Alfie Bown is the author of a book called The Playstation Dreamworld. I mention this so you can avoid it. The blurb says “it argues that we can only understand the world of videogames via Lacanian dream analysis. It also argues that the Left needs to work inside this dreamspace a powerful arena for constructing…” oh for fuck’s sake.
In the Guardian, Alfie says that computer games are fueling the rise of the far right. “Far right” has come to mean “people who do not agree with me” and this article is no different. His examples are hilarious. XCOM is right wing because it is about expelling an invading force of “aliens” (extra-terrestrials). All strategy games are right wing because they are about territory acquisition. So, presumably, are Risk and Chess.
One wonders what a left wing game might be like, if these are the criteria. Not much fun, I would think. Ooh, lightbulb: Fun Is Right Wing!
The author does nothing to defend his assertion that games cater to misogynistic desires. This is annoying because I wanted to shoehorn in an interesting video about an interesting game. I will do it anyway. Perhaps violence and territory acquisition in games make the misogyny so obvious as to need no argument.
Kingdom Come: Deliverance is a good game, but you can not play as a woman. Is it misogynistic? Or is it because being a woman in the middle ages is no fun? An enthusiast who makes interesting videos about life in the middle ages discusses this. He thinks you could make a historically accurate medieval game where you play a woman, but it would be a different game. He briefly discusses how it was rare, not unheard-of for a woman to engage in sword fighting, adding:
It is not to say we don’t like that or encourage it, trust me. Guys have been trying to get girls to play with their toys since the dawn of time. I’ve been trying to teach my wife sword fighting since the day we met, and with only mild success. It is not this exclusive thing that guys don’t want girls to do the things that we enjoy.
What does Alfie think?
the rationale of gaming is to unite pleasurable impulse with political ideology, a process which renders gamers susceptible to discourses that urge people to follow their instincts while also prescribing what those instincts ought to be
What a load of wank. Why do the left struggle with plain English? I think what he means is that because games are often about stuff like killing bad guys and acquiring resources, they make you think a lot about that sort of thing when you should be thinking about how to be nicer to poor people. And since some people he does not like have been known to play games he dreams up some complicated nonsense about how one causes the other.
The reality is that gamers do not care about politics while they are playing games. Games are escapist. Alfie Bown’s evidence includes Gamergate, which was above all else about keeping politics out of games. Games are meant to be fun, and a lot of games are about blowing stuff up and acquiring resources because that is fun.
I know what a left-wing game is like because I once got roped into playtesting one: a “green” game from a lefty body where the players were the energy ministers of countries, choosing the balance between meeting current energy requirements, moving away from fossil fuels to greener windmills and wave power, etc. One of its many absurdities was its “collapse cards”, like “chance” cards in monopoly, which were the sole penalties for messing up your policy. Because of the “we share one world – we must all cooperate” focus of the game, these ‘penalties’ invariably caused the other ‘nobler’ players to bail you out. The message emerged loud and clear – freeload on players stupid enough to do the ‘right’ (i.e. left) thing. (Quite unintentionally, it was therefore a realistic game.)
The few women who fought in the middle ages were often cavalry. The Lombard princess Sichelgaita, in whom “we come face to face with the closest approximation in history to a Valkyrie” (John Julius Norwich, Byzantium: Decline and Fall), is described as having considerable presence – probably a desirable trait when married to Robert Guiscard (“famous for the violence of his rages”). She apparently hardly ever left his side whether in battle (where she contributed to his success by fighting the enemy, by shaming Robert’s soldiers into greater courage, and by riding down and spearing any of them who turned to run) or out of it (where her constant presence may have assisted his fidelity 🙂 ). However the fact that she fought on horseback may be considered in the light of Jeffrey Hudson, court dwarf of King Charles I, and devisor and main actor in the comic interludes of court masques. When the civil war broke out, the 3-foot high Jeffrey fought on horseback for the king and was knighted, not undeservedly, for courage in the field. The point is that, in cavalry, upper body physical strength can matter less than steadiness and skill on a horse, whereas this is far from true for sword-fighting on foot.
(I should note that Sichelgaita may have contributed more to her battles by commanding than by actually coming into physical contact with the enemy. Whether, and how often, Sichelgaita went beyond commanding to actually charging into the enemy battle line is a point debated by historians. In the case of Queen Athelflaed, daughter of King Alfred the Great, her ability to command the battles she fought against the Danes may have been positively helped by the fact that a woman was allowed to stand behind, not in the forefront of, the battle line in a way unacceptable for a man at the time.)
In the dark ages and the classical period, the Celtic races were accustomed to summon young women to the host as well as men (this was perhaps mirrored in the fact, noted by the Romans, that if you found yourself getting into a quarrel with a Celt, you had to be aware that his wife would swiftly join in – and it was no joke when she did). The last case of this custom that I know is the battle of Dryfe Sands in 1593, the final act of the savage Johnstone/Mawell clan feud, where some 1 in 5 of the battle-line of the heavily outnumbered Johnstones were women who knew they were fighting for the very survival of the clan. This desperation, and the overconfidence of their enemies, is usually taken to explain their astonishing victory – it was literally a case of “anything is better than losing” (as a US admiral is said to have once replied when asked about women serving on warships 🙂 ).
These compalints about gamers have been going on forever. I believe that similar complaints were leveled against pinball machines, pool tables, card games, and every sort of game that involves competition. They tend to exclude women and are favored by men. The current explanation is hegemonic patriarchy. The old explanations were that they were silly ways for men to fritter away their time, instead of doing what women thought that they (men and boys) should be doing. Women used to be above this sort of frivolity.
Now, of course, they want to be part of it, because it is the gateway to tech jobs. So, of course, games have to be changed to appeal to women and girls. People who have exactly the same sorts of desires as males, but express them differently, so the games have to be inclusive of all. I think this is the basic logic involved.
It is all a bunch of crap.
Surely there’s a Berlin Wall Border Guard game where you get to machine gun would-be defectors, check tourists’ luggage for black-market jeans and give Jeremy Corbyn permission to travel around the socialist paradise on a motorbike with Diane Abbott?
Or you could hand out points equally for competitions, except that there’s a shortage of points?
I’m broadly (very much so!) with you (Samizdata Illuminatus) on this: except I’m a fencer and thus have many female friends and acquaintances who are highly proficient and keen (pun intended) sword-wielders who would probably make mince-meat (a British-ism) of “sword fighters” and certainly would slice and dice run-of-the-mill “rational[ists] of gaming”.
Well, at least it warned you on the back cover, like a poisonous snake.
(Lacanian dream analysis? At least it’s not pretending to be serious.)
Dedicated to rxc, as above:
–from “Ya Got Trouble,” from Meredith Willson’s The Music Man
Oh, go read the whole thing if you’ve forgotten how it goes. It’s a hoot!
https://genius.com/Meredith-willson-ya-got-trouble-lyrics
Then go on and read, and remember from the soundtrack,
😆 😆 😆
https://genius.com/Meredith-willson-pick-a-little-talk-a-little-lyrics
I wrote a novel set in an alternate Middle Ages. The agent who looked at it said “not enough women” and turned it down. Right. In the Middle Ages, women went along on merchant ventures? No! Women went along on, and even sometimes led, colonization ventures. (Aud the Deep-Minded and Freydis Eiriksdatter were two famous ones.)
Some people try to impose their worldview on all the world. This usually does not work. But they’ll refuse to admit that.
They failed to take over gaming because of Gamergate and this is just some new cockrot designed to continue the fight.
Which is why the left must be smashed flat enough to slide under a door. Every time.
Well, that and keeping prostitution out of game reviews.
Oh,gosh!
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gamergate_controversy
A left wing game? How about Tetris: designed in the old Soviet Union and all about making complex-shapes fit neatly together as part of your overarching plan.
Don’t read Wiki concerning anything with a left/right dichotomy.
Go back and read Perry’s post.
…or read the Infagalactic version.
I recall the plot of a science fiction short story I read a long time ago about an alien race that designed and produced toys for human children. The games were “won” by losing (imagine playing Monopoly but the first to be bankrupt was declared the winner). The concept was that if the ethos of losing was somehow right or best, then it would make the job of conquering the human race a lot easier.
But that’s just cynicism and tin foil hat wearing conspiracy theory lunacy about leftism, eh?
This is one of those instances where it seems perfectly reasonable to restrict what other people do. If it’s not your hobby or habit, there’s no cost to you. It’s why once the tipping point on smoking was reached smokers went from being able to smoke at their desks at work to being banished outside away from doorways.
The “far right” is everyone not to the left of Josef Vissarionovich.
I stopped reading at ‘Lacanian’.
Mr. Ed:
Well, there is a communist border guard game called Papers, Please.
From the Steam description:
Sorry, my computer is advising me not to read it, as it could be disturbing. I always do what my computer buddy, Hallah, says. Halllah has appointed me as its’ one true prophet, so I’d better listen to it!
There are plenty of people on the right who hate games, especially from the religious right. Remember the whole Dungeons and Dragons encourages Satan worship. And there is a constant drumbeat from that side about how computers mess with your eyes and destroy your attention span. You know, just like there was with TV. And no doubt back in the old days when books first came out someone was complaining about kids not going outside anymore.
Having said that I think games do indeed affect your brain in significant ways, both with regards to world view and, although undoubtedly an unpopular opinion, I have no doubt that some of the more outrageous games seriously damage the sense of empathy and realism that we all depend on to prevent us from killing each other. Of course most people have enough of it that they are fine, but there are plenty of people whose pool of these qualities is shallow and easily drained.
I think though it is funny how often the far right religious movement loops back to have their views align with the far left. One of the main ways being that there seems to be a deep seated dislike of “fun”, since you should be doing more serious things (like working for Jesus, or working for Gaia.) It always makes me laugh seeing the college campus protests full of kids who are so earnest and passionate and determined to change things. Their lack of experience with reality is so ridiculous it is hard to not smile benignly and paternalistically. On the other hand a lot of them are thugs, and there is nothing funny about that. What ever happened to getting drunk, getting laid, and doing stupid things (usually when drunk and with the purpose of impressing the ladies so that you can get laid.) I mean that is what college is for, right?
“In the Guardian, Alfie says that ….
*derp*
How do you explain the drop in the rates of rape and murder since the mid ’90s, when the internet and internet gaming became ubiquitous? Your certainty is contradicted by the evidence.
One of the commonly accepted explanations for this holds that those crimes dropped due to the massive release of sexual tension throughout the population stemming from the sudden flood of free instant private porn available to people who would otherwise find more destructive outlets for their passions. “The Internet Is For Porn!”
The murderers and rapists were too busy to murder and rape.
So it’s possible that the small practical effect of gaming’s influence on empathy and reality for a few players would be lost in the overwhelming signal of porn’s effects. But that wouldn’t make it less likely to be real.
And the gaming industries have taught us useful skills! If the Nazis come back, Wolfenstein has taught us what to do, and if aliens invade, Duke Nuke is our role model! Now that is responsible gaming!
“Guys have been trying to get girls to play with their toys since the dawn of time.”
Sole reason for living.
Sure. It’s also possible that the small practical effect of porn’s influence on empathy and reality for a few watchers would be lost in the overwhelming signal of gaming’s effects.
Hmmm……..sounds like time to pop open an icy cold Mountain Dew, fire up the Atari and play Custer’s Revenge.
In the US in the 60s and 70s, the left made great strides in enforcing their idea that crimes and criminals are best dealt with by their noble and sympathetic ‘understanding’, not by the right’s vile and sadistic idea of ‘punishment’. Vehement predictions in the 60s, that these policies would cause (and were already visibly causing) an explosion in crime rates were treated with mocking laughter. By the 70s, when “too many on the left had experienced having their typewriters stolen” (Thomas Sowell, ‘The Vision of the Anointed’), the mocking laughter was replaced with all sorts of explanations that pointed the finger anywhere but at them.
In the 80s and 90s, there was a reaction against this. The US now has high incarceration rates, and other symptoms of the time when they were so badly burned that they learned that fire is hot, despite what their media told them. The US now has crime rates lower than in those days. (It has even reached the state where we on this blog, contemptuous of the left as we are, occasionally discuss ‘prosecutor overreach’ and suchlike topics.)
This is one (not the only) long-term trend that could be so dominating violent video games and porn (and other things) that, left to themselves might (or might not) cause crime to rise.
“Gamergate”, the effort of Frankfurt School of Marxism “Social Justice Warriors” to take over gaming (or to destroy it), rolls on. And the Guardian is a blatantly Frankfurt School of Marxism publication – and its readers dominate the education system (the schools and the universities) and the television stations.
Only one conservative university (Buckingham) exists in the United Kingdom, and all the television stations are leftist – anti SJW television stations are not even legal in Britain. The rest is just wall-to-wall Guardian Frankfurt School of Marxism propaganda – dressed up as “anti sexism”, “anti racism”, “anti homophobia” and so on.
So says Shakespeare’s porter in Macbeth (at least, he does when quoted from memory by Niall Kilmartin). Is it possible violent video games are the same? Grand Theft Auto can teach you to steal a car – or rather, to take fun in the idea of your stealing a car – but it also teaches you to interact with a keyboard and screen in your room, not with real people and real cars out in the real (and alarmingly less controllable) world. Could the game be stealing your soul and giving you nothing in return – not even a stolen car to joyride in?
Just another 0.02p FWIW from Niall Kilmartin, thinking about what statistics of violent games and crimes might mean, if they mean anything at all.
Which answers your own question, if you apply to it the same way of thinking you did above. The truth is that we have no way of knowing what precise influence do games/porn/economy/enforcement/guns/immigration/war-on-drugs have on overall crime levels over this or that period. We can only make intelligent guesses and follow common sense at the personal level.
Further on the personal level, it makes sense to me that various factors that may have no detrimental effect on a “normal” person, can put a predisposed person over the edge – that may include video games, readily available weapon, or use of drugs. On the other hand that may also include any event pivotal enough for that specific person, such as divorce, loss of employment, etc. None of that means that we should collectively control access to video games or people’s marital affairs.
In general, escapism of any sort interferes with cultish indoctrination. Once people start imagining things, they might start imagining alternatives to your totalitarian utopia. Or they might start asking ‘counterfactual’ questions and discover the sheer incoherence of the worldview they had previously accepted by default. There are many features of modern culture (even apparently secular ones) every bit as poisonous as the most all-consuming cults.
Fun is also a reliable indicator that something is deeply wrong: The peasants must have some bit of spare time and energy to themselves which hasn’t been dedicated slavishly to the one true cause.
WRT Videogames: Most videogames are violent because violence is easy to code. Combat only requires the enemy to be vaguely autonomous within the sanitized environment of a gameworld (real autonomy for real combat robots in the real world is vastly more difficult, though progress is being made..)
Other game mechanics have been attempted with success, though in limited domains. Minecraft seems to be a simple enough world that exploration and freeform construction mechanics can be supported.
But other things? If you wanted to make a game about intelligent interaction with strange aliens, and not have it take the form of a strictly limited pre-recorded dialog tree, then unless you’ve invented general AI (and thus instantiated real intelligent strange aliens in your PC) you’re going to quickly run into the fact that you’re interacting with a dumb inanimate object. (Just as, in an exploration game, procedural generation can only take you so far – you can produce endlessly varied worlds, but they’ve always ended up being ’empty’ places somehow. Our brains are really good at eventually plumbing exactly how much complexity is really ‘out there’ in a phenomenon.)
Actually, now that I think about it – most games are about player-vs-player conflict anyway. Player vs. environment, or players vs enemy/environment can only really be done if you automate the other end of the interaction. I suppose D&D is players-vs-GM.
I suspect most JRPG video games are 1/2 an interactive way of telling you a story and 1/2 annoying combat mechanics that push certain randomness-addiction buttons.
‘One wonders what a left wing game might be like,…’
A wall and a firing squad?
Samizdata is my dreamspace. 🙂
From the looks of it, pretty terrible:
https://kotaku.com/a-game-about-making-a-socialist-society-1821295884
“Post Capitalism by Colestia is a short city-building and puzzle game about finding the weak links in capitalism and replacing them with alternatives in order to create a functional socialist society.”
😆
The thing about D&D (and other tabletop RPGs) is that there are a wide variety of different ways to play them. Some involve players-vs-GM. Many others involve the players trying their best to win with the GM only trying to put up a credible fight before losing. And yet others are about the players letting the GM lead them by the nose through the GM’s story. And, of course, there are other variations, including mixed versions.
I disagree, video games are inherently right-wing.
A game is a system, with objective concrete rules and principles against which you must test yourself. If you don’t succeed, you can’t get the system to change for you, instead you must git gud with hour upon hour of practice and study and training.
A game doesn’t care about your disadvantaged background; your race, religion, sex or sexuality; all players play the same game and succeed or fail as individuals.
Gamers celebrate success. Half a million people will tune in to watch a streaming video of you playing a video game, celebrating your excellence, dedication, and taking notes on your techniques.
Gaming is inherently competitive. Even in single-player games, players will compare high scores, completion levels, speedrun times.
Gaming is inherently voluntarist. The communities that surround games are formed on freedom of association. You ask to join, and if you misbehave you get kicked out. Some communities are very casual, with few rules, while others force their participants to remain in the role of their in-game character. You are free to pick a community that suits your unique preferences, or form your own, or not participate in the community at all.
It’s not by accident that the first real pushback against contaminating entertainment with left-wing political messages was Gamergate.
Agreed sconzey – agreed.