The Apparent Anti-Intellectualism of Gamer Culture

[Nemmerle]

There are two senses of what it is to be an intellectual.

In the first sense, intellectualism is a dedication to the pursuit of activities and skills that typically require a high degree of knowledge and practice. It is the equivalent to intellectual craftsmanship, in the same sense that a carpenter might be committed to his work. It is the view, spoken or otherwise, that there is value in such things.

In the second such sense, intellectualism is pretentious. It is the view that simply being able to comment on something, without being able to do it yourself and without having any relevant expertise or experience, is something valuable. It is the cliche version of the first sense. The court eunuch commenting upon how the king should get laid. It is the sort of viewpoint held by the sort of people who would state, "we see further by standing upon the shoulders of giants," while, at the same time, investing none of the effort that is actually required to climb up there.

In the case in hand, the reviewer is clearly not an intellectual in the first sense of the word. They make no acknowledgement of other viewpoints, they make no exploration of what else the work they are looking at might be taken to mean by its relationship to the audience, they don't account for any of the evidence in the game that supports any other viewpoints than their own and rate it purely according to its relation to their personal political agenda. That is not intellectualism in a sense that anyone ought to care about, that's not even good art commentary, that someone going off on a political bender with the presence of a game as an excuse. Heck, Nexus essentially disposes of, or give sufficient grounds to reject, the review's viewpoint in two paragraphs, which I may as well quote beneath:

Yeah, stellar review right there. I really came away with a greater understanding of the game. I've played the game for over 20 hours, and there are many things which this writer lies about or just fails to understand. Your job as a Division agent is not to "kill the poor looters trying to survive", rather it is to find evidence of the bioterrorists responsible for the outbreak, and to eliminate other terrorist elements who are literally going around burning everyone alive. In the meantime, you are tasked with helping people receive food and aid - and you routinely pass by "looters" who are not considered threats. You also routinely give supplies to the needy.

Furthermore, the charges laid on the story that the Division is just some form of statist propaganda, glorifying totalitarian agencies is nonsense. The plot goes on to show that the Division is flawed, and has too much power - a topic routinely discussed throughout the game's narrative, challenging the notion of federal agencies with unlimited power.

Now, most people do not seem to me to be intellectuals in the first sense of the word, but they at least have enough sense to occasionally recognise the "intellectuals" in the second sense of the word, and to want little[footnote]Which may be by there are so few real intellectuals these days, it has become somewhat of a dirty word, and for good reason.[/footnote] to do with them. In that sense, gamers, as with most of society, are anti-intellectual. This is no great tragedy.

The tragedy is that the outward appearance of intelligence has been hijacked, without the underlying skills and ethics that rendered it in adaptive part of society, and allowed to tarnish the reputation of the general concept. And that when it is paraded out, people are expected to submit to this pretence because, "well, you wouldn't want to be against smart folks would you? You wouldn't want to be stupid would you? Clearly the smart folks know better than you do - sort of by definition."

I probably qualify as an elitist to most people. That's where my values are. And I'm all for going off an an elitist polemic. However, if I were inclined to do so I would choose my friend somewhat more carefully. I do not think this fella would be among them.

 

[ManutheBloodedge]

What can I say that hasn't been said already? It seems to me that the readers of the review weren't looking for an analysis of the themes and plot of the game, but rather how well it functioned as an enjoyable experience. Yes, that included the story, but from what I understand, the author reviewed the game with little to no real concern on how anyone else would see the things that he saw. All he did was just talk about the moral implications of something that the mass media was going to pay little mind to. What he did was take the weakest part of a bridge and examine it thoroughly and declare that the entire bridge is unfit to be used by the public. Normally, this would be acceptable, as everything in a creation needs to work well. But all he did was examine the singular piece rather than the bridge as a whole, as a review should, before declaring it unfit completely, while the rest of the bridge was functioning and safe, albeit unexciting and ultimately not worth one's time, with the one part that he examined being the railings on the side. Nice to have, but ultimately not what people are there for. I don't think that gamers as a whole are anti-intellectual. Quite the opposite. Spec Ops: The Line is a big example of games that are intellectual and were successful. The problem is that he looked at the wrong thing, ignored everything else, and didn't bother to review the game under any guidelines other than his own as someone who had their sensibilities offended.

Look, I get what you are saying here, don't reduce a review of something on a small part of it and then value the whole thing, but the example you choose is rather ill-fited. It is perfectly valid to do that to a bridge, if a part of a bridge, especially the weakest part, is damaged, then this bridge is unfit to be used by the public. Because, you know, bridges can collapse when they have a weak spot. You don't have to examine the whole bridge when you find a structural weakness to declare it dangerous. So again, not the best choice of metaphor to suit your argument. This is more akin to rating a book on the font used for the text, without actually having read any word of it.

 

[CritialGaming]

Nevermind. This is a click bait article at best, labeled as a review because it wont get clicks otherwise.

Here is how the article appears when you google for Division reviews.

Review The perverse ideology of The Division - Kill Screen
https://killscreen.com/articles/the-perverse-ideology-of-the-division/
Mar 9, 2016 - In the first few hours of The Division, you will be bombarded with phone recordings, resources and consumables, an overwhelming litany of ...

 

[CaitSeith]

snip

snip

It doesn't help that the "review" appears in Metacritic either. The people who frequent Metacritic probably are the ones with the least patience towards such analysis.

What's interesting, they do criticise modern rating system and how iflated it tends to be(Which i generally agree with. Numbers summaring reviews are bullshit.) in this article: https://killscreen.com/articles/note-reviews/. Then, they rate DNF with whooping '-1000' score. I dunno, does that mean all the numbers there should be treated as a jab?

And a small digression: In the bigger picture i don't like how "serious" game criticism tends to put gameplay element aside . After all it's what differentiates this branch of (pop)culture from other, like books, or movies it so much aspires to. I think games should've stand on their own legs as a medium if you want them to be perceived than more just a mere copycats of "higher" art-forms.

I don't see them as "serious"; but as "alternative". If I want a different perspective of a game, well, they pretty much qualify. But I agree that a game review that completely ignores the gameplay is incomplete. I don't think we have reached the point in gaming where the game mechanics are so homogeneous that talking about them in new games would be stating the obvious (like saying that Superman v Batman has sound).

 

[CaitSeith]

As usual, the critics have the right to say whatever they want in their reviews, and the viewers likewise have the right to criticize this critic's review in what ever way they see fit (unless it violates the CoC for whatever site this is on, but they can still criticize it elsewhere). And of course, you can criticize these posters, and I can criticize your criticisms, and someone else can ... etc. The right to free speech doesn't only apply to critics.

However something that frequently happens is that they don't criticize the reviews. They "criticize" the critics (in quotations marks, because telling names isn't criticism). Yes, the right to free speech doesn't only apply to critics; but that doesn't give to every speech the same value (neither makes all of them automatically criticism).

 

[CaitSeith]

snip

Have you seen any reviews that are exclusively about the lighting angles in the transformers movies? Or I think more relevant to Killscreen's reviews have you seen any reviews that explicitly omit talking about some part of filmmaking such as acting or sound design because the reviewer doesn't think they add to the conversation? I think there is a world of difference between saying "we are writing reviews to focus on excellence in storytelling and largely we try not to focus on gameplay"(which Killscreen doesn't say for reference) and straight up saying:

"We like to stay away from the word "gameplay." Kill Screen?s primary concern is the interaction between games and culture, and so that's what our reviews hold a game to task for: how it reflects and responds to the world around it."

Because that's explicitly what they say about their reviews, they even go on to say "Describing "gameplay" doesn't often add to that conversation". which can easily be taken to mean that they don't think gameplay can add to a game in terms of artistry. I don't think they can be taken seriously if they don't think that gameplay can add to art. Especially with some games like Spec Ops; The Line or Undertale where gameplay and story mix like they do.

For reference here is the link that I am quoting from, it was also posted elsewhere in this thread:
https://killscreen.com/articles/note-about-our-reviews-policy/

Also even if there were "reviews" that focused exclusively on something like the CGI in a movie or something like that they would likely be labeled as opinion pieces and the author would hopefully have the decency to avoid giving the entire movie an arbitrary score based on that.

I agree. I think that a game review that completely ignores the gameplay is incomplete because I don't think we have reached the point in gaming where the game mechanics are so homogeneous that if you played one game, talking about it in new games would be stating the obvious (like saying that Superman v Batman has sound). Although this is an Ubisoft game...

 

[Bombiz]

seems to me that the people there are mad by the fact that the author reviewed the ideology and not the game. though reading more about the website it seems they want to talk about ideas rather than game play.

 

[Revnak_v1legacy]

On the one hand, analyzing a very specific theme of the game like this and nothing else probably doesn't belong in a normal review. On the other hand, I don't read reviews and instead read overly specific analysis like this because reviews are fucking worthless while I can actually learn something interesting from an in depth analysis. I am vaguely conflicted, but mostly uninterested.

 

[TheMysteriousGX]

So here's a thought experiment: If someone grafted the mechanics of CoD on to the everything else of, say, Medal of Honor: Warfighter[footnote]phahahahaha[/footnote], would that have made Warfighter a good game?

Was it the mechanics and graphics that made Metroid: Other M as bad as it was?

Do we really lose so much by having a single/handful of review/s that might not tell us as much about some aspects of the game and more on others?

(Preemptive Metacritic rebuttal: it's not Killscreen's, or any other reviewer's, responsibility to give a single shit what their score might do to the Metacritic aggregate score. If Killscreen, or any other reviewer, modifies their particular brand of arbitrary score based on how it could potentially hurt or help the publisher or developer, that's unethical.)

 

[Hair Jordan]

Nevermind. This is a click bait article at best, labeled as a review because it wont get clicks otherwise.

Here is how the article appears when you google for Division reviews.

Review The perverse ideology of The Division - Kill Screen
https://killscreen.com/articles/the-perverse-ideology-of-the-division/
Mar 9, 2016 - In the first few hours of The Division, you will be bombarded with phone recordings, resources and consumables, an overwhelming litany of ...

I don't think we can reasonably answer the question as to whether or not gamer culture is anti-intellectual without a proper case study. While a lot of research has been done on the subject of the general public, I'm unaware of published work focusing specifically on "gamer culture" (feel free to provide research, if anyone knows of any, this isn't my area of study). Even our taxonomical understanding of "gamer culture" is bound to be controversial, and at best, we could probably narrow our research to something like age ranges, or microcosmic sub-groups. To discuss it now, as a whole, we'd almost certainly rush into perilous generalizations, fraught with resentment. In the meantime, however, we can certainly analyze suspected instances when they occur, on a individual basis. Given a potentially large enough body of evidence, a person can, of course, draw conclusions for themselves.

For example, people are seemingly fixated on the difference between a game review, and what we might more traditionally call criticism. Rather than rationally debate the arguments posed by the author, we instead get attempts to invalidate the work, as a whole, though unsupported summary judgement. There appears to be a tacit thesis embedded in some of these retorts, which is that you can't, or shouldn't, write a review that escalates into game criticism, in the academic sense. This practice is certainly common in analogous film and literary criticism, particularly by those that employ specific ideological theory, such as Marxist or feminist theory.

In the intellectual tradition, if you're going to pose a thesis, tacit or not, the burden is on you to supply supporting arguments. Seemingly self-justifying theses that are primarily employed to erode another person's legitimacy, not their arguments (such as the one quoted above), are a hallmark of anti-intellectualism.

 

[Ragsnstitches]

So here's a thought experiment: If someone grafted the mechanics of CoD on to the everything else of, say, Medal of Honor: Warfighter[footnote]phahahahaha[/footnote], would that have made Warfighter a good game?

Was it the mechanics and graphics that made Metroid: Other M as bad as it was?

Do we really lose so much by having a single/handful of review/s that might not tell us as much about some aspects of the game and more on others?

Conversely, there are plenty of games that resonate with people that don't deliver on graphics or gameplay.

What can we deduce from this? Is gameplay and graphcis unimportant? Eh, no... turns out, games are highly subjective pieces of media.

The only "objective" quality one can levvy at games is whether it works or not when we hit play but even then when it comes to PC the onus can be on many parties, not just the developers of the games (poorly optimised drivers, OS updates scewing stuff up, poor hardware specifications on the part of the player). Even bugs and glitches have value. Some people find them charming or even integral to their experience (see speed runners that use glitches to circumvent huge segments of a game).

Depending on their own personal values, games can WILDLY differ in quality from person to person. Ergo, they are subjective. And here's the kicker... we all know that, even those ragebabies in the comment section of that review know that.

As Zhukov said earlier, the issue isn't inserting politics, or discussing games sans gameplay. The issue is talking about things "others" don't want to hear and their inability to tune it out. I guarantee you that if the politics and opinions discussed in the review were favorable towards The Division those ranting now would either show approval or say nothing at all (review would have likely never cross their path), while a new batch of folks would rant and rave in protest to this new spin because it doesn't jive with their own experience.

 

[Ryallen]

What can I say that hasn't been said already? It seems to me that the readers of the review weren't looking for an analysis of the themes and plot of the game, but rather how well it functioned as an enjoyable experience. Yes, that included the story, but from what I understand, the author reviewed the game with little to no real concern on how anyone else would see the things that he saw. All he did was just talk about the moral implications of something that the mass media was going to pay little mind to. What he did was take the weakest part of a bridge and examine it thoroughly and declare that the entire bridge is unfit to be used by the public. Normally, this would be acceptable, as everything in a creation needs to work well. But all he did was examine the singular piece rather than the bridge as a whole, as a review should, before declaring it unfit completely, while the rest of the bridge was functioning and safe, albeit unexciting and ultimately not worth one's time, with the one part that he examined being the railings on the side. Nice to have, but ultimately not what people are there for. I don't think that gamers as a whole are anti-intellectual. Quite the opposite. Spec Ops: The Line is a big example of games that are intellectual and were successful. The problem is that he looked at the wrong thing, ignored everything else, and didn't bother to review the game under any guidelines other than his own as someone who had their sensibilities offended.

Look, I get what you are saying here, don't reduce a review of something on a small part of it and then value the whole thing, but the example you choose is rather ill-fited. It is perfectly valid to do that to a bridge, if a part of a bridge, especially the weakest part, is damaged, then this bridge is unfit to be used by the public. Because, you know, bridges can collapse when they have a weak spot. You don't have to examine the whole bridge when you find a structural weakness to declare it dangerous. So again, not the best choice of metaphor to suit your argument. This is more akin to rating a book on the font used for the text, without actually having read any word of it.

That's why, in the bridge metaphor in this case, I said that the story was the railing of the bridge. I may not have made that part clear.

 

[Adam Jensen_v1legacy]

Well you have to realize that gamers aren't that different from other people. So if most people are stupid and under-educated, then most gamers probably are stupid and under-educated as well. Why wouldn't they be? Add to that the fact that you can't tell someone's age on the internet, it's entirely possible that a lot of gamers that say stupid shit on the internet are 10 year olds. That makes gaming community incredibly dumb. Maybe even dumber than most because they're a part of the gaming community despite their age. There's no age requirement for something like that. At least not the kind that you can't lie about.

 

[NiPah]

I always love to see how many gamers get absolutely infuriated and indignant over game critics daring to critique a game in a way they personally disprove of. If you don't want to read their opinions about a game, don't read their reviews. Seems simple enough to me. But no, instead, people have to argue why these people shouldn't be allowed to give their opinions about a game, because they're giving the WRONG kind of opinions! I mean "leave your opinion about things I don't care about in a game out of your opinion about a game" just seems like a laughably unreasonable and immature demand to make of a game reviewer. They do not owe you a review you personally approve of. If you don't like it, find one of the many, MANY other game reviewers that do review it in a way you approve. If you feel that's not the kind of review their audience wants, simply because it's not the kind of review you want, did you ever stop to think that maybe, just maybe, you're not the kind of audience the reviewer wants? That maybe they're allowed to review the game in whatever way they feel like reviewing it, and it's up to more people than just you to decide whether or not they want to be that reviewer's audience? That maybe other people might actually want that kind of review? What are you so threatened by that you cannot stand the thought that some game reviewers might review a game in ways different than what you, personally, want from a review, and some gamers might actually want such reviews?

Ironically the reverse is true, now critiques of reviews are hated, the review is a sacred thing and no one should have opinions about my opinions.
It all just becomes a matter of opinion in the end, the commenters judged the game differently and disagreed with the reviewer, they then stated them in the correct way to do it.
I don't agree with the commenters, but they're free to judge the review however they want, just like the reviewer is free to judge the game however they want.

 

[Zombie Proof]

I think the problem with this write up is that it's a really interesting editorial with some real thought provoking points on the tools used in gaming and what they signify. As a review though, it fails on all fronts because it's only focused on a few aspects of the game. There is no objective viewpoint on how the game plays and how those elements juxtapose with the themes therein. All of the articles energy is focused on themes and symbolism and in terms of what we'd expect from a full "review" falls short for it.

 

[Lightknight]

People in general don't want to be forced to see opinions informed by bias they don't agree with. This is a natural human tendency and even a component of something as core as tribalism.

Unwillingness to be faced with views you don't agree with could successfully be defined as anti-intellectualism but you have a damn long road to travel to express that this is somehow gamer culture specific and not true in the broader human culture. For example, the "SJW" culture that is often shown as clashing with gamer culture. You'll note that that movement contains within it the appropriation and abuse of safe spaces as instead being shelters to protect people from counter-ideas rather than truly being about helping people who are desperate need of a safe space due to trauma. Not that safe spaces are never just safe spaces, but usually they're just put up in protest of opposing ideas as a place to discourage listening to them.

Almost any other group has similar tendencies. The more science-based the groups get, the smaller the areas of conflict (where the goal of said conflict is aversion to differing ideas). The more ideological and passionate the groups get, the larger the areas of conflict.

Fun times.

 

[Gethsemani_v1legacy]

Almost any other group has similar tendencies. The more science-based the groups get, the smaller the areas of conflict. The more ideological and passionate the groups get, the larger the areas of conflict.

I take it you've never been involved in Academia? There are lots of conflicts there all the time, some of them so caustic and infected that they make the Chans seem like civil places. Besides there's no inherent conflict between "science-based" and ideologically motivated, there are plenty of ideological groups that ground themselves in research and science all the time (Like any Think Tank ever). And there's absolutely no conflict between science-based and passionate, most researchers are very passionate about their work, to the point that they are ready to duke it out with anyone that questions it.

 

[Lightknight]

Almost any other group has similar tendencies. The more science-based the groups get, the smaller the areas of conflict. The more ideological and passionate the groups get, the larger the areas of conflict.

I take it you've never been involved in Academia? There are lots of conflicts there all the time, some of them so caustic and infected that they make the Chans seem like civil places. Besides there's no inherent conflict between "science-based" and ideologically motivated, there are plenty of ideological groups that ground themselves in research and science all the time (Like any Think Tank ever). And there's absolutely no conflict between science-based and passionate, most researchers are very passionate about their work, to the point that they are ready to duke it out with anyone that questions it.

Conflict is not anti-intellectual. My apologies for leaving the phrasing as "areas of conflict" but I was hoping the context of my post would have explained the conflict as being a conflict to avoid intellectual growth. Academics debate and argue in the pursuit of intellectualism. Huge difference in type of conflict as opposed to groups sniping at the opposing side to try and silence them.

 

[Callate]

One, we need to get past the idea that criticism exists in a vacuum, a kind of intellectual exercise that has no motivations, intent, or effects of its own. The whole "I'm just stating an opinion, you aren't afraid of opinions, you aren't defensive about having your medium scrutinized, are you" argument is getting increasingly stale both for over-use and under-examination.

For some reason, too often I see people willing to indulge a couple of seemingly obvious double standards: that games have major effects to change thinking and ideology, but the critical pieces- often far more deliberate and targeted in their intent- do not, and that games are obligated to carefully examine their characters to avoid generalizations, stereotypes, and unfortunate implications, but writers of pieces examining the medium are under no similar obligation to explicitly separate the aspects of the game they find "problematic" from the assumption that the audience is at best a passive recipient and at worst an eager consumer of said aspects.

For all the supposed "depth" of this critical assessment, the subtext of the exchange seems more telling: This game is saying that poor people are expendable! Actually, I'm getting something entirely different out of the game than that, and I'm in no danger of going out and serial-murdering homeless people, but thank you for the patronizing implication.

Two, "Why are you afraid of criticism, games can't be art unless they're subject to criticism" implies a willful ignorance of both history and the current environment. The "typical" gamer, if studies are to be believed, is now in their thirties; that doesn't change the fact that many, many people continue to view the medium as one aimed at and consumed by children. Nor that quite a number of those people eagerly consume criticism that depicts games as antisocial activities that divorce people of empathy and train them to violence, but would never deign to actually play the games described in those criticisms to determine whether the depictions were accurate or if they had features that redeemed them. Nor that many of those people will happily throw their weight into letters to the editor, correspondence with elected officials, and threatened boycotts against major retailers to get "those games" off the shelves or place them under tighter restrictions, resulting in a chilling effect on anyone who might contemplate putting material others might consider off-putting into their games.

Further, we have reached a point in many media where we recognize and tolerate that some works don't merit the same kind of criticism as others. Oh, there might be the occasional dissertation on the amount of actual property damage a car chase in an action movie would actually cause, or treatise on the class implications of Harry Potter, but by and large the works are examined for their ability to entertain, perhaps with nods to strength (or weakness) of the writing, the depth (or shallowness) of the characters, the ability to maintain a brisk pace (or not.) Deep, navel-gazing scrutiny of current "pop" works is usually treated, appropriately in my opinion, as something close to parody. Notably, that doesn't mean that we stop doing more thoughtful examinations of Anna Karenina, or Citizen Kane, or Rite of Spring- but we don't assume that rolling our eyes at the former and condoning the latter means that consumers of literature, film, or music are foregoing the right to have those media treated as serious art.

The Supreme Court decision that declared video games worthy of First Amendment protections isn't even five years old. If the audience for video games is still leery of certain forms of criticism, it's also true that a certain class of criticism refuses to treat the audience of that criticism as anything more than children in need of their superior moral guidance, lest they fall prey to mind-control and juvenile delinquency. If the attitude of that audience is sometimes troubling, so, too, is the attitude of the critic, and no less deserving of measured and thoughtful push-back.

 

[Gethsemani_v1legacy]

Academics debate and argue in the pursuit of intellectualism. Huge difference in type of conflict as opposed to groups sniping at the opposing side to try and silence them.

Not to be snippy, but I'll re-iterate my question if you've ever been in Academia? The ideal is that academics and researchers will argue and debate to promote science and find out what is true and what is not. In reality it tends to come down to two or more camps sniping at each other and doing their very best to silence or shame the other camp. There's a lot of prestige involved in modern Academia and people invest decades into their specific field of research, so if your theories turn out to be wrong you've lost what amounts to you life's work. That's why so many academic disputes seem like nothing but pissing contests between arrogant douchebags who both seem more interested in telling you just how much of an imbecile and hack researcher the other guy is then they are in explaining why they are right (because it should be self-evident that they are correct, at least to them).

Just look at the "debate" about Homeopathy as a fitting example (and this is a debate in which one side is clearly right in terms of research). Both sides have their evidence and research lined up, but today the discussion is rarely about objective findings, but rather about how the other side are either paid shills for big pharma or ignorant yokels that need to learn some basic chemistry. This as opposed to comparing their research to that of the other sides' and then drawing a conclusion about which presents the strongest evidence.