The SMG Gamergate Thread

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?

1. everything is political
2. games have political content
3. 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.

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.

Fun

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.

Politics

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.

Art

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.