Well, speaking only for myself, my anti-intellectual insistence on games as a product rather than works of art is based on the analyses of the "culture industry" by the "Frankfurt School" Critical Theorists, especially Theodor Adorno. Briefly put, the authorship of anything beyond the simplest "indie" game is inescapably compromised by the need for mass appeal to fund the working of the capitalist mode of production required to create it. This means that the developer is not acting in the privileged role of the "autonomous artist", who would have the necessary freedom from economic constraints to authentically explore artistic problems.Kingjackl said:
The Apparent Anti-Intellectualism of Gamer Culture
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An analysis that is as short-sighted as it is damaging.StatusNil said:
Art has always been commerce. Paintings are commissioned. Buildings built to specifications. Statues made for reasons. Music composed to the taste of the audience. Scripts given notes. Patronage in any scale is adding constraints to a piece, a critical component that actually leads to places not even the artists could have imagined. It also assumes that the artist's voice dies in any collaborate effort.
In other words, they are become hipster, destroyer of taste.
Your explanation of Tom Clancy universe is the kind of intellectual argument that the OP didn't find in the article's comment section. Unlike those comments, yours actually addresses the points. I think that's really the OP's complain (too many STFUs, too little refutals)icythepenguin said:
I'd also add that the post you responded to seems to ignore the fact that art is not a product but a process. While a game, like a painting, or book or hat or building, can be an art object, they are not art in and of themselves. The artistic process is only complete when the audience has reacted to the art object in question. One may argue that artistic vision is compromised by the need to conform to economic pressure, but who is to say that my reaction to that compromised vision is any less authentic? I'm not reacting to an art object that could have been, but to an art object that is. The argument that art isn't art unless it is authentic creation unbound ignores that my reaction to the object is what makes it art in the first place.MCerberus said:
The argument is complex, and requires a pretty solid grounding in philosophy and Marxism. Short answer, for someone like Cait, yes this would apply to films, as well.CaitSeith said:
However, CaitSeith's insistence on treating games as either a "product" or "works of art" is a false dichotomy, through the lens of the Frankfurt school, as Adorno would certainly have agreed. He wasn't trying to declassify them as works of art, he was trying to point out their lack of autonomy from capitalism. Mass culture wasn't the issue, is was that the culture was being imposed from above. He mentions this subject in the book he co-authored, Dialectic of Enlightenment...
"'Light' art as such, distraction, is not a decadent form. Anyone who complains that it is a betrayal of the ideal of free expression is under an illusion about society." (pg.135)
Adorno was famously difficult to comprehend, but roughly translated, this means that people aren't doing something wrong by consuming "low-brow" arwork, as it's being imposed upon them from above. People are still experiencing art, it's just that those experiences serve a particular , pedestrian, capitalistic function, as opposed to the "pure" and "free" experiences that art could motivate when it was autonomous, and presumably, working towards a negation of capitalism.
Indeed, such art - actually functioning - is fundamentally crucial to his arguments concerning mass propaganda.
It's important to keep in mind here, that Adorno, and other neo-Marxists were attempting to rationalize why the proletariat revolution had not occurred the way Marx predicted it, in the industrialized nations, and capitalism still reigned supreme. The "culture industry" was extended as a possible solution to this problem, as it called into question the humanity of the proletariat. In other words, everyone got brainwashed by culture, due in major part, to the rise of sufficiently advanced technology, which paved the way for new forms of government, like fascism.
Calling "light" art a "consumer product" only has meaning in relationship to the "functionlessness" that Ardorno championed as an ideal state of autonomous art. This function, however, has nothing to do with gameplay, or anything remotely like such a nested concept. The term is defined in a much more technical fashion, and refers to it's function as a tool to impose the "culture industry". Being bought and sold is not an automatic way to trigger this "consumer product" label, and, indeed, Adorno defends the classical relationship of the patron and the artist as being one that was capable of being able to create autonomous art.
There's a certain intrinsic level of presumed justification to Ardorno's work that's worth pointing out. His arguments about what is actually "autonomous" artwork, and what isn't, basically boils down to his own preferences.
He makes the esoteric argument that certain, purely formal, works of art come from a pure, ideal, place while everything else - does not. This is the cutoff for determining what is a "consumer product", in the realm of modern works of art. If it isn't found to be containing a strong "dialectic" in it's basic form, it's to be excluded from the very slim list of truly autonomous artwork, which, coincidentally, highly favors his home country of Germany, and his own personal taste. Representational work, almost wholesale, is suspect, even that which contains calls to political action. This is because, according to Ardorno, such calls to action can only work within the framework of their own political reality - it's not an escape. Representational artwork reflects reality, and reality is tainted. Art, for Ardorno, is supposed to be about working towards things that truly exist outside of reality, in synergy with the goal of utopia.
This is important to repeat - according to Ardorno, even other radical left-wing artists were creating artwork that was essentially no different than that of the very people they considered their intellectual opposites, unless they subscribed to Ardorno's very specific axioms as to exactly what formal elements of artwork were "autonomous" from the tainted world of capitalistic influence, and the drudgery of human feedback.
In other words, Ardorno's argument comes off a lot like saying "only by creating artwork in a very narrow, exacting way that I prescribe are you truly creating artwork free of influence", even though he denied being an elitist. He had a fervently separatist point of view, thinking that "high art" needed to be distinctly categorized because, unlike popular art, it's motivations were pure and truthful.
While influential, Ardorno isn't taken very seriously as a media critic. He had an obstinate dislike for jazz music, which some critics have pointed out, borders on racism, which gave his views on art a bad reputation. The prism of his ideological lens is very focused. Indeed, almost the entirety of human output, according to Ardorno, is unworthy of genuine consideration, which many find unnecessarily bleak. In Ardorno's view, we should pretty much hold off on legitimate artistic appreciation until the "rapture" of a neo-Marxist, post-capitalist, utopia is upon us - whenever that's supposed to happen. In the meantime, we let that utopia rest, as some sort of last hope, in contemplation of "high-art".
If anything Ardorno would probably insist that we distance ourselves from the artwork, in review, entirely, and focus on it's larger context in society, and the ways it stands to reinforce late-stage capitalism...which the OP's article was attempting, more than most, perhaps. The game's actual aesthetic qualities, such as gameplay, would be interesting in so much as they served as a good examples of the culture industry at work.
Yeah. About that one. Whole game's based on "what if the bad guys won at the end of Rainbow Six (the novel)?", and Clancy's been a known right-wing conspiracy nutter since the '80s, and suddenly vidya talking heads are shitting their pants in collective fear-anger. We're talking about how gamers are the know-nothings?Dalsyne said:
That said, I have no beef with op-ed based on a game or two. Just don't bill it as a review if it's not going to include analysis of ludic elements, since that's generally what is considered the meat of a review.
Apparently telling someone I'm disappointed with the level of discussion is grounds for a warning? That's interesting.
I didn't. I was referring specifically to the people in the OP who were called gamers, or at least "part of gamer culture". The OP seemed to mistake the frustration of a bunch of people annoyed at the fact that the reviewer spends more time talking about politics than the actual game with people who reject deeper stories in games. Historically, this is not true, and I articulated that.Bombiz said:
The whole point of a review is to review something, not start talking about political BS. A reviewer talking politics doesn't tell anyone how good the game-play or the mechanics of the game are. If someone wants to talk politics they should do it as a separate form of content altogether. Reviewers like the one mentioned are why I stopped paying attention to reviews and started watching Let's Plays with little to no commentary or twitch streams for how the game-play, mechanics, and story in a game are.Dalsyne said:
You are tasked with reviewing a game, in other words, with informing the consumer whether or not a product/service is worth their hard-earned money. That's the object of your writing. Especially if you engage in the practice of 'scoring' something, which in itself is a terrible system, you have a responsibility to be as informative about the product as possible. Given that you probably want to write something relatively short and concise, which people will read and not look for the TL;DR version of it on Metacritic, you should focus on what the product offers. Deviations from this can happen, the reviewer's personal experience is valuable in a review, but not when it's monopolizing the critique.
After you've reviewed the game, go ahead and write an entire paper on the politics, the themes or your feelings toward it. People will of course criticize it, either positively or negatively, but you are entitled to doing that.
Gamer Culture isn't any more anti-intellectual than any other sect of western culture. If anything, the mere rise of places like Polygon and Kotaku back in the day speaks to that. People gravitated towards them and away from traditional enthusiast press in the form of IGN and Gamespot for a reason. But there is a time and a place for everything and when you have an audience as large and diverse as this, its various smaller groups will often find themselves in conflict with one another. It doesn't mean that gaming culture, as a whole, is anti-intellectual.
After you've reviewed the game, go ahead and write an entire paper on the politics, the themes or your feelings toward it. People will of course criticize it, either positively or negatively, but you are entitled to doing that.
Gamer Culture isn't any more anti-intellectual than any other sect of western culture. If anything, the mere rise of places like Polygon and Kotaku back in the day speaks to that. People gravitated towards them and away from traditional enthusiast press in the form of IGN and Gamespot for a reason. But there is a time and a place for everything and when you have an audience as large and diverse as this, its various smaller groups will often find themselves in conflict with one another. It doesn't mean that gaming culture, as a whole, is anti-intellectual.
Agreed. See, a bit of commentary here and there to grant an air of subjectivity to a review isn't necessarily a bad thing. But when you start taking points off for moral/political reasons, or when you insist on the politics of the game to the detriment of the rest of it, something starts to smell.Bat Vader said:
And at this point, it's not just an isolated case.
Honestly, I'd say gamers are more intellectual than many contemporary Western subcommunities. Now granted, "Western subcommunities" includes flat earthers, anti-vaxxers, and fans of reality TV, but it is what it is.Stewie Plisken said:
Gamers also happen to be strongly anti-bullshit, and have borderline supernaturally-tuned bullshit detectors, thanks to having grown up watching the games industry and games media with rapt interest. And, when gamers detect bullshit, are more than willing to treat that bullshit with precisely the respect it deserves.
I got about halfway through that piece before saying to myself, "oh, fuck this" and closing the window. Not because I necessarily disagree with the author, but because the author is clearly more interested in showing the audience how smart and "worldly" they think they are, than they are making a persuasive and succinct argument. Simply put, it was bombastic, condescending drivel that reminded me more of all the undergrad papers I've read in which some arrogant tryhard reaches with all their SAT word-fueled might to get Doctor-senpai to notice them instead of write a good paper, than it does a game review.
Honestly, were I to comment on the article, I'd just shitpost. Because shitposting is all it deserves.
I'm skimmed through the review because I don't have much interest in the Division, but I did find this bit interesting -
A PARANOID AND MISANTHROPIC IMAGE OF SOCIETY
followed by
This is the paranoid fantasy of the right-wing brought into disturbing actualization by The Division.
So that would be a dystopian setting then, just like so many other games, films, TV shows and books. Are they all problematic now, or would a paranoid fantasy of the left wing be OK?
A PARANOID AND MISANTHROPIC IMAGE OF SOCIETY
followed by
This is the paranoid fantasy of the right-wing brought into disturbing actualization by The Division.
So that would be a dystopian setting then, just like so many other games, films, TV shows and books. Are they all problematic now, or would a paranoid fantasy of the left wing be OK?
Hey, I appreciate the elaboration on my behalf. My personal inclination, however, is not to follow Adorno & co. very deep into grim Teutonic dialectics (as you could say I'm a touch disillusioned with Marxist prescriptions, even if I admire the clarity of many of their descriptions), but simply to introduce a category of cultural production between the binary of "Art" and "not-Art" that almost everyone taking part in this conversation seems to view as self-evidently sufficient. In other words, mainly to question the uncritical use of some rather elevated (not to mention capital "R" Romatic) notions of "Art" to conceptualize the mass products of an industrial process, not to share in mass condemnation of them from a position of intellectual superiority.Hair Jordan said:
I'm not saying this to make people think LESS of videogames, just because they don't, and can't, measure up to the most idealistic notions of "Art". Indeed, arguably much of the "fine arts" churned out by the Approved Practitioners who went to the correct art schools are quite compromised in their own way, compared to such ideals. (Meaning that they function more as an asset class for the wealthy to invest in than anything concerned with the "aesthetic questions" Adorno saw as the province of "autonomous art". But that's another debate.) People seem to have this idea that they need to justify their emotional investment in things by hanging this status-laden label on them. But it's distorting their idea of what games ARE, and what "improving" them means. That's why there's this massive overvaluation of narrative modeled on other mediums. Games, though, could be seen more accurately as something like "rule-bound challenges", dressed in fantasies because that makes them more compelling, like Chess is better because the pieces are designated as pawns, bishops, queens etc., rather than just abstractions.
It shouldn't come as a surprise that gamers resent being bludgeoned by the first two years of some blogger's University education. You say it like it's a bad thing, but "anti-intellectual" and "anti-authoritarian" tend to be two sides of the same coin. And as reactionary as that comment section seems, there is at least something fundamentally honest about insisting that capitalist media communicating through capitalist channels treat the product like a product, i.e., discussing The Division with the same vocabulary ordinarily applied to refrigerators, cars, clothes, and other objects of consumption.
In any case I think it's basically a good sign when people are willing to openly challenge any kind of media narrative, even if I happen to mostly agree with the Kill Screen piece itself. A healthy contempt for intellectuals isn't the same thing as being anti-thought or anti-analysis.
In any case I think it's basically a good sign when people are willing to openly challenge any kind of media narrative, even if I happen to mostly agree with the Kill Screen piece itself. A healthy contempt for intellectuals isn't the same thing as being anti-thought or anti-analysis.
Like Occam's razor, it's Hanlon's razor - never attribute to malice that which can be adequately explained by stupidity. It's obvious that Ubisoft hasn't re-created the works of Shakespeare nor have they done in recent memory.
I'm sure that people are more likely attribute FF8 be the work of a genius long before Ubisoft release a well written game. It will only serve just how dumbed down games are getting just like most TV programs and some films are.
Which in my opinion is the price of success.
I'm sure that people are more likely attribute FF8 be the work of a genius long before Ubisoft release a well written game. It will only serve just how dumbed down games are getting just like most TV programs and some films are.
Which in my opinion is the price of success.
Well, a contempt for intellectuals would indeed come close to anti-intellectualism. If the very act of applying critical analysis provokes "contempt", then there's something very discouraging and pointlessly restrictive at work.aspotlessdomain said:
Unless you mean specific intellectuals, of course.
I believe to whom he alludes are the psuedo-intellectuals out there who aren't out to contribute meaningfully to society or craft persuasive arguments, but rather prove how smart (they think) they are to the outside world, for their own sake.Silvanus said: