Category Archives: Game Criticism

Damsel in Distress

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I’m talking about me, not Peach, and my distress is the kind that will end with me punching my way through the prison wall and navigating my way out through a maze of guards all by myself, thanks. But seriously, this is about Anita Sarkeesian’s project, Tropes Vs. Women in Videogames. Given how much space I’ve devoted to it here, the fact that I’ve blogged about how I’m getting kind of sick of the project, and the (finally!) release of the first video in the series just a few days ago, I don’t think any of my readers are going to be surprised that I’m going to post about it. The first video – Tropes Vs. Women in Video Games: Damsel in Distress: Part I – looks at the history of the trope in games from the 1970s forward, with Part II promising to deal with contemporary games. Like VGW’s Jen Bosier, I have “some mixed reactions about it.”

As the video opens, Sarkeesian does remind us that we can be both critical and enjoyably engaged – something that a lot of detractors of criticism tend to forget. And this is very important to remember. I can like playing a game (or watching a movie or reading a book) even though I recognize the things about it that bother me from an ideological and/or a methodological standpoint. Criticism does not equal (at least not always) inherent dislike.

Okay, so the purple female fox was switched to Starfox, but while it may be true that Crystal’s outfit change was completely unnecessary, I think there was probably more to the change than just wanting to eliminate her as a hero. For instance, using a known and popular hero (Starfox) probably made the game more marketable, as it already had an audience. While I do agree with Sarkeesian that Crystal’s transformation into a literally “foxy” damsel in distress was both problematic and unnecessary, I don’t think that the choice to turn the game into a Starfox sequel was not necessarily the worst choice they could have made.

It is totally valid to point out that Nintendo seems to have, as Bosier notes, a trend of passing over or changing female-hero games in favor of male-hero ones, and she says that “the cause/effect of this would make for a great discussion. Unfortunately, this is abandoned to instead discuss the history of kidnapped females and how they worked their way into video games.” And here I have to agree with Bosier.

Perhaps it’s just me, but if we’re watching to hear about games, do we really need to hear the entire history of the phrase “damsel in distress”? Also, if we do, why did we skip the entire genre of chivalric romance, which, oh, invented the trope in its present form? But that’s just my academic side having completely unnecessary fits for the sake of largely irrelevant historical accuracy. But seriously, the whole “damsel in distress” segment should probably be its own video, rather than a part of a videogame critique.

Overall, though, I think this series – which is hard to judge from Part I of a segment alone – might ultimately prove to be a good thing, even though I think that it’s overly simplistic in its approach. There were a lot of things I liked about it, and I think that she’s trying to take on a subject that’s enormously complex and reduce it to something she can put into small, 30-minute-or-less segments. And that’s no easy task.

I liked her point that Peach (from Super Mario Brothers) was once briefly playable, but that she hasn’t been since (outside of some of the multiplayer versions). This is a valid point – as is her remark that female characters tend to occupy the object-position to the male subject-position within a lot of games. Yes, this is true, but everybody – up to and including my proverbial uncle – knows these games exploit this trope to the level of the ridiculous: as Bosier says, “I don’t know a single gamer who would point to Peach or Zelda as accurate or compelling video game portrayals of women.”

But – again – I want to hear about what we can do now, how games are creating a problematic ideology now, rather than what happened in 1970s and 1980s arcade games (like Donkey Kong’s cutscenes of DK carrying the blonde up the ladders). While Peach is the proverbial “damsel-ball” between Mario and Bowser, and many games have picked up on and perpetuated the formula through the 1990s, I want to see how this trope has been changed – or, more frighteningly – if it hasn’t. And, as Bosier says, Sarkeesian doesn’t mention the positives: “Also, as an aside, for as much time as she spends discussing the damsels of the 80s, I noticed she didn’t mention that it was the same time period that also birthed Samus Aran.”

When we get down to it, what I really want to hear about is not a catalogue of games that use a trope that predates their creation by several thousand years. Yes, the damsel-in-distress trope is enormously problematic and rests on a cultural tradition of misogyny. But videogames are not to blame for its existence. They are also not the only medium to employ and perpetuate it – films, television, books, and so on are also horrible culprits. Yes, she acknowledges this, and I agree with Sarkeesian that appeal to tradition is no reason to perpetuate the trope, but I’m not sure I find as much value in the historical analysis that she’s doing here as I would be in seeing her critique current games that are still exploiting the damsel-in-distress trope (what she’s doing in Part II).

Now don’t get me wrong – I think there’s a lot of inherent value to doing a historical reading of this trope in games from the 1970s-1990s. In fact, the academic in me thinks that it would be a great way to examine the way in which our social practices with relation to the job-market and career-choices in the real world are being reflected by the frequency and type of damsel-trope exploitation in videogames. In other words, do these games accurately reflect the ideological conceptions of gender of their decades, or do they attempt to cling to outdated tropes… and why?

Sarkeesian does begin to approach the question of contemporary games, as when she discusses Nintendo’s 2007 Ocarina of Time – which, I have to say, has one of the more sexist commercials I’ve seen in a while… I mean, really? “Wilst thou get the girl? Or wilst thou play like one?” Not exactly a shining example of gender equality. Sarkeesian says that the use of the trope actively disempowers women in the games in which they are damsels in distress… and that it creates a dichotomy in which male characters can only be empowered when women are disempowered. She also says that male characters are allowed to escape their imprisonment – while women are expected to passively wait for rescue (usually by a male). And she’s absolutely right that this strips them, in the world of these games, of agency and even personality in most cases.

(Can I just say, in a side note, that Dragon’s Lair is awful? And Princess Daphne… I… I’m just not going to say anything, but did you see her [lack of] outfit?!)

Sarkeesian’s closing becomes a little too political, I think, for the kind of project she’s working on. Yes, she’s absolutely right that games are a reflection of our social practices, and that they can perpetuate harmful stereotypes. Absolutely. And she’s also right that developers can choose to have female heroes in their games. But I think that just making women protagonists isn’t the answer to the “problem” of the damsel-in-distress trope. The “problem” is in large part that it isn’t as simple as just making the hero female. For instance, Tomb Raider as a series doesn’t do a lot to remove the labels of either misogyny or objectification from videogames, and it has a female protagonist.

Like Bosier, I was left with “the burning question in my mind was simply, ‘What’s the point?’” Okay, yes, this trope exists, it’s a problem, but what do you want me to do with that? It’s the same question I ask my students when they present me with a catalogue of “look at this thing in this novel!” So what? What’s the actionable part of your thesis? Why is this relevant? Why should I care? As Bosier says, “My concern is that I really, really wanted this video to start a serious conversation. Not only start a conversation, but advance the conversation. This video merely states facts that are already known and with her constant referencing Peach and Zelda, it feels like we’re spinning our wheels.”

I want to make it clear that I’m supportive – despite my being rather tired of the constant invoking of Sarkeesian like some sort of martyr to the feminist-online-cause (and I am still sick of it) – of her work. I didn’t support the Kickstarter financially, but I do support her project spiritually, even if I’m not 100% on board with her methods or conclusions. As she says in the opening of her video, we can criticize things and still like them. But because it’s Sarkeesian, there are any number of people who have crawled back out of the woodwork to once again raise a trollish-level stink, as Gameranx notes in its piece from yesterday, “Comments Aren’t Disabled.” Because clearly that was so effective last time.

Ultimately, I think that this series will do more good than harm. In fact, I don’t think that beyond prodding the proverbial hornet’s nest of internet trolls, it will do much harm at all. While I would like it to be more critical, more engaged with the nuances of the industry, and more reflective of its purpose behind a vehicle for complaint, I think it’s far better existing than it would have been never to have been made. And I applaud Sarkeesian for her desire to make it. I’d like to see someone more familiar with the industry, more academic (or at least, more trained in formal critical practices), add to the conversation, but I’m glad Sarkeesian is making them. I also hope that other people – men, women, cisgendered folks – will join in the conversation, because as much as I support Sarkeesian’s project, I don’t want her to speak for all feminist, female, or non-standard-white-male gamers. I want her voice to be heard, yes, but I don’t want it to be my voice. So while I’m going to work on my small chirping from this corner of the academic feminist-gamer side of the world, I hope other people aren’t deterred either by the content of Sarkeesian’s work or the backlash that she’s receiving. I hope she inspires others to speak up and make videos and posts of their own, or to hunt down places (like The Border House or Stay Classy) where others are already doing so.

TLF: I’m a Feminist Gamer…

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So yesterday this post of mine went up over at The Learned Fangirl: “I’m a Feminist Gamer and I’m Over Anita Sarkeesian.” Sarkeesian’s Kickstarter project and the backlash that she received for it were hot topics on the internet and this blog for a while, and at first I was a fan of hers. I thought it was great that she was doing and saying the things that she was because they needed to be said. I’m still glad she did – and those things still need to be said, discussed, and considered in the gaming industry and community.

But, as I explain at TLF, I’m getting to be a bit done with a lot of where the conversation has (not) gone. Rehashing wrongs committed against women and minority populations in gaming communities, while perhaps therapeutic for those involved and thus valuable, is not the conversation that the industry at large needs to be having. I’m also dubious about the kind of knee-jerk, boiled-down feminism that Sarkeesian’s tweets and posts often seem to evince. I’m hoping she does more with her series than the kind of simplified analysis I’ve seen so far, but I’m not holding my breath.

Speaking Out

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So I’ve been swamped with personal and work-related business and haven’t posted here in a little bit… but also because I had a piece out for consideration with the “real media,” and wanted to hold off on repeating myself too much more until I knew whether it would be appearing in public or not.

It is. The Christian Science Monitor picked it up and has posted it today: “Stop blaming video games for America’s gun violence.” (Their title, not mine. I like cute titles. News sites do not. It’s a genre thing.) It’s a discussion that’s got a lot of attention today: Daniel Greenberg has a piece in The Atlantic offering support for the same position, a Louisville news site, on the other hand, attempts to leave the proverbial door open on that question, and over on DiabloInc, a poster asks fellow players if they view gaming as catharsis or “anger management.”

So now I sit back and hope that the internet is nicer to me than they were to Anita Sarkeesian. I have the feeling that most of them are going to be on my side (at least the ones that went after Sarkeesian will be), but there’s always a sense of trepidation when you broadcast yourself on public channels as opposed to these small, semi-private ones.

The whole experience has been interesting. I post here, and get a few friends to like it or share it,  and I post over at The Learned Fangirl from time to time, but even though they certainly have a broader reader-base than my little blog does, neither venue is anything like the CSM. So this is a little scary for me. I’m talking, loudly and on top of a very real media soapbox, about something highly controversial that not even my mother would agree with (no, really, my mother thinks I’m wrong – I wasn’t allowed videogames growing up, and especially not ones that included guns). I’m pretty sure I’m in the right here, but that doesn’t mean there might not be repercussions. And repercussions can be scary.

So I’m hoping that the internet is kinder to me than it has been to a lot of people. I’m hoping it will be reasonable (“hoping,” not “counting on”), and I’m hoping that tonight’s State of the Union will be similarly reasonable. I’m hoping that we aren’t entering a new 1980s-era age of paranoia and implicit censorship. I’m hoping that we’re able, as a society, to recognize the value in dissent of all kinds, in free speech, but also temper that with the acknowledgment that we need to base our treasured opinions in study and fact rather than paranoia and knee-jerk reactions.

Speaking from Ignorance

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Something interesting about the recent outcry against violent videogames is the fact that – as pointed out in Edward Castronova’s Exodus to the Virtual World, and by any number of game journalists, scholars, and developers, including Kotaku’s Stephen Totillo – the people speaking out most strongly against them don’t play videogames. They’ve maybe watched an hour or two of someone else playing the game and taken that experience as symptomatic of what they believe must cause violent behaviors. My personal favorite came from Ralph Nader’s response to Obama’s inaugural address, reported on Gameranx: that videogames are functionally “electronic child molesters.”

Aside from Nader, who is clearly unclear on the definitions of either “videogames” or “child molester,” I – sort of – understand where they might be coming from. I know that I say things while playing (particularly multiplayer) that in any other context would be considered rude, crude, and rather threatening (“Die, you bastard,” is a frequent pejorative). The tenseness of shoulders, the leaning-forward pose, the seeming (and sometimes genuine) rage all seem to indicate an increase in violent tendencies. Except that they don’t, in the same way that the vast majority of sports fans (who exhibit similar physiological responses) aren’t incited to violence by watching a game.

Nor are they incited to molest children, a behavior that not only is unrelated to violent videogame content, but isn’t actually included in any videogame I’ve ever played or heard of (although I’m sure some villain did it in something). From this point on, I’m going to ignore Nader’s commentary, even though it makes me ragingly livid and is one of the most egregious examples of hyperbolic mud-slinging I’ve ever seen. But back to addressing those people who are at least well-intentioned, if ignorant, as opposed to those who are so clearly out in left field that they may well have departed the surface of the planet.

In fact, the simulated violence found in videogames can be cathartic, and it can also – in the right game – produce an anti-violence response. Dishonored, for instance, is a game about assassination. It involves hordes of plague rats that devour the living and the dead (and you can summon them!). But you are also presented with the choice in the game to play “non-lethal.” To not kill ANYONE. In fact, you get an achievement for it. With every “assassination,” you always have a choice to not kill your target – and you can sneak about and avoid killing anyone else, too. Or you can play “high-chaos” and kill everyone… but that produces consequences. More disease. More rats. More things that want to kill you in return. Which tells me that the game is subtly encouraging an anti-violence ethos even as it allows you to play violently.

Other games – like Mass Effect – grant you Paragon points for making the more “ethical” choice (although they’ve tweaked that in ME2 and ME3 to be less about good and evil and more about “style” so that Shepard pretty much has to be good). Others, like Bioshock, have “good” and “bad” endings, based on the decisions the player makes (often whether to kill people or not). And even Grand Theft Auto contains the occasional character who expresses feelings of discontentment and guilt for robbing people, stealing cars, and shooting innocents.

In short, most games actually encourage the players to internalize an ethos that is decidedly non-violent, particularly against innocents. While it might be okay to shoot the enemy (or zombies, or weird insectoid aliens), it’s not okay to shoot the civilians. So while watching Gears of War for ten minutes might give the non-gamer “insight” into the frequency of gunshots and the spatter of alien gore, it doesn’t actually tell them about the total experience the gamer has by the end of the game – which is to say, doesn’t see the narrative of war-weariness that permeates the series and leaves the player fairly exhausted at the end of extensive play.

So my invitation – to anyone who believes games are causing violent behavior – is to play one, start to finish, and then see what they think. Maybe they’ll change their minds, maybe they won’t, but instead of making sweeping claims about videogames rotting the brains of the proverbial children, they would be able to experience what gamers experience. To understand before they criticize. And while I realize that some of the people who speak out against videogames now would continue to do so even after playing, I’m okay with that because at least then they’re speaking from experience instead of ignorance.

Regulate Guns, Not Games

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As it turns out, my first post of 2013 is going to follow up on my last one from 2012, on the knee-jerk reaction to the tragedy at Sandy Hook claiming that school shootings are at least partly the consequence of violent videogames. This morning, Jeanine Celestin-Greer posted on Gamasutra about what she terms “violence against violent videogames.” In short, Celestin-Greer is concerned about videogames going the way of the Salem Witches – hung from the nearest large tree because someone panicked after eating bad rye.

Gamasutra reports that the IGDA (International Game Developers’ Association) responded to the call for research into the violence ostensibly produced by videogames spearheaded by Joe Biden – in essence, Gamesindustry International reports, agreeing to open-minded research into both the positive and negative impacts of gaming.They’re willing to play along, at least for now, in the name of appeasing the masses, but only because they know that legitimate, balanced research will show (as it has already shown) that games are not the root of the problem.

Celestin-Greer points out that people like to muddle along under the happy delusion that our world is not violent, and then when something tragic happens, they bemoan the decline of civilization and “try to understand why the world is ‘suddenly’ so evil and depraved.” The world has always had its evil. It has always been violent. We didn’t see mass genocide on the scale that we do now in the 1600s not because they didn’t have violent videogames (in fact, back then they made the argument that the theater, which we now consider a bastion of high culture, was causing violence in the streets), but because they didn’t have assault weapons and dirty bombs.

Celestin-Greer also makes the argument that there are plenty of people who play violent videogames who are not violent people – herself and (I hope) myself included. I have no interest in even owning a gun, much less killing anyone with it, but you can nevertheless find me playing first-person shooters on a fairly regular basis. Celestin-Greer observes that “people had also said that because the killer had Liked Mountain Dew, drinking Mountain Dew created murderers,” a fallacy equally as absurd, but – somehow – less likely to be believed.

Why? Put simply, because of something called cultural lag. The majority of people objecting to the influence of violent videogames are people who don’t play them. They’re people like my mom (whom I adore, but who doesn’t play games and still thinks that violent ones can cause violence), or like well-meaning senators and vice presidents who are calling for the videogame industry to “do something” about the violence in their games.

But no one is calling for the film industry or the television industry or the novel industry to do something about the violence rampant in their products. Murder mysteries, action flicks, and shows like 24 contain just as much if not more violence than your average videogame. Sure, they’re passive commodities rather than participatory ones, but they’re nevertheless violent. So why aren’t they targeted? Because we’ve grown used to them. When they were new, people were just as convinced that violent tv and movies were causing the degradation of society. Just like Stephen Gosson in the sixteenth century thought that going to a play was going to turn people into “Sodomits, or worse.”

And this is saying nothing about the fact that the nations with the largest ratios of violent crime, domestic abuse, and actual genocide are developing or third-world – and believe me, they aren’t playing violent videogames. Human nature is violent, and when unregulated, it will always be violent. Our instincts of hunting and survival make us that way, and the elimination of videogames is not going to change that. Celestin-Greer cites sports as an example of acculturated violence – and games are just another part of that.

Does that mean that all parents should allow their 5-year-old to play Call of Duty? Of course not, and Celestin-Greer agrees. Parents should regulate what their kids are playing in the same way that they should regulate what the kids are watching. But that doesn’t make the games inherently violence-inducing. They’re just another form of media, with the same cultural value and impact as any other type. We, as a society, just haven’t gotten used to them on the same scale: cultural lag.

Celestin-Greer makes some good points, but she’s not just defending games for her own audience, who are themselves likely to be gamers and already on her side of the debate. She’s trying to spur a movement. To cause gamers to speak out in defense of their violent games – although she very validly suggests that they need to do so reasonably: “Every time games are targeted, we need to always be there calmly proving them wrong.” And to a degree, since she inspired me to write this post, it’s working. But I don’t have the same level of concern she does that games will be banned or so strictly regulated that they might as well be banned.

First, the games industry is a multi-billion dollar industry. A triple-A title makes as much as a movie, maybe more, and the games that sell the best are the ones that people claim cause violence: Call of Duty, Halo, Gears of War. There’s too much money and far too many jobs at stake for first-person shooters to go the way of the dodo. Second, cultural lag. We’ve gone through this same type of reaction to every introduced form of media from ballads onward. We’ll get over it. Should we make an effort to introduce ourselves to the factual studies that demonstrate that violent videogames have no impact on our drive to shoot real live humans? Of course. But we don’t need to froth ourselves into a panic that we’ll never be able to play them again.

What we need to do is just move forward. Lag with catch up with us, the industry will innovate, and it will become even more evident than it is now that games are not the source of the problem. People are. Parents need to regulate what their kids are seeing and playing; adults in general need to take responsibility for their actions; nations need to see that global conflict and the violent propaganda that valorizes it contributes to small-scale domestic violence; lawmakers need to recognize that abuse within families is just as problematic as (and probably contributes to) lone gunmen. Maybe gun regulation or restriction is part of that answer. Maybe it isn’t. But the problems are to be found within a society that condones actual violence, not in one that uses fictive violence as an escapist outlet.

Redcoats and Petticoats

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With the recent release of both the new Bioshock Infinite and Assassin’s Creed 3 trailers, coupled with the presidential campaign and debates, I’ve been doing a lot of thinking about American exceptionalism (by which I mean the notion that Americans are somehow unique from and superior to other nations’ citizens). I expect that I will have more to say about this (and, indeed, I did, over at The Learned Fangirl) with relation to Bioshock Infinite‘s new trailer (and the game itself, come February), but for now I want to stick to Assassin’s Creed 3.

In part, this is spurred by Border House’s blog post yesterday. Jillian Scharr says that “my coworker and I both agreed that there was something ‘off’ about the trailer.” Which made me want to go watch it for myself.

The trailer is surprisingly… multicultural. There are Native Americans, colonists, several men who appear to be pirates (maybe Minutemen in tricorns?), in percentages that are radically unrealistic to the actual demographics of colonial America. Except for African Americans. They aren’t present (despite the fact that AC3 has already announced that the protagonist of the DLC Liberation will be both African American and female) at all, in fact, a point that Scharr notes:

while we’re on historical accuracy, maybe you thought you were dodging a bullet by apparently not including African Americans in AC3. I suppose it remains to be seen what you do with American slavery. But if the trailer’s line about playable multiplayer maps including “the blood-soaked cotton found on the Virginian plantation” is any indication, you’re going to milk that for every drop of exploitative “coolness-factor” as well.

In short, if you’re going to mention those “blood-soaked cotton” fields, you might as well make it clear whose blood soaked that cotton long before you decided to turn them into killing fields for assassins. (This, of course, doesn’t mean that the game itself won’t have African Americans in its Virginia setting… but it doesn’t show them here.)

But the absence of the obvious is only one of the trailer’s problems. The voice-over is less a “narration” and more a sales-pitch, which breaks the fourth wall nature of most contemporary trailers. It’s selling a game instead of telling a story – focusing on mechanics rather than ludo-narrative (the story told by the gameplay) or narrative (just story). While that make seem to make sense on the surface, it doesn’t mesh with what we’ve come to think a “trailer” is supposed to do. It ignores the potential narrative power of the setting – revolution, national identity, etc. – in favor of describing multiplayer maps. While players are interested in those maps and the multiplayer experience they signify, the list of information does not make for a very good trailer.

Finally, there is the point that really concerns Scharr: that the proportion of violence inflicted on men is much lower than the proportion of it inflicted on women:

The trailer shows a lot of men killing men, and quite a bit of men killing women. Only twice was a female assassin shown killing a male: once, at 0:38, where the Native American female assassin shares the screen with a white male assassin; and at 2:49, the last assassination of the trailer, when a white woman nails a white man in the head with the butt of her rifle, then shoots him as he lies on the ground. The other women in the trailer are either shown non-lethally striking a man, being non-lethally struck or thrown by a man, or being killed by a man. The worst is at 1:16, when a man in an overcoat and top hat grabs a woman in a low-cut green dress who is backing away from him, and plunges a dagger in her stomach. Then, for some reason, we get an instant replay.

This is not really what bothers me the most about the trailer, but I can understand why Scharr noticed it. The ratio is really quite poor. And – especially once you’ve had it pointed out – very obvious. Certainly, there are female assassins in the game, a point in its favor. However, there is no reason why the trailer needed to emphasize violence against women over violence against men (particularly given the fact that most players are like to be men, and therefore male-on-male violence would be a more accurate representation of the actual demographics of the gameplay).

While – in this trailer specifically – I find the voice-over more off-putting than the disproportionate violence against women over men, I take Scharr’s point that it is a problem. However, it isn’t just a problem with AC3. Violence against women – specifically, sensationalized violence against women – is a symptom of the larger issues that I’ve addressed here before (and which appear to be central to Anita Sarkeesian’s interest in producing “Tropes vs. Women in Video Games). I think Scharr is probably right to criticize the trailer for its imbalance, but that isn’t what struck me as “off” about the trailer.

What struck me as “off” is that it was less of a trailer about the game as art and more a focus on the game as product. And this bothers me, in part, because of Scharr’s point about violence – not because the game is violent (I happily play shooters on a fairly regular basis), but because the game commodifies that violence as the sole point of the game, which ultimately diminishes it to nothing more than a sequence of mechanics about mortality.

And a title like AC3 is about more than just its mechanics. Multiplayer is a bonus for games with deep and rich singleplayer campaigns, not the point of the game. It provides incentive to keep playing even when the campaign is over. It serves, to put it bluntly, to keep players playing long enough that they don’t immediately sell their copy back to GameStop. And I don’t really have a problem with this, when it comes down to it. But the explicit commodification of violence (especially with an emphasis on violence against women) as the ultimate raison d’etre of the game does it and its potential audience a profound disservice. Games are more than that, and gamers (most of them, at least, I would hope) are looking for more.

In short, the trailer assumes that its audience is not as sophisticated as I believe they are, in by focusing on the game as specifically commodified violence, it panders to those who disparage games as juvenile and unethical, and it reinforces its own reputation as inartistic and misogynist. I very much hope that the trailer is not a promise of a similarly shallow game that has little consideration for gender and racial politics. I hope – as I did when I first saw the announcement of Liberation – that AC3 lives up to its promise of gender and racial balance.

The Cost of Play

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Today, Kotaku linked to a New York Times article by one of its own, or, rather, a debate between Kotaku’s Stephen Totilo and Yahoo‘s Chris Suellentrop on the fiscal future of gaming. A part of this discussion was the assertion that “it was possible that 2012 would be the worst year for retail video game software and hardware sales since 2005.”

This financial hit is brought to us in part because of the general economic downturn, and in part because of the popularity of handheld phone games, which are free or astonishingly cheap (Angry Birds, for instance). I would argue that part of it is the lack of a next-generation console for the last several years. The Xbox 360 is the oldest, followed by the Wii, then the PS3, and even the PS3 is several years old at this point. People aren’t buying new hardware because they already have the hardware. Software purchases have decreased in retail stores because many of the games are available for download online through Xbox Live, PlayStation Network, or Steam, and they’re sometimes cheaper to buy without the box. Games are also getting more longevity out of the added replay value of multiplayer modes and downloadable content.

Totilo also points out that many industry games and hardware releases in 2012 – with a few notable exceptions – have been uninspiring. The Kinect, for instance, is interesting, but amounts to, he says, “a watered-down repeat of the Wii phenomenon.” Similar problems have faced Blizzard’s Diablo III: “How very 2012 it was for the vaunted hit-maker Blizzard to release a game, Diablo III, that was 11 years in the making and then have to repeatedly apologize for its shortcomings.” Games haven’t done well because they haven’t been well-crafted. D3 in particular was buggy, poorly written, and demanded almost as much time downloading patches as it did playtime (at least for me, and I admittedly gave up in disgust partway through chapter two).

Suellentrop points out that gaming is an expensive hobby – consoles cost in excess of $250, new-release games cost $60, and DLC tacks on $5 and $10 at every available opportunity. And if you want to play with friends, everyone needs a copy, meaning a layout of quite a bit of capital – especially if you compare it to the equipment needed to play Risk or soccer. But one $60 game can keep a player entertained for 40 hours… the first playthrough (unless it’s Skyrim, in which case I’m at about 50 hours and nowhere near halfway through the main plot). I have friends who have logged more than 100 hours in a single game – which ultimately makes that game (hour-by-hour) cheaper than most movies, and more stimulating. [Note: I do have to love him for suggesting that a book costs less than $25, new, and can provide many hours of entertainment and reread value.]

What I find more interesting is Suellentrop’s argument that this isn’t a problem exclusive to the gaming industry: “The nation is facing nothing less than a fiction crisis.” In short, while some indie developers have done some interesting things in 2012, the nation as a whole is producing crap for fictional media – videogames included. Totilo says – with a caveat to BioWare game players (like me) – that “few people play video games for the story,” arguing that a failure in fiction doesn’t account for the widespread failure of the gaming industry.

But I find myself agreeing with Suellentrop. Sure, people don’t, as Totilo says, play Angry Birds “for the story,” but we’re not talking about Angry Birds. Yes, that game will occupy tens of thousands of people on the subway, but that’s just it. They’re bored and confined and will do whatever it takes to keep themselves from punching the person next to them on a subway car. I’ve been there. You’ll play solitaire to keep from going mad on a subway, and it has even less of a story than Angry Birds.

But if you had a good book, a game with a good story, you’d rather be playing that. What you do when you get home from that hellish subway trip is not play more Angry Birds – you want to watch something, read something, or play something with a story that has intrinsic meaning and value. And here is where we need leadership in the entertainment industry: literary, cinema, television, and gaming. We need innovators not only in mechanics and technology, but in story development. Twilight should not be the closest thing to popular quality literature produced in this decade. Please.

Save the Trolls?

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So today’s post is the consequence not of someone’s blog post, but of an email sent out to the Digital Games Research Association list. Apparently, the emailer (Jason Wilson) notes, there has been recent concern in Australia with trolling, which, given the media attention being paid to it here is probably unsurprising. After a fairly comprehensive definition of what a troll is and an analysis of how trolls interact with – and are even produced by – the “desire for deliberative democracy” that characterizes much of the online community.

And this is where things got interesting.

Trolls are usually someone else, defined from our own position and interests. When they are not, and we inhabit trolling, we discover that trolling requires know-how, close reading, experience, sometimes sympathy with those we would disrupt.

 What are the consequences to seeing trolling and other forms of affective behaviour as the norm, rather than the aberrant? The discourse of digital art has long since told this story, but the intellectual desire for open and constitutive democracy has overridden the ‘actually existing democracy’ of bullying, trolling, threats, inane memes and low signal-to-noise ratios. What would happen if we started to think of trolling as the central practice in online discourse? What if trolling is the Internet’s signature mode of discursive politics? What if we started to think about trolling as a practice which is generative rather than destructive?

Having heard the “confessions of an ex-troll” at SMCRVA last month, the idea that trolls might actually be contributing to the production and continuation of online community came as something of a surprise. But the sense that trolls are the perpetual Other – and almost never ourselves – raises some interesting questions. Are we trolling, for example, when we make arguments against a position with which we disagree when we know the other person cannot be persuaded? Is there anything wrong with perpetuating an argument just for the sake of perpetuating the argument? Is a devil’s advocate really a troll?

But I like the question, “What if we started to think about trolling as a practice which is generative rather than destructive?” Because when you stop to think about it, (some) trolling can be generative. For example, Anita Sarkeesian’s Kickstarter project probably would not have garnered the attention, the funding, and the national awareness that it now has were it not for trolls. (That said, I would not wish their treatment of her on anyone, and I stand by my assertion that much of what was said and sent to her should never have happened.)

Trolling can draw attention to those issues that we take for granted but aren’t motivated enough to do something about. Online bullying. Sexism. Homophobia. Bigotry. By hyperemphasizing the accepted and tolerated low-level intolerance that is part and parcel of Western society, trolls are actually making a demand (whether on purpose or by counter-point) that we reexamine the mores that make up our dominant and sub-cultures to see why behavior like theirs is possible. Whether intentionally or not, trolling actually permits the kind of “deliberative democracy,” even though, as Wilson remarks, “Trolls are not interested in redeeming democracy through deliberation, and they mock attempts to do so.”

In short, in order for our society to be motivated enough to make a change, we need to recognize that our ideology is permissive of a degree of behavior that crosses a line. We are willing – whether ethically or not – to tolerate a certain level of bigotry because it doesn’t inconvenience us; trolls raise that level to the point where we are no longer willing to tolerate it, thus actually catalyzing systemic change.

I’m not sure I would call a troll a leader in the sense that we typically mean in leadership studies. Perhaps the internet age requires a new term to describe such leadership (although “troll leadership” just doesn’t sound right for so many reasons), or perhaps this is simply a new form of social satire produced by technological progress. Whatever the cause, perhaps Wilson is right that trolls aren’t all bad, and that maybe we need to leave one or two of the more innocuous ones under a few choice bridges.

 

[Note: For members of DiGRA, the original email can be accessed here.]

Playing Nice!

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So an article that grabbed my attention yesterday is actually on how playing games can make us nicer – specifically, “Forget violence: Do co-op games make us less aggressive?” by Jamie Madigan on Gamasutra.

I’ve mentioned co-op games on this blog before, although specifically in reference to board games. Madigan’s article is talking specifically about videogames and psychology studies. Apparently, recent studies from 2010 onwards have found that players show fewer violent impulses, make fewer connections to violent language, and are generally more cooperative with others after playing a game in co-op mode. Basically, cooperative play produces a cooperative mindset that then translates into other behaviors.

I do not in the least find this surprising, nor do I imagine most people do. If you’ve just spent several hours trying to help other people accomplish something, you’re in a completely different mental space than if you’ve just spent several hours trying desperately to kill more people than anyone else.

Here’s something that the article doesn’t mention, but that I’ve noticed from a lot of play-time (electronic and tabletop). Your lexicon is totally different. When you are playing cooperatively – in Team Fortress 2‘s new “Mann vs. Machine” mode, say – the other people on your team are “dudes,” are referred to by “name,” or by their character class. The people or bots you’re competing against are usually some sort of expletive or insult. In-group vs. out-group, as I talked about today with my students.

“Mann vs. Machine” actually has raised several of these issues for me recently. As a long-time TF2 player, I was fully expecting to see a leaderboard when I loaded up “MvM.” I didn’t. At first, I was disappointed. I wanted to see that board – to know where I was on it and how well I was doing. Even though TF2 has always been cooperative to an extent (your team versus another team), there was always a leaderboard and therefore a level of competition. But not in “MvM.” And it makes people better team players.

There’s no competitive pressure to do better than your teammates (to say nothing of the other players), but there is pressure to help your teammates and the team as a whole. Pressure is exerted if you aren’t contributing to the collective goal by showboating or running off to kill everything yourself. And people are nicer to each other – fewer insults, more helpful suggestions, and even the tone of comments telling people they don’t know what they’re doing are constructive rather than offensive.

Maybe there’s something to the idea that we don’t always have to be individuals. We can be a useful member of a team and have value there without always having to be praised individually for being special. Sometimes, sure, individuality is important, vital, even. But sometimes, it’s better to play Engineer and support your team, to play Medic and keep everyone alive rather than just trying to rack up points by following the one Heavy who shoots everything.

And cooperative play – whether Yggdrasil or Pandemic or TF2 - puts us in a better state of mind overall when it doesn’t also pit us against one another. Games like Modern Warfare produce animosity within teams because they force players to measure one another rather than encourage team play. And the deep irony is that if players work together (rather than each striving for individual top score), their team does better. Leadership isn’t just about who kills the most enemies or steals the most intels. Leadership can also be about teamwork, and the leaderboard actually hinders that process in online play.

And, really, I’m all for anything that makes people be nicer to each other in the online gaming community.