Consistently, in Marxian thought society is seen as something of a workshop. That is, the world is less an object to behold or contemplate than an artifice that has been created and then inhabited. The setting–with its machines, sawdust, and sweat–is the crucible of human experience.
Thomas Henricks, Play Reconsidered p.33
I only caught the tail end of the Indie Custom Cube tweets that were going around today, but I saw enough to hit the high notes. Later this evening I saw this defense of the Indie Custom Cube by one of the developers. The defense is constructed around the argument that critics of the Indie Custom Cube are ignorant of the basic mechanics of Magic: The Gathering, and therefore those criticisms cannot be taken seriously. The developer then goes on to address each major argument made against the Indie Custom Cube in detail, linking each argument up to Magic and explaining why the Custom Cube is apparently above reproach in the world of games. Luckily, I’ve played Magic on and off, sometimes very intensely, for about a decade. Hopefully I won’t be dismissed out of hand for not producing some sort of documentation.
I’m going to write some responses to the first two defenses, because I think the answers to these criticisms are the most deserving of response.
[note: I’m not going to go into the lines in the original post that equate to “people who call out sexism/racism are the REAL racist/sexists” because that argument is the most patently ridiculous one in the world.]
“Women in the ICC deck are given an extra qualifier: they are “female” developers, “female” artists, and “female companions” (in the case of the “Supportive Spouse”). The same cannot be said of men, who are identified by nationality or personality.”
The core of the defense here is that because there are so few few women who are developers, it is a design “feature” to make them a distinct “creature type” in the language of Magic. In Magic, the benefit of doing this is that it allows players to design specific synergistic decks of single creature types, like a deck made of goblins or elves or soldiers.
There are two problems with this: the first is the word “female,” a typological designation with an immense amount of baggage that carries the weight of 4chan nerds talking about “female gamers,” and which could and probably should be simply replaced with “woman.” However, that doesn’t address the imbalance in the “creature type” designation going on in the design of the Indie Custom Cube. As the designer says, the decision to avoid a “Male” “creature type” was because “it would affect the majority of the creature cards, which wouldn’t work very well.”
The designer is right to say that the number of men in and related to the video game industry is much higher than the number of men who work in the game industry. The designer’s claim is that implementing a “man” or “male” subtype would have made the set’s balance skewed because it would have made the possible combinations of those cards both more powerful and more plentiful.
This is a design failure on the part of the team behind ICC. It is absolutely possible to give all of those other cards a “man” designation while purposefully avoiding implementing cards that boosted or synergized with other “man” cards. There are hundreds of examples of Magic cards with creature types that have zero relationship to the other creatures in their release set, and the same could have been done in this case.
The politics of the design choices that they did make is that women appear to be a small “tribe” (in the language of Magic) that can only synergize with one another and who are ultimately useless outside of those collaborative strategies. We know that this isn’t the case in the real world, and the way the ICC positions it is particularly problematic.
Does that mean that I and the critics who have informed this criticism are calling the designers sexist? Not necessarily. Rather, they have created a game that has sexist politics embedded in its very design.
“Soulja Boy is included as an “unstable” black card.”
The defense of this card is twofold:
1. “Black” is a mana type in MTG. The cards that use black mana are destructive cards that often kill creatures.
2. The card was designed to counter the Jonathan Blow “planeswalker” card because of a very popular video of Soulja Boy playing and not “getting” the game.
First, there is an unfortunate correlation between racial blackness and the color black. There is also an unfortunate correlation between Soulja Boy’s blackness and the fact that the card exists to “kill” other cards. The design intent behind this may not be racist, but the combination of the two is certainly a massive failure on the part of the design team to not catch and at least think about those mechanics and colors in relation to a man who is part of a criminalized and oppressed group of people who are often demonized as uncontrollable and violent (making violence against them justified).
Second, the video referenced by the designer plays into racist tropes about “getting” the “art” of Braid. When that video is passed around in games culture, particularly in forums culture, it is not “look at this person not understanding Braid,” but rather, “look at this young black man who doesn’t understand this art.” At the least, this is racially coded; at the worst, it is straight-up racist. I have personally witness both ways of passing the video around on Twitter, Facebook, and forums, and a design team who isn’t at least able to parse and think about the raced connotations of the life of the video clip has some issues.
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When it comes to these situations, I generally (with exceptions, I will admit) go with the Jay Smooth approach: I am not damning the souls of the Indie Custom Cube developers by saying that they’re sexist or racist. I am saying that the way the Indie Custom Cube is designed has sexist and racist elements that can be eliminated and redesigned. If the cube comes back online, I think that those elements should be designed away. The general ire of the twitter community today wasn’t just angsty people throwing slime at a wall–it was the reaction of a group of people looking at a designed product and finding something internally wrong with it that offended them. That isn’t baseless criticism made for fun; the people angry about the Indie Custom Cube aren’t just deciding to be offended because it is something to do. It isn’t arbitrary. It is honest community feedback, and the community found the ideological representations of the ICC problematic in a number of ways. The designers should take that seriously; when a community reacts poorly to an object and has specific criticism, it is best to listen to that criticism, especially if it is in regards to questions of representation.
That’s a rambling paragraph, but what I mean is this: there are real problems with the Indie Custom Cube and the designers would do well to take community criticism seriously instead of deriding it as ignorant “immaturity.”
Unfortunately for us players, it’s in ArenaNet’s best interests to ensure the vast majority of players are not wealthy. This would entirely undermine their buy-to-play model and their reliance on you purchasing gems. Were gold readily available they would inevitably be unable to fund their Living World teams because no one would buy gems, they would simply convert them. Due to this, the mechanics the game has in place are all designed to ensure wealth gain is incredibly slow.
Lewis B., “In Search of Guild Wars 2 Gold“
Slowly MMO designers realize that massive immaterial delocalized economies modeled after the real world are doomed to failure.
All of these choices and changes are clearly tied to programmatic decisions. How NPCs react to and form relationships to my character are coded into the characters’ artificial intelligence. Arguably the goal in some of the NPC reactions is to enrichen the experience of the game, by making choices (including sexuality choices) matter to the game play experience. The fact that certain clothing options are read as cross-dressing, that sexuality is inscribed into characters’ very code (their very being), and that gender and sexuality are statically related, however, demonstrates an oppressive worldview defines the very structure of the game. In a fictional world where I can use magic on a regular basis, where faces carved in rock talk to me, and in which I battle fantasy creatures, that particular types of reality and marginality are reinforced in the Fable games is curious. It is also indicative of larger systemic problems in how marginalized characters are incorporated into games.
Adrienne Shaw, “The Lost Queer Potential of Fable“
This is going to be shorter than the other posts in this series just because I don’t have very much to say about Bientôt L’été.
I’m not saying that to disparage the game, but instead to reign myself in. Tale of Tales, as you may know, is a artgame collective that creates and releases, well, artgames. These games are always on an accessibility scale–by which I mean that you can play them–but they rarely give any when it comes to their purposeful “artiness.” Those are mixed words, so let me be clear: Tale of Tales create games that are at home being curated and placed in galleries. They also sell those games on Steam sometimes.
Bientôt L’été puts the player on a beach. There are sometimes objects on that beach. You can touch them and make them part of your character. When you have a few, you can go to a cafe and deploy them in a game of chess that is both visual and verbal–you can smoke and drink through a clash of words.
That’s the basic game, but the turn comes from the construction of the cafe scene. The player sits in one seat; another player sits in the other. This other player is intended to be a human player. They would sit there across from you and you would both fumble with the pieces of language that the game gave you to work with and sometimes things would collide beautifully and sometimes you would be bored.
Here I am, a long time after release, and there’s no one to play with. I can click the substitution button – “Simulation” – but it feels like I’m cheating. When I played the game, I sat and waited a while. I thought that there might be one single person in the world, and we could have a serendipitous connection to each other. Ten minutes gave me nothing.
There’s beauty in that hope. There’s more beauty, maybe more truth, in the fact that there’s no delivery on it. No one is coming. No one is going to come and complete this game for me, with me. There’s just the player and some objects that I can imbue with whatever meaning I want.
I spent most of this last weekend fulfilling the rewards from the Kickstarter I ran for Catachresis. If you had a story written about yourself, you can find that here. If you had an image or animation made of yourself, it should be in your email.
If you did not receive what you were supposed to receive, please email me (I’ve tried to communicate to a couple people via Kickstarter with some questions, so check there too.)
As promised, this is a blog post where I mention the names of a lot of people who helped make this project a reality.
Game Developers Convention
lemontaub
SuperSugoiSoftS
Nick Douglas
torahhorse
David Griffen
Nathan Sanzone-McDowell
Project Maiden
Nathan Altice
Yancey
Martin Falder
Ross Williams
Matt Sharawara
Theory Georgiou
Anthony Capendale
Ben Llewellyn
Steven Higgins
Pat Ashe
Zoth Ommog
Mark Wonnacott
Jordi Escobar
Hunter Harrell
Liz
Deborah Tague
Voxelstorm
Erik Hanson
Ben Mentzer, Whiskey Jack Gaming LLC
Victor Hughes
Aaron Malone
Megan Fox
and now for the bigger font crew because they gave me more money
Audiences know that you can’t make a film without a camera. For a long time, Hollywood-style editing and cinematography developed to minimize the audience’s awareness of the camera. What would have been unacceptable in these films, visual acknowledgement of the camera’s presence (lens flares, water or fog on the lens), was permissible in documentary films. Eventually it became part of the cinematic language of narrative films. In a weird way, acknowledging the camera is “there” capturing an image became a way to draw people into that image, rather than pushing them away from it.
When you move the “camera” into the sunlight in The Last of Us, light reveals a dirty lens. During a cut-scene the “camera” shakes a bit. These artificial cinematic “imperfections” are animated in the service of “realism”. But visual cues that say “hey, there’s a camera here!” when there is a camera become a lie when there is no camera, no lens, no visual “imperfection”.
And maybe a certain quest for “realism” dooms these games to be copies of films. They can’t invent their own imagery because they make meaning out of the familiar. Other games, like those made in Twine or other text-focused styles, or more abstract games not seeking to replicate the audiovisual cinematic experience, are freer for it. Their author-creators are not bound by some attempt to create an “objective” reality within their electronic world. They don’t have to recycle cinematic images to make their spaces legible.
Realism isn’t about the real world; it’s about how much something reminds us of the real world, how much it DOESN’T challenge our understanding of the world, how well its digital and our mental models mesh.
Brian Taylor, “The Last of Us and Pittsburgh“
At the bottom, I know that Louis doesn’t hear me; he hears me only inside me, inside us (though we are only ever ourselves from that place within us where the other, the mortal other, resonates). And I know well that his voice within me is insisting that I not pretend to speak to him. And I also know that I can have nothing to teach you who are here, since you are here.
Jacques Derrida, “Text Read At Louis Althusser’s Funeral” p.117
I was interviewed for First Person Scholar last month and it went up today. A taste:
FPS: So we’ve actually had this conversation quite a bit lately among the FPS editorial staff about what makes good satire in a game. But I’m guessing you don’t think GTAV is very effective satire and I’m wondering if you could elaborate on that, on why it doesn’t work as a satire, or maybe why it does.
CK: Look, I don’t think that anyone in videogames knows what the word “satire” means. I think that’s just it. I think that people who read Wikipedia pages [on satire] and never actually read satire think that the moniker “satire” gives you free range to do and say whatever you want. The whole point of satire is that there’s going to be a turn in the satire that makes you realize that it’s not true. There’s a moment, maybe not a wink, but you see a set piece wall fall down or something and you’re like, “Oh, yes this is not being told straight-faced; it’s being comedic in some way or making light of the situation.” But when you have things like GTA that don’t play that, there’s no wink ever in GTA. Sometimes there’s a meta-move, to say, “Of course we know we’re a videogame,” but that’s not satirical. So there’s a sort of straight-faced reproduction of awful things and then you say, “Oh well it’s definitely satirical.”
TRIGGER WARNING: discussion of sexual assault
I finished Grand Theft Auto V this past weekend. I’m not sure if this post is really about that game, but it is certainly about the circuit of culture that creates legions of fans who will defend a game to the bitter end against any and all criticism.
I’ve been thinking a lot about the defense of Grand Theft Auto V that goes something like this: “Yes, we are aware that the representations of the game are bad and/or harmful, but don’t you understand that GTA has always been satire? Therefore, it is being critical of capitalism, sexism, violent crime by presenting us with a satirical take on contemporary, media-obsessed life.”
I stand by what I wrote in my previous post. That’s all bullshit.
On the other end, however, I am curious the desire to read “irony” or “satire” into a work in order to absolve it of any cultural wrongdoing. If I accept that Grand Theft Auto V is at-face satirical, it is roughly equivalent to calling someone a horrific slur and following it up with “just kidding, lol.” It is the internet troll’s defense. It is the rhetorical equivalent of pushing another kid down on the playground, looking at his scraped knees, and saying “it was a joke!” In short, the rhetorical position is deeply nihilistic.
I wouldn’t have written anything about this if the game didn’t put it into my head. During a play session this past weekend, I did the Michael mission called “Parenting 101.” In this mission, Michael has to save his son Jimmy (a hate-spewing, videogame-playing, Jonah Hill-knockoff caricature of an entitled rich millennial) from kidnappers. As we learn through a phone conversation, the people who have kidnapped Jimmy are constant victims of his trolling. To defend himself, Jimmy says:
It’s just an online persona. It was satire, or parody, or something! I didn’t mean it!
That’s the perfect defense of GTAV‘s inherent criticism of what is replicating if I have ever seen it. Jimmy, a metacharacter who actively comments on videogame and Grand Theft Auto tropes throughout the game, is clearly grasping at straws to defend trolling and his defense is the same that GTAV fans jump through hoops to provide. It gestures at some reflexivity on Rockstar’s part–with a character like this, surely they know what they are doing with everything else.
Then the rest of the conversation occurs:
Kidnapper: Shut up, troll! You gave up your right to free speech when you insulted a celebrity on the internet!
Jimmy: It was a couple of comments. Some colorful language.
K: It was harassment.
J: You’re the comedy writer. Deal with the heckle.
K: I blocked you. You started another account. I blocked you again, you started another. But what you didn’t count on was me having the money and the resources to trace your IP.
J: I counted on you having better things to do.
K: Well, I don’t. I’m a lonely man and social media is my life. It’s given me the recognition I’ve been denied my whole life. I can make snarky comments, and glib pronouncements, and lap up the adulation, banishing any form of dissent. I’m a king, and Bleeter [GTA version of Twitter] is my kingdom.
J: Okay. Umm, that’s pretty sad.
K: Don’t lose sleep over it. When I’m done, the only Bleeting you’ll be doing is actual, like, bleeding cause then you’ll be in pain. (laughs)
As you can see, the writers at Rockstar pull their infinitely predictable move. They present both “sides” of the issue of trolling and then make both of those sides appear equally ridiculous. If Jimmy’s initial comment about satire could have been understood as being reflexive, the following conversation ensures that that reflexivity was fleeting if it existed at all. Trolling is yet another feature of contemporary life that Rockstar is interested in showing (and making it the core of a number of jokes between Michael and Jimmy) and then absolving themselves of having to deal with.
What do we do with Jimmy’s flailing, though? Why would Rockstar include this seemingly aware moment before a the inevitable Rockstar move?
Maybe a better question: what kind of work does the irony/satire duo perform in the contemporary media culture?
A quotation from Adam Kotsko’s Awkwardness (a favorite) might contextualize the argument I’m about to make. He writes:
Though it was quite fashionable to claim that the terrorist attacks of September 11, 2001 marked “the end of irony,” I would propose a more straightforward explanation: the irony trend simply exhausted itself. The exhaustion hypothesis has the advantage of actually explaining what followed “the end of irony”: not, as the 9/11 fetishists would have it, a culture-wide turn toward earnestness and patriotism, but rather a reemergence of the awkwardness that I have claimed as the “default setting” of American culture since the 1970s. As we will see, 90s-style irony even today remains an important part of many people’s defense against awkwardness, but it is now mainly a temporary expedient rather than an all-encompassing lifestyle choice. In the cases where something like irony has played a dominant role, it has tended to shade into a more obvious sociopathy, as in It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, which can be understood as a radical reworking of Seinfeld for a post-irony era. [24]
Kotsko’s argument is simple: irony (and I would add satire) are rarified in the contemporary media landscape. You can find them in pockets, but those pockets are deeply entrenched, cannibalistic, and over the top so much that it is indistinguishable from what it is criticizing: to commit to satire in the now is, as Kotsko writes, “sociopathy.”
The dual commitment that satire/irony necessitates has become a solidly two-faced enterprise: you have to become a monster that disavows all monstrosity. That’s the trap and the source of almost all satire in the contemporary world. Where is the dividing line? Who gets to decide?
These aren’t abstract questions posed merely to be debated. For instance, there is the recent case of “Matthew,” the now-former Social Chair of the Phi Kappa Tau fraternity at Georgia Tech. A week ago a number of websites ran a story with the text of an email that he sent out to his fraternity members to teach them how to talk to women at parties or, as he writes, “lure rapebait.”
The email is everything you would expect, so I’m not doing any kind of long reading of it here. The interesting part is the apology that he published a couple days after his email went viral. It is mostly unremarkable–this kind of horrific things come out enough that this is basically a genre of writing at this point–but there’s a part in the middle that caught me.
Misogynistic behavior is everywhere online and unfortunately, my attempt to ridicule it in an immature and outrageous satire backfired terribly and in a manner I mistakenly underestimated.
And here we have it, what I will forever call “the Grand Theft Auto Defense,” written into the social once again. At best, it is aggression rewritten as an olive branch; sociopathy presented as empathy.
this cage is worms 