Yesterday, I wrote about Vox Day’s extravagantly evasive — yet highly revealing — interview with David Pakman. But the interview also featured a few striking moments of candor. One of these came when Day — a sometime gave developer as well as the biggest asshole in Sci Fi — offered his answer to the question: “What is Gamergate really about?”
Suggesting that the issue of “corruption in game journalism” was little more than “the spark that set the whole thing off,” Day declared that
what Gamergate is fundamentally about is the right of people to design, develop and play games that they want to design, develop and play without being criticized for it.
Which is an. er, interesting perspective, as there is in fact no “right” to be immune from criticism.
If you write a book, if you make a movie, if you post a comment on the internet — you should be ready for it to be criticized. Because that’s how free speech works. That’s how art works. And that’s how ideas work.
Criticism — whether it is positive or negative — helps to sharpen ideas and make art less self-indulgent; it pushes creators to hone their craft and expand their vision of the world. And it helps the consumers of art not only to look at art with a more critical eye but also to appreciate it more fully, by helping to draw out the more subtle meanings of this art and to put it in a broader cultural (social, political) perspective.
Of course, neither the artists nor the consumers of art are required to listen to this criticism, but they have no right to demand that such criticism be eliminated.
But Vox is right in one sense: the elimination of criticism is in fact is what #Gamergate has been about all along — or at least the elimination of criticism aimed in their direction. Indeed, that’s what most #Gamergaters mean when they talk about fighting “corruption in game journalism” — shutting down those writers and publications that have dared to critique the prejudices of a backward portion of the gaming universe that is hostile to any challenges to the status quo ante — particularly from women with opinions different from theirs. That’s what drove the outrage over the “death of gamer” articles last Fall. And that’s what has driven “critics” of Anita Sarkeesian from the start.
Speaking of which: If you want to see how testy Gamergate types get when the criticism they lob at others gets turned back in their direction, even in jest, take a look at Jordan Owen’s new video responding to a post I wrote a few days ago gently mocking Owen’s recent plea for more money to fund The Sarkeesian Effect, the alleged “film” he and far-right Anton LaVey impersonator Davis Aurini are allegedly putting together.
Owen has devoted much of his life over the past several years to attacking Sarkeesian, a woman whose main “crimes” in the eyes of her detractors have been that 1) she raised more money than she asked for to produce a series of videos looking at sexist tropes in video games, and 2) that she’s taken longer than originally planned to put out these videos (which is largely because the extra money she raised has allowed her to research these videos more thoroughly and increase her production values, but never mind).
Yet Owen is outraged that anyone would even gently tweak him and his partner Aurini for going over budget and missing deadlines on their own film. Of course, Owen and Aurini are planning on charging their Patreon supporters more money at the end of the month unless these supporters specifically opt out; Sarkeesian herself never even requested any of the additional money she received.
In his video, Owen also compared me with Bill Donohue of the Catholic League which is, er, weird. But hey, it’s his right to criticize me, no matter how ineptly.
Here’s the video, if you’re interested. Alas, he did not film it in his famous bathtub.
Ugh. I mixed up your and you’re in that last post 🙁
Anyway, the animals fighting = animal racism thing was pretty hilarious. Someone doesn’t quite know how animals work.
Sorry, let me be a little clearer: critiquing video games based on social morals doesn’t actually require you, as an individual, to change one fucking bit. Stop trying to make other people shut up because you don’t like what they have to say when it doesn’t hurt you in any way.
@katz
Wow, really? That’s awesome. :O It really deserved it. I looked it up and it won in 2011 even though the game it was from came out in 2007. Well, I guess delayed recognition is better than none.
Man, this one is all over the place. From Aristotelian ethics to God to “Traditional Western values” to animal behavior. And I’m not sure how evolution or Marxism got into the conversation but I’m pretty sure none of us brought them up.
How can lions be racist against other lions? They’re all the same color!
My stupid phone won’t let me embed on this site so sorry for the long obnoxious link, but click on it to find kittens committing cultural Marxism.
%3Bhttps%253A%252F%252Fwww.pinterest.com%252Fsmdl0711%252Fwhite-kittens%252F%3B236%3B291
@WWTH “How can lions be racist against other lions? They’re all the same color!”
Not quite
http://4.bp.blogspot.com/-5xYt6oVqUYI/T9fH4omEIFI/AAAAAAAACU4/qZ9Lz1dXaAc/s1600/black__melanistic__lion_wallpaper_by_paulie_svk-d52lazs.jpg
Every time a kitten snuggles a bunny, God cries, because that GOES AGAINST THE ORDER.
http://imgc.allpostersimages.com/images/P-473-488-90/21/2144/OCBCD00Z/posters/jane-burton-black-dutch-rabbit-with-black-and-white-kitten.jpg
* Still don’t think lions are racist towards lions with melanism though.
I can only think of this now.
If Aristotle is as far along as your “science” ever got, boy howdy you’ve missed some important developments.
Like actual science.
How “natural” is your computer, by the way? Know what else is “natural”? Arsenic is all-natural. Do you put that on your natural oatmeal? Oh, wait, you can’t eat oatmeal, since oats are cultivated and have been bred for certain traits by humans for millenia, and hence are certainly not natural.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Appeal_to_nature
You know, I actually read a study about this! Female lions prefer male lions with long, dark manes, and other male lions are more cautious of them. So lions do judge each other based on their color!
@Spindrift
That lion must get all the sex because female lions happen to be more attracted to males with darker hair because dark hair means more testosterone or something IDK. They like fucking dark haired lions at least.
Oops, katz beat me.
How did I not know lions come in black!? He’s gorgeous! I’m waiting for the troll to come back and call him a thug or something.
Well, bad news for this boy, I guess.
http://www.wall321.com/thumbnails/detail/20121029/animals%20lions%20white%20lions%20leucism%201932×1449%20wallpaper_www.wall321.com_37.jpg
@Spindrift
Don’t worry. He has fine role models like Kimba to look up to.
KIIIMBA~!
Jackie, you are quickly becoming my favorite person by like leaps and bounds.
The game genre isn’t all male, you festering turd. I’ve been playing video games since the 1980s, and some of us have been there longer than that. It’s just as much ours as yours, and we have just as much right to an opinion as you have.
Know what else is a virtue? Justice. It’s a Platonic virtue. Social “Justice” Warriors: Virtue is right in the name! (And last time I checked, God was pretty all about justice in the religion you claim to espouse.)
Oh the nostalgia!
Oh, ‘nother random fact about lions. There are actually some (rare) female lionesses with manes. There are even some male-sized, unmaned lionesses that compete over territory like males and laze about like them, too.
http://voices.nationalgeographic.com/2012/10/09/weird-wild-rare-maned-lionesses-explained/
So, you know, nature isn’t even all that hot on sex and gender roles 100% of the time. And none of the male lions are making a big stink about these lioneeeeeeesses coming in a taking their power away from them either. Mostly because they’re animals but you get the point.
@Paradoxical Intention
You had me at “I’m a YouTube gamer”.
“And none of the male lions are making a big stink about these lioneeeeeeesses coming in a taking their power away from them either.”
Somehow I’m picturing male lions complaining about how dangerous it is to work on an oil rig, and how male lions are totally disposable in modern lion society.
That’s a weird mental image. Glad the MlRM (male lions’ rights movement) never caught on.
At least when male lions go their own way they don’t troll feminist blogs.
@jaygee “I think about how sequential hermaphrodites in mollusks (I think specifically limpets?) would blow their minds.”
Yes, slipper limpets (Genus Crepidula) switch from male to female. There are also more than 100 species of mollusks, both snails and clams, that are not only simultaneous hermaphrodites, but self-fertilize. An act characterized as anatomically impossible for humans is routine for them. Think about how that would blow their minds!
@Banana Jackie Cake “This guy must be a Neonazi.”
Maybe he’s Janos/Vlad from Clusterfuck Nation. That guy occasionally asks other people in the comments section of a peak oil blog what they think of Gamergate, generally accusing them of being on the SJW side in the process. I never have cared much for Vlad, who seems never to have met a retrograde cause he doesn’t like, including Fascism.
That leads me to the subject of this entry.
“Gamergate is fundamentally about is the right of people to design, develop and play games that they want to design, develop and play without being criticized for it.”
That belief is one of the hallmarks of a net.kook. I have a list of the others in The Way of the (Political) K00K. See how many the Gators and other MRAs display. I’m confident readers will find lots of them. The MRAs were kooky when I encountered them in soc.men on Usenet 10 years ago and they’re kooky now.
http://mrwgifs.com/wp-content/uploads/2013/08/Goofy-Blushing-Playing-With-His-Ears.gif
Wow, this got busy. Sorry for being late with my reply, but I was at work.
So I’m going to use Banana Jackie Cake’s post here, as I feel the points therein are the ones most often used. Obviously the views expressed from this point forward are my own perspectives.
“One) Games have art design to them. From costumes to set design to character design, everything is designed with purpose. There are very few games that just toss things in for no reason.”
Yeah, games are designed. I would disagree that games do not have things tossed into them for no reason. There is a reason, that being the rule of cool. But other than how cool something is or would be, it has no reason. Games are a product, whose exclusive purpose is to sell as many copies as possible in order to generate as much capital as possible. They are a collaborative effort, of which artists contribute less than a quarter of the work involved, to create a product which must appeal to the greatest number of people, and by extension must therefore appeal to the lowest common denominator.
“Two) Games have stories. Many of them might not have the best stories, but many have amazing stories and moments. Penumbra: Overture, Psychonauts, Gone Home, Silent Hill 2, Red Dead Redemption–all have good stories with real emotion to them, whether that’s fear, humor, sadness, disgust, hate, love, whatever.”
Games do not have stories. Games are written by committee, wherein the committee members play a long and elaborate game of telephone. The end result bears no resemblance to anything envisioned by individual writers. Silent Hill was used as an example, and it is often considered one of the frontrunners for good writing in games; however, how much of that was intentional? How much of that game’s story was just a fun coincidence, and the developers just decided to run with fans’ interpretations? How much was just things placed in the game because they seemed creepy?
I’ll offer a counter point: the Souls games. They, like Silent Hill, are frequent examples of games being intricately designed and written. Yet 80% of the “story” in any of those games is pure, baseless speculation. The game’s writers never have any clear answers, and all the story elements presented in those games are just connections the fans made themselves. So each time I hear about a game’s writing, I have to wonder how much of that is just wishful thinking making tenuous connections, where none truly exist.
“Three) Games have direction. Fixed camera angles, first person perspective, third person perspective, scene animation, all of these had to be planned out to best keep the player invested and immersed in the story and gameplay.”
So do advertisements. Would you call those art?
“Fourth) There’s still a ton of art mediums that go into making games. Saying games aren’t art is like saying 3D animation isn’t art or costume designing isn’t an art or set designing isn’t an art. You’re disregarding years of work people have went through to create the game.”
Number of collaborators, and hours spent working, does not make a thing art.
I have a moral objection to violent video games, but moral issues are a conversational quagmire so best not to look at that too deeply.