Super Nerd Sunday Presents: The Problem with Gamergate's Problem with Games Criticism!

#gamergate has made it out of the cultural sidelines and into the main stream, with talking heads regularly appearing on network news over the last week.  The fact that the issue has achieved such critical cultural mass is shameful.  The level of vitriol and sexism touted by the movement's proponents is unconscionable, as is the exceedingly queer rhetoric of the movement's inexplicable celebrity spokesperson, Adam Baldwin.  It's to be expected; the movement spawned from an attack by a jilted ex on a vulnerable (culturally, emotionally, physically, fiscally, or whatever) young woman, an old story.  The only new thing about #gamergate is the scope of the attack: the young man who attempted to defame Zoe Quinn managed to shape a movement out of his weird MRA bullshit, instead of just quietly receding to some corner of the internet.  Perhaps the only good thing about the entire movement is that it has given Anita Sarkeesian some much deserved national attention, as she is repeatedly brought in front of national news broadcasts to quietly call out video games on their problematic past.

And Sarkeesian really does deserve her attention.  She's been trying to fix the broken apparatus of games criticism from the outside for years now.  Her Feminist Frequency series began in the early days of Kickstarter, and serves as a case study for the incredible things that an intelligent person at the fringes of an intellectual framework can do given a little support from an interested subset of the community.  She's been doing a fine job of it, too: Sarkeesian's intelligent, well considered and thoroughly researched videos are a breath of fresh air in the fetid swamp of gaming criticism, and they give us exactly the kind of insightful commentary on the overarching latticework of games as an art form that the existing myopic, "enthusiast press" centered media outlets that have dominated games journalism and criticism over the last two decades have lacked.

Which brings me to my point, as it exists: #gamergate's sexist, childish tone does a disservice to gamers as a whole.  It's inexcusable.  That's a thoroughly undeniable component of the dialogue that's occurring right now, but a lesser evil, one I still find thoroughly infuriating, is that the #gamergate asshats have been using a call to reform video game journalism as a shield.

Games journalism is broken.  It's apparent to anyone with half a god damn brain that it's broken.  It's so broken that Penny-Arcade founded the Penny-Arcade Report to try and fix it, and then abandoned that tack after two years.  It's so broken that seminal Newsweek critic N'Gai Kroal straight up left the field after making it quasi-respectable a little less than half a decade ago.  That's not to say that there aren't good critics: Sarkeesian, PAR's Ben Kuchera, Kroal, Stephen Totillo, Leigh Alexander, and Tom Chick, to name a few, are all fine writers, and most of those writers have fought tooth and nail to remove themselves from some of the more arbitrary constraints of the field.  But much of the dialogue of gaming journalism and gaming criticism is dominated by vapid fan-boyish diatribing.  Sometimes, this is the product of genuine enthusiasm which, while perhaps not good writing, isn't necessarily toxic in and of itself.  But just as often you can map the patterns of publications to a sort of queer cronyism, wherein the work of certain publishers or certain series receive favorable treatment, regardless of the product that is produced.  Big ticket series, like Call of Duty or Madden, can release games that actually don't work, and reviewers will give those games favorable reviews time and time again. 

There are a few reasons this could be happening: the underlying vitriol behind #gamergate could be saturating the consciousnesses of the reviewers as well, prompting them to hedge their bets or curb their critiques for fear of aggressive fan response.  Tom Chick is an especially noteworthy example of this.  Chick's forthright criticism has earned him a great deal of ire from people who feel he "hates games" because he sometimes says they're bad, or not even bad, but just not great.  There could also be some fear of reprisal from studios or publishers: reviewers or publications who give bad reviews to certain products may no longer be given advance copies to complete reviews with, which puts reviewers in a very awkward position, if they're reviewing for the purpose of guiding consumer confidence.  And sometimes, it's just the issue with the enthusiast layer of the press in general.  There are a lot of middling to poor writers out there who write not because they see the form as culturally important, but because they just love the products.  These people will sometimes write effusive prose about how great things are because, dernit, they're great. 

This last variety is perhaps the least deleterious to the dialogue as a whole, because it's a product of genuine enthusiasm instead of fear, but it's still problematic.  While genuine enthusiasm is necessary to propel a medium forward, if it isn't tempered by a strong critical perspective it can lead to stagnation in a medium.  Consider the Call of Duty franchise: everything it does now it did in Call of Duty: Modern Warfare.  The manner in which its new releases iterate on that framework is mostly a matter of set pieces, and the new bits that work (things like the Zombie mini-game from World at War) are sometimes little more than afterthoughts that take on a life of their own after release.  But Call of Duty: Ghosts had to be all but unplayable on release in order to earn even moderately critical reviews, and even then it sold like hotcakes.  Broken multiplayer aside, the fact that the game was little more than a repackaging of previous iterations of the franchise was secondary to many reviewers (though some did speak on it quite effectively, praising, first and foremost, the dog-murder sequences of the game over its faithful reproduction of Call of Duty's tried and true game play model).

Even without the unfortunate binary of effusive praise and respectful silence that an enthusiast press brings, games journalism has problems.  The Escapist, one time respectable publication now lain low by editorial mismanagement, produced a problematic, tacitly sexist frame for much of its #gamergate coverage.  Much of the dialogue that doesn't occur on a cultural layer, the dialogue that occurs surrounding the works themselves, is also problemitized by norms in the industry like the idea of "scoring" games, which fundamentally places minimalist, independent, or high-concept games at a disadvantage: Wasteland 2 being an 8.5 to Dragon Age: Inquisition's 9.5 doesn't actually speak to the relative quality of each game so much as it speaks to the fiscal power of the marketing and production teams behind each project.  They're both excellent, but one game plays to a niche audience, and the other plays to a mainstream audience.  The higher number doesn't reflect relative quality so much as it reflects relative reach, or projected market impact.  The end result is that games journalism has oriented itself almost entirely around a kind of consumer-guidance mindset, one where it's less important to establish why objects will be culturally significant, and more important to benchmark just how culturally significant those objects may eventually become.

There are bastions against this, but these are largely the very institutions that #gamergate seeks to disenfranchise as part of its "movement."  The press that targets work they see as significant, rather than profitable, has long been marginalized, and it's that kind of press, the kind that focuses on projects like Quinn's and the work of studios like Tale of Tales, that really promises to revolutionize both the apparatus surrounding games and the reach and framework of games themselves.  This is the very press under attack by the #gamergate movement: the critically minded press that attempts to expand the discourse beyond a "best values" catalog, not the enthusiast press that borrows its journalistic standards and approaches from magazines that were, at their inception, owned by the industry they wrote about.

Perhaps this origin, natural enough in the industry's early days, is what really problemitizes the relationship between consumers, critics, and content-producers.  Whereas the apparatus governing the discourse surrounding literature and film is traditionally helmed by people who either study or produce the material they're discussing (less so in the case of film, to be sure), games journalism is removed from its apparatus: it's rare to see the people who review games produce them.  In fact, when they begin to do so, they're excised almost entirely from the critical apparatus.  Sometimes this is for moral purposes; Anthony Burch has been quite forward about Gearbox and Destructoid's cross pollination, and how it problemitizes critical relationships between the two entities.  But it may also stem from a fact that the writing surrounding games is almost uniformly constructed as "lesser" - games writing, and ergo games journalism, is a secondary concern to a number of other things.  We've come to expect second rate work from the people who produce games, and, as such, when they actually write things, they're asinine or incoherent.  There are exceptions to this rule, like Burch and, to my pleasant surprise, Cliff Bleszinski, but they're less frequent than I'd like to see, and what's more, they're standouts in a sea of mediocrity.  For every pleasant, thoughtful consideration of a game, there's a coarse dismissal of something for its slight difference, or a vapid celebration of a game centered around nebulous concepts like "fun," defined without context from the author, or the medium itself.

It's infuriating to watch a culturally significant medium languish without an effective apparatus for responding to the ideas within it, and what's more, when that apparatus is absent, the ideas that go unseen often go unexplored in future iterations.  Part of why literature and cinema engage in pattern shifts over the years relates to how the apparatus processes elements within them.  Feminist poetry and prose has spawned a body of work which responds not only to the writing itself, but to the criticism surrounding that writing.  Cinematic movements emerge to try and defy critics, or answer challenges from critics.  Games are yearning to do so: critiques of the Tomb Raider series spawned the Tomb Raider reboot, one of the most fascinating feminist games in recent history which defies many genre conventions, and structures itself around eradicating the damsel stereotype.  Tomb Raider was a mainstream success, and a critical darling, and rightly so: it took the resources it had, and did something awesome with them.  It did something socially significant, and it did it in a way that people seemed to largely enjoy.  That's how great art made for popular consumption is supposed to work.  People read The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao on the train to this day because it's a good book, and people discuss Junot Diaz in academic circles because he made a body of previously overlooked work visible through his efforts.  An effective critical apparatus had to be there to help Diaz achieve that goal, however, and give him the attention he deserved.  That's what we're still lacking as a medium.

Kuchera might disagree with me semantically.  In his farewell note to PAR readers, he says that "We didn't fix game journalism, but the whole idea of it being broken and needing a white knight to run in and make everything better was arrogant and more than a little pigheaded. There was good game writing before PAR, and there's going to be good game writing after we go away."  I'm with him part of the way.  Good writing will always be around, and there's no white knight that will suddenly shift the tone of games criticism and make it into something better, something more worthwhile.  But there are still problems facing the apparatus of games journalism, and good writers working together can make the medium as a whole something more, something better.  There's a toxicity to games journalism that ties in to its medium, the same toxicity that made #gamergate a thing.  The internet is where trolls live, and trolls will always be there, yammering endlessly, threatening people futilely.  But slowly, steadily, we, as a community, can eke out safe spaces for expression and create frameworks for real critical discourse.  There have already been attempts to create "serious publications" that effectively function outside of the enthusiast press apparatus.  Some institutions of the enthusiast press have even succeeded at breaking away from their limited circumstances and becoming something more.  Gamasutra, for example, does great reporting and, every once in a while, puts out a superlative critique or commentary of games as a medium.  The answer to fixing games journalism isn't silencing voices, and it certainly isn't marginalizing people who have historically been marginalized.  It's creating more spaces for more types of expressions, places where you can find all kinds of discourse, places where works of art are discussed in depth, not reduced to a numeric score.