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  1. kfwyre
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    This was a great read, and a lot of what she shares resonates with me. What I share below is mostly a rehash of an older comment I've made on the site, but I reshare it here because it's directly...

    This was a great read, and a lot of what she shares resonates with me. What I share below is mostly a rehash of an older comment I've made on the site, but I reshare it here because it's directly relevant:

    There was a period of time in which I was really interested in the burgeoning games criticism scene. I loved reading about ludonarrative dissonance in BioShock, and I eagerly devoured a book-length analysis of Spec Ops: The Line. The areas these kinds of writings were exploring felt untapped. We already had this kind of discourse for books and movies, but games were new and novel, and, consequently, so too was us pulling them apart. Roughly a decade ago large critical conversations about games started to spring up regularly, and they really picked up steam in the early 2010s.

    The game Dear Esther was one of the most significant instigators of these discussions. It features no choices or traditional gameplay to speak of. You simply walk through the environment and listen to the narration. People debated whether it was even a game in the first place. Many of the conversations about it would produce hard and fast rules such as "games must have a fail/win state" or "games must allow for meaningful player choice." Many gamers took a dislike to Dear Esther and others like it (e.g. Proteus) and created the "walking simulator" label as a mostly pejorative term.

    Possibly unsurprisingly, these conversations were not often thoughtful, measured ones about what makes a game but heated, angry discussions that felt incredibly gatekeepy to me. Here's a review of Dear Esther that captures a tone that was common for conversations of the time:

    Dear Esther is, of course, another one of those games which aren't actually games. I understand there's some controversy over this one point - all I gotta say is, fuck anyone who even considers seriously participating in such an argument. No, it isn't a game. It isn't a story. It isn't a concert. It's barely a picture, and a boring one at that. It's a waste of time, is what it is.

    Dear Esther and other games like it seemed to be small flashpoints in a gaming culture war that pitted artistic expression against interactive enjoyment. Opponents of games like Dear Esther saw them as pretentious, bloviating "experiences" chasing critical acclaim that was afforded to them unfairly. They felt they were the digital equivalent of "Oscar bait". To fans of games like Dear Esther, these were expanding the medium past the expectations of shallow fun and violence that they felt permeated and often defined the rest of the gaming landscape.

    These tensions never really got resolved so much as the two camps stopped talking to each other. I loved Dear Esther and spent a lot of time defending its status as a game. I then loved Gone Home and spent a lot of time defending not only its status as a game but its LGBT narrative as well. My efforts unfortunately seemed to amount to little more than spitting into the wind, however, as I was continually met by people who refused to think that I could actually enjoy the games on their own merits. Furthermore, they also refused the reality that I was and had been a gamer for a long time. Probably longer than most of them! Instead, my affinity for those games was treated as membership in an outsider group of progressives trying to destroy videogames by infecting them with gays, feminism, and storytelling.

    These roiling tensions were the foundation for Gamergate in 2014. The foundation of hostility against non-traditional games was no doubt influential in the explosion of hatred against Zoe Quinn given that her game, Depression Quest, checked all the boxes for things that many "core gamers" hated and had been speaking out against for years.

    This was the point at which I stopped caring about what other gamers thought of me or other games, and I stopped trying to lay claim to my right to enjoy games like Dear Esther. Furthermore, I stopped trying to even defend their right to exist. The discussion had been so poisoned that it was no longer fun to pull apart and tease out all the interesting nuances of why games worked the way they worked, and why some worked differently from others. The games in question had become proxies for larger ideas and standpoints, most of which I considered outright absurd at best.

    I am no longer particularly interested in games criticism, though in theory I should enjoy it. Part of it is because so much of it is salted earth at this point, but another part of it is because my gaming habits have shifted. I don't seek out novel or experimental games and instead prefer the creature comforts of known quantities. I'd rather decompress after work with a mindless experience that demands nothing of me than give something up to an experience that promises to make the exchange worthwhile.

    This says more about me than it does about games or criticism, and I definitely do think that better criticism is a way forward for the industry. I just don't know how effective it will be if even people like me, who are sympathetic to the cause and even potentially interested in its form, are a little burnt out on the idea. We probably have Gamergate to thank for setting back games discourse for years by turning discussion of even the most neutral, benign, and uncontroversial titles into explosive and fatiguing cultural wars. I can no longer muster up the same enthusiasm I once had for them, and in that way, the gamergate-keepers won. When the well is poisoned, I'll find somewhere else to drink and, after enjoying the new place long enough, why would I go back?

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