A reader of ZenOfDesign sent me this thread that he started on NeoGAF near the turn of the year. I’ve found it an interesting topic to talk about, but haven’t had time to discuss it in detail.
I am very interested in creative processes and complex discussions around the creative freedom of artists as balanced against societal responsibility…. I have seen enlightening discussions amongst members around these subjects (the “butt-slap story” or “Quiet as embarrassing” being some of them). This is why I wanted to start this discussion around the role of the artist beyond his own creation as a “meta” topic.
– can [the Artist] do as he/she feels?
– should he/she be concerned by the social environment of his/her art?
– is he/she tacitly influenced by his surrounding status quo, so the idea of art of isolation is chimera?
– should he/she be entirely free but so are critics to point out the problematic aspects of the creation?
The answer is a big ol’ ball of wax to unwind, but in truth is fairly straightforward – at least to questions 1 and 4. Maybe I’ll take 2 and 3 later.
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- The artist can, and should be, able to create just about whatever the hell he wants to create. This is core to my own beliefs about free speech, and maps pretty well to reality as well. For all of the fearmongering of the easily spooked idiot brigade, virtually any game can be made and sold- at least in the US. GTA V was made, sold record numbers and got stellar reviews. Hatred was made and sold. Huniepop as well. They didn’t exactly blow the doors off the bank vault – but their content made them somewhat niche. That’s fine, too. And while DOA isn’t coming to America, it’s not because of legal reasons, but because its projected sales don’t justify the expense.
- Well, not absolutely everything. The First Amendment – the legal bailiwick of Free Speech in America, at least – is one of the US’s more constrained amendments compared to, say, the Second Amendment. The biggest no-no is child porn. Libel and slander have legal consequences, although room is carved out for satire. Copyright and trademark law is meant to protect the artist. And you can’t go yelling fire in a movie theater, or go throwing down credible threats against other people. But if you can avoid these legal landmines, go at it. Push your envelopes. Take some chances. But keep in mind that some taboos are in place for a reason limited directly to broad market acceptance.
- However, this freedom is not about defending art as much as its about defending a message. The primary purpose of the concept of freedom of speech is not to protect art. That’s a really cool secondary effect, and one my work depends on. No, the concept of freedom of speech is to defend the right to criticize, especially for those in the minority to criticize those in power. This is the idea that free speech is a bulwark against tyranny. Art is protected because an artist may have a message – a political or cultural message – he wants to convey. And plenty of games do! Call of Duty is basically an ode to hoo-rah culture. The Sims is an exploration about how being trapped in consumer culture may not actually make you happier. Bioshock is about the failure of Randian philosophy. Civilization’s nuke mechanics are a pretty damning critique of the usage of nukes in terms of leaving the world a viable place to live. And so on, and so forth. In many cases, the message may be unintended by the designers. That’s okay – it’s protected anyway.
- And by extension, critics have just as much – if not more!- freedom to criticize art. If you conclude that the primary goal of free speech is to protect political ideas, it becomes clear that art criticism is exactly the sort of speech that the First Amendment was meant to protect. Does HuniePop have a political message worth protecting? The Supreme Court would probably blush as they played it before saying ‘probably not but maybe….’ — but that ‘maybe’ is good enough to warrant protection. However, Anita’s criticisms of games like HuniePop are DEFINITELY criticisms about the cultural status quo. One of the tenets of free speech is that the answer to bad speech is more speech. That’s all cultural criticism is. And the fact that its an unpopular opinion among gamers is exactly why it needs free speech protection – the status quo rarely needs protection.
- Criticism is not censorship. One of the most frequent and annoying themes of the alt-right/gamergate brigade is to suggest that we want to end problematic content. There may be some who have lofty visions of that, but most of us simply want to see the state of the art expand to include more diverse games with less problematic content. Which is to say, I don’t expect for GTA V to ever go away or for Call of Duty to ever stop embracing the jingo militarism that has made them a powerhouse brand. In fact, their dev teams would be idiots to stray too far from that successful formula (I wouldn’t expect Guns & Ammo to start selling Bernie Sander’s bumper stickers either). When most cultural critics say that GTA is bad, they aren’t saying it shouldn’t be sold (and I strongly fought against Jack Thompson, a right wing nutjob who did try to censor games at the governmental level). They are saying that they wished there were more games that were different.
- Criticism is, in fact, healthy for the genre. There seems to be a population of gamers who are completely satisfied with every game being a carbon copy of a game they’ve seen before – and endless array of fighting games, CoD clones, and sequels to Assassin’s Creed. Games are capable of so much more, and in so many directions. And while many people are focusing on new directions involving new tech (VR) or new game mechanics, adjusting the games we make and sell to reach broader audiences is not only a competitive advantage for companies willing to listen, it also is important for gaming as a hobby to continue its rise to ubiquity. Seeing game companies like BioWare, Volition and tobyfox expand how games approach these issues is more important to the genre growing as improving our fill rates and creating ever shinier shaders.
- Criticism of criticism is also fair game. People like to rant that Anita ‘can’t be criticized’ in return. This is belied by the hundreds of GamerGate adherents who have filled YouTube with criticisms of Anita’s work. Much of it is not very good. But no one is stopping you from doing so.
- Free speech does not grant you a market. Just because you can make a game does not mean that anyone should be obligated to sell it. If Steam had decided they didn’t want to sell Hatred or HuniePop, they’d have every right to exclude them from their shelves for whatever reason they want to. We don’t force Christian stores to sell Satanic bibles, we don’t force Wal*Mart to bely their family friendly brand by selling porn. ‘Freedom’ includes letting the owners of a marketplace decide what they want on their shelves in order to attract the clientele that they want.
- Free speech does not grant you press – good or otherwise. No one is obligated to write about your game – nor are they obligated to write positive things about your game if they do. No one is obligated to let you complain on their website if you disagree with their review. No one is obligated to turn on comments so you can turn their website into a sewer. And no one is obligated to give you a checkmark if you break their rules. Part of freedom of speech is the freedom to publish. We don’t force the New York Times to let Donald Trump write the front page either. If you don’t like how Twitter or Polygon treats you, go start a blog or find someone who wants to publish your rant.
- People who fight to shut down cultural critics are anti-free speech and against the growth of video games as a genre. If you are trying to scare or intimidate voices off the internet with death threats, scare tactics or just outright bullying in order to shut them up, you are trying to silence what is very likely a valid voice about games. I’m not saying that that voice is always right – as an example, I tend to like Anita’s work but still find plenty wrong with it – but her videos have given me plenty to think about and have contributed directly to my growth as a designer, and to an overall improvement in the games that I make.
- A lot of game designers could care less about what cultural critics say, and that’s fine too. Again, you want to go make Hatred 2 or HuniePop, be my guest. You probably won’t get great reviews from Polygon, but sadly, you’ll probably milk the ‘controversy’ that someone hurt your feelings to sell far more than a non-controversial game would ever sell. Which is, of course, the funniest thing about this whole ‘CRITICISM=CENSORSHIP!’ meme that floats around. Hatred is, for example, a pretty lousy game by most standards based solely on their gameplay, not their craptastic politics. It probably sold a lot better than a lot of other, much more worthy games that didn’t have that controversy to milk.
- That being said, shitty, hateful & awful games DO hurt the industry. It’s a necessary pain in the service of free speech, but every time some jackass attempts to generate controversy to sell games, as they did for Hatred, they can turn people off of gaming. When an article about Slave Tetris hits the LA Times, it may result in parents taking their gameboys and ipads away from their kids. This will become less of a problem in the future – gaming now has just too much momentum as broadly acceptable by almost everyone – but one cannot ignore that there may be ripple effects. And for what its worth, sometimes its the SJWs that are poking the bear, such as when Mass Effect added lesbian sex scenes to the ire of Fox News.
When I started out in the industry, I didn’t pay much attention to cultural criticism of games – in fact, I also bristled at political correctness affecting my games. I expect a lot of industry folks are like I was then. But in twenty years of working in the industry, I’ve grown a lot. Working in MMOs, I’ve been in a lot more contact with my fans, and I’ve gotten more and better feedback about how my games have been perceived and have affected minority voices. Running teams, I’ve grown more aware of how few of these voices actually find themselves in decision-making positions on dev teams. And frankly, having been an avid game player my whole life, I’ve gotten a little weary of playing the same games year after year. I’m still interested in the next Doom that’s coming out, sure, but frankly I’ve been having way more fun in the last year with games like Undertale and The Stanley Parable – games that actually challenged the conventional wisdom of what a game actually is and- in many ways- who a gamer actually is as well.
I’m a lifelong gamer. I’m a fan of games as a genre and a way of life. I’m eager to see them improve in every vector. My freedom to create any game is vital to that – but so is the freedom of critics to help guide the genre along the way.
Few points Damion:
– I haven’t encountered many who cry “CRITICISM = CENSORSHIP”. I think what many appreciate is when a publisher or developer is coerced into self-censoring, for reasons other than sales, and/or because they are fearful of the backlash, that’s still censorship. When people compare some (not all) critics to those who assaulted the industry a decade ago, it’s because the puritanical goals appear to be the same, merely the tactics are different. I have plenty of time for critics when they are talented (many are not) – SuperBunnyHop is one of my favourite YT channels, for instance. As you concede yourself, there may be those whose end-goal *is* the end of “problematic content” that so many harmlessly enjoy.
– Anita: the criticism isn’t that no one can criticise her, it’s that the games press (and broader press) has not handled her with any measure of balance. It’s pretty much praise/defend her or ignore her. Those of us who would have welcomed a constructive and nuanced discussion of the claims being made in her videos have had to look elsewhere. As a critic, wouldn’t you agree that it’s a shame she was handled the way she was? Wouldn’t a nuanced discussion have been productive?
– DOA: unless you are privy to information I have not seen, the claim that DOAX3 will not receive an American release because of low projected sales is unsupported. Happy to be proven wrong. DOAX2 sold 250k copies according to VGChartz, of which 150k were sold in North America. So I’m very sceptical of the claim you make above.
1) They don’t cry ‘criticism = censorship’. They just use the term ‘censorship’ when what they mean is ‘criticism’. Pretty much every discussion about Anita’s videos are how she is trying to censor your games. Tauriq was accused of wanting to censor Witcher 3 when he actually described it as one of the best games he’s ever played. And so on, and so forth.
2) Most gaming sites have very little discussion of her other than ‘Anita posted a video’. Seriously, go look it up.
3) That being said, if you set up a website, you can support the views you want to support, and not give air to the views you don’t want to give attention to. As an example, I have emails from multiple GamerGators who want me to get involved with some eCeleb drama involving RalphRetort and how some suicide was handled. I don’t, because it’s petty-ass bullshit that my audience shouldn’t care about, and because RalphRetort doesn’t deserve to be elevated.
For what its worth, if the existing journalism power structure doesn’t have anything that represents your point of view, and that point of view actually is a mass market one, then that’s a great market opportunity. However, the status quo is actually pretty well represented by the games media – I count IGN and Gamespot, who rarely if every give feminist viewpoints much attention and simply print ‘gamez are awesome!’ type journalism — which is fine. Going beyond that to actually attacking Anita’s point of view has not, on the other hand, gotten much momentum to warrant a larger audience, judging by the relative failures of sites like NicheGamer and GoodGamer, who tried to cater to the GG fanbases.
4) I cannot speak to why a game company decides to take something international or not – I am not in their board rooms. However, localization is something that can be cheap, or can be expensive. They may feel that by coming to the west, they might have to water down the core game, and that they can be more tittilating if they don’t bring the game abroad. Or, they may feel that they can’t get the game into Wal*marts. Or, and I suspect this is most likely, they may just be trying to drum up controversy, in order to sell more games because ‘fuck political correctness’. You know, the Hatred model.
And speaking from experience, it may well work, and it likely will sell more copies of the game. I’m someone who tends to buy a lot of fighting games, and DOA has always been among the dullest, most milquetoast of games in terms of fighting mechanics. If you really want extra boobage fighting game, I’d much rather reach for Guilty Gear.
4)
decent enough counterpoint about nichegamer and IGN but how much about that is just how toxic this stuff is labelled when mainstream gatekeepers see it? I remember looking over at file 411 who had a great collection of sadpuppies/rabbid puppies articles (author firmley anti puppies fyi) and a good number of those anti puppy yet sci fi insiders (i.e. actual writers) pointed out that places like WIRED were being unfair to people like Turgenston and reducing everything to the lowest level of quality. Rectio ad Vox Day essentially.
The Sad/Rabid Puppies debate was an interesting one. Vox Day’s slate of nominees included some absolutely terrible sci-fi writing – and I don’t mean ‘because they were politically correct’, I mean ‘because a fifth grader could have written a better sci-fi story’. However, he did actually nominate some that were decent, even worthy.
They lost out because the voters felt the need to protect the integrity of the awards themselves. The worthy candidates were put onto slates where worthy competitors were excluded due to Vox Day’s machinations. It’d be like someone manipulated the NFL into putting the Browns, Jaguars, Buccaneers and Carolina Panthers in the playoffs this year. Sure the Panthers would win, and no one would argue that they aren’t likely the best team in the NFL. However, playoffs that included those other three instead of the Patriots, Broncos and Cardinals would be a sham, and should be treated as such.
I got the name wrong: file 770
http://file770.com/?tag=sad-puppies&paged=4
“However, playoffs that included those other three instead of the Patriots, Broncos and Cardinals would be a sham, and should be treated as such.”
the problem is why people attacked it and reading though those puppy columns makes it clear insiders were seeing a lot of ugly stuff that didn’t mesh with reality. Again this isn’t a “sad puppies are right” post it’s a “media unfairly smeared a lot of people according to insiders”.
you’re ignoring the argument i put forward.
My point was about how people were treated reduced to stupid characatures of evil bigots a la vox day. The point was about people being treated fairly in regards to sad puppies and what light that sheds. Fairly can mean dismissing sad puppies and attacking many nominees as undeserving. ideologically driven slander isn’t. Again it’s in the file 770 links. can’t find the specific one though. Again the articles i’m thinking of (defense of people) were written by people who were against puppies for hte reason you listed.
Thanks for replying Damion.
To your first point: you say yourself that some critics may want “to end problematic content”. Feminist Frequency’s output appears to be geared around exactly this. It isn’t about praising content that does it right. It’s about shaming content that does it wrong. That’s exactly how someone would go about it if their end goal was for including “problematic” content in a game to be untenable. Tauriq’s tone-deaf criticism of Witcher 3 may or may not have been censorious in nature, but it is understandable that readers could reasonably interpret an attack on a Polish developer for not arbitrarily conforming to North-American standards of diversity as such.
If you want a tired meme that the other “side” of this discussion often encounters, it’s the claim that “self-censorship isn’t censorship”, which is absurd, especially when it comes out of the mouth of a journalist (who are coerced to self-censor all over the world). There is obviously a point where something crosses from criticism to coercive pressure, and the blanket statement “criticism isn’t censorship” doesn’t account for this. It’s more complicated than that.
I do think there’s an audience for the things you say there isn’t one, and I’d point to videos on YT critical of FF that run close to a million views or to Adrian Chmielarz’ critique of Moosa’s aforementioned attack on W3 published on Medium that had hundreds of thousands of views purely through viral sharing. I think conversations around these subjects are as toxic as they are, precisely because larger publications ignores them, when it could be owning them.
Lastly, you say “I cannot speak to why a game company decides to take something international or not” which I’ll take as a retraction of your point #1 above, where you state it as a matter of fact that it was a sales reason.
1) Anita does, in her work, highlight games that do it right. She also highlights videos that were trying to do it right, but fell short. She is not a raging demon. She is a critic with a specific focus.
2) Tauriq’s criticism is not tone-deaf – the response was. Tauriq’s review literally says, “This is one of the best games I’ve ever played. I just wish that it had more people of color in it – since there is a really cool POC race in the Witcher backstory anyway.” People took this as ‘OMG, TAURIQ WANTS TO CENSOR THOUGHT!” At any rate, if you sell a game on an international market, you have to deal with cultural concerns of those markets.
3) Yep, plenty of people read Adrian’s critiq of Moosa’s attacks (despite the fact that they were clumsy and misguided, and ignored Moosa’s enthusiasm for W3 =) If they are this popular, then NicheGamer & the Escapist have a decent chance of using these viewpoints to catch up to Polygon and Kotaku.
4) Fair enough re: sales reason. The idea that that company shies away from controversy is laughable, though – they used controversy to sell Volleyball and if they hadn’t said a word, barely anyone would have noticed that DOA isn’t coming here. This is to me very clearly an attempt to drum up enough interest so that sales catch up.
That being said VGCharts shouldn’t be considered the gospel on sales numbers. I know from looking up some games I’ve worked on that they are frequently WAY off.
I’ll agree to disagree with you on most of this, I’d just like to remind you of what Moosa’s article said, and why it strikes me as tone-deaf, and potentially censorious. He accused the game of repeatedly dehumanising “people of colour” which is a heck of a charge, and repeatedly called for diversity as an imperative. This is tone deaf because, as a European, I see a game that is an expression of a culture and a group of people who spent most of last century under the boot of multiple oppressive forces, and who even today are considered an underclass when they venture outside their country. Just as you wouldn’t reasonably demand diversity quotas from a game about and by native Americans, it seems bonkers to make similar demands of a Polish publisher.
Of course the response to this article was over the top. In part because when people tried to engage him on on, he labelled them harassers, blocked them, deleted critical comments under the article, wrote about being attacked, and along with other bad-faith actors on all sides destroyed any hope of a constructive dialogue.
This cycle is ultimately what prevents games criticism from gathering much traction IMO, and what keeps it in its infancy, with the most visible “dialogue” occurring on places like Twitter, where in 140 characters it’s impossible to convey nuance, but easy to convey hatred and stupidity.
Do you believe that the cornerstone of the heritage of central europe is fiercely defended Whiteness? Is that what defines it? Because that’s not particularly complementary to those people. Do you believe the recent Thor movie was ruined by the inclusion of a black Heimdall?
In truth, if Witcher 3 had been more inclusive in general, they could have spread the tales and heritage that they wanted to share to a much larger and broader audience. This is pretty much commonly understood not just in game design but in movies & television as well. This is not to say that Witcher 3 isn’t excellent – it is, and Moosa said so – but that does mean that it could have done some things better.
As for ‘he labelled them harassers’, I was watching his Twitter feed. Truly, truly awful and noxious people who went after him with threats and racial slurs and, after he went silent, started going after his friends on Twitter. They were fucking harassers.
@Damion Schubert
I’ll try to explain what bothers me about Moosa’s opinion. I was raised in a city located about 200kms north of Quebec City. During my childhood and my teens, I’ve read a few books from a local immigrant from Haiti, I was dimly aware that there was 1 or 2 black students in my school during the last 2 years of high school and I heard that my little brother had a black teacher at some point. Maybe because I wasn’t social at all, I didn’t interact at all with any blacks and I wasn’t aware of any actual Asians. Looking at the statistic from stat Canada, the eara where I lived had a little more that 1000 non white or non native American for a total population of about 104 000. There was only 260 blacks, so few that if I had to organize a theatre and had a black character in the script, I don’t think I could avoid using black-face.
http://www12.statcan.gc.ca/census-recensement/2006/dp-pd/prof/rel/Rp-fra.cfm?TABID=2&LANG=F&APATH=3&DETAIL=0&DIM=0&FL=A&FREE=0&GC=0&GID=842911&GK=0&GRP=1&PID=92636&PRID=0&PTYPE=89103&S=0&SHOWALL=0&SUB=0&Temporal=2006&THEME=80&VID=0&VNAMEE=&VNAMEF=&D1=0&D2=0&D3=0&D4=0&D5=0&D6=0
When I moved to Quebec city, I fully realized black people existed. Don’t get my wrong, I knew black existed, intellectually but there were more people that existed in American movies than people in flesh and bone, people I could talk to until I bough ice cream from a black and complained to her about the *uking hot day of July.
I would probably create a depressing white world not because, even unconsciously, try to erase the colour. I would probably create a white world because I was raised into one and I still live in a, admittedly less, homogenous world. Of course, I would welcome the suggestion to add colour from an editor, especially if my story contain characters with pointy ears. That the problem I have with his article, I don’t think it describes very well the situation outside the USA and South Africa, but his suggestion of adding more diversity, hell yes.
Beside, our demons aren’t Americas demons but let me tell you, Canadians have their racial demons.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Canadian_Indian_residential_school_system
I know and I work with people that would call me a traitor if they knew I posted the last link.
That’s funny Damion, because I was watching that day too. He blocked me for this tweet (http://archive.is/nji4T) not exactly harassment is it? He blocked Daniel Vavra who wanted to talk. Pretty sure he blocked Adrian too. He was blocking indiscriminately. This is exactly the problem I spoke of above: you group harassers with good faith actors and pretend there’s no distinction. That lets the bad-faith actors own the conversation. As for Tauriq, there’s nothing more hypocritical than a thin-skinned critic. He should *welcome* critical scrutiny. Seek it out. Instead he represents attacks as racist, says “The angry responses to my post confirm why I wrote it” under an incendiary hashtag, and uses claims of harassment to deflect criticism and a real, positive dialogue. All while championing even the most absurd defences of his position (“poc Tumblr” anyone). Much like the other “critic” we’ve discussed. That’s not how you start dialogue. That’s how you produce flamewars.
You want games criticism to grow up? To be treated better? Then tell the critics to start behaving like adults.
Witcher 3’s “whiteness” is a non-issue. If they chose to include people with dark-skinned pigment that would’ve been fine too (albeit opens it up to cries of tokenism and stereotyping), but that they didn’t is not evidence of some endemic racial bias in gaming when the reality is a) the developers living in a country where you can literally go twenty years without seeing someone who isn’t white is a much more likely reason for why diversity quotas weren’t on their minds and b) their focus was on representing a people and culture that has *never* had representation in mainstream gaming.
There is something incredibly petty and self-centred about one under-represented voice or group demanding representation in another under-represented voice or group’s video game, isn’t there? This isn’t some North American developer. This is a unique voice from a people that are still feeling the effects of being broken by two consecutive superpowers and someone truly concerned with diverse representation in gaming and not, say, self-promotion or ideological warfare, would celebrate that.
(this is in response to the reply re: harassers and Witcher 3 – I don’t seem to be able to reply to that one, so I’m replying to the one above)
Specifically regarding the DOA Xtreme sales, just looking at the raw numbers for the first two games doesn’t tell you much, seeing as they were exclusive to Microsoft platforms. In Japan, the Xbox line of consoles has always been horrendously unpopular. Then when the series made its handheld debut in the form of DoA Paradise, a port/remake thing of the second game for the PSP, it sold more units in Japan than it did in North America and Europe combined, at least according to VGchartz: https://archive.is/7O7mW
Man, I sure hope VGChartz is inaccurate, because with the exception of DOA3 (which I assume was a launch game or something?) these sales numbers are all pretty anemic.
http://www.vgchartz.com/gamedb/?name=dead+or+alive
What’s lost in sales figures is the cost of advertising a game, which varies wildly from country to country. As an example, its easy to advertise in Korea – billboards are popular there because everyone is in one place. The US is far worse, especially if you have expected sales that are <200K. At that scale, it's tough to sell enough copies to cover your marketing - and there's no way you get there without marketing.
But again, VGChartz should not be taken as gospel.
I was halfway through typing this in response to the Trump thread when you published this, but I see my comment (with a few changes) is more fitting here.
I know you’ve posted this mostly in response to GamerGate, but I’ve seen authoritarians both left and right.
Indeed, one of my main criticisms of GamerGate has always been that they act *exactly* like those they claim to be fighting against. Sometimes intentionally, by following the same tactics under the excuse that the other side did it first (and indeed how could liberals make a case against that when they followed the same approach to, among other things, try to kick Rush Limbaugh off the air?). Or by turning the Privilege racket on its head by claiming that gamers were a victimized group (“gamers are dead”, etc.). Sometimes unintentionally, by being as hostile to free speech opposed to their views as the people on the “authoritarian left” they were decrying just as they shouted “free speech now”.
This being said, the authoritarian left exists. I have seen it in action, at various sites, sites they go out of their way to bleat are “safe spaces” with codes of conduct that are just intended to trip (and consequently ban) people whose views they don’t like, while the welcome users are allowed all the latitude to abuse, mock, and shame their opponents. And when they lack ideological opponents — and it’s inevitable, because nobody else will bother joining — they turn on one another for being insufficiently pure of thought. Every space they inhabit they turn willingly into the black hole of Calcutta or the raft of the Medusa, whittling down the population until there is nothing left to contemplate but the death of their community.
This is *exactly* what I saw happening at Broken Forum, when Lum came up with his new rules in 2013, which he happened to introduce a week or so after lifting my ban there. How could I not take it personally? And after I typed a 2,000-word response to it, he banned me for two weeks, while the other users threw a load of TL;DRs my way.
That’s what they do. They don’t like you, they want you out, and they’ll go out of their way to make you feel unwelcome and attempt to push you out. And if that doesn’t work, if you’re too daft to get the message or too resilient to heed it, they will appeal to whoever is in charge, with loud cries of “SAFE SPACE IMPERILED”, on whatever pretext, and in the end, you will be kicked out. (There’s a certain irony that what finally got me banned was when I one-upped their own tendency to call games ‘problematic’ by calling Grand Theft Auto immoral and taking them to task for playing it anyway.)
And yeah, I chronicled it all afterwards, until last year. You think I’ve written 100,000 words about getting banned from a minor online forum just because I’m particularly resentful? No. It’s because BF was emblematic of the myriad ways in which online discourse has become polarized and intolerant of opposing viewpoints. In which you must not only agree with whichever side you’re supposedly on, but also agree for the same reasons.
There is a certain point at which criticism does become censorship, if you start, say, accusing the people behind certain films (not to mention those who liked the films in question) of being racists for not caring about the ‘problematic’ elements — because if you cared, how could you make/enjoy this? — or if you try to get people fired from their unrelated job because of something they wrote. It’s just the progressive variant on the kind of stunt which church authorities pulled for decades (here anyway, before Vatican II). Yes, to exercise speech should carry consequences if you abuse it — and GamerGate is reprehensible because it thinks otherwise — but it doesn’t mean much to constitutionally protect speech if the diktat of public opinion can get you fired for saying things over which you would never see the inside of a courtroom. If the mob can stoop to destroying a dentist’s professional reputation because he went on a safari, it will stoop to anything.
Yeah, sure, feel free to express yourself — if you’re prepared to die homeless in the middle of January after being told by countless people to just get a job, from which they’d be the first to try to get you fired once they learned what you had said in the past. As much a pariah as an ex-convict.
Yes, “free speech is a bulwark against tyranny”. But it means nothing if it is not shielded from the tyranny of a vindictive mob. It means nothing if it is reduced, GamerGate-style, to what there is quantifiable commercial demand for. (Melville’s “Moby-Dick” was a bookstore flop.) GamerGate was, indeed, the apotheosis of this sort of mob censorship; to borrow a phrase from I can’t remember where: they play to crush.
Artistic independence is threatened from both the left and the right. From the right is obvious enough these days: It’s GamerGate’s desire to destroy independent games they don’t like, which is just a continuation of all that complaining about the “Mass Effect 3” ending to the FTC and the BBB a few years ago. But from the left is getting apparent too.
I see that GamerGhazi picked up your post. They’re a fine example of a “safe space” driven into the ground by becoming a parody of itself, confirming every Gater stereotype about its opponents in the process, and getting quite a reputation for banning people who disagree with the place. I oppose GamerGate, but GamerGhazi makes me retch. They don’t even deal with video games journalism anymore, leaving the field wide open to GamerGate; and I have no doubt that if I started poking Ghazi, I’d get the comment that a certain political position is necessary to be ethical — which is, you will recall, the same reasoning that Milo Yiannopoulos was making at AirPlay, and for which I have no patience.
It never ceases to amaze me how Gaters and their progressive opponents are alike. I can’t make any difference between those trying to rig the Hugo Awards with their Sad/Rabid Puppies slates, and the kind of people whining about the lack of nominees of color at the Oscars. If you give credence to awards in general — which I don’t, neither for the Hugos and even less for the Oscars — this is just a recipe for rewarding mediocrity just because the result is palatable to your political views. Yeah, that wouldn’t change much — the Hugos I can’t tell, but the Oscars have been rewarding mediocrity for years — but I do not see any benefit to suddenly start demanding the rewarding of Mediocrity Of Color, which progressives will predictably react to, were that the case, by praising the Academy for a good taste it never had. (Meanwhile, as Freddie deBoer said recently, progressives will strenuously object to the idea that those winners must have been rewarded primarily because of their race, after progressives will have done exactly everything to cultivate that impression by bleating about the necessity to de-whiten the Oscars.)
Also, I wish you would have acknowledged the danger posed by monopolistic businesses which can de facto control discourse, like media concentration. I’m fine with Steam deciding not to sell stuff, but I’ll change my tune if Valve came to control 90% of the online game retail market.
Vetarnias,
Please never stop writing. You should spell check a bit, but I actually wanted this incredibly lengthy post to just keep going. I was sad when it ended. You should post more shit, or write a book or something.
That said, and this is a bit off topic, but I do want to point out something about your Mediocrity of Color point re: The Oscars. Specifically, I don’t think de-whitening Oscar nominations will bring about mediocre performances. As you’ve pointed out, The Oscars are already exceptionally mediocre. Take The Revenant, for example– like, really, It’s kind of like a race to nominate the last movie that comes out in the calendar year. It’s telling (of the “whiteness” problem) that the white screenwriter of Straight Outta Compton got the nomination for basically doing nothing more than writing down a bunch of historical events, when the black actors who brought those characters to life (quite impressively, I might add), were completely ignored. *THAT* is the Oscars problem.
Anyway, just had to get that off my chest.
Regarding the “Mediocrity of Color”: Yes, the Oscars are mediocre, and yes, they’ve been geared for years to nominate, with the complicity of the studios, whatever comes out in December (and sometimes not in general release until some weeks thereafter, but just enough to meet the Academy criteria). And there’s more to be said about its being completely swayed by industry politics and a solemn, relentless infatuation with itself that’s evident every time it attempts some tepid attempt at self-deprecation.
I was reading a piece someone linked to recently, that was talking about Seth MacFarlane’s emceeing in 2013, during which he pulled the old “Our next presenter (Meryl Street) needs no introduction” and walking off the state. The writer (it’s at Jacobin) summarized the Oscars in two sentences: “Introducing Streep this way did triple duty: fawning over her Great Actress status, undercutting that status by neglecting to introduce her, and acknowledging just how jaded everyone is about her Great Actress status. We love the ritual, we crave the ritual, we despise the ritual.”
And it’s time for the ritual to end. It’s everything wrong with Hollywood in one evening. And you don’t end the ritual by attempting to legitimize it, or by giving it a new coat of paint of a different color to make it fashionable according to the public mores of today. And because ending the ritual is my top priority, it’s preferable that the Oscars remain dazzingly white, irrelevant to the last: they will only sink faster. (I swear, at times I almost hope Milo and his cohorts could topple Twitter, for similar reasons, though I want absolutely nothing to do with them.)
This is how I interpret the people who say there should be more Oscar nominees of color: they have their use, but only after the fact, after the whiteness has been consecrated for the 88th year in a row. The danger in their acting now is that the Academy could be so afraid of its bad PR that it might take corrective action before the awards, and that the members realize that for their self-congratulatory industry shitshow to continue having any relevance, they have to vote for the black guy this year. And if that happens, will the progressives denounce the Oscars as the self-congratulatory industry shitshow it always was and always will be, or will they lapse into some self-congratulation of their own at having achieved another victory for Diversity? From history, I know which is by far the more probable.
I have no idea if there were genuinely good performances from actors of color in 2015, because I have yet to see a single American film made this past year (and if there weren’t, the problem is in the film production chain, of which the Oscars is just the symptom). But to complain that the Oscars are too white means you take the Oscars as an award to be credible enough to bother with attempting to fix them. But all that makes the Oscars shitty will still be there, even with nominees of color. And if you don’t respect the Oscars, how cynical is it to make it a matter of principle over who they nominate?
The reason that GamerGhazi bans dissenting viewpoints is that they want a place to talk about *their* viewpoint without having to explain their position three-hundred times to people who aren’t the least bit willing to change their minds. What GamerGate doesn’t realize is that opinions don’t always win in the “public arena” by virtue of being more correct: they most often win by being *louder.* And I can tell you that when you’re dealing with hordes of people who are tremendously obnoxious, stubborn, and incapable of reflecting upon their own prejudices and revising their outlook, odds are you are going to want to avoid having to talk to them out of sheer exhaustion.
Forums with strict codes of conduct exist because they give people a place to voice their thoughts without having to tear their hair out having to deal with ignoramuses. Social justice by nature aims to challenge widely-held beliefs and ideas responsible for injustice, so that means it is always going to be relatively unpopular anywhere outside its own spaces, and SJ advocates will always have to deal with this problem outside their own communities.
Free speech exists to protect minority opinion. Forums with these codes of conduct, as such, do not usually violate the actual purpose of free speech. Many people mock these “safe space” forums as “refusing to hear ideas you don’t like,” but that itself carries with it the arrogant conceit that their ideas are automatically *worth* hearing, or that the people refusing to hear them haven’t heard them already.
While this is not to say that “safe spaces” are perfect by any means, they exist because of a real problem within certain spheres of conversation. I would actually much rather prefer that they didn’t exist at all, but it’s not realistic to treat them as *uniquely* authoritarian when they are formed specifically in response to a power imbalance in discussions. GamerGhazi wouldn’t ban people if KiA users hadn’t insisted on flooding and brigading it with their nonsense early on. Blockbots wouldn’t exist if GamerGate didn’t so often dogpile their critics with the expectation that they simply put up with dozens of hostile accounts at once. You get the idea. The first step to doing away with these authoritarian policies on websites is to understand *why* they resorted to authoritarianism to begin with.
While I may agree with you somewhat, I’m now seeing the Ghazbags distort my comment by casting me as follows:
“I’m one of those neutrals who will go out of my way to point out how reasonable I find Gamergate’s view on reality, but man oooh they are just as icky as the people that exact view has taught me to hate, don’t it feel good to be the superior centrist?”
Since when does opposing both GamerGate (which I’ve done from the beginning) and the likes of GamerGhazi translate into neutrality? Also, “that exact view” has taught me nothing; I saw that kind of intransigent progressive American type at work years before anyone heard of a “GamerGate”, the kind of people who would destroy your language and culture and have the gall to call it progress — no better than neocons, as it were, because there’s the same American exceptionalism lurking underneath.
It’s not too hard to figure out why I despise both, when you know that I’m a Quebec separatist. To Gaters, to defend the French language against the encroachment of English is sheer “SJWery” (as evidence, look up a YouTube video under the title “Your Future, My Present: SJWs in Power”), but to American progressives, any nationalism is inherently reactionary and everything we do gets immediately compared to Marine Le Pen and the Front National in France, and suddenly — how strange — the whole Privilege thing they’re so fond of ceases to apply. I’m damned by both sides, as it were.
(It’s an interesting characteristic that I’ve encountered several Gaters who are not American, and say they are Gaters precisely because they fight against this form of bien-pensant American liberalism. What they fail to realize is that they have consequently aligned with a very typical form of American conservatism — think Breitbart — which is no better.)
Also, I read the GamerGhazi comment about me as the usual polarizing “with us or against us” — which is the exact same kind of bullshit I see GamerGate pull all the time. And if it comes down to “with us or against us”, my answer will always be: against. Because if you can’t frame supporting your movement by using an honest proposition, I can’t trust the honesty of your movement, and I know I’m being sold a bill of goods, and I know you will never be satisfied unless I start groveling for approval.
If I showed up there and corrected them, how long would I last?
That depends on whether you were actually correcting them or just being an asshole.
I’ll see how that goes. For the time being, it’s amazing how Ghazi and Kotaku In Action are yin and yang — how they feed off one another even though I don’t see much of a direct interaction between them anymore.
To wit: Damion’s post was also picked up at KiA, except they’re linking to an archived copy to deprive him of his precious advertising or something. I’m sure he’ll be glad to know that he is “a great example of how socjus fundamentalism does more harm to the industry than good.”
Or both sites talking about PressFartToContinue allegedly landing a writing gig at The Escapist, which, if true, would be a case of The Escapist putting its foot in its mouth and shooting it, as even the KiA Gaters won’t have anything to do with the guy. There is evidence that someone let both Escapist publisher Macris and Editor-in-Chief Vanderwall know about PFTC’s past, with as far as I can tell no response from either.
If there continues to be no response, I’ll have to come to the conclusion that it has to be true, or that the Escapist management doesn’t care about even its own public image. Because that’s the point where you start asking questions: how did PFTC come to write at The Escapist? How did you come to know him? Above all, did you know about his history in GamerGate? He might be a very competent writer — I haven’t even read any stuff under his alleged byline at The Escapist (as I tend to avoid the place). But PR-wise, it’s as awful as it gets, especially since there’s a pattern of shittiness that followed The Escapist since 2014: giving the boot to, or losing, its talent like Chipman, Tito, and Sterling, only to turn the place over to Gaters and ideological hacks like Brandon Morse; or that infamous game designers article that Macris rammed through only to leave Tito holding the bag; or the general pigsty of its forum taken over by sealions and 14-year-old redpiller wannabes.
This, if true, might be the last straw, one where everything about the management of The Escapist becomes suspect, and one where someone like Yahtzee will have to ask himself what good there is to stay there, or risk being tainted by association. I think it’s the point this has reached. Being associated with GG is bad enough; being associated with someone too toxic even for GG is something else. And if this is true and they choose to remain silent because they think they can let the storm pass, it says a lot about their treatment of their readers. I’m not a Gater; I am loath to see a publication, even a shitty one like The Escapist, fold, but one needs a cautionary tale every now and then, especially when something appears to be beyond redemption.
Back to KiA and Ghazi, the two are slowly sinking into irrelevance, but in opposite ways.
Ghazi is well on its way to succeeding in having a completely airtight echo chamber (not unlike in the fourth act of Aida, I should think).
KiA, in comparison, is losing focus; it’s a dozen threads at once all clamoring for attention over anything even remotely connected to “SJWs” — they seem to have completely dropped any remaining pretense of being about ethics now — while they decry the GG Revolt hardliners of 8chan as reactionary radicals, which would explain KiA’s rejection of The Ralph Retort, which was associated with the Revolt crowd (especially after there were alleged leaked chatlogs showing Ralph and his cohorts didn’t care about GamerGate or were concerned that “SJWs” were ruining it). They still don’t have the courage to tell off Milo, though, even though they seem to sense they can only go down by following him.
I think your understanding of censorship is shakier than you might realise, which is unfortunate because there’s a fun conversation to be had about how groups that form as a reaction to reactionary groups often end up being reactionary as well. (GamerGhazi often paints behaviour in totalist terms, either black or white – nuance allows GamerGate to flourish, apparently. You can only rigidly define what is true and what is false if perfection is possible, or you’re deluding yourself into thinking perfection is possible because of your perfect truth. Because the people who disagree with you can’t comprehend your perfect truth, they mustn’t be worthy of respect – of being treated as people. GamerGhazi aren’t as conspiracy-laden or as violent as GamerGate, but they’re still dangerous.)
Anyway, censorship: censorship is bad not because of the WHAT you are and aren’t allowed to express (this quickly become ludicrous: movie theatres don’t allow filming = CENSORSHIP), but because of WHO decides. Our values and standards must be publically debated, it’s critical to democracy. Censorship is bad because it short-circuits that debate, and it’s the censor who makes the decision. When the debate over what we believe is won, however, it becomes a shared value. It becomes something more important: it binds a community together.
Questioning it once it’s a shared value isn’t debate, but an attack. If a movement started in America arguing that all men aren’t created equal, it’s an attack on the Constitution, not someone launching a healthy debate about what America means. If I go to a D&D group and say that we should play board games instead, I’m not helping to broaden the tastes of the group, I’m disrupting someone’s D&D game to be an asshole. If I don’t want to be a part of that community, I should go somewhere else; we’re here for D&D. America is here for all men being created equal.
Most of the behaviour you describe here is the same thing; you question the shared values of a community, and then get surprised when people correctly treat it as an attack on the community. Such are the perils of deciding your values in isolation.
(Interesting to note you’re a Quebecois separatist.)
“Questioning it once it’s a shared value isn’t debate, but an attack. If a movement started in America arguing that all men aren’t created equal, it’s an attack on the Constitution, not someone launching a healthy debate about what America means.”
And yet there is a strong case to be made that all men aren’t created equal. It might be a fine ideal, but we all know it’s not true. And making this case might be precisely the antidote to the sort of libertarian power fantasy which denies (mendaciously or not) that not everyone has a serious chance of ending up a winner, or that some people are born Trayvon Martin while others are born Donald Trump, or which insists that if you fail, it’s entirely your fault. The sort of libertarian power fantasy that’s currently sinking the Republicans but from which the Democrats were never truly exempt either.
As for the specific community I was describing (not GamerGhazi), it’s a little more complicated than that, in that the entire vibe of the forum in question shifted when I was already there, after it went on hiatus for six months or so and was resurrected around a new community. The more time passed, the more I felt like one of the last holdouts of an old neighbourhood getting gentrified. Then came the rules out of nowhere which codified a lot of unacceptable commentary, which I thought was squarely aimed at me because my politics clashed with most of the rest of the forum’s users. That’s what I didn’t like.
But what good does it do to public discourse if you just retreat into your circle of friends who already happen to agree with you? That’s why I really despised the idea of Twitter blockbots, for instance: you shouldn’t rely on someone else to do your blockings for you.
Ironically, you’ve hit on the very reason why I’m neutral about the Quebec separatist movement. On the one hand, Those People do have a vast number of legitimate grievances. But on the other hand, some of Those People are just so shrill and demanding! And they insist that we changes things really fast, without carefully and rationally considering all the possible consequences, especially the negative effects that it might have on Regular People.
If Those People were willing to sit down and calmly discuss my few objections over and over and over and over again until I was finally convinced, then I’d be more willing to support them. (Not that they’re *my* objections, of course. I’m just playing ‘Devil’s Advocate’) But until that happens, I’m not going to support either side. If that means that the status quo stays in place – well, Those People have no one to blame but themselves, right?
TL;DR: Supporting the status quo isn’t a “side”, and anyone who tells you otherwise is probably trying to change the status quo!
Heh, I get your point; but it’s also why the public face of a movement matters, likewise how you promote its agenda. We know it’s something that GG never cared for — because it wanted to avoid being pinned down, to be in a position to deny any doxing/harassment/etc. done by its supporters — and perhaps never understood (to claim that Yiannopoulos hasn’t become the movement’s public face is rather disingenuous after a large part of the Twitter users started using his name and face after he was denied his checkmark).
But it doesn’t seem to be something which the Ghazi crowd (and a few people and outlets I’ve mentioned in another comment) don’t seem to realize either. If you’re shrill, abusive, and block people for disagreeing with you, you just end up (in this case) making the Gaters’ case for them. You know, if you want to persuade people that GamerGate doesn’t have a point, how about you stop acting like the very embodiment of GamerGate’s “SJW” stereotype? Or have “Ghazelles” become so convinced that they’ve vanquished GamerGate, that they’ve transcended this particular culture war, that they don’t even care about acting like in a typical courtroom show where the accused is found innocent just for his lawyer to discover that his client had indeed done it?
Politically, I’m on the conservative side, but with no comparison to what passes for either American or Canadian conservatism nowadays, so I end up voting left. Never would I vote for the morass that calls itself liberal, either lowercase- or capital-L. But because of my moral positions, I’d never fit with Gaters, who want absolute free speech just to abuse it, and demand creative expression just to throw their weight behind petitions supporting importing games with pixels shaped as 13-year-old girls in bikinis. The kind of position, for that matter, that Yiannopoulos used to have, or pretended to have, before GamerGate.
I never believed in absolute free speech, because that opens the floodgates for truly vile stuff. But I also believe that only the government has the legitimacy to impose limits to free speech. Not the power of money, not any religion, and not an unaccountable shrieking mob that spams Twitter with “kill yourself”. It’s not my fault if the US Government has been reduced to just that: the power of money, Bible thumpers, and a shrieking mob — plus a thoroughly partisan Supreme Court.
“Kill yourself”, indeed, a key phrase of the state of public discourse. It’s the new death threat, which those who make it think is more acceptable because “hey, his fault if he takes it seriously” — even if there have been cases where people did take it seriously. Worse, this “kill yourself” tends to come with a moral obligation for the recipient attached, something which is impossible for a regular death threat. Needless to say, it proliferates on Twitter. “Free speech now! Kill yourself! Free speech now! Kill yourself!” Now, that’s a basis on which to build a conversation.
Not to mention the other tendency. “I’ve blocked the world except the people who reflect what I think in every way (and to be excised should they stop doing so.” The state of contemporary public discourse — and not just online — is a Venn diagram in which the circles don’t even intersect. And all you have to fall back on, in lieu of a conversation, isn’t even some kind of negotiated agreement of fortune between disparate groups with some shared elements — instead, it’s a blunt, ugly situation that has made the fortunes of the likes of Nate Silver: the Power of Demographic. Who’s got the biggest group.
And wake up Ghazbags: even though GG might be half-dead, the biggest group isn’t people who are in perfect agreement with you. Surely Trumpism would indicate something? But no, just go back to shrieking, snarking, upvoting people who agree with you, ban everyone who doesn’t, then roll up in front of the TV watching whoever’s the new Jon Stewart nowadays, basking in your self-satisfied confidence that everything will turn out just as you want it to be. It will, won’t it? After all, you’re on The Right Side of History, are you? Are you? Are you indeed, you smug sanctimonious pricks?
Have you ever considered the fact that there is a world outside the internet?
Who’s homeless for saying something racist? Jeremy Clarkson says racist things regularly and his punishment is that his 7-figure salary comes from Amazon and the Sunday Times instead of from the BBC. Everyone who threw their support behind gamergate has basically had their star rise. Some people are able to make whole careers out of taking on the dread SJWs. If the “Authoritarian Left” had the power you attribute to it, you think they’d do something more than whine on social media just enough to have their concerns and noticed and promptly dismissed by everyone in authority.
What kind of insane world do you live in that “The Authoritarian Left ” is as dangerous as the right? What do you think the stakes are in this fight? Do you think this is all some parlor game for emotional validation?
While you were pounding out screed after screed about web forums. The far right in Hungary was rewriting their constitution to turn it into an effective one party state. In France, the party of Nazi-collaborators regularly leads in the polls. In Germany anti-immigrant groups are using the Cologne disaster as a clarion call to start deporting people back to certain death in Syria. All over central Europe mosques are getting firebombed. And that’s just civilized ol’ Europe. In America, the leading candidate for the Republican party is winning because, not despite, his plan to implement a large scale ethnic cleansing policy.
And that’s just the extreme right. That’s excluding the nice libertarian center-right that’s just as hell bent on sending the developed world to hell in a handbasket on the twin rails of extreme income inequality and global climate disaster.
Oh, but the left is just as bad because some PR rep lost her job for making an AIDS joke on Twitter 3 years ago. How bad a case of tunnel vision do you have to have to think both sides are equally bad? How morally bankrupt do you have to be think false accusations of racism represent a more urgent problem than racism in a country where children get murdered in front of their families because their skin color makes them suspicious, and the murderers don’t even get indicted let alone get punished? What kind of person are you? I’m serious; I read what you type, and I can’t imagine the type of person who would type it.
“Mediocrity Of Color”
Its the other way around. Mediocrity of white, because white is “relatable to the target audience”.
Protesters are not calling on bad actors to be given awards over better white actors sacrificed on the shrine of diversity. It is the other way around, it is a call for the industry to stop rewarding white mediocrity simple because that is who the industry is set up to reward.
A day doesn’t go by without another actor, director, producer, screen writer, camera man etc etc coming out with an behind the scenes view about how the industry is set up to reward and promote white males at the expense of all others.
Screen writers talk about how they have to make their lead a white straight man to be “relatable” to the audience and if they don’t their script is worth less or won’t sell. Even if it is really good.
Producers talk about how they get pressure from finances to make the story or characters more “relatable” to white people, changing the story in ways that don’t even make sense (and thus making them poor stories)
Women actors and black actors talk about how they get paid significantly less than white male actors, which has the knock of affect of restricting the roles that these actors can do as pet projects where they reduce their salary, as plenty of big star male actors do because they make the money up in other big budget movies where they get paid millions.
The entire industry is set up to reward mediocre white performance with money and praise by holding back actual talent that is seen as “unrelatable”. And the Oscars are simply a visible end result of that. Those protesting want to change that system but more than anything simply want to highlight that system and how bad it is.
can’t reply where i want to because there are thread limits so here it goes
The main arguments against gay marriage pushed by the right for example are largely nonsensical. I don’t mean wrong. I mean not logical consistent even based on their own premises. How does mainstream press represent seriously? One can argue in support of them, and say they are supported by 40% of Americans. But that doesn’t make them legitimate, that just makes them popular. Any first year journalism student would immediately call the person the inconsistencies.
1. i quoted the public editor of the new york times making this argument. you’re going to have to go against his word.
> Cumulatively, though, they would make a very effective ad campaign for the gay marriage cause. You wouldn’t even need the articles: run the headlines over the invariably sunny pictures of invariably happy people that ran with most of these pieces, and you’d have the makings of a life insurance commercial.
>This implicit advocacy is underscored by what hasn’t appeared. Apart from one excursion into the legal ramifications of custody battles (”Split Gay Couples Face Custody Hurdles,” by Adam Liptak and Pam Belluck, March 24), potentially nettlesome effects of gay marriage have been virtually absent from The Times since the issue exploded last winter.
stuff like this avoids your trap argument (hint “the problem is my enemies don’t make arguments i need to seriously consider” is never an argument you’re right on) about the lack of serious conservatives who disagree. Cheerleading one ideology and going out of your way for sympathetic stories and ignoring more complex ones that question the narrative are the sort of problems one doesn’t have to even disagree with an idea to find problematic.
*How do you define “legitimate” disagreement though?
is also the exact problem i’m pointing out. You’re saying “my opponents do not have legitimate realms to disagree.” That’s admitting how serious the prejudice is (prejudice isn’t always wrong) so at least we can avoid that.
This claim means cultural criticism by your definition will pretty much always advance left wing ideological goals since you don’t seem to suggest plausible alternatives other than “all smart right wing people no longer exist” or something very close to that.
That piece on the NYT is from over ten years ago. But you are missing my point. I’m not arguing that the media should not show balance. I’m arguing that the “other side” of the argument put forwards points and argument that are utter nonsense.
You are suggesting that these media outlets air these opposition arguments without any sort of filter as to whether they are nonsense or not just because they are coming from the other side. As the Irish comedian Dara O’Brien joked in standup (on youtube) you don’t run a piece on NASA launching a new satellite and then cut to Bill who explains this will never work because the sky is a carpet made by God, all for the sake of “balance”.
Its not an argument that the NASA program will work but if Bill the Carpet Guy is representing the moderate right wing voices of America you have a big problem in terms of how to show balance. If you got out and try and find someone who is a little less nuts than Bill and you just find lots and lots and lots of Bills all telling you that is their position, well you are stuck.
“This claim means cultural criticism by your definition will pretty much always advance left wing ideological goals since you don’t seem to suggest plausible alternatives other than “all smart right wing people no longer exist” or something very close to that.”
That is not my definition. Who are the smart right wing people? Trump wants to ban all Muslims from the country. Cruz announced his campaign at a school that teaches the world is 6000 years old. And these are the front runners for the Republican ticket.
You can’t complain that no one is listening seriously to the right wing when the right wing itself has allowed itself to become populated by populists and lunatics.
What’s up with gamergate folks talking up ‘ghazi’ like it’s terrifying boogieman? By any metric like active users, subscribed, and highest voted posts, it’s more than an order of magnitude smaller than the gamergate reddits. Compared to stuff like TiA it’s an even tinier fraction.
But people constantly talk about that subreddit in fearsome and powerful terms then when I check it, it’s like the same 50 people venting about the thousands of gamergate people mobbing someone.
Ghazi was never particularly big, and its declined as interest in GG (particularly KIA) has declined. There are other spheres on the net for activist gaming discussions that are really good. Ghazi was always just for mockery. And yeah, it’s got maybe 50-100 of the same people posting.
“Gamergate folks”?
If you’re talking about me (as it seems to be in response to my post), you don’t have a clue.
Ghazi, I will add, is exactly the kind of place that ends up making GG’s case about “SJWs” for it, which is a feat only a few select shrill writers and venues on the liberal left (that is to say, nothing close to anything truly on the left) manage to do, like Jessica Valenti and most of Salon. You don’t do that kind of arrogant bragging interspersed with hortatory shrieks when you’re losing — and yes, you’re losing when a guy like Trump could become president of the US. And all you’re doing is inadvertently convincing people to go with Trump just to spite you.
Not at all saying you should censor yourself here. But what you’re doing is pretty much playing Russian roulette on a full magazine. It might be fun, but it doesn’t last long.
@Vetarnias Thank you for a post that makes me want to shut-up and listen!
“And while DOA isn’t coming to America, it’s not because of legal reasons, but because its projected sales don’t justify the expense.”
You reference this as a fact, but the truth of the matter is that Koei Tecmo localizes games which sell worse than any DOA spin-off ever would (Arslan, Nobunaga, etc.).
Is it really so difficult to realize and accept that the most likely reason DOA Xtreme 3 isn’t being localized is all the bad press Koei Tecmo would receive in the predominantly left and prude us-based video games-press, that employs more feminists than actual journalists? And that is something no publisher can afford if it wants to stay in business and continue to sell games. You’re right, that’s not censorship, it’s coerced self-censorship which is almost worst.
“most of us simply want to see the state of the art expand to include more diverse games with less problematic content.”
While everyone could live with or, in your case, be happy with additional diverse games with “less problemativ content” (highly subjective) the problem stems from the fact that the criticism of people like you and Anita is almost always absolute. It’s not like you want additional safe-space games, you want all games which could be considered to be remotely sexist, racist or anything else you feel offended by, gone or changed. So much for free speech and diversity.
It’s a simple train of thought: If you are right, why should any media that doesn’t conform with your pov be allowed to exist and not adhere your rules?
“bad press Koei Tecmo would receive in the predominantly left and prude us-based video games-press, that employs more feminists than actual journalists? And that is something no publisher can afford if it wants to stay in business and continue to sell games”
Do you actually have a logic sequence of how that would actually work? Feminists complain about the game, something something Tecmo is out of business.
It seems to be just nonsense scaremongering to justifying attacking socially aware reviews of these games.
Probablt the same way journalists went after platinum and kojima. They “criticize” the game, position their critique as the only moral way to see the issue, and the next thing you know, a flood of articles about how this game is sexist, evil, hateful, blah blah and the developers are misogynists teenagers, blah blah blah.
It’s not a question of “will it happen.” It’s now more a question of how long will the dogpile last. Months, as was the case with Metal Gear Solid.
“Probablt the same way journalists went after platinum and kojima. ”
Which didn’t result in any publishers or developers going out of business.
“It’s not a question of “will it happen.” It’s now more a question of how long will the dogpile last. Months, as was the case with Metal Gear Solid.”
Metal Gear Solid V grossed $180m on release. How exactly is that feminists driving a company bankrupt.
The thing you are scaremongering will happen across the whole industry hasn’t even happened in the 2 examples you hand picked.
You just need a reason to make it sound like you are justified in attacking social criticism of games. You could at least pick a slightly more plausible reason.
Polygon’s Metal Gear Solid review: 9.0.
Brianna Wu talks about how awesome FemSnake is.
In short, you’re pretty much imagining both the level of SJW vitriol, as well as the impact of what was said.
Remember, they’re the same kind of people who wanted Carolyn Petit fired because she dared to mention misogyny in her review of Grand Theft Auto V. To which she’d given 9.0 anyway.
if doa doesnt come because of the bad bogeySWs.. thats a rather sad lie and its know thats a lie for people who ..well do a bit of research.. like looking on the official FB site…(which denounced the second statement btw.. that in november)
why did they reported that doa wont come to the west IN AUGUST last year? Two month before that imagined hullabaloo that this one facebook-speaker and playasia conjured up to get the attention of the easily leadable rabid trve gamer that reflexively buys shit to spite the one they perceive as the enemy while regurgitating proven lies..
here the reports in august who said that its very unlikely to come (but when people nag enough then maybe..)
here is an article on FIST august 15 which cites the oficcial FB page on august.. and I cite
“We announced DOAX3 (Working Title) today, but it will be made exclusively for Japan and Asian market.”
soooo.. no bogeywarrior.. the restriction was know AT the START of the development… but thats less attractive for the regressive right or whatever
http://gematsu.com/2015/08/dead-alive-xtreme-3-development
http://www.cinemablend.com/games/Dead-or-Alive-Xtreme-3-Probably-Won-t-Getting-Western-Fans-Excited-Anytime-Soon-75657.html
after that for like 1,2 months nothing happened.. until someone repeated the info and added a bit of a spin.. instead of costly localisation (there is nnot only english what people forget.. they would have to add french, spanish, italian, german, maybe even greek and turkish translations, maybe even synchros.. Which is costly for a game that sold like week old stinky fish..
So only making an english translation and no further localisation but releasing it without region lock means that people worldwide can simply download the game (but no dlcs).. which would be bad for importing shops like playA.. who then pulled the oppression card (because people being critical of games is now verboten… which is like so much irony it hurts)
so.. yeah. lot of screaming over nothing. but profit for playasia and even koei who now have more attention so more people will learn that they can just download the game.. like known in august
I think this is well-intentioned but misguided. The mindset of people who believe that critics are engaging in censorship aren’t mistaken about what censorship means (any more than most people); they genuinely believe that critics are colluding and co-ordinating to censor debate they don’t like. This is because they have all ‘bought in’ to something that is patently and obviously not true, and because it’s obviously not true, they can’t have been persuaded by the arguments. No, they must be getting something out of it. They are not going to be persuaded by someone who’s obviously up to something that they are not in fact up to something.
There’s a terrifyingly poisonous idea buried at the heart of this worldview: anyone who disagrees with me is not just wrong, but not quite human.
or just that there is systematic bias/discrimination. Is that actually such an insane view?
http://www.nytimes.com/2004/07/25/opinion/the-public-editor-is-the-new-york-times-a-liberal-newspaper.html
Only if you cherry pick the sites. “Polygon and Kotaku are proof that the games media has a liberal bias!” Which ignores that Gamespot & IGN don’t tend to have a liberal slant, or that Nichegamer, Techraptor, and the Escapist all work to cover the other side.
The fact that the other side doesn’t have great readership might give a good clue as to the relative approval of that point of view.
is it?
every right winger’s favorite socialist had a neat post a few months ago
http://fredrikdeboer.com/2015/09/07/whats-happening-and-why-and-why-does-it-matter/
> relative approval of that point of view.
of who? That’s sort of my point. How many mainstream media outlets were writing from anything other than a pretty strongly pro-choice and pro gay marriage slant since say 2008? That showed certain groups viewed those issues as settled in their favor with no real room for legitimate disagreement but those groups are hardly representative of all of america.
*Only if you cherry pick the sites. “Polygon and Kotaku are proof that the games media has a liberal bias!” Which ignores that Gamespot & IGN don’t tend to have a liberal slant,
how does this disprove stuff? Based on your own argument in the other post this is just an argument for “mainstream” outlets, the big ones with good amounts of startup capital and/or legacy, range from liberal to ignoring. That does shape responses. If your game gets engaged with in cultural criticism terms it comes into a onslaught of criticism from a certain specific progressive orthodoxy (see link at top). Where are the views of an armond white (or a non trollish armond white if you think of him as a troll)?
your argument seems to split the world into “progressive cultural politics” and those who ignore cultural criticism and that doesn’t rule out systematic bias. Id also note that systematic bias doesn’t even have to mean “makes more money”. if you like the witcher 3 criticism by polygon it is valid regardless of if there is a major audience for it.
“no real room for legitimate disagreement but those groups are hardly representative of all of america.”
How do you define “legitimate” disagreement though?
The main arguments against gay marriage pushed by the right for example are largely nonsensical. I don’t mean wrong. I mean not logical consistent even based on their own premises. How does mainstream press represent seriously? One can argue in support of them, and say they are supported by 40% of Americans. But that doesn’t make them legitimate, that just makes them popular. Any first year journalism student would immediately call the person the inconsistencies.
There might be serious arguments against gay marriage that we are all missing, but you won’t find them by listening to the right debate the issue.
News has always had a responsibility to represent legitimate position but an position doesn’t become legitimate simply because it is populist.
This is one of the great tragedies of modern western politics, the serious right has almost disappeared. There used to be serious people making serious arguments about conservative and right leaning policies. Those people have been replaced by the Trumps and Cruzs of the world who are making ridiculous arguments to appeal to “low information” voters (ie people who just want to be told populist things). You should see what the serious right and serious centrists in Europe think when they look at someone like Trump. The Economist isn’t hailing him as the saviour of the American dream, lets just put it like that.
I’m left wing but I also believe in a strong serious right wing to offer cheques and balances to the left wing losing the run of themselves. But that serious alternative has disappeared. Blaming the press for this for being too liberal is utterly missing the wood for the trees. Of course they will seem too liberal when the right is only putting forward clowns to represent them.
*One of the most frequent and annoying themes of the alt-right/gamergate brigade is to suggest that we want to end problematic content
OTOH there is a really simple way in which both groups agree. “GG” is really at its core about status games and people make less low status games and more high status games. We make very few fascist films unlike interwar Italy because its problematic content makes it very low status unlike the general ideas behind the prestige films that get made. Hopefully the fascist example makes it clear i’m going for the ideas behind this not a cheap and easy attempt to win via framing
* They are saying that they wished there were more games that were different.
another way of saying this is just “I want the next game to be Spec OPS the line 2 instead of Homefront?” Thus are they really wrong? you do want less problematic content because the “new diverse” stuff you want to make more of has an ideological straight jacket that crowds out other stuff. no one is taking away COD or GTA but “super popular problematic content” isn’t the only space for content you disagree with ideologically. Shakespeare’s Richard II isn’t particularly popular and is rightly considered as fairly reactionary in its politics. Your argument just ignores the potential of such a thing existing.
*****************
* ” No one is obligated”
A lot of your “rebutals” just ignores the real strong claim: systematic discrimination on the part of cultural critics and criticism on what views are allowed to be aired and aggressively denying a platform to dissenting voices. No one is required to host you sure but there is a difference between engaging and rejecting arguments and ignoring the existence of counter arguments and preventing mainstream people from seeing those arguments. If this argument were to speak bluntly and say “Free Speech doesn’t mean I can’t systematically discriminate against you and your voice” it would be seen as highly problematic and it is. The problem doesn’t change if the victim becomes a trump supporter instead of an approved minority group part of the coalition of the ascendant.
*************
I’ve been a bit insulted by your comment on reddit first and here later that the adult position is your left wing cultural politics and those who disagree just need to grow up. Well not really insulted so much as I don’t think its a good argument and I expect better from an interesting thinker like yourself. Hopefully I’m misreading you
Because the cultural bolsheviks are being smarter.
At the end of the “1984” novel, the protagonist is first brought to a state of total breakdown in order to make him self-shame for his actions, to prevent him dying as a martyr, that would have been the consequence if he were just killed.
That is the new brand of “post-censorship” introduced by authoritarians. No, not creating an authority body who officially approves or rejects the product or the idea, but shaming its creator into belief that the work is unethical, “problematic”, “oppresive”. Nihilist GamerGaters do it by simply bullying, that is obviously heinous, but the way the authoritarian left does it is worst, because its hypocritical and shrouded in an aura of social justice legitimacy.
I think its time for creatives to flood spaces with highly problematic, maybe even borderline illegal content, in order to create a climate where authoritarian left crusaders can’t even approach. The solution to the culture war, ate least for me, its not argumentative or dialectic but creative, because even the cherished spaces of the social justice crusaders are forced to appreciate problematic content if crafted carefully (Kotaku, Polygon, etc articles about Rapelay, HuniePop, Yandere Simulator, GTA’s rape mod, Skyrim and other nude mods).
The cultural war in gaming probably won’t be won at the social networks and comment sections but at the code editors, 3D modelling applications and game engines.
I can pretty much tell when someone is a non-serious actor in the debate: it’s when they use phrases like ‘cultural bolsheviks’ to describe benign game criticism that they happen to disagree with. It speaks to myopia, lack of proportionalism, and INCREDIBLY thin skin.
Because you’re offended that some people say ‘it sure would be nice if game creators put some more thought into the parts of the game that aren’t core to their artistic vision).
And you know what? Artists are free to ignore cultural critics. Artists DO IT ALL THE TIME. Some of them succeed. Some of them fail. That’s cool too.
As for flooding the market with problematic content, I don’t like it because the wrong game can actually start getting the Jack Thompsons of the right traction. Custer’s Revenge and Night Trap were huge stumbling blocks to the industry when they came out, that prevented the genre from getting to mass market acceptance sooner than they should have.
But more to the point, I don’t think that they’re going to be terribly successful beyond short-term flash-in-the-pans. At any rate, there are REAMS of ‘problematic’ games out there if you know where to look RIGHT NOW. They don’t get coverage from pretty much any gaming press because, frankly, most of them don’t deserve it any more than “Cherry Anal Sluts VI” deserves attention from Roger Ebert.
You seem to think that problematic games don’t exist. You’re wrong. There are plenty out there, and they shouldn’t go away. However, game makers can at least learn to make those decisions cognitively as opposed to stumble into potential issues.
Criticism in my view is describing from a political and social standpoint the cultural relevance of a piece. I’m not offended at all by that. I don’t expect to silence every voice that criticizes what I like or what I create. Criticism done right broadens visions, enriches the audience.
However the alarming trend I see nowadays is to attack the person, not the work, to bring down the dialog to the point of gossip (and harassment). Specially when the creator affected has or had relationship with the social justice cliques, any disagreement with the mainstream SJ current is often interpreted as treacherous, and the author becomes the target of an internet lynching mob. Remember the case of the Steven Universe fan who got driven to suicide attempt for the interpretation of his drawings from a bunch of SJ zealots.
And yes, this is also valid for the GamerGate nihilists who act this way, the ideological zealots, the crusaders, the feminist-allergics of /pol/.
Those lynching mobs fall outside of what I can consider valid criticism. You can call a work misogynistic, fascist, etc., but in a climate of cultural war, how much responsible will you be if a bunch of your fanpeople dox me, or try to get me fired from work, etc.?
You are talking about games “problematic for the sole sake of being problematic”. Yes, there are lots. But that is not the idea. To create innovative gameplay who emphasizes problematic content. Enticing games who transgress the unwritten rules. And its not just matter of “add sex and violence”. As I said previously in other posts, a game like Sims but based of the economics of sex and affection would have zero or minimal nudity and/or violence (Lovemaking could be 2 game characters just getting together covered by a big pulsating heart), while being a tremendous shock to the current standpoint on gender theory if done right.
I’m not referring to the pulp pornography of games (Not that I have really something against it, but you seem to be talking about it). I’m talking about the Nabokovs and Bukowskis of future alternative gamedev.
“nd by extension, critics have just as much – if not more!- freedom to criticize art. If you conclude that the primary goal of free speech is to protect political ideas, it becomes clear that art criticism is exactly the sort of speech that the First Amendment was meant to protect. Does HuniePop have a political message worth protecting? The Supreme Court would probably blush as they played it before saying ‘probably not but maybe….’ — but that ‘maybe’ is good enough to warrant protection. However, Anita’s criticisms of games like HuniePop are DEFINITELY criticisms about the cultural status quo. One of the tenets of free speech is that the answer to bad speech is more speech. That’s all cultural criticism is. ”
I want to try again to clarify my thoughts. I think one reason people loath (or a class of people) Cultural criticism so much is they see no space between cultural criticism and advancing a political narrative of a strong/proud left wing cultural vision that really isn’t actually all that popular in total. I’d argue that a more diverse class of cultural critics would separate mutliple issues which currently bunch together and create analytic confusion. Sad Puppies and GG both have major “stop criticizing my games” components but as the Deboer article points out that’s not the only type of argument that grows restless at the current state of cultural criticism as a boring restatement of left wing platitudes and built in assumptions.
* ” We don’t force Christian stores to sell Satanic bibles, we don’t force Wal*Mart to bely their family friendly brand by selling porn.”
but on the flip side people still get very upset about these market forces. If the Rey toy exclusion made economic sense (it doesn’t they made a stupid mistake) people would still be angry at stores for not stocking the female protagonist and would have grounds to be angry even if many of them will not pay a lot of money to support the toy without a public outcry. One can legitimately dislike “the only type of cultural criticism i see is one by people who assume i’m a sexist horrible person” (i.e. why people got so angry over Alexander’s gamers are dead piece which took a pretty dim view of plushy hat wearers even if the real culprit is big buisness). I personally think there is a way to meld a much larger variety of voices into mainstream outlets without embracing a breitbartian culture war vision which has limited appeal outside of the truley alienated alt right.
There are certainly people who want to write from that point of view. Other than those who write caustic crap for Breitbart, though, not many have gotten much traction that translates into reliable output that can earn eyeballs. It would seem that the left-wing cultural vision is much more popular than the right-wing vision, if you look at it that way.
At any rate, describing ‘we’d like games to be less sexist and/or racist’ as strongly left-wing is… not the case. Most of the american middle class would prefer to see us be better off as a people. The progress of our media has tended towards better representation and less overt awfulness. Yes, the left is trying more aggressively to make that happen – and you’d expect that. But for example, the James Bond of today is a far cry from the James Bond of 50 years ago. And black roles today are light years away from the 60s.
Criticizing stores for what they sell, and manufacturers for what they make, is also protected speech! As a reminder, GamerGate attacked Target Australia when that private business decided to stop selling GTA. Similarly, parents who are proud geeks and want to pass that heritage of geekdom to their daughters know that demand has to go up for supply to come. And at any rate, most of the examples that I could cite in this regard include heroes and characters far more marginal than the excluded female heroes – Scarlett Johannson’s Black Widow comes to mind. And a huge part of establishing the fact that women do, in fact, have a place in the geek firmament involves including them in the narratives that young boys enjoy as well.
Here’s something that is telling: watching TV boosts the self esteem of children – if they are white boys. Critics (including myself) believe this is directly related to the representations of characters on TV. The decisions that content creators such as myself make do have tangible effects on the lives of people around us, and while we shouldn’t subvert our art for social justice, if a decision can bend in the direction of better representation without affecting the artistic message, why shouldn’t we do so?
To be fair, the people who were engaged in GamerGate from the beginning were deeply infested with sexist, horrible people doing sexist, horrible things, and Leigh Alexander (as well as myself and the gaming press in general) were right to condemn them as well as the people that offered them cover.
‘we’d like games to be less sexist and/or racist’
your argument seems a bit disingenuous since the whole argument is about what people mean when they attack the things as racist or sexist. The whole “not the color of their skin but content of their character” idea is a conception of equality with broad support, the idea that say games set in the middle ages are bad because one imagines Anglo-Saxon/Nordic figures instead of black people just isn’t. It may be right just as say quotas for movies or a rooney rule might be right but that doesn’t make it not a far left view that isn’t actually supported by people who think “racism is bad”. pretty much all broad value terms are politically contested. you seem here to pretend it isn’t the case. That’s why most people both profess anti racist beliefs and beliefs about gender equality while hating left wing cultural politics in “political correctness”. Do you think they are being incoherent in this?
and again its perfectly coherent to say “there isn’t a buisness model for good cultural criticism i strongly disagree with” but that doesn’t actually solve the problem of people’s perceptions
“Hatred was made and sold.”
It wouldn’t have been if Gamergate didn’t initiate a backlash against self appointed moral guardians who got it removed. Gabe Newel himself went in and circumvented the original removal.
“And while DOA isn’t coming to America, it’s not because of legal reasons, but because its projected sales don’t justify the expense.”
You know linking a Polygon article that doesn’t actually have a citation proving that it was financial interest (VGcharts suggests the opposite of what Polygon baselessly asserts). Esspecially when Koei Tecmo LITERALLY MAKES CLEAR that the reason for it not coming to the US is because it appear to cause offence. Financial incentive have fuck all to do with it.
“People like to rant that Anita ‘can’t be criticized’ in return.”
Anita is an untouchable by the very press that is supposed to be serving their audience. This is pretty apparent. Go to Neogaff and be critical of her. Not abusive, but critical. See how long before you get banned for Bad think.
“Free speech does not grant you a market.”
Just like you are not entitled to an audience…. *COUGH* SUNSET *COUGH*
Even if it has the “progressive message” that all the fart smellers decided.
“People who fight to shut down cultural critics are anti-free speech and against the growth of video games as a genre.”
People who fight to shut down critique of critics are just as anti-free speech. Ill make a clear and direct example. I dont want Anita to shut up. I want the industry to take her about as relevant as her opinions deserve. And would mean leaving her on the street corner next to the other ideologically pushing idiots outside comicon. Yes those people are on her level. Or rather she is on theirs.
I am going to end off on a Quote from Churchill
“We accept in the fullest sense of the word the settled and persistent will of the people. All this idea of a group of supermen and super-planners, such as we see before us, “playing the angel,” as the French call it, and making the masses of the people do what they think is good for them, without any check or correction, is a violation of democracy. Many forms of Government have been tried, and will be tried in this world of sin and woe. No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time; but there is the broad feeling in our country that the people should rule, continuously rule, and that public opinion, expressed by all constitutional means, should shape, guide, and control the actions of Ministers who are their servants and not their masters.”
The “Progressive” press is “playing the angel”. Deciding that it is their moral imperative to guide society. An authority given to them by divine right (see the comparison to the religious nuts outside comicon seems more and more valid) on the notion of them being morally superior due to their political orientation.
The problem is…. the second they started serving themselves rather than serving the public. They lost their worth and their relevance.
>It wouldn’t have been if Gamergate didn’t initiate a backlash against self appointed moral guardians who got it removed. Gabe Newel himself went in and circumvented the original removal.
There are other distribution platforms. Valve has the right to deny anything it wants from being sold on Steam. Sorry.
>Esspecially when Koei Tecmo LITERALLY MAKES CLEAR that the reason for it not coming to the US is because it appear to cause offence. Financial incentive have fuck all to do with it.
Except KT explicitly said that social issues weren’t the cause. Nobody was talking about DOAX3. Nobody cared about DOAX3. There was no boycott. Hint: The “nobody caring about DOAX3” bit was the important part.
The Anti-SJW crowd got duped into raging and buying a shitty game to spite nonexistent SJW critics. Again.
>Anita is an untouchable by the very press that is supposed to be serving their audience. This is pretty apparent. Go to Neogaff and be critical of her. Not abusive, but critical. See how long before you get banned for Bad think.
For one, not at all. There are threads on that spooky scary evil SJW hugbox GamerGhazi that are critical of her all the time. Damion himself has talked about the stuff he doesn’t like in her videos. People are fine with valid criticism. A lot of the criticism, however, is NOT valid and pretty much just betrays that the people making it hate women with opinions that make them feel like they’re doing something wrong.
For another, GG has made it exceptionally difficult to criticize her at all in public, because then you get held up as agreeing with the rest of the shitheads who’ve never even watched her videos, just read Thunderfoot’s clumsy, idiotic “takedown.”
>I want the industry to take her about as relevant as her opinions deserve.
Here’s the really sad part for you:
The industry, and the people who make the games you play, find her criticism and opinions valid and important.
She’s been praised by dev after dev, many of whom have been in the industry for years, many of whom have said that even her mild criticism has made them realize where they can be doing better. And it is exceptionally mild criticism, mind you.
Anita has improved the industry far more than GG could ever dream.
>The “Progressive” press is “playing the angel”. Deciding that it is their moral imperative to guide society. An authority given to them by divine right
Oh, bullshit. There’s no moral imperative, there’s “man, now that we’ve started paying attention to this, games and gaming culture are pretty exclusionary. Wouldn’t it be great if everyone could love games and feel as welcomed by games as much as we do?” And there are marginalized voices – women, LGBTQ, POC voices – speaking out about some of the things that make them feel alienated.
And despite the tiny, vocal minority, it’s doing pretty well. 🙂
I see the foundational premise of this argument as one that attempts to swap around art and the criticism of that art, in terms of their cultural importance. Perhaps it was just a poor choice of headline, but why is criticism ‘exactly’ what free speech was meant to protect? Criticism is among the huge category of things that humans can do to express themselves, which should all be protected under the ideal of ‘freedom of speech’ (or ‘freedom of expression’).
[Note: I’m careful to distinguish between ‘freedom of speech’ as an *ideal* shared by most Western cultures and the constitutional provision for free speech in America. I’ve noticed that a lot of Americans seem to think that freedom of speech comes from the 1st amendment, rather than vice versa. The 1st amendment was shaped around Enlightenment philosophy which recognised free speech to be an important cogwheel of society, and therefore prohibits government from interfering with it. It doesn’t *define* freedom of speech as ‘only things that are protected by the first amendment’]
As a species, some of the things we most desire the freedom to create are literature, music, movies and yes, games. This truth is culturally universal. It’s why the thought of book-burning carries such shocking emotional weight to many people. It’s why people ascend to such acrobatic heights of cognitive dissonance when they seek to avoid appearing in favour of censorship, when in fact they often do favour censorship as part of a vested interest that is misaligned with universal freedom of expression.
Now, art can itself contain criticism. It can attempt to skewer the social values of its time. It can also be encoded with advocacy of the status quo. It can be neither or both. Freedom of expression protects its right to be any of these things and more. Freedom of expression in turn should protect the existence (albeit not the intellectual legitimacy) of criticism of the art. However, saying that ‘Criticism is Exactly What Freedom of Speech Was Meant to Protect’ feels like an insincere attempt at cultural equivalency. Criticism *is* what freedom of speech was meant to protect. If there is any instance I’m unaware of where somebody’s right to criticise is not being protected, then it should be. Criticism is *exactly* what freedom of speech was meant to protect, in the sense that great literature, fart noises and racist outbursts are also *exactly* what freedom of speech was meant to protect, but that doesn’t mean very much so I have to question why the word ‘exactly’ is being used here. Is it because the author believes criticism to be as culturally significant as the art it critiques? Or because he thinks critics are being censored more than artists? I’d take issue with either claim – that title just rubbed me up the wrong way and I wanted to thrash out the reasoning why.
Intentionally or otherwise, this piece is a mis-characterisation of the censorial climate that surrounds gaming nowadays. Critics are not being deprived of their avenues of criticism, to the very best of my knowledge. We live in an era where it is extremely easy to self-publish your opinions and have them receive exposure, this blog being one example. For lovers of censorship – which nobody should be -the most effective means of shutting down this kind of discourse would be to manufacture a social moral stigma, such that the author or his employers in the wider world would fear to be associated with these views, and therefore might self-censor in an attempt to remain physically and financially secure. However, the views expressed in this piece remain so deep within safe ideological territory, as propounded by larger games websites and the wider climate of games discussion, that such a scenario doesn’t sound very plausible. It’s also free content, so fine profit margins don’t dictate whether it will emerge in the first place or blink out of existence. Someone wishing ‘to suppress this work in whole or in part on an ideological basis’ – that’s a nice fundamental definition of censorship, btw, in case anyone was wondering – would probably have to detonate a low-atmosphere EMP blast to get their way.
It is far harder to express yourself through the medium of a game while remaining immune to the influences of social-political gatekeeping, than it is to self-publish internet opinion pieces. Most games exist within a framework of industry. They are subject to regulations and ratings boards. They require content delivery mechanisms of some kind, usually operated by third parties. They are produced by companies and individuals who have a concrete financial stake in their own PR, so much so that larger corporations might invest millions into appearing (rather than actually being) socially conscious and responsible. They require money and profit to make – which is not to say that every piece of human expression deserves to be profitable, but that ideologues who have the power to subvert market forces have a further weapon of censorship.
Any ideologically driven actor who has the influence to pull on any one of these levers is a potential censor. If they are willing to do so, they are against freedom of expression as an ideal.
So is this happening? Yes, unfortunately it’s happening everywhere. Cultural conservatism is still alive and well in Steven Universe, liberal regressivism convinces varied artists to remove designs on an anti-sexual basis, and everywhere cultural commentators label things they dislike as ‘problematic’. The word ‘problematic’ is like a half finished argument. What’s the problem? How is it caused? Is there harm? How much and where? If there’s one thing I respect Anita Sarkeesian for, it’s that she doesn’t leave the argument hanging. She flat out asserts that the games she criticises are harmful. That’s why most of her criticisms are so easily debunked as worthless. Many other commentators prefer to leave their weasel worded half-claims within the realms of unfalsifiability. Make no mistake, this is attempted censorship. If we didn’t know what the ‘problem’ in a ‘problematic’ game being alluded to was, then it wouldn’t be censorship… for example, if someone said ‘this movie is problematic to me in so many ways – it’s just so damn boring!’, then it would be laughable to call that an attempt to censor. However when accusations of real, measurable harm are imputed and then gain traction, no content creators are able to just stand by and say ‘don’t like it? don’t buy it’. By doing so they appear to shirk their social responsibility and put their entire reputation at stake, reputations which have real world worth and can be affected in real tangible ways. They expose themselves to the punishment that can arise from creating something deemed deleterious to society.
I play an obscure roguelike game which is well out of the public eye (and due to the following story, I don’t want to do much to change that). At one time, it featured an area where the female members of the antagonist race of monsters were being held captive and experimented upon for breeding purposes. Females of this monster race were being deformed to physical extremes in an effort to sustain troop numbers for a desperate war against the ‘good guys’. The enemy overseer of this area had killed himself out of despair at what he’d created – then been replaced by somebody who continued its operation dispassionately. The monster offspring were aggressive waves of fodder which attacked the player. The lore for the area was some of the most thoughtful and intelligently written in the game, which is already one of the best-written RPGs I’ve ever played. It called to mind various themes about the dehumanising potential of war and the impossibility of maintaining a virtuous stance when engaged in persecution. Besides some primitive tile art that nobody cared about, all of this was accomplished through descriptive text, some of which was calculatedly grotesque.
That area has now been censored out of existence. Concerns arose that the text was distasteful, perverted, then later these descriptions of the text escalated so that it became ‘misogynistic’. ‘Concerns’ arose that the game could be traumatising children and that if it wasn’t altered then perhaps the creator could have his game reported to his digital distributors. An attempt to change the tone of the area, making it more morally black and white, inadvertently made the non-monster races in the story more overtly comparable to nazis in WW2. The suggestion was then raised, possibly by a troll or bad faith arguer, that the creator was an anti-semite. Expressing regret and anxiety that people didn’t see him as a ‘good person’ any more, the creator cut the entire area from the game. When this event was discussed in other places, I’ve seen the issue dismissed to the tune of ‘who cares, I’ve never played it myself but people who like that kind of thing are probably rape fetishists and hentai fapping perverts’.
This is the gauntlet you face, the kind of thing you become associated with, if you dare to stand behind ‘problematic’ content. Attacks on the moral character of content creators have real world consequences and they should never be mistaken for anything other than what they are – attempts to suppress content on the basis of moral outrage… or, in another word, censorship.
Admittedly, with the word ‘problematic’ some commentators are referring to the problem of a lack of diversity within gaming. However no one game can be ‘problematic’ for this reason, because it’s not the responsibility of any single game to redress the balance. Furthermore, it needs to be established why lack of diversity is a problem in any given instance – for example, a story set in Ireland during the potato famine is probably going to consist of an all white cast and so lack of diversity should not be considered a problem, but on the other hand, a hypothetical fictitious depiction of GamerGate would certainly have a problem if it ignored the female and non-white participants in the movement. Of course, that would still not be a harmful, *moral* problem which reflected on the creators, since the truth of the matter would be easy to research, but one of questionable cultural merit and lack of insight.
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Finally, I wanted to take issue with the old ‘can’t shout fire in a crowded cinema’ canard that you used here. Of course you *can* shout fire in a crowded cinema! It would probably be the sensible thing to do if there was a fire, for instance. Absence of a fire does not instantly make the act illegal, either. Perhaps somebody mistakenly smelled burning or thought that they saw smoke and embers. Assuming they made it up, even then – in order to convict on the basis of law, you would have to prove to a jury that there was malicious criminal intent on the part of the person shouting ‘fire!’, something which is not easy.
Should people be injured in the crush to exit, then they could sue the fire-shouter for damages, rather than criminal charges. However, this is less to do with free speech than it is to do with people being held liable even for things they don’t intend, under principles of civil law.
It should also be noted that this ‘you can’t shout fire’ argument first arose from a court case where a socialist was being tried as a traitor and a spy, for disseminating harmless socialist pamphlets. His free expression was considered problematic. We should all be careful of the sentiments we choose to stand behind. More info here:
http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/11/its-time-to-stop-using-the-fire-in-a-crowded-theater-quote/264449/
In particular note the commentor who relates the story of serving on a jury, which could not prove malicious intent on the part of a man claiming there was a bomb in a hospital (a far more inflammatory statement than even claiming ‘fire’ in a cinema).
Looks like Kotaku In Action can’t like this piece enough, as they’ve made two threads about it. Unless of course they’re too lazy to read what others are posting. Right now, they’re saying:
-Damion’s an elitist snob.
-Also, he’s “a great example of how socjus fundamentalism does more harm to the industry than good”.
-And a shitty designer.
-That his opposing Thompson back in the day is meaningless because Anita is the new Thompson and he and his “SJW” cohorts like her.
The irony, which it’s necessary to repeat endless times, is that GamerGate is a greater enemy to artistic creation than Anita Sarkeesian will ever be.
I like to compare GamerGate to historical equivalents (let’s hope this doesn’t go to its head). The Dreyfus Affair. Disco Demolition Night. Recently I remembered how Gaters’ reception of Zoe Quinn’s “Depression Quest” was mostly that she dared to defraud the public with something that wasn’t a game. And that brought to mind the famous Whistler-Ruskin libel trial of 1878, where the painter James Whistler took the art critic John Ruskin to court for writing:
“For Mr Whistler’s own sake, no less than for the protection of the purchaser, Sir Coutts Lindsay ought not to have admitted works into the gallery in which the ill-educated conceit of the artist so nearly approached the aspect of wilful imposture. I have seen, and heard, much of cockney impudence before now; but never expected to hear a coxcomb ask two hundred guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public’s face.”
And Whistler won. Pyrrhic victory, indeed — a farthing in damages, without costs, pushing him to bankruptcy.
Both are still respected in their fields, which distinguishes the matter from Gaterism, which is a nihilistic force that will destroy everything it touches before destroying itself. But the comparison is there, in how something isn’t worth the price that is being asked of it, even though there is no fraud, because what you see is what you get. Compare this to Depression Quest, offered on a pay-what-you-want model, in response to which Gaters have been highly hypocritical — they who would submit everything to market forces to determine its worth, but whine to high heaven that anyone should want to contribute towards Quinn’s Patreon or crowdfund Feminist Frequency’s videos.
Ruskin’s point, however, was the exact opposite of Gaters, as it was this very idea that any work of art could be justified and validated by its commercial demand for it that horrified him. Which is something Gaters do relentlessly, except when it doesn’t serve them.
Fascinating. I’m sure a lot of people appreciate these updates on the latest GamerGate goings on.
Out of interest, how did GamerGate react to the Whistler case back in 1878? Were they as angry then as they were about Depression Quest, which had already existed for 18 months and, on Steam, was released several weeks prior to the first time the hashtag was even used?
I laughed out loud at this.
That being said, many of the primary actors in the misogynistic part of GamerGate were attacking Zoe and Anita long before the hashtag existed. Which, of course, you probably knew.
The argument over why AS and ZQ have drawn such ire is such well trodden ground that it’s a pit liable to break through the earth’s crust, better covered elsewhere already, including some parts of this comments section.
It also raises the question of the difficulty in distinguishing good faith arguers from third party trolls. I suspect that a lot of the mentality which drives the harassment of such women is not dissimilar to that which drives brats to swat twitch streamers – which, while disgusting and worthy of discussion in and of itself, drags this whole thing out of the realm of a censorship debate and ‘who should criticise the critics’.
@Interlocutor
“It also raises the question of the difficulty in distinguishing good faith arguers from third party trolls.”
Difficulty? Try impossibility. Anonymous Trolls don’t even have to be third parties; given the ease of Eggs, Bots, and Brigades. Once the stakes rose so incredibly high (circa 2010 and the various coordinated Sportsball Flamewars on Kotaku, Polygon, and Gamefaqs), many of these “good faith” type posters took to “throw-away” accounts–years before GG.
Ask Kotaku’s Fahey about how many “good faith” accounts were banned from Kotaku in 2010 for flaming Sports-fans discussing sports in a Sports-game comments section. Funnier yet was Kotaku’s own staff belittling one of its own for nominating a Sports-game for Game of the Year. This was exactly the time I stopped reading Kotaku; 2010.
Granted, the event alone (cultural ridicule (sports)) didn’t upset me. I’ve written for CNET, CNN, PC WORLD, and GAMEPRO, and we all had our share of crazy cultural ridicule behind closed doors… What upset me was Kotaku not keeping all of that behind closed doors in the name of brand strength. Quickly, entire articles/threads were deleted. And unless someone took screencaps, citations are lost forever. Again, this was four years before GG.
This was also a very different Kotaku in 2010, one celebrating “Japanese Nose Enhancers” and “Sexy Beach 3.”
“Out of interest, how did GamerGate react to the Whistler case back in 1878?”
Probably punching the portrait of Queen Victoria (a woman!) on the corner of an envelope addressed to the editor of the Times.
“Were they as angry then as they were about Depression Quest, which had already existed for 18 months and, on Steam, was released several weeks prior to the first time the hashtag was even used?”
I’ve seen so much vile stuff written about DQ by Gaters that was completely disproportionate to the cultural importance of the game (indeed, it’s GamerGate which made it important). Not to mention that it was over the alleged sex-for-coverage claims about its designer that the whole GG circus rolled into town.
If you want my opinion of it, I think it cheapened itself by attempting to be a game. (Though I wish someone would design the kind of game which opens doors just to slam them in the player’s face.) It would have been more effective as a novel — not even Choose Your Own Adventure. If CYOA is something you’d regard as a game, then DQ is a game, but it doesn’t matter if it is; you’d call it an interactive story and Gaters would still object to its existence.
P.S.: “(Though I wish someone would design the kind of game which opens doors just to slam them in the player’s face.)”
Shadowbane doesn’t count.