I am 100% sure that a game could contain an explicit, obnoxious message about class struggles, or a subtle one, even an unintended point about class struggles that emerges from gameplay.
A game could by accident, and with a lot of leeway for interpretation, be a vehicle for feudalism, individualism or neoliberalism. Just think of Eve Online, Minecraft and World of Warcraft. Actually I’m quite sure SMG would agree that WoW is neoliberal.
But there are games that make their points without nuance, without subtlety, and rather explicitly in-character and in-universe. Aerannis by @fffbbb is such a game. Not only is it political - everything is political! - it is explicitly political. The game has a message.
World of Warcraft does not have a political message. The game is not meant to be political. Cart Life and Papers Please are meant to be political.
That does not mean that all these scholarly essays about “The politics of League of Legends” are without merit. But the angry forum posts that decry games as infiltrated and undermined by SJWs are the flip side of academic wankery that brands them as vehicles for neoliberalism.
SMG is an academic wanker stranded in a forum. I don’t know if his words could stand on their own if there was not the occasional goon wandering into these threads, acting as his foil - allowing for breaks from the monotony of baseless theorising about the minds of people who play games by insulting the intelligence of his interlocutor.
So why did I harp on these three statements?
- everything is political
- games have political content
- games have deliberate political messages
People are prone to equivocate between them, step by step. That is not really that bad if you talk about games in the abstract, but it becomes quite annoying if you wrote a game or if you only say you enjoy a game. You talk about the themes in the game, and suddenly you are a hippie nazi communist witch liberal cuckservative.
I believe @avienbgwp that you can make a fun game about class struggles. I’m just wary of somebody going all SMG on that game, redefining the meaning of the game and the word “fun” under my feet.
Grinding
is not separate from the logic of desire, but a purer manifestation of
it. It’s why Progress Quest and Cookie Clicker are fun, despite not
having gameplay. Microtransactions are simply a method of more directly
monetizing grinding - ‘pay to win’ doesn’t ruin fun, but actually allows
for maximum fun.
It’s
incredibly fun to pay to win. That’s why people do it. The problem is
that, once you’ve paid to win, all you’re left with is a videogame - and
videogames are not fun at all.
If you think of game design as an actual discipline, you must either define or taboo the word “fun”. Koster defines fun (and it’s not what SMG is talking about here), while more narrative-oriented game designers do not even want to create Koster-fun or SMG-fun in their games.
SMG does not define what he means by fun, but he uses the word in such a way that it does not mean what we commonly understand when somebody says “fun“, but something very specific: Reward Signals.
SMG enjoys this sophistry too much, enjoys arguing too much to defend a coherent thesis, or to spell out his views.
Gone
Home lacks DLC, microtransactions, grinding, purchasable hats… and as
a result, it provides pretty much no fun whatsoever. This fact makes it
one of the purest examples of game art. That’s not a value judgement;
it probably sucks. Gone Home just is art,
and gamers don’t know what to make of that. Give them Gone Home and
they will try to ‘speedrun’ it. The speedrun takes roughly a minute. The
whole concept is alien to them.
SMG likes to pretend he does the whole metamodernist metacontrarian Lacanian thing, but actually this is the reactionary Roger Ebert position: Can games be art: No, but they can contain art. Art is all the non-game stuff: Story, graphics, dialogue, music. The less gameplay, the more is available for space for art in your game. This is the position of stodgy conservatives in the 90s.
If you simply add grindy combat to Gone Home, you get Bioshock.
That’s a dry ice take. It also betrays the fact that SMG knows a bit more about games than he lets on. But the people who made Gone Home (and Bioshock 2, the same people!) had a certain conception of games and storytelling. Bioshock is not supposed to be a fun game. Bioshock is supposed to be an experience, to be immersive.
The 10/10
for Gone Home is controversial because it makes absolutely no sense
according to the belief that games are fun, and that review scores rank
how fun each game is. The 10/10 is suddenly gauging artistry, and it
instantly reveals the whole system to be laughably inadequate. Imagine
ranking paintings this way.
Any score for Gone Home would have the same problem. “Games are art, but not fun” is the edgiest take possible. “Games are fun, but not art“ is just the standard 90s literature snob take. SMG constructs the category-theoretical dual of a Hegelian synthesis between the two.
The whole thread is really interesting because SMG accepts all claims of GG and their framing. At the same time, SMG demonstrates conspicuous ignorance of games, conspicuous knowledge of certain games,
Gamers seriously believe that a dude’s loopy girlfriend threatening to kill herself should be international news.
Hey quick question because this thread is long and I haven’t read your posts carefully.
If Hitman gets an unprecedented 6/10 for writing, then gamers actually believe that they are not allowed to
like the game. They (jews) have taken the fun, and they (jews) are not
allowing me to have it. If games are actually fun, this obviously
wouldn’t happen.
You are getting worked up imagining their outrage, and that betrays a lack of self-confidence.
The proletariat includes people from all segments of society.
This is a shell game with goalpoasts, and it’s fascinating.
It’s fascinating because SMG got banned from SA so late. This constant bulverism, this constant taking your opponent’s statements and twisting them into a pattern must be corrosive to a community. He’s not writing insight porn about topics, he’s also marketing his insight porn as insight into the motives of other posters. This is almost confusion politics.
If he had a tumblr, somebody would call this gaslighting -it’s not actually gaslighting, but it’s close enough to the tumblr conception of it.
I think by reading into the linked page again, I have started channeling SMG myself, and everything since the occurence of the word “neoliberalism” at the end of the fifth paragraph of this post has become kind of wonky.
So I’m going to twist this into a conclusion: SMG sounds like somebody who is not in his right mind, but he is oscillating in a somewhat predictable way between different opinions. He uses the same words in many of his forum posts, but they mean different things, or at least he uses them as if they did. Maybe he means the same thing throughout, and is even more inconsistent.
