Polygon’s Ben Kuchera on why he has no friends.
In today’s episode of “I Don’t Understand Incentives”, guest star Ben Kuchera reveals why everyone not in his movement should work to destroy its political power…
I decided to collect this and archive it, after some people asked me what I meant by “fun is an ideology” in the discussion about Polygon the other day.
you know how I always said that critical theory involves just blithely stating hypotheses as if they were facts?
this guy just cuts to the chase and just directly lies as a premise. “everyone was completely fine with financial corruption, gamers only care because they think Zoe Quinn bought reviews with sex, which is unavailable to them”. I can’t read this. he just lies too much. the only kinds of arguments that seem to be available to them are lying and very forcefully stating his premises as facts.
you know how a possible definition of a low-status activity is that you are perceived the more of an expert the less you know about it and engage in it?
This is why Gamergate fascinates me, even though I haven’t played a videogame since around 2008.
the correct reply after this confession is “nice opinion, fuck off”, not taking him seriously for 400 pages
“You are actually not sincerely enjoying it, it’s just artificial desire created by capitalism.” That reminds me of a Rhizome article on porn in which the author answered the question on how the itch should then be scratched and the answer was cultivating a wholesome relationship with a woman. Games aren’t fun, they don’t lead to true self-actualization, but what then does? They could be art, but they aren’t, or aren’t read as such (ie, they or the analysis does not convey messages on class relations).
Insane levels of class reductionism, fantasy=reality, games are good when they’re bad because they expose the reality of class relations, villains should be expropriated, all of this is actually anxiety about how you’re a cog in the capitalist machine, but what is his alternative? He says somewhere how Christianity is like communism, but what branch?
Because I get a sense of that it’s a sort of Calvinism in which only work/self-actualization that enriches the soul according to some vague commie guideline matters (e.g. exploitation for profit is terrible, labour and leisure should serve the community, which is why you’re going to labour camp). We drag you out of Plato’s Cave so we can shove you into the Republic (we’re more equal, says the Philosopher/party intellectual). If you were not weak and impotent, you wouldn’t have sought your solace in consumer goods (this coming from a dude who quotes nothing but Zizek, the go-to philosopher for those whose class analysis can only come through pop culture ephemera).
Also nothing about crunch time and labour circumstances in the industry itself (and thus his posting wholly ignores literally the worst worker exploitation in the vidya industry).
I am 100% sure that a fun game could comment on class struggles.
I know this because Mother 3 exists. And Super Paper Mario.
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?
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.
Okay, so I had a response ready to type out, and then I got sidelined by the confusing commentary about “jews”, which I’m almost certain was antisemitic.
But anyway, I don’t fault game devs for wanting to put more explicit political content into their games, not separate game devs for wanting their games to be less explicitly political. Artists don’t have a duty to express ideas about politics in their art, unless self-imposed.
I don’t worry about people misinterpreting art, if there is such a thing. Death of the author and all that (just don’t then blame the author for your interpretation). Calling Gone Home “not a game” doesn’t make it not a game, and calling it not fun doesn’t make it so for others, not that that’s what he meant by “fun”. It’s just one extra level to reach understanding that SMG uses “fun” to refer to reward signals, but once there, the problem is when he (seemingly) switches back to the common definition of fun when talking about scores reflecting the funness of games.
I’ve actually heard the point that I think SMG is trying to make before, though they used the term “context” instead of “art” to refer to the non-interactive parts of games (just the point mind you,l not the position). They argued that without context, games can only be so entertaining; that without context most people wouldn’t find even their favourite games as enticing to play, and further that without context, games can only convey a very limited set of emotions.
At worst, if “fun” gets redefined, we’d end up with a different word to replace it. That’s not so bad.
So if you’re a game designer who is committed to game design as a discipline, you would both avoid saying fun without qualifiers, and use a more vague term whenever possible when you talk about design goals, as well as more concrete terms for the feelings and dynamics that make your game fun. You still need to talk to players though, and you can’t rob them of their vocabulary. You can’t take the word “fun“ away from other people. You can only ask them to clarify, because they don’t always mean “engaging“ by “fun”.
You also don’t gain anything by only replacing one word - “fun” - that refers to a broad and ill-defined concept with another word - “engagement” or “entertainment” - that refers to the same concept.
But anyway, I don’t fault game devs for wanting to put more explicit political content into their games, not separate game devs for wanting their games to be less explicitly political. Artists don’t have a duty to express ideas about politics in their art, unless self-imposed.
I agree completely.
I don’t worry about people misinterpreting art, if there is such a thing. Death of the author and all that (just don’t then blame the author for your interpretation).
This is a big problem. Not only the concept of “fun” is ill-defined. It is very unclear to me, and not agreed-upon in the wider gaming community, what it means for something to be political.
If the author was truly dead, games journalists would not change their positive reviews of games because the author said something political they disagreed with on twitter. Some critics invoke the death of the author when the author defends himself, and others think the author reflects back on the game.
To a certain extent, you get these effects from any loose coalition of people with shared goals but different philosophies.
Calling Gone Home “not a game” doesn’t make it not a game
Early in game studies, or even earlier, back when Chris Crawford wrote the book on game design and founded the GDC, but up until 2008, game design people were exasperated at literary critics. People looked at games, applied the lenses of film studies to literary criticism, and concluded that games were not art (yet).
There had been movements to produce hypertext literature and interactive fiction, art forms distinct from games. Game designers, hypermedia artists, and IF authors all tried to establish their own modes of criticism and analysis. Marie-Laure Ryan, Espen Aarseth, Jesper Juul, Ian Bogost and Frank Lantz tried to understand games, to give us a gamey vocabulary to talk about them.
When independent game development started out as a movement, it was all about games that tried to be art as games, eschewing the trappings of films, paintings, and books. Indie games like World of Goo made bold stylistic choices against a trend toward higher graphical fidelity. Indie games went for tighter loops instead of more stuff. Passage communicated something profound through its mechanics.
Gone Home was so different from games, especially from early indie games. Gone Home used the medium of AAA games, a 3D engine. Gone Home was more hypertext literature in a 3D space than a game. Gone Home tries to be art in the way a book is art.
That’s fine by itself. But when Gone Home came out, everybody said that Gone Home is art, that Gone Home is proof that games can be art, that more games should be like Gone Home. It’s like a stage director telling me that Dogville was the proof that movies can be art, and we need more movies like Dogville and fewer movies like Jupiter Ascending. (Only Dogville came out when we already agreed that movies are art, and it was not made into a symbol of a lerger issue.) When Gone Home came out, we thought we had just finished this debate, and suddenly people flocked to it to concede that games can be art, as long as they are notgames.
Context: http://www.rogerebert.com/rogers-journal/video-games-can-never-be-art, https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/jonathanjonesblog/2012/nov/30/moma-video-games-art, http://www.sophiehoulden.com/can-art-be-games/
Games are art, no matter how gamey they are.
The question is, why are these people relevant? Why should we care if literary critic types think games are “art”? Why do they deserve for us to argue with them that they are, rather than to keep putting out and playing games until the next generation of critics replaces them? If some snob says “games aren’t art” to protect his status, self-image, and simultaneous ability to ignore them, why should we care? We don’t owe them anything.
What neither side of US politics wants to admit: the promotion of identity politics combined with the declining white super majority has led to turbo charged white identity politics. Since Dems catered for non-white identity politics, Trump and the GOP took hold of white identity politics.
Most countries that do not have a 70%+ super majority ethnic group have ethnicized
electoral politics.
Yes, my fear is that Lee Kuan Yew is right.
Male-dominated video games become spectator e-sports for predominantly male viewers because they sustain a different project than celebrating physical excellence. They don’t showcase a specific form of male-bodied performance so much as support a specific sort of male spectator: a straight middle-class boy full of resentment and patriarchal rage. This is and has been the sports fan par excellence.
http://reallifemag.com/jocks-without-borders/
hooo brother.
(via argumate)
why do they always write about white men like bad fantasy books talk about orcs? I mean, ‘full of patriarchal rage’?
(via 1nsomnizac)
now remember that most of these straight middle-class boys are Korean, even in the linked article, and scratch your head.
(via argumate)
no patriarchy like Korean patriarchy
(via argumate)
Koreans are the whitest boys of all.
(via mitigatedchaos)
[insert roof Koreans joke here]
(via raggedjackscarlet)
New Alt-Right faction: The Seoul Boys - Militarized Korean shopkeepers will retake Europe for Christianity.
I actually suspect that the switch to identity politics over class politics may have been based on a growing ineffectiveness of class politics.
“BUT THE POOR!” lost ground as more cached arguments were built up against it, even if it wasn’t entirely justified.
“BUT RACISM!” still had a lot of bite and could circumvent some of those cached arguments. So, it’s natural to shift to it and build the platform around it.
It had a lot of bite, anyway.
There was always the focus on what was morally right, even in the minds of people who claimed they didn’t believe in morality, over what was effective policy, so now we get a lot of talk about guilt, or about pie in the sky ideas of “dismantling the systems of X oppression requires dismantling capitalism” (and people remember how “we need to dismantle capitalism” went last time), and not so much about “we should distribute multivitamins to the poor.”
I mean, that does sometimes get through, but the zeitgeist doesn’t seem to care about it as much as it cares about language policing and thinks that beneficial policies will just naturally unfold once everyone acknowledges their sin.
Anonymous asked:
sinesalvatorem answered:
Leukemia is not actually a good thing, anon. If your blood is over-saturated with white cells then please seek medical assistance.
I just saw an article last week suggesting that using identity politics in the US was a bad plan because the majority can practice identity politics, too, and the definition of “white” has expanded in the past.
I’m pretty hyped. What exciting new races or ethnic groups will be considered “white” in the future? Could Asian-Latin fusion cuisine become the next official white people food? When will they be issued their official White Man™ polo shirts?
Jon Stewart, John Oliver…mostly enact the pure arrogance of the liberal intellectual elite: “Parodying Trump is at best a distraction from his real politics; at worst it converts the whole of politics into a gag. The process has nothing to do with the performers or the writers or their choices. Trump built his candidacy on performing as a comic heel—that has been his pop culture persona for decades. It is simply not possible to parody effectively a man who is a conscious self-parody, and who has become president of the United States on the basis of that performance.”
Hell, why don’t we re-enact Sherman’s march and raze the US south, the southern US is full of shitty people with shitty politics. Maybe burn down all Mormon churches and compounds, they got both nasty shit going on and nasty politics.
I get you wanna piss your fuckin pants because it’s those dirty furriners doing those dirty furriner crimes, but horrible shit didn’t start with immigration and it won’t end when it’s cut off.
Things being bad is not a reason to make them worse. (This part of the problem with arguments about alcohol/drugs, too.)
We have no obligation to import these people. We do not have an obligation to import people that will make the country worse. We don’t have an obligation to tolerate criminal acts favored by their cultures, or tear our national social cohesion to shreds to tolerate those acts.
So some fringe groups of Mormons are still polygamists and practice shady things with young brides and that sort of thing. Oh look, Westerners doing a bad thing. Better import enough people that have similar practices so that it becomes normalized and gains political power! That’ll sure improve things! Yay justice!
but horrible shit didn’t start with immigration and it won’t end when it’s cut off.
How much FGM was happening in the US before it was imported? It won’t stop now if immigration is shut off only because we won’t literally kick all those who practice it out of the country.
Kicking out only individuals who are actually convicted of it is the individualist approach. And it makes sense. The preconditions for citizenship included not bringing foreign criminal/terrorist activity to this country. Those preconditions were violated.
In light of that, how does removing citizenship not make sense?
And I don’t really think the problem we have is “We don’t execute criminals grotesquely enough.“ I think there’s a reason why we don’t do that sort of thing anymore. If you wanted to heighten investigation, that could make sense, but public executions don’t really help anyone.
It apparently cost $500,000 to prosecute three guys, and the number of crimes committed is far worse.
However, “diversity” ideology covered up that the crimes were even happening in the first place. Admitting that some cultures practice this bullsht more than others was “racist”. I mean it’s just economics, right? Cultural differences beyond food aren’t real, right?
What is your plan to force assimilation on this issue?
Maybe we don’t have to publicly execute them. Maybe we can just ordinarily execute them and make sure it gets in the news where their buddies we read it.
Maybe I don’t even want to go that far. Maybe I just want to throw the Overton Window far enough to the right that Cultural Antirealism will die and Left/Libs will at least start admitting that there is a problem and we can get a gentler solution that actually works.
It seems like at least one of the things that’s gone wrong with American politics is that the Democrats have absolutely zero interest in taking up the language, priorities, rhetoric or politics of the left, which kind of leaves them without much of a message except for ‘I mean, we do actually know how to govern and when we get the chance to do it we improve peoples’ lives. and have you seen the other guys’. But if people aren’t happy with how things are going, that’s a really unappealing message - and no one is happy with how things are going.
I don’t know what a good message for the Democratic party would be, but they keep losing with this one.
One of the issues is that the Democrats would have to get smarter on policy, not just shift in a left-wing direction. They’d also have to actually follow through better on some of their policies.
For instance, a program of direct-to-employee wage subsidies would help the working class and boost employment. This is to the left of current Democrat policy (increasing the minimum wage), but has some good acceptance by economists. It would also put them in a better position for courting working class whites, especially when the Truckpocalypse hits.
However, they appear to be committed to a policy of demographic shift or even replacement, so it’s unlikely they’ll go for this option.
Anonymous asked:
The memeing (#augmented reality break, #chronofelony, #the year is, etc) serves several purposes…
As for the writing style, it is what it is, you either read it or you don’t.
If you only want the actual serious stuff, I recommend the #flagpost and #policy tags.
SAN FRANCISCO—In an effort to reduce the number of unprovoked hostile communications on the social media platform, Twitter announced Monday that it had added a red X-mark feature verifying users who are in fact perfectly okay to harass. “This new verification system offers users a simple, efficient way to determine which accounts belong to total pieces of shit whom you should have no qualms about tormenting to your heart’s desire,” said spokesperson Elizabeth James, adding that the small red symbol signifies that Twitter has officially confirmed the identity of a loathsome person who deserves the worst abuse imaginable and who will deliberately have their Mute, Block, and Report options disabled. “When a user sees this symbol, they know they’re dealing with a real asshole who has richly earned whatever mistreatment they receive, including profanity, body-shaming, leaking of personal information, and relentless goading to commit suicide. It’s really just a helpful way of saying to our users, ‘This fuck has it coming, so do your worst with a clear conscience and without fear of having your account suspended.’” At press time, Twitter reassuredly clarified that the red X was just a suggestion and that all users could still be bullied with as little recourse as they are now.
