21st century geopolitics have been on prominent display this summer, everywhere from bailouts of US financial markets by the sovereign wealth funds of the semi-periphery to the awe-inspiring celebrations of the Beijing Summer Olympics, and from Evo's smashing referendum victory in Bolivia to Russia's successful peacekeeping mission in South Ossetia, the latest sign of its return to world power status.

Videogame culture had its own fireworks, in the form of Metal Gear Solid 4, which lit up widescreens around the world with the force and fury of the 1908 Tunguska impact. Solid Snake's final adventure will go down in history as a landmark in the world media culture -- read our spoiler-free review for more!

We also have an update on cell gaming, which is taking off faster than anyone expected.

In keeping with the Olympic spirit, we have an update on China's game culture, which is booming thanks to intelligent industrial policies and massive government investment in a national broadband system.

Finally, we broaden our focus with an overview of the world semi-periphery, and some informed speculation about where the world media might be headed.



Metal Gear Solid 4: Neoliberalism is Powerful, but the Developmental State is Solid


First things first: Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns of the Patriots (2008) is an aesthetic marvel, an authentic classic of the 21st century media culture.

Everything about the game radiates brilliance, from the opening installation screen to the final credits. The superlative graphics, finely-honed game-play and gorgeous cut-scenes perfectly complement some of the greatest characters and boss battles in gaming.

Yet MGS4 does more than simply surpass Kojima's previous high-water mark, Metal Gear Solid 3: Subsistence (2004), one of the great videogames of all time. Solid Snake's grand finale is also one of the most thoughtful and searching critiques of neoliberalism in recent memory. Its seamless admixture of heart-stopping suspense, pulse-pounding excitement, crackerjack voice-acting, and globe-spanning geopolitics is comparable only to Square Enix's audacious Final Fantasy 12, unquestionably the greatest final fantasy of them all.

This is still more amazing when you consider that most of the basic building blocks of the stealth espionage genre -- everything from Cold War paranoia to Bond-style gender stereotypes -- are deeply reactionary or saturated with decades of Anglo-American imperial and neocolonial hubris. Thankfully, series creator Hideo Kojima steadfastly refused to heed the siren call of Empire. This is partly due to his principled refusal to glorify warfare or empires of any kind, but also due to his inspired grasp of game-play. Kojima's games have always privileged stealth, non-detection, guerilla guile, and non-lethal means over firepower. Players can use brute force if they wish, but will not unlock certain rewards or experience the true thrill of the game.

In fact, one of the most extraordinary achievements of MGS4 is its capacity to quote, pastiche, or otherwise reappropriate a vast range of game-play styles in the context of a single game. This means can play the game any way you wish -- as a straightforward first-person shooter, as a third-person shooter, as a tactical suspense game, as a hide-and-sneak mission, or as a pure stealth mission. It's entirely up to you, and each style comes with its own unique rewards and challenges. If players rely completely on brute force, the difficulty level of the game does increase considerably, giving experienced fans of action games an exciting run for their money, but the choice is ultimately left up to the player.

Metal Gear fans will be the first to concede that Kojima's previous games were marred by overly complicated control systems and unwieldy camera angles. Not this one. MGS4 has one of the most refined, polished and intuitive control systems ever created -- you can play through the entire game using only four buttons. The camera system works perfectly, something particularly noticeable during certain action sequences when Snake is riding vehicles -- you can move your sights around freely, but if you release the trigger, the camera instantly pans towards the nearest threat, enabling you to return fire instantly. On a high-definition television, the effect is one of seamless immersion -- it really does feel as though you are starring in a blockbuster action movie.

In addition to stunning visuals, realistic rag-doll physics and crystal-clear 1080P resolution, MGS4 has one of the finest sound-tracks ever created. The roar of battlefields, the rumble of vehicles, the crackle of sniper rounds, the shouts of soldiers, and the stirring theme music have been honed to a razor's edge -- to get the full effect, Uplink highly recommends that players use their surround-sound equipment or high-grade headphones. The performances are equally inspired, thanks to an all-star voice acting cast, an intelligent script, and Kojima's mind-bending storyline, which successfully brings the previous three Metal Gear epics to a fitting close.

As for the ending -- we won't mention any spoilers, but suffice to say that the ultimate villain of the entire Metal Gear saga is not a specific villain or even a group of neocon-style conspirators, though these latter do make an appearance. It is, rather, a set of deeply destructive social tendencies, economic imperatives and cultural logics, otherwise known as neoliberalism, a.k.a. Wall Street financial fundamentalism.

In fact, to fully appreciate the magnitude of Kojima's achievement, it is crucial to understand the history of neoliberalism. As a political ideology, neoliberalism emerged in the late 1970s as a reaction to the national anticolonial and liberation movements of the Third World, as well as the threat of electoral insurgencies in the industrial nations, and became a hegemonic global force in the 1980s and 1990s. Its basic tenet was, "capital good, labor bad". Anything which made the owners of capital richer or powerful was held to be good, while anything which involved redistributing capital from the wealthy to the vast majority of citizens -- public schools, education and health care for all, environmental protection, media diversity -- was denounced as an egregious crime against the all-seeing, all-knowing perfection of the Market.

Of course, this perfection was a total crock. At its peak, neoliberalism imposed structural adjustment packages (typically via IMF conditionality and other financial interventions) on two-thirds of the planet's population, immiserating vast swathes of Latin America, Africa and Asia, and wrecking the economies of giant countries like Russia, Indonesia, Nigeria, Brazil and Turkey. In country after country, a few billionaires and oligarchs accumulated inconceivable wealth, while the rest of the place went down the drain.

In Kojima's game, neoliberalism is represented by the Patriots, a shadowy, nebulous organization grown rich and powerful on collusion with the military-industrial complex, espionage and economic outsourcing. It is one of the richest ironies of history that Metal Gear's fictional anti-neoliberal insurrection detonated at the precise moment that real world neoliberalism fell into terminal crisis.[1]

Yet what Kojima accomplished with MGS4 was not merely to chronicle the rise of neoliberalism, but to accurately portray the social forces battling against such. The semi-peripheral nations of the world ravaged by neoliberalism -- places like China, Russia, Malaysia, Eastern Europe, Venezuela, to name just a few -- have either evolved into or forged mighty developmental states, capable of resisting neoliberalism on its own global turf. These semi-peripheries are crucial to MGS4's storyline: look closely, and each major character is tied to specific geopolitical places, specific mass media genres, and particular developmental states. These geopolitical registers are tied to a set of equally intriguing set of micropolitical narratives and storylines, far too delightful to spoil here, ranging from Sunny's family background to Naomi Campbell's scientific interests.


-- DRR


1. The latest act of this real world crisis is the on-going implosion of the US housing bubble, a financial Frankenstein created by neoliberal deregulation and speculative excess. To make a long story short, Wall Street created lots of low-grade mortgage loans, slapped an AAA or top-notch rating on this junk, and then re-sold these loans to global investors -- all at a lucrative markup. When these loans finally went bust and the bubble collapsed, it triggered the biggest financial crisis since the Great Depression. Recently, the US government has been forced to nationalize half of the mortgages of the American economy and to buy up one of the largest insurance companies in the world, AIG, to avoid a complete meltdown.




Cell Gaming Comes of Age


While Apple's highly successful iPhone has been grabbing the headlines, the real story of the past two years has been the lightning expansion of the cellphone boom across the less wealthy, industrializing countries of the world. There are at least 3.5 billion phones in use around the planet today, and literally hundreds of millions of new users are signing up every month. Suddenly, societies where the means of communications were expensive, scarce and unreliable are becoming highly networked, creating the preconditions for vast social change.

More importantly, the next generation of cellphones hitting world markets will be more than just speaking devices. Analyst firm InStat has estimated that in the next four years, India's cellphone population will grow to well over half a billion users, while the comparable figure for China will be 800 million. Somewhere between 40-50% of these users will have phones capable of accessing the internet -- a total population of 618 million potential web-surfers, in just these two countries alone.[1]

In a very short amount of time, these cellphones are going to become sophisticated mobile media devices, replete with media playback, storage and download options. The expansion of this mass market should also give renewed energy to Sony's PSP and Nintendo's DS handheld consoles, devices which will become become affordable to at least 2 billion new consumers over the next two years.

Mobile gaming is already a multibillion dollar industry, and most analysts predict world revenues will hit somewhere between $4 billion to $4.5 billion by the end of 2008. Gartner researcher Madhusudan Gupta sums up the growth potential of the industrializing world this way:


"Emerging market operators should make the most of the demand for mobile games and the low personal computer penetration in these regions and push game sales as a viable, albeit imperfect, lower-cost substitute to PC and console games."[2]


Interestingly, major franchises such as Kojima's Metal Gear Solid series have begun to release mobile versions of their games, a trend which will accelerate as game-capable phones increase in sophistication and number. That said, the real innovations are likely to be driven by indigenous media producers within these emerging markets. For example, the South Asian market for Bollywood ring-tones will diversify very quickly into full-fledged media and game downloads.

While giant nations such as China and India will have no difficulty redeploying their indigenous culture-industries to produce mobile games, the outlook is less rosy in many peripheral nations, especially in regions controlled by an unholy alliance of foreign neoliberals and indigenous comprador elites. For example, the country of Nigeria has one of the most vibrant and creative video industries in the world, distributed via affordable VCD technology. Given its booming cellphone market, Nigeria ought to be at the forefront of West Africa's mobile gaming culture.

But things are not so simple. Blogger S. Okwunodu Ogbechie describes how foreign multinationals and well-connected comprador elites are monopolizing the gains of Nigeria's energy and cellphone booms:


"Driving through Lekki astonishes me: the new houses already built or under construction are opulent by any standards. Owning a house like this would set you back some serious sums even in the West, and the houses of the rich in Nigeria compare favorably to any kind of McMansion you've ever seen in the tony stretches of Connecticut. Then there are the simply unbelievable edifices, like the vast estate of a famous Nigerian industrialist, an immense oceanfront property sitting on a huge expanse of land. Armed patrols stand guard everywhere around this incredible estate... These opulent estates contrast with the woeful state of roads and infrastructure in a supposedly planned city development area that two decades ago comprised mainly of forests and salt water marshes. The estates are also haunted by the ghost of Maroko, one of the largest 'slum' settlements in Lagos, whose residents fell victim to the rising value of their land...

...Cell phones are the most visible aspect of Nigeria's new economy and each person carries two or three, the better to outwit the unreliable satellite networks systems that drop calls on a whim and provide less than creditable connections when it does work. However, it works and in being available, communication technologies have transformed Nigeria (and I suspect, other parts of Africa) in ways no one could have foreseen two decades ago. The foreign communication companies and their Nigerian partners provide unreliable basic services and still make gargantuan profits...

...It thus seems there is a lot to celebrate in Nigeria's rapid incorporation into the global economy. But something still seemed not quite kosher. Then it occurred to me: I've seen this system of capitalism before, in the inner cities of the United States, where vampiric enterprises investing in what is euphemistically called 'the poverty market' move in to exploit communities denied basic economic services because they are considered unprofitable markets."[3]


Ogbechie's analysis is dead on the mark -- the communities of color in New York City are being immiserated by precisely the same social forces which are immiserating ordinary Nigerians. It follows that one of the tasks of the mobile game artists of the 21st century will be to narrate this state of affairs, as well as reflect upon the social movements which might someday change this state of affairs.


-- DRR



1. "BRIC nations set for mobile boom." Web: http://www.livemint.com/2008/06/23112116/BRIC-nations-set-for-mobile-bo.html?d=1


2. Marin Perez. "Mobile Gaming Revenue To Hit $4.5 Billion". Information Week, June 26, 2008. Web: http://www.informationweek.com/news/mobility/business/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=208801005


3. S. Okwunodu Ogbechie. "Capitalism in Lagos: Mining the Poverty Market." September 01, 2008. Web: http://aachronym.blogspot.com/2008/09/capitalism-in-lagos-mining-poverty.html




China's Game Culture


Recently, China's online population became the largest of any nation in the world, hitting an estimated 253 million users, as compared with 220 million in the US. In fact, the vast increase in China's broadband population is just one aspect of the multi-tiered media revolution sweeping contemporary China. This is the near-simultaneous emergence of mass markets for digital television, Web content, digital streaming media, and videogames. Research analyst firm Niko Partners recently estimated 2007 videogame console sales in China at 2.48 million units, and total expenditure for online videogames at $1.7 billion.[1] Assuming world averages for console models, China's console market is probably worth at least $500 million and maybe as high as $700 million, which makes China one of the largest videogame markets in the world ($2.2 to $2.5 billion revenues -- about four times as large as the Latin American market, roughly comparable to total videogame sales in Germany or France).

The fuzziness in the statistics is due to the fact that consoles are still not officially licensed under Chinese law, i.e. they are a "grey market" activity, conducted by resellers and street vendors. Those laws are due less to any lingering ideological orthodoxies, than to perfectly rational techno-nationalism. As a developing nation, China wanted to discourage its consumers from spending on expensive imported consoles, and encouraged the purchase of domestically-made computers. Of course, nowadays all of these consoles are manufactured in China anyway, which means at some point the laws will be revised and China's console business will go legitimate.

This will give a significant boost to China's game studios, which are already producing topnotch online games. In the early 2000s, most of the major online games were produced by US or South Korean firms, but today most revenues in the Chinese market are generated by Chinese firms (often in partnership with foreign firms such as Blizzard). Currently, Shanda Interactive has nearly 20% of the total market, NetEase has 12.8%, Zhentu Online has 11.4% and The9 has 10.9%. Interestingly, the largest franchise measured by number of players is NetEase's Journey to the West franchise, which draws upon the classic Chinese novel by the same name.[2]

Perhaps the single most striking feature of China's game culture is its astounding growth. Total online and console sales skyrocketed 70% for 2007 alone, and according to this summer's sales data, annual growth should reach 50% by the end of 2008.


-- DRR


1. "Interview: Niko's Hanson On Chinese Game Biz Growth." Gamasutra. May 2, 2008. Web: http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=18473


2. Leigh Alexander. "Shanda Leads $637 Million Q2 For Chinese Online Games". Gamasutra. August 12, 2008. Web: http://www.gamasutra.com/php-bin/news_index.php?story=19803




Gaming and the Semi-periphery


The rapid rise of China's game culture signals more than just the rise of a specific nation. It is part and parcel of the emergence of a worldwide Web audience, particularly in the larger countries of the world. In order to understand the long-term implications of this process, it's worth stepping back for a moment to ponder the titanic social, economic and cultural revolution sweeping the world over the past decade or so.

About two-thirds of all human beings live in what the sociologists call the semi-periphery -- countries still in the transition from agrarian-rural to urban-industrial societies. Many of these countries were ravaged by ill-conceived neoliberal economic policies (the so-called "Washington consensus" retailed by Wall Street investment bankers, neoliberals and other high-rolling hustlers, nicely dissected by Ha-Joon Chang's excellent Bad Samaritans)[1] during the 1980s and 1990s. Argentina and Russia were driven into bankruptcy, Southeast Asia dodged a near-fatal heart attack in 1997-1998, while most of Latin America, Central Asia and Africa experienced twenty-five years of grinding immiseration.

Two factors changed this. First, the semi-periphery fought back, by forging powerful developmental states in countries as diverse as Russia, Venezuela and Vietnam, or else retrofitting and upgrading existing developmental states (the strategy chosen by Malaysia, South Korea and China). Secondly, just as the US co-sponsored the rise of Japan and Western Europe during 1945-1975, so too have the European Union and the wealthy regions of East Asia co-sponsored the rise of the Eurasian and Latin American semi-peripheries in the early 21st century. (The EU bailed out Eastern Europe and became Russia's biggest market, while Japan invested heavily in China and Korea).

The result has been an impressive worldwide economic boom, which has driven the rapid spread of cellphones, handheld electronics and Web media. One of the most noteworthy signs of this boom is the fact that the semi-peripheries make up the biggest and fastest-growing Web markets in the world. Here are the seventeen largest countries in the global semi-periphery or true periphery as of mid-2008:[2]



Country

Web users (millions)

Population (millions)

Web density (percent)

Foreign exchange reserves (billions US$)

Sovereign wealth funds (billions US$)

China

253

1,330

19.0%

1,500

558

India

60

1,150

5.2%

296

0

Indonesia

25

237.5

10.5%

61

0

Brazil

50

190.0

26.3%

204

0

Pakistan

17.5

167.8

10.4%

10

0

Bangladesh

0.5

153.5

0.3%

6

0

Russia

32.7

142.0

23.0%

418

163

Nigeria

10

138.3

7.2%

55

11

Mexico

24

110.0

21.8%

92

0

Philippines

14

92.7

15.1%

37

0

Vietnam

20.2

86.1

23.5%

21

2

Egypt

8.6

81.7

10.5%

33

0

Ethiopia

0.3

78.3

0.4%

1

0

Turkey

26.5

71.9

36.9%

78

0

Dem Rep Congo

0.2

66.5

0.3%

0

0

Thailand

13.4

65.5

20.5%

103

0

Iran

23

65.4

35.2%

81

12.9



These eighteen countries alone make up 63% of the world's population (6.676 billion). As of June 2008, they had a grand total of 579 million web users, about two-fifths of all users on the planet. Given past growth rates, this number will either triple or quadruple over the next five years, depending on how effectively national broadband policies are implemented. This is not pie-in-the-sky dreaming: the column showing sovereign wealth funds and foreign exchange reserves shows that most of these nations have the cold, hard cash to roll out these networks.

By the same token, this is not to argue that Thailand's mass media will automatically follow in the footsteps of China, or that Turkey's media will follow the Russian model. One of the most pernicious myths of the neoliberal era is the notion that the advance of mediatization, consumerism and global trade and cultural flows around the globe means that the US is the inevitable model for all other economic, political and media systems -- or, to be blunt, that we are all Americans now.

Nothing could be further from the truth. The reason is not simply that the epoch of US hegemony is gone for good, or that we are entering an era of multipolarity, both of which are true enough. But what is even more important is the fact that both the semi-periphery and periphery have a key structural condition which fatefully differentiates it from the global core. Interestingly, this condition is not directly visible on the above chart, and is frequently overlooked or downplayed by social scientists and observers -- indeed, even observers from the semi-periphery itself. Nevertheless, this condition constitutes one of the most fundamental aspects of social existence for the 80% of the human race who reside in the semi-periphery and periphery. This is the reality of massive internal heterogeneity.

Simply, the social differences inside semi-peripheral or peripheral nations are just as -- and often even more significant than -- social differences between those same nations. Shanghai is booming, but China's western rural provinces are growing much more slowly; Moscow has the most billionaires of any city in the world, while many farflung Russian villages are still on life support; Sao Paulo has a flourishing industrial base, while Brazil's rural Northeast continues to struggle, and so forth.

As you might have guessed, the media and technology boom is heavily concentrated in these wealthier regions. This presents the culture-industries of the semi-peripheries with a unique problem, which Hollywood and the other First World media industries do not have to worry about: their narratives must appeal to state-of-the-art urban citizens, while also doing justice to the social complexity and cultural traditions of the rural areas.

The ingenious response of India's cinema industry was to create not just one cinema-industry, but several. Most readers have probably heard of Bollywood as the generic term for the epic-sized, song-and-dance-filled Indian films which are exported around the world. The name is a playful admixture of "Bombay", the traditional British name for the western Indian port city of Mumbai, and "Hollywood". However, while Mumbai is indeed a major film producer, it is not the only game in town. The real strength of Indian film is its flourishing regional cinemas, rooted in communities of Telugu, Tamil, Bengali and Malayali language-speakers. In any given year, only 20% of all Indian films are in Hindi -- the rest are in regional languages. Today, the Indian vernacular languages are experiencing multiple media booms, e.g. Telugu radio, Bengali television serials, Malayali newspapers, and so forth.

One of the great unanswered questions in the media culture today is how precisely these new vernaculars will mobilize, leverage, or otherwise interact with the new digital media. The new forms of digital distribution and mobile media devices have the potential to create new audiences and energize existing vernaculars, very much as the printing press energized the discourses of religion and dynastic politics in 16th-century Europe. This will be particularly noticeable in vernaculars which are just beginning to establish popular literacies of their own -- for example, the boom in Yoruba-language videos recorded on affordable VCDs in multiethnic, multilingual Nigeria, something accompanied by the rise of Hausa and Igbo video productions in that country.

If South Asia's film culture is any guide, then the result will be a plethora of media products which will blend the new with the old, the modern with the traditional, and present-day media genres with the narrative achievements of the past in sophisticated and surprising ways -- but which will be distributed on digital networks of cellphones, portables and handheld media players.


-- DRR



1. Ha-Joon Chang. Bad Samaritans: the myth of free trade and the secret history of capitalism. New York: Bloomsbury Press, 2008. Web: http://www.amazon.com/Bad-Samaritans-Secret-History-Capitalism/dp/1596913991


2. Data from Internet Worldstats (http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats1.htm), IMF statistics on foreign exchange reserves and national reporting banks (http://www.imf.org/external/np/sta/ir/8802.pdf), sovereign wealth statistics from Sovereign Wealth Fund Institute (http://www.swfinstitute.org/funds.php).




Stay tuned for Uplink 14: the End-of-the-US-Oiligarchy issue!