NOTE: This is an experimental First Draft post. Please point our spelling, grammar and theoretical suggestions in the comments :-)
Papers Please is a video game; that apparently has a cult following. But its also an indoctrination into the banality and excitement of bureaucracy its. The things that go through players heads are incredible.
And now someone has gone and made it real..
It seems I have denied entry to some high profile cosplay peeps :PH/T to the Make Me Cosplay senpai(s) for noticing me!
Posted by Namasu なます on Sunday, 25 October 2015
So we have a video game about borders turned into a piece of performance art. It is tempting to see this all as 'parody', of something 'serious' but maybe 'game' and 'parody' are the only way of 'accurately' expressing the phenomenon. Are games and parody a better way to challenge the image of borders and their agents as meritocraticly rational? How to remind people that borders are temperamental and deeply human. Think of Border Security the TV show where the 'bad' person almost always gets caught. In which the narrator guides the viewer to the voice of the border guard in there interaction with the tired and suspect traveler. I remember the show being used as an example as an undergraduate ten years ago in 2005. Back then, I remember writing that these shows were basically teaching people to be racists, but at the same time I couldn't stop watching them. These shows have taught a generation the meaning of 'border security', much as CSI has taught a generation about forensics. Police officers even call this the CSI effect. So my question; what is the Border Security affect. Has it changed or made us empathize with the border security official, rather than the border crosser? Were they intended to make us feel safe, scared or both?
So with this in mind; today I did two things;
1) I spent an hour at the Oulu Police station, submitting an application (that's all I did, I submitted it) to extend our residence permits and change to a more permanent category. In the process, I got asked why their was so many stamps in my passport and that maybe I had 'traveled to much' to be eligible to be seen as a more permanent and valued resident of Finland. She was overwhelmed with all my stamps from traveling between Hong Kong & Shenzhen. How do I explain that my work, the very work that enables me to live in Finland, which that she was assessing was inside those stamps.
2) I tried to write more text for my Methodology chapter. Particularly the text where I frame myself as an 'impostor' going to Shenzhen as a privileged white top-tier passport holding man. But then having to line up for hours with the other foreigners and tourists, while my local informants with their 'e-channel' passes were able to wiz past me using the fully automated fingerprint based gates. While I waited in line to get a physical stamp in my paper passport.
Someone posed the question yesterday at the start of a conversation; "are we really as academics 'busy' or do we just 'act' busy because we think it makes us look good?" and then the conversation ended "how do you manage the blurred lines between lived life and our research?" "but maybe that's what motivates us?"..
1) I spent an hour at the Oulu Police station, submitting an application (that's all I did, I submitted it) to extend our residence permits and change to a more permanent category. In the process, I got asked why their was so many stamps in my passport and that maybe I had 'traveled to much' to be eligible to be seen as a more permanent and valued resident of Finland. She was overwhelmed with all my stamps from traveling between Hong Kong & Shenzhen. How do I explain that my work, the very work that enables me to live in Finland, which that she was assessing was inside those stamps.
2) I tried to write more text for my Methodology chapter. Particularly the text where I frame myself as an 'impostor' going to Shenzhen as a privileged white top-tier passport holding man. But then having to line up for hours with the other foreigners and tourists, while my local informants with their 'e-channel' passes were able to wiz past me using the fully automated fingerprint based gates. While I waited in line to get a physical stamp in my paper passport.
Someone posed the question yesterday at the start of a conversation; "are we really as academics 'busy' or do we just 'act' busy because we think it makes us look good?" and then the conversation ended "how do you manage the blurred lines between lived life and our research?" "but maybe that's what motivates us?"..
h/t @Telerabies for the cosplay refrence