Last night I went to see King of Kong, a documentary about a middle-school science teacher who tries to unseat the world record holder in Donkey Kong:
It's really a terrific movie. It's also a great sociological treatise for anyone who's interested in status concerns. In response to those who are worried that economic status competition is making us all worse off, people like Will Wilkinson have argued that modern society is so excellent precisely because it offers us proliferating status hierarchies in which to excel. Or as Tyler Cowen once told me, the secret to happiness is alternative status hierarchies, combined with self-deception.
The common rejoinder is that there is a meta-status hierarchy that comports with money:
Wilkinson’s claim implies, unless I misunderstand him badly, that it doesn’t matter very much to me if I’m a despised cubicle rat who can’t afford a nice car and gets sneered at by pretty girls, because when I go home and turn on my PC, I suddenly become a level 75 Night Elf Rogue who Kicks Serious Ass! Now this example is loaded – but it’s loaded to demonstrate a serious sociological point that Wilkinson doesn’t even begin to address. These indefinitely proliferating dimensions of status competition are connected to each other in their own implicit meta-ranking, which is quite well understood by all involved. Being a world-class scrabble-player isn’t likely to win you much respect among people who aren’t themselves competitive scrabble-players; the best you can expect is that someone will write a book that pokes fun at your gastro-intestinal problems . It’s a very different matter if you’re a world class soccer player; you’re liable to be invited to all sorts of fun parties, hit upon by beautiful people, stalked by the paparazzi and the whole shebang. Being a world class blogger is somewhere between the two, albeit certainly much closer to the scrabble-player than the soccer star. Even if you’re king of your own mountain, you’re likely to be quite well aware of the other mountains around you that make yours look in comparison like a low-grade class of a gently sloping foothill, or perhaps even a slightly upraised knob in the middle of a steep declination. You’re similarly aware of those less well-advantaged foothills or knoblets whose owners you can look down upon…. In short, people are highly aware of the relative rankings of their obsessions.
This movie seems like the perfect illustration of these competing claims. It involves a guy named Steve Wiebe, who's been laid off and never really hit the big time career-wise. He decides, naturally enough, to become the world's best player of Donkey Kong.
Unless I very much miss my guess, Seth Gordon, the director, would agree with Henry Farrell. There's a strong undertone of "OMG, what amazing losers" from start to finish, and the very fact that these guys care about who is the world's best Missile Command player gets repeatedly played for laughs.
But a lot of the time, that's just an assumption of a certain sort of elite who has already climbed fairly high on the status hierarchy they identify as the central one.
If you've ever spent time around competitive rock climbers, for example, you'll know that they really do believe that being the world's best alpinist is superior to being, say, Secretary of State, even though most people would rather meet Condi Rice than Reinhold Messner. Indeed, in many cases, their status hierarchy is inverted; being a total loser is better than being a certain sort of corporate cretin. And these aren't people who have chosen to opt out because they can't make it elsewhere; they're not noticeably less popular, intelligent, or competent than people who seek success in more traditional ways than a sub-four-hour solo of the Eiger.
Okay, one might argue, but there will always be weird little-cultlike pockets existing outside of normal society. Nonetheless, most people recognize the rough status pyramid that Henry Farrell is talking about. But even on that point, I'm not so sure. As I wrote last year:
Much status comparison is localised. Rich people don't compare themselves to the folks in the housing project ten miles away; they compare themselves to their neighbours. The poor, likewise. All the upper middle class people I know, including ones who make no money, like journalists and academics, believe that the working and middle classes secretly envy us our high social status. All I can say is, having recently spent several years at a working class job, if this is true, then the working classes must be extraordinarily good at keeping secrets.
Among print journalists, television is widely regarded as second-class (albeit, high paying) work. But try telling that to my relatives in western New York, who had never heard of The Economist, but woke up at 5 am to see me go on a now-defunct farm-team talking heads show on CNNfN.
Many of the people in the movie probably are conscious of having failed in the world outside video games. But the tendency among the coastal elites is to assume that the failure they experience is not having gotten a good book contract from Knopf, and I'm not so sure. I'd bet that for most of them, the failure is rather more brutal than not making it to a high prestige job: approximately 100% of them seem to be afflicted with pretty severe Asperger's--which is hardly surprising, given the superhuman concentration and obsessive attention to detail that is required to master those kinds of video games. These are people so socially disconnected that virtually all of them still dress as if it's 1982; would they really feel less alienated and unsuccessful in Sweden? Are they seeking refuge in video games because they'll never get tapped for the Supreme Court, or because they never get a promotion--or a second date?
Which is why ultimately the movie is inspiring. If there really was a unified status hierarchy, or even the kind of orderly meta-ranking that Mr Farrell posits, most of us would be completely screwed. Only a few people can be the smartest, richest, or most athletic guy in the world.
But having failed, like the rest of us, to become Bill Gates (or anything close), Steve Wiebe had an alternative: he could use his obsessive, socially awkward personality to become the best Donkey Kong player in the world.
Imagine Steve Wiebe's life in a world where Americans didn't work long hours producing soulless frivolities like video games.
Is this a bad time to point out that Americans didn't write Donkey Kong?
:)
"Make no money" is a relative concept. Being college graduates, many journalists and academics might believe "making money" entails earning a hundred thousand dollars a year or more. However, to many of us--I make well under $40,000, for instance--what the average journalist and academic makes hardly seems like "nothing."
But yeah, the idea that we proles envy them their "high social status" is pretty much a hilarious and pathetic lie they tell themselves to moderate their burning envy of those who *do* make more money than them. Most of us don't really care to live in New York or Los Angeles either, believe it or not.
What if you don't give a shit about being the best at anything, or find competition of any sort totally stupid and vulgar? I'm sure Wilkerson would tell me I'm just "denying my true nature."
The geek hierarchy underscores Henry Farrell's point about a semi-orderly ranking.
socially disconnected... er, from what?
I think with an ounce of thought you may notice that small social groups ARE the basis for all larger social groups. The super-rich? I know there is a small group of them that play polo, and another group that race porsches. They may not have much to do with each other, and they surely wouldn't be considered mainstream, because their existance is so far out of it. How mainstream is a guy from Greenbay who wears a fake slice of cheese on his head, and attends every homegame of the Packers? Few may match his interest in the Pack, but he may well be a church elder, and may use his day job skills to help habitat for humanity. Or maybe he doesen't have the skill set, and just donates instead.
There are webs of groups that each of us belong to, and depending on the group you may have the wealthy, and the poor, the charismatic, and the nutjobs, but what defines their failure? Or their success?
It is certainly odd of you to take a ficitonal movie, played for laffs, and consider it to be truth... Although, I know many strange and wonderful people, who do evidence eccentric traits, some of them even are ASPies.
In the long run, I would have to wonder if there is some overall clique that everyone aspires to be a part of, and some fail at. I think of it as being an illusion... Reach the billionth level of DK, or Halo3 or soemthing else? Comes with it's own cred, shorthand and payoffs. Just like if you design rockets, or build motorcycles, or are a doctor. Or a blogger. I would assume there are those that turn up their noses at you too.
Feel like a failure?
speaking of geeks.. eh greeks:
Socrates claimed that it is not the achievements that count but the character?
But that was regarding self-confidence and happiness... today we conduct this discussion in pure "currency terms"...
how much social respect to we get from others - how "needed" do we feel? is it real or virtual currency, etc?
It is an inherent problem that I have witnessed while studying economics in the city. Only 1 in 100 students cared about "economics"..? 99% did it for the "status", the suite, the office, the car... the life it promised? They were after the "banker" brand and not the product... they never tried anything else but Prada and would not even know how... My guess is that the dudes who invented "money", who invented derivatives and interest rates and inflation and the term "economics" were after completely different motives?
This approach - the Greeks said of the Persians - defines a barbarian? ;-) (but those geeky greeks had many definitions for that...)
King of Kong is only playing in the DC area at E Street through Thursday. So if you're going to see it, see it ASAP.
D:
According to the Ebert and Ropert (or whoever is on there now) movie review program, the movie is not fictional. They reviewed it last night in the Phoenix area.
Freddie:
Why is competition vulgar and stupid? I would suppose then that other factors would motivate people to get better and better at some task? And they would evaluate what is "better" with out comparing?
How might Ford come up with a more fuel efficient car without competition? Of course they could just do it I guess, in the same way you could work for your boss for half the price, not wanting to be competitive as to your own income.
Nearly everything we do involves competition. It's built into how our world functions. You are either competing against others, or some sytem designed to measure your contributions.
The flip side of no competition is collusion. And the end result of that, in the real world, is stupid.
It's been a while, and maybe I'm not recalling it correctly, but the odd feeling I got from the Farrell (et all) take on the matter, is not that he didn't believe that alternative status hierarchies exist, but that alternative status hierarchies *shouldn't* exist. That whoever ranks himself by one just doesn't know what's good for himself.
heh, Finn, I was thinking that after I posted, it's probably "based on a true story" ... but if you've ever been part of a true story, what is captured for screen and then edited to fit, is 'something like it' at hopeful best, and 'but that's not what I said...' at worst... It's kinda a moot point either way. The movie is what it is.
and what Scott said! I used to know a guy in Taos, NM. Lived in a trailer, and had a hotdog pushcart on the plaza. He did odd jobs during the winter to make it through... and had given up a 7 figure salary on wallstreet [that was A LOT of money in the early 80's]. His doctors said his 7fig. job was killing him. After his wife divorced him, and took him for everything he owned? He dropped out and moved to Taos and redefined what was actually important to him. That put him in a completely different sort of hierarchy....
I've actually met Billy Mitchell, the main character of the film, a few times. He's a hilarious guy. Long hair, always in a suit, thinks the world of himself. I'm told the movie (which I haven't seen) plays him off in a bad light unfairly. In any case, he is ridiculous at these arcade games; he can play PacMan without even looking at the screen, while simultaneously giving a TV interview!
What you are describing is known in mathematics as a "partial order" or "partial ordering":
http://mathworld.wolfram.com/PartialOrder.html
Elements within a given hierarchy may be compared with each other, but comparisons are not necessarily possible between elements in different hierarchies.