PREVIEW: Uncharted 7

Game Criticism | by

I was very surprised, upon visiting Uncharted developer Naughty Dog’s new downtown office, to discover that the walls were all stained yellow. It’s a bold choice, coming from a developer known for its games’ exceptional polish. Their Production Lead, who identified themself only as K, smiled oddly as they led me down the tunnel to what they called the studio’s ‘testing apparatus’. Uncharted 7 will make use of an exciting new haptic technology, they explained, to really immerse you in the vibrant world of Nathan Drake. When they first showed me the apparatus, I admit I was skeptical; the upfront cost of 270 motorized syringes would price most gamers out of the market, never mind the ongoing expense of fluid cartridges. I asked K if there would be an option to play the final game WITHOUT strapping into the needle machine, but their PR person told me there are no details about that at this time.

Uncharted 7 will be the first Naughty Dog game to run at a solid 500 frames per second. They can do this, K explained, because the game contains no computer graphics whatsoever. Instead the forthcoming adventure will be rendered directly onto the player’s back using the aforementioned motorized syringe array! That’s right: every second, 500 needles will inject differently-mixed pain fluids beneath the surface of the player’s skin, communicating all the action directly via their central nervous system. K said there is far less latency than a traditional computer setup, but I was in shock for most of it so I can’t confirm this firsthand.

It was a little weird, in retrospect, that there was no sign above the studio’s front entrance. And that K’s PR person had talons instead of a face. Oh well. Uncharted 7 is coming to all needle-based gaming platforms on the Eve of Dar’ghul’s Awakening, which I assume is like Fall 2018? Stay tuned for our obligatory 5-star review and, hopefully, some much-needed skin grafts.

The Abject Emptiness of ‘Everything’

Game Criticism | by

The philosopher Slavoj Zizek is distressingly fond of a rhetorical trick we’ll call Confirmation By Negation. The idea is that by searching carefully through seemingly contradictory notions we arrive at some fundamental truth. You tell me you want to drink this latte, but what if the opposite were true!? You may want to hold the latte, to sip from the latte, but never would you want to finish it! Never would you desire to grow fat from its milk and sugar, or to suffer the negative effects of its caffeine! In this notion of the dairy-free, sugar-free, caffeine-free latte we discover the truest ideals of postmodernity! And so on.

So it is with many of today’s open world videogames. They seek to let you do anything, which of course means there is nothing to do!  Their attempts to regulate your rise to power flatten them to an exercise in exchanging meaningless junk for the means to accrue more meaningless junk, and their deluge of tiny consequences for all your tiny actions of course renders them consequence-free. Their unique storyworlds—immersion in which is supposed to be the entire point of playing—somehow become completely external to them, since of course every ‘open world’ from Middle Earth to Mad Max manages to be exactly the same. You say you want an open world, but my god, don’t you actually want the opposite!?

We can view these games as a sequence of empty gestures designed to mediate our experience of the dreadful Other who lurks on the opposite side of their ending cinematics. We climb many instances of essentially the same tower to reveal wide swathes of essentially the same territory, in which we perform essentially the same regimen of busywork. We do this so that many instances of the same Orwellian super-presence will pass ‘control’ over this territory from itself unto us. In Assassin’s Creed we transact with the evil and mysterious Templars; in Batman it’s the evil and mysterious Arkham Knight. In The Elder Scrolls: Oblivion, perhaps most tellingly of all, we transact with hell itself. The game opens scores of its Oblivion Gates—all of which are essentially the same Oblivion Gate—and invites us to close them one at a time. By investing many hours of our labour, we sew shut the bursting seams of eternity! What better way to relieve ourselves of boredom?

What is boredom, if not fear of our inevitable death?

Within each of these games we pilot the same walking contradiction: something that is at once us, and not us. Where our real world body cannot have very much of what it wants, our open world body can have everything that is available, which of course is many instances of the same thing. But you see, it is also more! Confirmation By Negation tells us that ‘possession’ is predicated both on what we have and what we can’t have. When there is nothing in the universe we can’t have, the idea of ‘possession’ does not meaningfully exist; there is, in fact, nothing to possess. Thus when Fable II’s Orwellian super-presence permits us to transact from it marriage with every character in the world (each of whom is essentially the same character and thus a non-character), we discover little point in marrying anyone in particular. We discover the very essence of the open world system: a machine permitting us to learn, by manipulating it, precisely how and why manipulating it can have no effect.

The ‘open world’ is a mirror through which we can view, indirectly, the abject emptiness lying beyond our realm of experience. Within its reams upon reams of collectible things, we recognize and find comfort in the absence of any particular thing; we enact the ritual of collecting junk until there is no more junk to collect, at which time we discover triumphantly that we have succeeded in gathering the pure, distilled essence of nothing. We hold it in our hands, we add it to our gamer score, then we reach for a second world that is in truth another instance of the first. Here is Zizek’s dairy-free, sugar-free, caffeine-free, never-ending latte! Drink as long as you please, for your stomach can never fill.

The Joy and Tragedy of Flash Programming

Programming | by

The phrase ‘Flash is dead!’ isn’t so much a declaration of fact as it is an expression of one’s political alignment. To discover the nature of this alignment we need only ask ourselves: if indeed Flash were dead—if, somehow, a medium for creative expression were capable of experiencing death—who would we say had killed it? Was it Steve Jobs in the hardware biz with the iPhone? Or was it the front-end web person in tech services, scheming to fix the broken relationship between HTML and CSS? Was it Google Chrome, whose commitment to ‘openness’ has predictably come to preclude any software its parent company can’t manipulate? Or was it JavaScript, that mangy nightmare of a programming language whose hunger will consume the world?

Should we rejoice in our ever-impending freedom from all of Flash’s dreadful security problems (to be replaced, one assumes, by every other platform’s dreadful security problems)? Or the tremendous memory management and performance benefits made possible by… uh… cross-compiling to JavaScript? Shall we shower ourselves in the splendour of CSS3 on Chrome, then shower ourselves in the splendour of CSS3 on Firefox, then shower ourselves in the splendour of CSS3 on IE 10.0 and up, then media query into a set of stylesheets that works on more than fifty percent of recent android phones?

As I said, it’s very much a question of politics.

What gets lost in the ideological shuffle, though, is how wonderful a programming language Flash’s ActionScript 3 is. It’s both powerful and flexible, which is nice; yet beyond that, AS3 is fun. Where Java is verbose, consistent and largely insufferable, AS3 gives you getters and setters to break up the monotony. Where C# gives you a giant kitchen sink in which to deploy any programming pattern ever conceived by humankind, AS3 lends itself to a more particular, off-beat style of code.

Most centrally, AS3 provides all “The Good Parts” of JavaScript while at every turn being worlds better than JavaScript. You of course get all the whacky closure-based nonsense you’d find in JS and any other function-y language; yet AS3 provides syntax for strongly-typed variables, permitting software devs to write honest-to-goodness APIs with coherent, half-readable method signatures! You get IDEs capable of auto-completion, tool-assisted-refactoring and reference lookups! You get the gift of sanity! Do you know what sort of creature writes software in Notepad++ with naught but some crummy syntax highlighting plugin? A WILD ANIMAL. Possibly a rabid one.

Then when it comes time to program some ambiguously-typed, data-structure-melting atrocity, it’s as simple as casting all your variables to * and hacking away the night. I must concede that kitchen-sink languages like C# present all sorts of interesting rope with which to hang yourself in these situations—generics, operator overrides, reflection, occult contracts and so on—yet I’m not certain a jungle of generics has ever proven much more comprehensible than a few AS3 dictionaries packed full of mystery meat. In neither case is anyone going to understand anything you just wrote two months from now.

Speaking of dictionaries: AS3’s dictionaries are obtuse and absurd and absolutely marvellous. For some reason you use ‘for(x in dict)’ loops to iterate through keys but ‘foreach(x in dict)’ loops to iterate through values. Anything can be a key, and anything can be a value; strict typing is not permitted, so the language almost begs you to do something cool/weird. Astonishingly, dictionaries can use weak-referenced keys! In fact, any AS3 event dispatcher can use weak-referenced callbacks! Not even C#, that notorious syntactic sugar thief, is able to do that!

There is a sublime quality to Flash’s outrageous RAM and CPU overhead that doesn’t quite come across until you’ve used it to program games. I once built a Flash game that streams hand-painted full-resolution environment art from the internet and loads all of it into memory at once:

I once programmed a dynamic 2d lighting engine that renders circular gradients into a bitmap every frame, blitting it back across the screen as an overlay:

I wrote all this using Flash’s excellent 2d graphics API, which treats me like a human being by asking for shapes, fills and gradients rather than vertices, triangle maps and my first-born’s blood. I never had to explain the foreign notion of a ‘line segment’ to some illiterate thousand-threaded polygon pump, futzing with triangle fans and clipper libraries and “programmable” shaders. The libraries I used were entirely CPU-based—which is to say slow as hell—and I still got away with murder.

To use my favourite Bogost-ism, I find certain a squalid grace in hogging 2 gigabytes of RAM and 3 gigahertz of computing power just to draw a 2d videogame. It speaks to a promise fulfilled: a world where we can make sprawling, beautiful, outrageous software without fear of over- or under-utilizing the hardware against which we labour. A world free of scarcity, in which computers serve programmers rather than the other way around. A world without limits.

Yet in the shadow of Flash’s ever-impending death—an era of innovation for its own sake, leaving everything behind amidst our fumble for the bleeding edge—that world cannot exist. The hardware will always be too slow; the software will always be half-broken and impliable. This is not cause for celebration; if anything, it’s cause for sorrow. There is value in the old and the venerable. There is culture. There is expressiveness. There is joy. We’d be wise to treat it with respect.

The Ghosts of Bioshock

Game Criticism | by

This article is also available in audiobook form over at Sufficiently Human!

chief-big-foot-croppedSpotted Elk, a man known later in life as Chief Big Foot, lived in a place we now call South Dakota from ~1825 until December 1890. Though he was a notable figure in life, today the United States remembers him mostly for his death. He remains famous there, by sight if not by name, because a Chicago newspaper published a photograph of his corpse lying bent up in the snows of Wounded Knee Creek following the massacre that bears its name. Archivists preserved this photograph through the intervening century so that it now adorns many a textbook and webpage. When I look at it I’m tempted to see a sensational primary document depicting the death throes of the Lakota people, the Great Sioux Nation to which they belonged and, in a larger sense, the final defeat of First Nations civilization at the hands of European expansionism.

But then I consider the ways in which this image is deceptive. As I understand it the photographers posed Spotted Elk’s body posthumously, propping him up for the camera before they took the shot. I wonder whether they shovelled that snow onto his thigh to connote the passing of the Sioux into the land, never to be seen again. I wonder if they wretched at the sight of the bullet wound in his neck while working to hide it from view; or perhaps they did not flinch, having already grown accustomed to articulating dead bodies. The most famous version of the photograph, the one you see above, crops out the United States soldiers mulling about in the aftermath of the massacre; it excludes the hundreds of dead Sioux surrounding Spotted Elk in the snow, and the mass grave into which the soldiers shovelled their bodies. It frames the victim rather than his attackers, suggesting he was taken by some disembodied force instead of a soldier’s Winchester rifle. The serene expression on his face makes him seem like some spirit vanishing quietly from the world rather than a sixty-five year old man who was just shredded to pieces in a hail of gunfire. The photograph does not reveal the fact that Spotted Elk died right in front of his twelve year old grandson; it can only hint at the fact that the child miraculously escaped.

What we see in this photograph is not the Sioux as they truly were in 1890. It is the Sioux as Chicago wanted them to be: Tragically and conveniently eradicated. Wounded Knee was to become the curtain call for what whites dubbed “the Indian Wars”; the mighty engine of Manifest Destiny was to be at last decommissioned, victorious in its quest to colonize the continent, and the times of trouble were supposed to be over. In the 1870s, when white settlers still surged into Sioux territory, newspapers might have painted Sioux as wanton rapists and pillagers. Yet as their capacity for resistance gradually waned and they ceased to pose a threat, a gentler image came into fashion: That of the noble savage, a piteous being driven to extinction not by human beings but by the spirit of ‘historical progress’. In truth, of course, the Sioux were never wanton rapists and pillagers nor did they ever go extinct. They are still here, no matter how hard the US government tries to ignore them, and Wounded Knee Creek has remained a battleground (both literally and figuratively) for over a century. Spotted Elk’s family survives to this very day; you can find some of them on Twitter.

I came to study the Wounded Knee Massacre via the unlikeliest of tangents: I heard about it in Bioshock Infinite, a big-budget videogame in which the racist inhabitants of a floating city named Columbia present an astonishingly ‘1870s’ view of the event:

Here we see Wounded Knee as a Disneyland exhibit, were the theme park run (as Columbia is) by the unrepentant perpetrators of the massacre. Inside we find more photographs; more painstakingly articulated corpses, their photographers hoping to sell us a story about the people who killed Spotted Elk that day at the creek. The photographs are nested within one another, each showing conflicting perspectives. On one level we see the perpetrators hoping to erase their guilt from history; on another we see the creators of Infinite seeking to highlight this attempt at historical revisionism. It speaks once again to how images mutate over time. In Chicago 1890 they mourned the noble savage; in Boston 2013 we reconsider who is most guilty of savagery.

The Bioshock franchise purports to tell us ghost stories in a multiverse with three constants: There’s always “a Man, a Lighthouse and a City”. These, however, are not the constants that interest me. When I look at Infinite I see hundreds upon hundreds of photographs, along with the corpses those photos depict. Among these number cardboard Sioux warriors, as we’ve discussed; beside them are cardboard rebels from the Boxers of North China; lastly there are American frontier people, personified by residents of Columbia and the various incarnations of ‘1870s Doomguy’ Booker DeWitt. Recently we’ve all gotten the chance to photograph the corpse of Irrational Games itself, which closed its doors in the aftermath of Infinite’s perilous production and complicated reception. (This article constitutes another such photograph.) I’ve come to believe that in the histories we write about our world there are only two salient constants: There’s always a corpse, and there’s always a camera.

What follows, then, is a ghost story from me. It’s about what happened to the Boxers and the Sioux, whose stories bear an uncanny resemblance to one another despite their separation by an ocean. It’s about what happened to the spirit of Columbia, who was a real world national myth before she became a fictional sky city. Lastly it’s about what always happens to men like Booker DeWitt: The stories they steal from their victims, the messianic cults they fashion for themselves and their ultimate fate lying dead in the very same grave they dug for their enemies. This story begins, once again, in the Dakotas.

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Hard in the Hinterlands

Game Criticism | by

Dragon Age: Inquisition is a very large, very long videogame. We in the business of producing such things use special lingo to express this: We say it features a great deal of ‘content’. We believe this to be a good thing. Unlike the film industry, wherein reviewers complain with equal frequency that this movie is too long or that one too short, the game industry is all about high volume for a low price. The formula is as follows:

value\propto\frac{{duration}\times{quality}}{price}

Just as we assess duration differently from the film industry, so too do we have a unique way of assessing quality. We tend not to care all that much about character, or plot, or tone, or Shakespeare’s 5 act structure. Videogames are about ‘gameplay’, yes? They’re about ‘fun’. We in the videogame business seek a compelling ‘core loop’ to which players will gladly return over and over (and over and over) again. In plainer language we might say we seek some series of rituals for the player to perform that never ceases to gratify her so long as we freshen it up every so often; something we can augment in subtle ways, say by changing the setting in which she performs it or the circumstances compelling her to do so. Dragon Age: Inquisition is about a few different things, but mostly it’s about murder. This is no surprise: Killing people is a popular component in ‘core loops’ all around the game industry on account of its versatility. You can kill them on a plain. You can kill them in the rain. You can kill them in a coup; you can kill them with a shoe.

This is how our ‘content’ avoids becoming tangled like the elements of an intricate plot often do, where nothing can move an inch without the whole thing collapsing. Our ‘content’ is a modular, fungible commodity. We can add or subtract it as we require and players can consume as much or as little as they please. It’s how we make 90 hours of near-identical media images feel novel and gratifying the whole way through. The Hollywood film industry does not operate in quite this way; I find it very interesting, however, to reflect on the fact that the porn industry is almost perfectly analogous.

The most common strain of pornography you can find on the internet features one female actor cast as the ‘star’ alongside one male performer cast as a sort of ‘cipher’ through which the viewer vicariously obtains access to this star. The ideological objective of these films is to render the star’s body and mind into a quantity of ‘content’ for the viewer to consume (vicariously, via the cipher) over the course of the next half-hour or so. To this end, the actors simulate a series of rituals by which the cipher gains access first to the star’s attention, then her company, then her clothed body, then her naked body and so on. The film’s dramatic climax (what people in my biz call a ‘boss fight’) depicts the cipher’s orgasm in excruciating detail; the narrative heralds this as the ultimate ritual by which the cipher/viewer finishes consuming the star’s ‘content’, signalling that she has supremely and comprehensively gratified them in that peculiar capitalist way familiar to anyone who has ever bought and completed a large videogame (which is to say ‘they had fun’). This is the ‘core loop’ of pornography; change up the actors, the venue and/or the wardrobe and you’ve got ‘content’ for days.

Yet here is where my problem begins. I once heard a former porn star compare the sensation of having sex on set to massaging one’s back teeth with one’s own forefinger. For her there was no libidinal aspect to it; it was just arbitrary physical exercise. I’ve also watched documentaries in which male actors describe the difficulty involved in obtaining and sustaining an erection on command; often they come to rely on erectile dysfunction medications to help them. I must therefore conclude that porn actors get to have sex all day in the same way QA testers get to play videogames all day, which is to say they don’t really get to do so at all. The actors do not truly gratify one another in the way these films suggest the characters do; the sexual component of their interaction is, of course, the product of a dramatic performance.

This all leads to a funny moment near the end of the video, just as the cipher is on the verge of performing his orgasm. The star is usually in the midst of pantomiming whatever sex act the director chose for the climax, panting in the way pop stars do after they’ve been singing and dancing on stage all night. Then suddenly the cipher shoos her away from his genitals so he can focus on the task all by himself. You see, a good cipher is a reliable cipher: He must deliver his performance regardless of who his partner is or what they’re doing. As such, he has learned which precise sequence of mental, physical and chemical auto-stimulation he must now perform. The star needn’t know anything about this; her contract does not require her to assist her partner with his erection and no one expects her to do so. In truth, her presence makes no actual contribution towards the orgasm about to take place. Yet there she is, feigning enjoyment in very close proximity to her partner while being careful to avoid distracting him. And there he is, blithely ignoring the presence of the partner who in the plot represents the bestower of and sole impetus for his orgasm. What brilliant irony!

I need only consult Gamasutra’s blog section to confirm that the most notable difference between videogames and other media (such as hardcore pornography) is the fact that games are interactive. I have read over and over again that this unique quality changes everything about how we should approach our little medium. Well, okay: Let us then claim that games like Dragon Age: Inquisition are distinct from porn in that they cast me, the player, as both viewer and cipher simultaneously! Not only is it my job as viewer to become gratified by consuming the game’s ninety hours of ‘content’; as cipher I must also perform the rituals by which my character shall obtain the power they require to save the fictional realm of Thedas. I’ve noticed the game’s boss fights are ironic in the same sense as the money shots I just described. There I am, perched over Dragon Age: Inquisition with controller in hand, furiously repeating the combination of magic spells and deadly swordplay I know will gradually reduce the boss’ life to zero. And there is Dragon Age: Inquisition, doing its best not to distract me with any of its extravagant voice acting or lavish scenery. In truth the boss does not even resist my efforts to kill them, as the plot suggests they should; instead they strive to provide a strenuous yet ‘fun’ encounter, tacitly assisting me in my epic quest to perform the same repetitive hand movements over and over again until they are dead.

A question, reader: Were you weirded out just there, or in any of my preceding paragraphs, by the casual association of sexual favours with acts of murder? If so, I might cautiously infer you either haven’t played a lot of large videogames or you’ve played far too many. Nowhere is our culture’s bizarre conflation of sex and violent conquest more apparent than here in videogameland. Consider that as developers we intend for our games to foster collaboration between the player and her computer; indeed, we spend boundless energy ensuring that as a performer she feels comfortable and unconfused while as a viewer she experiences the gratification we promised her in our marketing materials. Suppose for a moment that I am an uninitiated observer. Should I not have every right to expect software whose stated purpose is ‘fun’ to have far more to do with sex than violence? (Is this not why Gamasutra, our foremost industry trade site, thought to name itself after a manual for sexual endeavour?) Why, then, does the plot overlaying my frantic hand gestures concern itself so deeply with violence (combat, war and diplomacy) instead of collaboration (sex, friendship and trust)? This is the fundamental problem we encounter whenever we attempt to borrow the viewer/cipher/star dynamic from other media: While in movies I might only observe a violent encounter between human and Abyssal High Dragon, in videogames I must simultaneously don the silly motion capture suit and perform before a greenscreen. In games, as on stage, I sense the virtual dragon waiting politely for me to finish.

I believe it is for these reasons that I enjoy Inquisition most whenever sex, friendship and trust advance to the foreground; when I’m shooting the shit with Bull and his mercenaries, or wandering the wilderness listening to Sera embarrass all our mutual acquaintances. These are the performances I wish to deliver on behalf of the game’s protagonist, and so I am put off each time it insists my primary purpose within it is to pantomime murder over and over again. I resent the market forces that drove Bioware to inlay my favourite scenes between swathes of banal violence stretching beyond the horizon. I resent the quantification of all things into obstacles to crush and spoils to obtain in the name of a vain and transparent ‘core loop’ whose underlying ideology I find toxic. If there is to be room in my life for huge videogames I must ask them to do more than incrementally enhance the resolution and scope at which I view and simultaneously pantomime the penetration of my character’s enemies. They must stop attempting to gratify me in this way; frankly, I’d be thrilled if they sought to do literally anything else.

Armageddon

Projects | by

Armageddon is a videogame by me you can read about in this blog post and play (for free!) on itch.io.

newScreen1

Everybody has to do something. Me, I dissociate. So when I look back at my graduation photo I don’t recognize myself in the face. I see the glassy half-sneer my muscles make each time they force a smile; I see the silly robes my university afforded me, and the silver medallion my parents had me present to the camera. But that was just my body. I don’t live in my body. I am aware of the places it goes and the things it does, but I am not in it. Instead, I live in a dream. While my body lurches through conversations, I busy myself imagining what I might have said, and how my acquaintances might have been impressed; how they might have responded, and what I might have gained. While my body quakes and slouches in proximity to some person it finds attractive, I flirt with a phantasmic projection. While my body drains the bar of whiskey I might well be on the dancefloor. My body does not like to dance, but I do. It resents me for it. We have become estranged.

On that day when I graduated it felt like the dream was ending. In university there had always been time to meet the people I wanted to meet, to realize the personality I coveted in my fantasies and to lead the sort of life I imagined I should lead. Now there was no time, and my body had not done any of these things. As we prepared for convocation my body and I looked out at three hundred faces; many had been acquaintances, but precious few were friends. My body was lonely, for those faces smiled away from it. The dream gave me some measure of solace; though it faded second by second, in there the faces smiled at me.

I began Armageddon during the ‘Compo’ section of Ludum Dare 27 (a game jam whose theme was “10 seconds”). It’s a game about that moment when the dream ended, and about the ensuing years. It’s about how to confront privilege, and then how to confront failure. It’s about how Vancouver becomes two different cities late at night, when the skytrains stop running but other people still drive their cars. Mostly it’s about that peculiar sort of stasis that happens when the gears in your brain spin independent of your worldly form. One day it will burn you to cinders.

Revisiting Problem Attic

Game Criticism | by

I told Liz Ryerson I’d try to get a Let’s Play together for her videogame Problem Attic (a videogame you can read about and play for free on her website) way back in January of 2014. I needed to take care of a few things first, however. Most pressingly I needed a reasonable microphone, which was simple enough to acquire. But secondly I wanted to try correcting the frontal lisp that has embarrassed me since childhood. A frontal lisp happens when your tongue sticks through your teeth as you pronounce an English ‘S’; the word ‘spin’ becomes ‘thpin’, for example, or the name ‘Liz Ryerson’ becomes ‘Lith Ryerthon’. This was unacceptable.

One day last August I resolved to go cold turkey; I would simply refuse to allow my tongue through my teeth unless performing the English ‘th’ (a sound present in few other languages, perhaps because of how utterly bizarre it sounds and how badly it links with other consonants). The first week or two my tongue would slam into my gums every time I tried to talk; the ensuing months gave me jaw cramps from clenching it all day long. By the time I recorded voiceover for this video I’d gotten a passable handle on my new way of speech; when I listen back to the recordings, however, I cringe at every single bad ‘S’ (of which there are many). Having read these two paragraphs, dear viewer, you now get to do the same!

What follows is a Let’s Play of Liz Ryerson’s Problem Attic from beginning to end, with voiceover recorded after the playthrough. I made it exactly one year after publishing Fashion, Emptiness and Problem Attic on this very website; my perspective on the game has changed quite a bit since then, but I’m still fairly happy with my work.

Notes on IndieCade

Game Criticism | by

I attended IndieCade for the first time this year!

My friend ceMelusine and I had grown tired of watching all our twitter friends have fun at game conferences without us. And so, right after missing GDC last March (for the twenty-fifth consecutive year) we resolved to fly down from Vancouver and see what IndieCade was about.

I didn’t get everything I hoped to from LA, as is usually the case when my surroundings require me to schmooze; I am often shy, cold and awkward around new people. Nonetheless, I am pleased to report that the conference yielded many memorable moments and a few resonant themes. I thought I would document them here as a sort of travelogue through the great state of small videogames.

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March of the Pigs

Game Criticism | by

#GamerGate believes it is winning.

For those of us on the wrong side of the endless media shit barrage, this is a difficult statement to parse. Who, exactly, is winning? Who for that matter is losing, and what shall they lose? What does anyone stand to gain from this fiasco? If we chose to ‘surrender’, what would be the terms?

The language of ‘culture war’, it turns out, is indistinguishable from the language of actual war. We imagine battles fought, moves made, territory gained and lost; a coherent narrative of the sort we’d see in a military history book. Yet as we gaze into the abyss of Gamer Gate (and as the abyss gazes menacingly into us) there is no through line to be found. There is no organized military following a strict chain of command, no unified strategic objective. Instead we encounter a sort of militia in which any given member might be an activist, an agitator, a sadist or a profiteer. This lot is too diverse (in the sense that the audience to a public execution might be ‘diverse’) to condense its will into a unified whole. Instead it spreads itself everywhere at once, a rolling cloud of excrement whose form is impossible to discern.

One of the hashtag’s innumerable undulating faces insists Gamer Gate is about “ethics”, though not in any specific sense of the term. Another is preoccupied with locating women on the internet and calling them “cunts” over and over again. Gamer Gate appears to be unconcerned by the fact that its expressed goals contradict as often as they overlap. Its denizens seem perfectly content to deny, to shift blame, to escalate and so on. Howsoever they might differ, their sole point of agreement remains: They believe Gamer Gate should never end. Enamoured by its lawlessness, its savagery and its stupidity (which manifest, as Noam Chomsky is fond of saying, in that precise order) the Gaters rage on into September, unfocused as ever. What can we say is the true purpose of Gamer Gate anymore, save for the prolonging of Gamer Gate? How should we describe a supposed theatre of ‘culture war’ in which the only apparent strategic objective is to roam about in perpetuity setting fire to the flammable? This is no ‘war’ we see before us. It’s a hockey riot, sanctioned tacitly by social media companies and the great state of videogames. All it lacks is police.

Like any good riot, Gamer Gate has its share of anonymous militants using other people’s faces as their shield. As The Art of War reminds us, anonymity represents the ultimate defensive formation: It presents no angle of attack even as it permits all manner of atrocities against one’s target. The militants sneak about using shitty words like ‘doxxing’ to rationalize their monstrous and criminal abuse of the marginalized. Meanwhile, conscientious activists stand in the foreground preaching about “ethics”. The militants hide behind the preachers as the preachers blithely ignore the presence of the militants; both groups, united under the banner of ‘gamer’, stand distinct yet indistinct, free (by their estimation) to avow or disavow whichever actions help their cause.

The effects of this implicit partnership are as horrific as they are disorienting. The cultural construct of the ‘gamer’, a figure shared by preacher and militant alike, flails this way and that as if affected by a debilitating psychosis. “How dare you use ad hominem attacks against us” shouts one ‘gamer’ as a second speculates about the odour of their victims’ genitals. “How dare you accuse us of perpetuating rape culture” yowls a third ‘gamer’ as a fourth threatens rape survivors with sexual assault. “How dare you accuse us of violence”, bellows a fifth ‘gamer’ as a sixth inflicts violence on a woman as revenge for critiquing the degree of violence present in videogames. “This is about ethics!”

A rigorous grasp of “ethics” in the philosophical sense of the term would, of course, compel our preachers to consider the possibility that every gain they claim on behalf of Gamer Gate resulted predominantly from militant harassment campaigns (and, furthermore, that these campaigns actually pre-date Gamer Gate by many years). Yet I do not see this concern reflected in the voices of the congregation. Shall I conclude that the people calling for ethics only seek fair treatment for themselves, and that they do so by any available means? Are we no longer discussing ethics in any capacity, having fallen back upon its duplicitous cousin tyranny? It is difficult to say when so many voices cry in unison at cross purposes from one another. Indeed, it is difficult to say anything at all.

Riots like this one are but one of the many perils to which we can look forward so long as we live under a monoculture of ‘gamers’. In a more pluralistic domain each individual might enjoy the liberty to produce and consume as they see fit, building unique and valid identities around these modes of self-expression. Under ‘gamers’, however, taste is a matter of public interest and, therefore, subject to public inquisition. The monoculture holds consensus to be a foregone conclusion: For every game there exists one objective review score, tangible and knowable, as real and true as the plastic in the disc. Each ‘gamer’ believes their own values to be the culture’s common values. Each believes their own review score to be the correct one. Each looks upon disagreement as delusional at best and heretical at worst. Their belonging in the culture rests upon how closely they manage to fit the local weighted average.

Seeking to eliminate dissent and, therefore, to defend the status quo, the monoculture successfully obscures all the processes by which the games industry actually manipulates it. The preachers of Gamer Gate do not complain about the marketing practices by which AAA’s target demographic honed itself to a fine point; they excuse the publishing practices by which a loose confederation of ambitious game studios congealed into a handful of annualized franchise mills; they celebrate the development practices by which accommodating the cultural mean became a matter of religious fervour. In a culture that has made them poorer in every respect they remain content to punch down at whichever outliers they can find, punishing a disempowered few for regarding them as violent and misogynistic monsters rather than the wealthy giants who made them that way.

Those of us who make videogames (and writing that pertains to videogames) have little stake in the ‘gamer’ monoculture; many of us would prefer to abandon it. Yet what we’ve learned from Gamer Gate is that one cannot simply secede from ‘gamer’ culture without incident. (Arguably, it was our determination to do so that sparked this riot in the first place.) ‘Gamers’ depend on us, and we on them, in the exact same sense that a narcissistic partner is codependent with the victim of his abuse. ‘Gamers’ demand an unending stream of products with which to reify their cultural identity while we require funding and must often seek it near or within mainstream circles (no matter how abusive we find these circles to be). The videogame scene’s avant garde is, in no uncertain terms, a colony of the ‘gamer’ empire. Like an imperial power, ‘gamers’ demand control over everything we produce. Under their rule developers must make only what ‘gamers’ will like; writers must produce reviews only for these ‘objectively’ good products; and, most importantly, every single one of these reviews must contain nothing except a replication of the same ‘objective’ score. Where games like Depression Quest manage to obtain broader cultural appeal the ‘gamer’ appropriates this, seizing all the benefits of the situation while simultaneously disenfranchising their creators. “Games are art!” cries a seventh ‘gamer’ while an eighth hurls slurs at Zoe Quinn for daring to produce something other than mere entertainment.

Existing as no more than a whirling storm of tuples in the databases of online retailers and dwelling solely amongst images and AstroTurf, ‘gamer’ culture cannot imagine a world made from anything except these things. Where it observes human friendship it imagines vast conspiracies, unable to comprehend a culture connected by individuals rather than brands and corporations. Where it encounters the flesh and blood experiences of Anita Sarkeesian it seeks to combat them with the pixels and ideology of Vivian James. (It is, in fact, incapable of discerning a difference between the two entities.) When people dispute its rule it assumes they serve a rival empire from the distant continent of ‘Social Justice’, come to steal its wealth and territory. It cannot imagine a reality without consensus, where different people and ideas coexist. Instead it drives its dissidents to revolt as an excuse to further marginalize them.

The ‘gamer’ empire, like all empires, wages a campaign of perpetual violence against its discontents. It threatens to eject them yet never permits them to leave. It goads them into attacking it so it might justify harassing them continuously. It makes impossible demands of them so it might punish them for failing to satisfy it. This is the never ending dialectic by which the powers of industry process creative people into pig feed: Exit the trough and you must answer to the animals.