[Voice of Meridia from Skyrim] "A new hands touches the beacon."
Greetings gentle
viewer, welcome to the first of a
multi-part series examining game culture,
language, minority gaming, and discourse.
Sounds thrilling don't it? I'll be honest,
if someone opened their video with a
similar statement, they'd need a pretty
good hook to keep me watching. So here's
my one sentence pitch: this is a series
about how a locked door, an angry brit, a
magical tattoo, a foot-tapping hedgehog,
and some Nordic racists, all with the
help of a dead anthropologist, taught me
a deeper appreciation for an art form
that I've loved since before I could
properly spell my own name. There, how's
that? And I do feel before I get much
further into this that it's also worth
mentioning: even if video games really
aren't your thing, what I'm doing here
isn't just for other gamers. If it were I
really couldn't personally justify
making it in the first place, let alone
including all the supporting material to
make my points. Instead I'm using games
as a springboard to broader themes. This
is where my social science background
sidles up and introduces itself:
anthropologist Clifford Geertz, beginning
in the 1970s, theorized that a reliable
method for picking up our cultural ideas
and beliefs was treating culture as a
form of text. He meant reading a culture
by noting how the culture sorts its
concepts and beliefs into internally
consistent categories, and what it then
subsequently calls them, and what its
members consider related ideas to that
original idea. We call this method
Symbolic Anthropology. In this model
mind-reading is irrelevant for
discussions of societal behavior anyway,
because what matters is actual behavior
and how it's discussed by the
participants, what words a community uses what actions they take, what patterns
they repeat, and what members of the
community say about what happened.
We don't have to worry about their
motivation because we're listening to
how they describe their motivation.
So, speaking of discussing ideas HBomberguy,
Philosophy Tube, and Folding Ideas
are youtubers with a collective
following of 1.3 million subscribers as
of the writing of this script. They have
between them nearly a dozen videos
dedicated to gameing,
the industry of video games, and concept
analysis. Folding Ideas's "Minecraft,
Sandboxes, and Colonialism", Philosophy
Tube's "The Trouble with the Video Game
Industry", HBomberguy's "Doom-Fist In-Depth Analysis and Review" and "In Defense of
Dark Souls 2", and most importantly the
"And Here's Why Series" HBomberguy's
"Pathologic is Genius and Here's Why",
Speedrunning is Awesome and Here's Why",
"Bloodborne is Genius and Here's Why"... I
say those are the most important because
it was for me. They're tied to the very
first video that I ever saw from h-bomb
which led me to the other creators and
many more besides. I discovered his work
through the tantalizingly titled "Fallout
3 is Garbage and Here's Why". I watched
that now almost four-year-old polemic
entranced. One of his complaints echoed a
common topic in gaming which was
replicated in the Folding Ideas on sandboxing
and even in Philosophy Tube and
his respect for Jim sterling. A complaint
which comes up a lot but doesn't get
much discussion when it does. Each of
them had a similar argument but entirely
different even mutually alienating
phrasing and examples. They also focused
more on the corporate side of gaming and
less on the discourse of gaming. But I
think the noise in the intersection of
those two considerations: discussing
games versus gaming as an industry
controlled by huge corporations is
just as important. By favoring business
over language they ended up
demonstrating just how difficult it was
stating the core problems that they were
noticing. Accurately namely what each of
them was hinting was we really have no
language to discuss how subtext and
assumptions of a game replicate the
intentions of its authors and persuade
players to participate in those
assumptions, based on the assumptions the
authors have about the players. I want to
be clear on my position here: games
are a cultural artifact, they're a
product of a society and something
interpreted by its members. They are as
validly art as films or books or pottery.
In exploring games gaming and game
reviews,
I found it surprising that well-known
elements of style analysis in other
disciplines like art criticism, or
literary criticism, including:
usually superficial or completely absent.
Which is kind of baffling since the
difference in effect on the player even
between something as simple as a
top-down gaming experience, and a
first-person gaming experience, is pretty
immediately apparent. Even unrestrained 3am youtuber reviews, full of caffeine and
opinions, have trouble discussing basic
elements of emotional appeal. Folding
Ideas, aka Dan Olsen, pinpoints a lack of
vocabulary directly as a key factor in a
current debate within the World of
Warcraft community over whether the
original format was better than the
current format. {Olsen} Now, I do want to walk a
fine line here because when it comes to
talking about video games and difficulty
the conversation turns into a swamp
super fast, because the language that we
use to talk about the systems and
interactions isn't particularly well
developed so people end up just shouting
the same words at each other with
different implicit meanings and it goes
nowhere. {Rabbit} That said, I don't expect every
player to have a detailed literary
analysis of Overwatch, but there's got to
be better options than all of these
breathless reviews using "awe-inspiring"
and "flawless" or the generic objections
of "repetitive" and "lazy". Plus the desire's
there even from the engineering and
design side: Erik M Gregory PhD discussed
engagement in "Understanding Video
Gaming's Engagement" all the way back in
2008. Jose Zagal, and friends, published
"Towards an Ontological Language for Game Analysis"
further back in 2005, using even
older texts as backup. By the way,
remember those dates. Zagal and his
co-authors happened to be at the Georgia
Institute of Technology, in their
computer science department, and they
were arguing that design needed a
vocabulary to describe the
self-contained world-scape that a
character inhabits. They noted that the
way an overall story is broken into
manageable sub stories, then fitted to
overall theme, and finally how everything
is combined into a full experience,
somehow doesn't have a word in game
design. What we mean when we describe a
games "difficulty" or its "persuasiveness".
And yet any first-year theater student
could write several pages on the subject
of storytelling tropes, Freytag's Pyramid,
Checkov's Gun... Similarly it almost feels
at times like Dr. Gregory is suggesting
every game reviewer desperately needs to
take an intro to social science or an
English Lit class. Zagal and company
threw down a gauntlet that the gaming
community, it seems, over a decade later
still isn't prepared to take up.
I thought I'd give it a shot, with Gertz as
my guide. Simply break down the various
complaints and experiences of gamers,
compare the commonalities, and named them.
Then they're accessible for discussion
and analysis. BTW,
this isn't about Ludo narrative, or worse
ludonarrative dissonance. It's not about
how a game's raw mechanics do or don't
conflict with the story the author's are
attempting to tell, or the guesses
they've made about how the player will
end up playing the game physically.
Frankly that horse has been beaten to
death for so many years now it's a fine
powder. This also isn't about plot holes,
or single instances of choices within a
game which are counterintuitive. Instead,
what they were all coming at from
different angles was the reality
contained within each game has a series
of perspectives that it presumes the
player understands and accepts. It then
manipulates those perspectives to
perpetuate the particular game's story.
It inspires the player to continue
playing, hopefully, but potentially it
goes further and gets them to invest
significant money in add-ons as new plot
lines develop, as new tools within the
game are developed, or DLCs like new skins for new suits or some piece of jewelry...
Before h-bomb I didn't even watch game
criticism very much. but since I'd played
Fallout 3 and I didn't enjoy, unlike many
self-styled reviewers at the time, I was
curious if he had similar complaints to
my own. His splendid rant hit most of
Fallout 3 that I didn't like. Now, my own
introduction to Fallout was New Vegas.
Loved It!
Please sir may I have
another!
If Fallout 3 had been first, I'd think
the series was first-person shooters
with tedious dialogue and a bizzare karma
system based on, well near as I could
guess, phases of the Moon. I found it...
Boring. It was written for the type of
gamer I'm not. It favors a play style
that I don't. And a lot of its quests are
pretty firmly rooted in that writing and
that play style. Mr. B Tongue, another
youtuber, discusses almost the same
experience when playing Mass Effect for
the first time. {BTongue} I knew from the map that
in order to reach the next objective and
progress the story I should turn left
after leaving the office. So of course I
turned right because that's how I do.
I walked into a side room and struck up a
conversation with these two
funny-looking things. This bit of dialogue
represented the first opportunity I had
to poke the world of Mass Effect with a
stick and everything I found was full of
creativity and soul. I suspect that the
few minutes I spent in this random side
room, talking to these two random weirdos,
was what sold me on the entire series.
But what if Mass Effect had been more
cinematic? This scene and its accompanying
Codex entries would have been
the first thing cut for time. Let's bust
out my sloppy MSPaint diagrams again. In
a linear narrative like you'd find in a
book or a movie, setting details are only
included when they're directly relevant
to the story. But as a story becomes less
linear, as it becomes more "Shandfied",
the distinction between story and
setting begins to dissolve. The setting
becomes the story and vice-versa.
{Rabbit} His complaint of other games not living
up to a similar standard was what he
called "Shandification". Now he meant
that as a shorthand for having several
different ways to complete a story.
He based the term on the novel "The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy: Gentleman".
Which, for those who haven't read it, is a
nine book series with almost as much
subplot as plot. It's very interesting to
read, but it relies on the reader having
several different ways to get to a main
story because the primary narrator is
actually incapable of staying on topic.
Interestingly he, Hbomb, and I, also had
the same experience of comparing New
Vegas and Fallout 3. Weird... What really
caught my attention was within Hbomb's
screed, he made a passing point about
games habituating playstyle, not just A
equals fire and B equals jump,
but routine in-game challenges, plot
lines, and dialogue, which creates
standard player solutions to situations.
In other words side quests, minigames,
anything as a game within the game, those
micro games are justified and
perpetuated within the larger games
reality using certain tropes. It relies
on a player-type to provide the self
motivation for pursuing the quest in the
first place. It's exactly what I didn't
like. If he didn't like it, and I didn't
like it, and we've noticed it
independently from one another but
neither of us had ever heard a term for
it, there was something meaningful in
that observation sure. But also something
meaningful in the hole where that term
should be. He was specifically focused on
how the lock-picking mechanism, and the
skill tree in Fallout 3 is redundant because it's regularly
undermined by keys for most of the locks
that you find being hidden near those
locked locations. Players get trained to
look for keys and not investing in the
lockpick skill. It favors a particular
style. Now that wasn't the specific
example that I would have used, but
Hbomb had a clever insight regardless,
and it looked like an issue I'd noticed
way back in 2014 in an old blog that I
wrote. Do people still do opinion blogs?
Or are we supposed to call those think
pieces now? Maybe it was a think piece...
Anyway I'd noticed game critiques like
those of the now well-known Anita
Sarkeesian ultimately were just about
how certain go-to characters and
settings in a lot of games rely on
being played by a certain kind of player.
Being a minority gamer myself
nothing she said felt particularly
earth-shattering. honestly I was pretty
surprised at the backlash. So, I wrote a
blog about it. Still, what struck me
wasn't so much that her work focused on
proving that women are all too often the
butt of the joke, it was that even she
didn't seem quite to notice the
assumptions about plot and
characterization that she was also
simply accepting. The ending of Earthworm Jim for example, where Princess What's-Her-Name
-Yes that's the character's actual name-
is killed just before Jim rescues her.
Sarkeesian noted it for being pretty
misogynist, what with the joke depending
on crushing a female character to death
with a cow. But she didn't seem to notice
the whole plot of the game:
it's a worm in a person suit. I was
significantly more alienated by the
potential inter-species romance that the
game relied on to get to the not
particularly funny ending then she was
by the ending itself. Now this may in
part be because for many sexual and
racial minorities, the beastial analogy,
or the idea "they're hidden among us" isn't
all that far back in the collective
history, so I tend to be a little more
cued into symbolism which relies heavily
on those sorts of juxtapositions in the
first place. And I'm not saying that
Earthworm Jim is racist, or homophobic by
the way, I happen to think it's just a
crude and overall unremarkable first
entry in a forgettable franchise. But the
fact that she and I could find the joke
unfunny for completely different reasons,
- And that's only two of the options by
the way. there's a third one which is: the
fact that the ending isn't funny to
someone new to gaming, who doesn't know
the "damsel in distress" trope at all, let
alone it being a central motivation for
whole swathes of games from Donkey Kong forward -
we can therefore use the ending
and the dozens more like it, and the
symbolism in it, to pinpoint both who is
most likely writing the game and who
they expect would be the audience for it.
Similarly the ending of braid where it
turns out that the princess didn't need
rescuing and was in fact running from
the supposed hero the whole time by
darting from house to house. It was
praised for the inversion of the "damsel
in distress" trope, even Sarkeesian gives
it some credibility and... okay. But again
this also isn't particularly funny or
surprising, but more importantly it isn't
particularly clever if the player
doesn't know "The Princess is in Another
Castle" is one of the oldest gamer jokes
next to "All Your Base Are Belong to Us".
Frankly, Sarkeesian was giving Jonathan
Blow who wrote Braid, credibility for
inverting a trope which is only a trope
to certain cultures to begin with.
Right! I probably should have said "Spoilers" there. So if you didn't know the ending
to Braid or Earthworm Jim, pretend you
didn't hear me give them away.
Anyway, Hbomb got a little closer with his
breakdown of Braid by suggesting that
the design and level system force
the player to interrogate issues of
motive and sacrifice, but again that
depends on an ending which to many
people isn't terribly clever, to get the
player thinking that it might have a
deeper message in the first place. All
this means I think both Sarkeesian and
Hbomb fell short of truly interrogating
the actual language of games and gaming
because they were too focused on the
tropes as they are, rather than as a
symbol being used to communicate
specific ideas within a particular group.
That is where my attention will be
focused. So, for the next few videos I'll
be going over what I've identified as
key ideas in gaming and game criticism,
how I believe they fit into a larger
framework of analysis, and why I think
this topic is important on a broader
cultural scale. Along the way I hope to
present an accessible example of how
social scientists approach emerging
cultural complexes and subcultures, how
we fit them to existing theoretical
methods or even develop new methods to
accommodate the new data, and finally how
we justify the conclusions we reach
based on those observations. I hope
you'll join me. If this pawprint is
the kind of content you like to see
please like and subscribe to my channel.
If you're new here please have a look at
my previous video on the Native American
origins for communism and anarchy, and
finally if you're impressed enough with
what you've seen so far and you'd like
to throw a few dollars my way please
check out my Patreon. I hope you have fun.
