You get a gold star!

*I'll warn you now, this is an article about a facet of gaming culture*

Well, you read the title, didn't you?  Look at the title, now back to me.

You got a gold star!  Congratulations, don't you feel special?

No?  Then you're stupid, and worse than that you're a spoil sport, just trying to ruin everyone's fun.

At least, that's what the gaming industry wants to say to you.  As most of you who are still with me are likely to recall, around the start of the console generation that's currently ending (or in real world terms, mid-2007) Microsoft introduced a crazy new idea to console gaming.  It was called the achievement.  Literally, it was called that.  Everyone who knows what I'm talking about knows that I'm not joking.

The way this works is that when you complete a certain in-game criteria, you hear a little blip, you're treated to a nice little phrase and a cute picture, and then everyone who cares to look (which is no one, let's be frank) can see on your online profile that you've been crowned with the achievement.  This was such a marketing success that Sony jumped in about two year later, demanded that "trophies" be put into all new games and backlogged them into older PS3 games.

Of course the achievements, by one name or another, come in different varieties.  Most games give you at least two or three achievements for essentially nothing but booting up the game.  I can think of a few games I've played where 10 seconds in I literally received an achievement for moving forward.  However, just as the little reassuring blip at the bottom of your screen becomes a nice reminder of your progress, the stakes rise.

The first time your probably straight, white, male protagonist collects one of the thousand gems of wonderment scattered in random, meaningless parts of a meaningless digital world, you get a nice little blip and a trophy to let you know how much of a good boy you've been.  There's probably another at 10, another at 100, and maybe one or two at 500 and 700.  But what the game wants to fire home is that you haven't REALLY played the game unless you get all 1000 of them.  After all, if you do that you get treated to a nice little blip on the bottom of your screen.  Yes, you've wasted several hours of your life but at least you got that gold star.

The same thing is done with difficulty levels, but in a more frustrating way.  Here, the game is literally designed to tell you either respectively how much of a wuss you are for playing the game on easy, barely handing out any achievements for a leisurely, fun, escapist romp through Space Marine Call of Honor 3: This time it's personal, in contrast handing them out like candy in a South American slum if you can somehow manage the blinding, banal, you died because you forgot to cross your toes on the second Tuesday of every fifth month while simultaneously weaving a basket 8 fathoms under boiling salt water torture of the "Veteran" or "Hardcore" difficulty.

Seriously though.

Granted, there are those for whom, apparently, even these vast difficulty levels are like grating cheese, but I have yet to meet one of these wizards, and back here on planet Earth I don't appreciate what the gaming industry has been doing for the last 6 years now.

My biggest problem with all of it is that it is specifically designed to destroy your life.  Just to be clear, I'm not exaggerating there.  King Henry VIII famously said once that time is a man's greatest loss because he can never get it back, and for all of his drunken whoring and church-making he was right on that point.

The whole system of meaning behind achievements is specifically designed so that you waste (not spend as you do when you're just playing the game) your time so that a paltry blip on the bottom of your screen and a quick little pun can make you feel better about yourself.

So buck the system!  Go out, buy a game and play it on easy.  Don't feel ashamed of yourself, just enjoy it.  The whole point of gaming as a medium tends to be that one has fun while playing the game, whatever way one might want to.  All that achievements do as a thing is tell you how to have your fun, whether or not you've had enough quite yet, and remind you that if you were really having fun the way you were supposed to, you'd be doing what the achievement tells you to do.

Congratulations, you made it to the end of the post.  You get a PLATINUM star! 

With all the force of a great typhoon

So the other day I went to a mass at St. Francis Catholic Church in Madison, Mississippi.  Having not been to mass in a while, I was elated as the priest ascended the central podium of a wide, circular meeting-tent style church and announced that the introductory hymn would be number such and such, Holy, Holy, Holy.  Having grown up a Protestant, this was one of many more popular classic hymns with which I am thoroughly familiar, so I was thrilled as I found the hymn in the book and stood to sing.  Then, around the first time we finished the chorus I noticed that something was wrong.  Looking up and carefully observing the crowd I quickly found the problem.

Almost all of the men in the church were silent.

"What," I thought to myself, "this is only one of the best hymns ever!  Why would anyone not sing to this?  How could these ingrates be so ungrateful as to not sing one of the most kick-ass songs of worship written in the last 200 years?"  The answer came to me by the next song we sang, an all too familiar problem with church music.

It's just too damn high.

At St. Francis, the worship leader was a small, stout older lady with a beautiful, calming soprano voice.  Her vocals, accompanied by a wonderful flute and the obligatory piano, provided the basis for the worship setting, and I'm sure that she meant well.  However, most men (if I remember my science correctly) are either basses or baritones naturally, which means their comfortable range (in my experience and the experience of my fellows) ranges from approximately a low G to a high B, give or take a not or two.  Of course there are a large number of men who are tenors, but even these, when they are not trained, can have a hard time rising above a solid D or E.  Meanwhile, worship music (of catholic and protestant varieties) tends to be written for tenor and soprano high voices, meaning that the high points of melodies will hang out comfortable around D and E, often rising as far as high F and high G for melodic effect.

Only serving to exacerbate the problem, whether you're singing hymns or Chris Tomlin choruses, the melodies of the songs are meant to be belted out and sung in a full voice.  For persons like myself who are basses or baritones (again, the majority of men) this is more than difficult, it's uncomfortable.  I've spent several years of my life in choirs and voice lessons, and even for me it is hard to sing a nice D or E at a volume and tone appropriate to a worship setting.  I can only imagine how bad it must be for my fellows who aren't as well versed in the vocal arts.

The eventual result of this focus on high melody is that, as is the case in most churches I have attended, most men simply don't sing in church.  At times when the congregation is supposed to be lifting their collective voice in collaborative praise, at least half of the congregation is more or less unintentionally excluded because the music simply does not fit their vocal range.

What's always frustrating to me, as a performer, is that this problem is by no means necessary.  First of all, there's the ever-present option of simply dropping the key of worship songs so that they fit in a more comfortable range.  This is not always doable for everyone, either for technical reasons pertaining to the musicians in a worship team or because some songs are written in such a way that dropping the key would make the ladies generally unable to participate.

However, churches throughout the 19th and early 20th century made a regular habit of actually having their congregations sing in 4 part harmony.  Having performed in many choirs, I recognize that this is difficult to achieve, but I think that this solution is under-utilized in the modern church.  4-part singing can provide a wonderful allusion to the different functions of different pieces of the body of Christ, and it is furthermore simply more comfortable.

Still, I acknowledge that in some congregations, forcing or offering 4 part congregational singing is either impractical or simply not doable.

Nonetheless, it is certainly at least one of several important issues facing the church that men, who make up normally half the population of a community and who, in many churches, are the sole proprietors of the ordained ministry, are generally not singing.  We must all find a way to alleviate this problem.  Perhaps this means that we don't sing Chris Tomlin choruses, or that our gloria will be a much more simple (dare I say maybe even boring) melody, but in the end it is more acceptable to do different music or less exciting music than it is to essentially exclude half of a congregation from participation in musical worship.