This... is thorough. It's just a tiny bit uplifting that a lot of these events feel like relics of an age that has passed. Most of that stuff hasn't really changed at all, though. Here's a small...
This... is thorough. It's just a tiny bit uplifting that a lot of these events feel like relics of an age that has passed. Most of that stuff hasn't really changed at all, though.
Here's a small quote I found interesting and worth expanding:
Heading into the 2010s, feminists were seen as boring killjoy outsiders to gaming who couldn’t possibly understand it, similar to your parents, or Jack Thompson.
I always thought there is a really unfortunate multiplier for this sort of bullshit that comes from decades of gamers having had to "protect" games from "non-gamers". The anti-shooter-games narrative was real around Columbine, Jack Thompson really had a crusade going against violent videogames, as some kind of easy scapegoat for problems nobody really understood. Back then, one of the best defenses was "lol, it's just silly videogames, we're not taking this seriously, it's just stupid fun!". Which was true. But it became a bit of a desperate/obsessive go-to excuse, a gamer mantra that collided with the rise of indie games and more serious video game criticism around 2010.
If you analyze a videogame from a feminist angle (which is done all the time for every other medium on earth, btw), you have to take videogames seriously. You have to talk about "serious" social issues and use real-world terminology. And suddenly "serious business" can no longer be that defensive, sarcastic joke thrown at any attempt to criticize videogames. I think that's about the time a lot of gamers collectively lost it, coupled with the right discovering social media as a weapon and recruiting gamers into us-or-them political warfare (I'm barely exaggerating here, Bannon literally mentioned gamergate as a tool to recruit people to the alt-right).
I think this "gamer vs non-gamer" narrative is what "Gamers are over" wanted to counter. The core of this isn't so much misogyny, that's just a symptom. The real problem is that gamers, through a spiral of insecurities and defensiveness, completely blocked themselves from the rest of the world. They couldn't handle games growing into the mainstream, games facing deeper criticism and having to share that space online with new people.
Really they can’t handle growing up and accepting that the frivolous pastimes of their childhood were, indeed, frivolous. They’re unhappy about this, but that’s way too abstract a feeling to...
Exemplary
They couldn't handle games growing into the mainstream, games facing deeper criticism and having to share that space online with new people.
Really they can’t handle growing up and accepting that the frivolous pastimes of their childhood were, indeed, frivolous. They’re unhappy about this, but that’s way too abstract a feeling to actually work through so they find convenient scapegoats for why this hobby that used to bring them such enjoyment feels so empty now.
You see this with a lot of games criticism where people hold up old writing as great and modern writing as crappy which honestly couldn’t be further from the truth. Blizzard’s lore is a perfect example. We used to love it, now people complain it’s campy and hokey. But the truth is, if you go back and take the nostalgia goggles off, it was always hokey and stilted.
The trouble with this argument is that it doesn't really connect back to why games themselves are supposedly frivolous or why many are "not art". I don't think many would disagree with your...
The trouble with this argument is that it doesn't really connect back to why games themselves are supposedly frivolous or why many are "not art". I don't think many would disagree with your statement about the "dilution of purpose" and why it happens, I think it's easy for most people who care about games to look at the state of the medium and see that there's an absurd amount of high-profile projects which are formulaic and safe, but it doesn't really satisfy the question at hand. "There's a lot of bad games because what sells does not line up with what's good," is a pretty agreeable thing to say, but it still seems like a big jump to go from that to "games are frivolous" or "most games are not art".
This does kinda naturally lead to a "what is art?" conversation which is almost always a dead end that's exhausting to get to and should probably be avoided, but I think to sidestep that a little it makes the most sense to consider art as a way we approach something rather than a property of the thing itself. There's a clear disconnect between people who want to approach games as they would any other kind of art and people who resist that, and it's probably more productive to look at how these groups operate rather than just explaining why there's a lot of bad games out there, yknow?
Where I don't agree with @NaraVara is that to my eyes it seems like these people desperately want to cling to games being frivolous. They want them to be just games that aren't worth taking seriously and as such aren't open to serious criticism, but there's an internal conflict there when they find something they do think has more value...something that's deeply meaningful to them. Some try to have it both ways and keep the "they're just games!" defense while also promoting the merits that they see as higher. Some realize that conflict and instead cut the gaming world in two halves, making a distinction between games which are true Arte and games that are just games.
Of course personally I'd say both angles they have are silly and that all the ways we can study any kind of art apply just as well to any game out there, but I have a really hard time with NaraVara's claim. It just doesn't line up with how these groups act.
Most popular media is frivolous. That’s why it’s popular. And very few games ever got past the basic, formulaic nature of pulpy media. The ones that do sell ver poorly. Frivolous doesn’t mean...
Most popular media is frivolous. That’s why it’s popular. And very few games ever got past the basic, formulaic nature of pulpy media. The ones that do sell ver poorly.
Frivolous doesn’t mean “bad” or “not art.” Most art is, also, pretty frivolous.
How does that definition not click for the vast majority of commercial art out there for you? Most of it is meant to be a fun diversion that occasionally dips it’s toes into emotional resonance or...
How does that definition not click for the vast majority of commercial art out there for you? Most of it is meant to be a fun diversion that occasionally dips it’s toes into emotional resonance or exploration of the human condition. But it’s not exactly “pushing the envelope.” And most of the stuff that does push the envelope invites a bunch of “my 3 year old could have done that!” or “I don’t get it. . . “ criticisms.
It’s fine to not be super serious and just be for fun. But there is a deeply seated insecurity in the gamer-sphere to pretend a lot of this “just for fun” popcorn-flick level entertainment be canonized while also shielding it from any kind of criticism that actual art invites. Which is very weird. It’s like people want the credibility of being “grown up” and “serious” without anything that actually comes with it.
Uh… There's a lot of legitimate criticism of Blizzard's lore. Warcraft 3 had epic lore behind it. Then they made World of Warcraft. They added a bunch of epic stuff, but they also added a bunch of...
Blizzard’s lore is a perfect example. We used to love it, now people complain it’s campy and hokey. But the truth is, if you go back and take the nostalgia goggles off, it was always hokey and stilted.
Uh…
There's a lot of legitimate criticism of Blizzard's lore. Warcraft 3 had epic lore behind it. Then they made World of Warcraft. They added a bunch of epic stuff, but they also added a bunch of utter nonsense. Right now, if you want to make an epic story out of Warcraft, you have to be ridiculously revisionist about it.
I went to see the Warcraft movie a while back. It was great; legitimately very enjoyable for a Warcraft fan. It also reminded me how bonkers awful WoW's lore is, and how it still has kernels of great.
The thing is, “lore” isn’t really an engaging story. And “epic” isn’t the same thing as good. When you actually look at the quality of writing, characterization, plotting, and dialogue that...
There's a lot of legitimate criticism of Blizzard's lore. Warcraft 3 had epic lore behind it. Then they made World of Warcraft. They added a bunch of epic stuff, but they also added a bunch of utter nonsense. Right now, if you want to make an epic story out of Warcraft, you have to be ridiculously revisionist about it.
The thing is, “lore” isn’t really an engaging story. And “epic” isn’t the same thing as good. When you actually look at the quality of writing, characterization, plotting, and dialogue that comprised the stories in Warcraft or Starcraft they were really bad. Dialogue was horribly stilted and almost all the characters are one-note tropes. The characters actions and even their personalities are meant to drive the plot points they want to hit rather than having plot develop from characters reacting and behaving according to believable motivations.
It’s all kind of poorly written in a way most people are cool with when they’re young because the “big picture” stuff is interesting. But as you become more sophisticated in your tastes and capacity for empathy as you get older you really start to see the seams show and recognize how shoddily written it was. But the baseline was really low back then, so people were happy to get what they got. Nowadays the quality of writing has gotten a lot better and Blizzard hasn’t been able to keep up nearly as well. Even BioWare, though they’ve kept up better, still have a lot of trouble in the “believable writing” department.
I'm sharing this one because I think it's an excellently written, impassioned look back at the last decade from one of the most maligned viewpoints, culturally. Not just in the video games—the...
I'm sharing this one because I think it's an excellently written, impassioned look back at the last decade from one of the most maligned viewpoints, culturally. Not just in the video games—the level of hostility thrown towards women and professional writers in video games, and especially women professional writers, catapulted it into decade-defining territory.
And yet I don't think it will be received any better than it would have been back in 2010. I remember being in the thick of all these events, on either side depending on the particular issue, but the only thing that really got me out of there wasn't that the discussion changed. It was that I learned more about what the actual issues are, and then moved on from video games being such a central hobby of mine as I got older and more focused on life in general.
Sometimes I wonder if general gaming forums and communities on the internet really are always going to be full of 12–30 year old males because their users rotate out as new ones come in. There's something about gaming forums that keeps people limited in their social worldviews and it's not until they go and find out what's really going on that they seem to break out of it.
Then again, it could just be because GamerGate set gaming communities back about 5 to 10 years with how insidious and all-consuming its misinformation tendrils spread.
[rant]I still see traces of them, like how "journalists" became the default term to refer to anyone involved in professional writing. Consider: GG was a coordinated campaign by Steve Bannon as practice, who infamously went on to de-fang the press through "fake news" accusations with Trump's presidential campaign just a year later. [/rant]
I left gaming circles online after Gamergate's social storm started up and showed no signs of stopping. I fought the tide for a little bit, but over time it became clear that it simply wasn't...
I left gaming circles online after Gamergate's social storm started up and showed no signs of stopping. I fought the tide for a little bit, but over time it became clear that it simply wasn't worth it for me to stick around in those communities. Seemingly everything was overrun with the most flagrant misogyny and gatekeeping.
Tildes is the first place in years where I feel like I can talk gaming with online strangers and not have to worry about hateful rhetoric coming out of the woodwork. Instead people just share what they're playing and what they think about it. It's refreshingly boring, which is not a criticism. In a social landscape whose real-estate is almost entirely toxic waste or dumpster fires, "boring" is wonderfully inviting and cozy.
One small upside to the absolutely awful state of affairs is the growth of tightly-knit little groups of decent people who don't want to deal with mainstream gaming culture. The outside world is...
One small upside to the absolutely awful state of affairs is the growth of tightly-knit little groups of decent people who don't want to deal with mainstream gaming culture. The outside world is so hellish that people who would previously deal with the (relatively) small amounts of bullshit in the past are now grouping up and making spaces which are genuinely pretty pleasant.
Tildes is one example of this, but I also think Discord is a great example. For all its problems, it encourages these close user-managed and selected groups which hadn't really been seen in gaming culture for a long time (and even then, it was mostly for the nerds who would actually hang out in vent or be regulars on game servers).
It's a nice trend to take comfort in while the rest of gaming is on fire.
This... is thorough. It's just a tiny bit uplifting that a lot of these events feel like relics of an age that has passed. Most of that stuff hasn't really changed at all, though.
Here's a small quote I found interesting and worth expanding:
I always thought there is a really unfortunate multiplier for this sort of bullshit that comes from decades of gamers having had to "protect" games from "non-gamers". The anti-shooter-games narrative was real around Columbine, Jack Thompson really had a crusade going against violent videogames, as some kind of easy scapegoat for problems nobody really understood. Back then, one of the best defenses was "lol, it's just silly videogames, we're not taking this seriously, it's just stupid fun!". Which was true. But it became a bit of a desperate/obsessive go-to excuse, a gamer mantra that collided with the rise of indie games and more serious video game criticism around 2010.
If you analyze a videogame from a feminist angle (which is done all the time for every other medium on earth, btw), you have to take videogames seriously. You have to talk about "serious" social issues and use real-world terminology. And suddenly "serious business" can no longer be that defensive, sarcastic joke thrown at any attempt to criticize videogames. I think that's about the time a lot of gamers collectively lost it, coupled with the right discovering social media as a weapon and recruiting gamers into us-or-them political warfare (I'm barely exaggerating here, Bannon literally mentioned gamergate as a tool to recruit people to the alt-right).
I think this "gamer vs non-gamer" narrative is what "Gamers are over" wanted to counter. The core of this isn't so much misogyny, that's just a symptom. The real problem is that gamers, through a spiral of insecurities and defensiveness, completely blocked themselves from the rest of the world. They couldn't handle games growing into the mainstream, games facing deeper criticism and having to share that space online with new people.
Really they can’t handle growing up and accepting that the frivolous pastimes of their childhood were, indeed, frivolous. They’re unhappy about this, but that’s way too abstract a feeling to actually work through so they find convenient scapegoats for why this hobby that used to bring them such enjoyment feels so empty now.
You see this with a lot of games criticism where people hold up old writing as great and modern writing as crappy which honestly couldn’t be further from the truth. Blizzard’s lore is a perfect example. We used to love it, now people complain it’s campy and hokey. But the truth is, if you go back and take the nostalgia goggles off, it was always hokey and stilted.
The trouble with this argument is that it doesn't really connect back to why games themselves are supposedly frivolous or why many are "not art". I don't think many would disagree with your statement about the "dilution of purpose" and why it happens, I think it's easy for most people who care about games to look at the state of the medium and see that there's an absurd amount of high-profile projects which are formulaic and safe, but it doesn't really satisfy the question at hand. "There's a lot of bad games because what sells does not line up with what's good," is a pretty agreeable thing to say, but it still seems like a big jump to go from that to "games are frivolous" or "most games are not art".
This does kinda naturally lead to a "what is art?" conversation which is almost always a dead end that's exhausting to get to and should probably be avoided, but I think to sidestep that a little it makes the most sense to consider art as a way we approach something rather than a property of the thing itself. There's a clear disconnect between people who want to approach games as they would any other kind of art and people who resist that, and it's probably more productive to look at how these groups operate rather than just explaining why there's a lot of bad games out there, yknow?
Where I don't agree with @NaraVara is that to my eyes it seems like these people desperately want to cling to games being frivolous. They want them to be just games that aren't worth taking seriously and as such aren't open to serious criticism, but there's an internal conflict there when they find something they do think has more value...something that's deeply meaningful to them. Some try to have it both ways and keep the "they're just games!" defense while also promoting the merits that they see as higher. Some realize that conflict and instead cut the gaming world in two halves, making a distinction between games which are true Arte and games that are just games.
Of course personally I'd say both angles they have are silly and that all the ways we can study any kind of art apply just as well to any game out there, but I have a really hard time with NaraVara's claim. It just doesn't line up with how these groups act.
Most popular media is frivolous. That’s why it’s popular. And very few games ever got past the basic, formulaic nature of pulpy media. The ones that do sell ver poorly.
Frivolous doesn’t mean “bad” or “not art.” Most art is, also, pretty frivolous.
How does that definition not click for the vast majority of commercial art out there for you? Most of it is meant to be a fun diversion that occasionally dips it’s toes into emotional resonance or exploration of the human condition. But it’s not exactly “pushing the envelope.” And most of the stuff that does push the envelope invites a bunch of “my 3 year old could have done that!” or “I don’t get it. . . “ criticisms.
It’s fine to not be super serious and just be for fun. But there is a deeply seated insecurity in the gamer-sphere to pretend a lot of this “just for fun” popcorn-flick level entertainment be canonized while also shielding it from any kind of criticism that actual art invites. Which is very weird. It’s like people want the credibility of being “grown up” and “serious” without anything that actually comes with it.
Uh…
There's a lot of legitimate criticism of Blizzard's lore. Warcraft 3 had epic lore behind it. Then they made World of Warcraft. They added a bunch of epic stuff, but they also added a bunch of utter nonsense. Right now, if you want to make an epic story out of Warcraft, you have to be ridiculously revisionist about it.
I went to see the Warcraft movie a while back. It was great; legitimately very enjoyable for a Warcraft fan. It also reminded me how bonkers awful WoW's lore is, and how it still has kernels of great.
The thing is, “lore” isn’t really an engaging story. And “epic” isn’t the same thing as good. When you actually look at the quality of writing, characterization, plotting, and dialogue that comprised the stories in Warcraft or Starcraft they were really bad. Dialogue was horribly stilted and almost all the characters are one-note tropes. The characters actions and even their personalities are meant to drive the plot points they want to hit rather than having plot develop from characters reacting and behaving according to believable motivations.
It’s all kind of poorly written in a way most people are cool with when they’re young because the “big picture” stuff is interesting. But as you become more sophisticated in your tastes and capacity for empathy as you get older you really start to see the seams show and recognize how shoddily written it was. But the baseline was really low back then, so people were happy to get what they got. Nowadays the quality of writing has gotten a lot better and Blizzard hasn’t been able to keep up nearly as well. Even BioWare, though they’ve kept up better, still have a lot of trouble in the “believable writing” department.
I'm sharing this one because I think it's an excellently written, impassioned look back at the last decade from one of the most maligned viewpoints, culturally. Not just in the video games—the level of hostility thrown towards women and professional writers in video games, and especially women professional writers, catapulted it into decade-defining territory.
And yet I don't think it will be received any better than it would have been back in 2010. I remember being in the thick of all these events, on either side depending on the particular issue, but the only thing that really got me out of there wasn't that the discussion changed. It was that I learned more about what the actual issues are, and then moved on from video games being such a central hobby of mine as I got older and more focused on life in general.
Sometimes I wonder if general gaming forums and communities on the internet really are always going to be full of 12–30 year old males because their users rotate out as new ones come in. There's something about gaming forums that keeps people limited in their social worldviews and it's not until they go and find out what's really going on that they seem to break out of it.
Then again, it could just be because GamerGate set gaming communities back about 5 to 10 years with how insidious and all-consuming its misinformation tendrils spread.
[rant]I still see traces of them, like how "journalists" became the default term to refer to anyone involved in professional writing. Consider: GG was a coordinated campaign by Steve Bannon as practice, who infamously went on to de-fang the press through "fake news" accusations with Trump's presidential campaign just a year later. [/rant]
I left gaming circles online after Gamergate's social storm started up and showed no signs of stopping. I fought the tide for a little bit, but over time it became clear that it simply wasn't worth it for me to stick around in those communities. Seemingly everything was overrun with the most flagrant misogyny and gatekeeping.
Tildes is the first place in years where I feel like I can talk gaming with online strangers and not have to worry about hateful rhetoric coming out of the woodwork. Instead people just share what they're playing and what they think about it. It's refreshingly boring, which is not a criticism. In a social landscape whose real-estate is almost entirely toxic waste or dumpster fires, "boring" is wonderfully inviting and cozy.
One small upside to the absolutely awful state of affairs is the growth of tightly-knit little groups of decent people who don't want to deal with mainstream gaming culture. The outside world is so hellish that people who would previously deal with the (relatively) small amounts of bullshit in the past are now grouping up and making spaces which are genuinely pretty pleasant.
Tildes is one example of this, but I also think Discord is a great example. For all its problems, it encourages these close user-managed and selected groups which hadn't really been seen in gaming culture for a long time (and even then, it was mostly for the nerds who would actually hang out in vent or be regulars on game servers).
It's a nice trend to take comfort in while the rest of gaming is on fire.
I guess I've fallen that far out of the loop because I hadn't heard about any of this, honestly.