The Apparent Anti-Intellectualism of Gamer Culture

[Hair Jordan]

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.

I think this is a blatant misunderstanding of the role of "anti-intellectualism" in history. A fundamental aspect of every overtly totalitarian government has been the suppression or outright persecution, often murderously brutal, of the intellectual class. From the purges of the USSR or Franco's Spain, to the deplorable censorship of modern China and North Korea, carefully controlling thought is critical to authoritarianism. Pol Pot famously executed people, simply, for wearing eyeglasses, as it implied literacy.

Intellectuals are often the vanguard of new systems of thought designed to challenge authority.

Even if we confirm your idiomatic relationship, your argument still doesn't work. You'd have to make the case, somehow, that an article written for private purposes, under the pretense of free-speech, was somehow "authoritarian" in character or it's method of delivery.

 

[Pseudonym]

I seem to have missed this reply. It has been over a week but I thought I'd reply anyway. The substance of my reply is that 'writing an expository essay'=/='being intellectual'. The rest of this post goes mainly to pointing out grammar that makes you unintelligable and you apparently not reading or forgetting what you yourself quote.

http://www.dictionary.com/browse/intellectualism

noun
1.
devotion to intellectual pursuits.
2.
the exercise of the intellect.
3.
excessive emphasis on abstract or intellectual matters, especially with a lack of proper consideration for emotions.
4.
Philosophy.

the doctrine that knowledge is wholly or chiefly derived from pure reason.
the belief that reason is the final principle of reality.


Of the various ways to write an Essay, I believe that the Expository Essay is the closest fit to the description of Intellectualism:

http://www.time4writing.com/writing-resources/types-of-essays/
3. Expository Essays: Just the Facts
The expository essay is an informative piece of writing that presents a balanced analysis of a topic. In an expository essay, the writer explains or defines a topic, using facts, statistics, and examples. Expository writing encompasses a wide range of essay variations, such as the comparison and contrast essay, the cause and effect essay, and the ?how to? or process essay. Because expository essays are based on facts and not personal feelings, writers don?t reveal their emotions or write in the first person.

Uhm, you posted a definition of intellectual which doesn't support your case, ignored it, and then went straight on to quote a definition of an 'expository essay' and claimed that being an intellectual meant writing expository essays. It doesn't. If we go back to that definition of 'intellectual' you quoted we see that being intellectual entails devoting energy to intellectual persuits and employing the intellect. Is it your opinion that the other three types of essays, the persuasive, narrative and describtive essays should not employ the intellect. Is convinving other people or taking a controversial stance inherently unintellectual? Are arguments then unintellectual?

The article in question, however, is based on personal feelings, the writer's emotions heavily factor into things, there is no contrasting views, simply a single view used with the intention to persuade. And, specifically, to persuade via attacking the opposition, characteristic of a polemic, which is often associated with rhetoric that is very Pathos.

Nearly everything you've written here is incoherent, grammatically incorrect, untrue or some combination thereof. I'll go through it piece by piece and point out some of the most glaring issues.

The article in question, however, is based on personal feelings,

I think you meant to say that the argument is based on personal feelings, not the article since "the article is based on" doesn't really mean anything. In any case, besides the first two paragraphs and the last, the authors personal feelings are hardly mentioned at all. The bulk and the substance of the article is substantiated by pointing out specific events, mechanics, events and backgrounds in the division and explaining how all those things point to specific ideological views.

the writer's emotions heavily factor into things,

Where exactly? Could you quote anything from the article where the writers emotions are factoring in. The closest thing to an emotion that I've been able to find in the article is what it calls 'numbness' which is hardly an emotion.

there is no contrasting views

are*. Besides that this is correct but you seem to be unaware of some of the implications of this fact. I'll get back to that later.

simply a single view used with the intention to persuade.

In the same way articles aren't based on things, views are not used to persuade. Arguments (or psychological tricks in some cases) are used to persuade people of specific views. But more to the point, so what if the article doesn't present other views or intents to persuade? Like I said, I don't agree at all that intellectual means you cannot try to persuade or have to present multiple views in everything you write.

And, specifically, to persuade via attacking the opposition

Like you said, the article hardly mentions any other point of view and mentions only one specific person they disagree with is a guy called Julian Gerighty and he is not personally attacked. His opinion is noted and the writer says in one or two sentences that they don't agree with his opinion because xyz and that is pretty much that. Nobody was attacked and there hardly is a clear opposition, besides a one-off mention of 'right-wing fantasy'. Unless you consider saying something you disagree with an attack on yourself or on some opposition that isn't mentioned in the article itself, this is just plain false.

characteristic of a polemic, which is often associated with rhetoric that is very Pathos.

http://www.dictionary.com/browse/polemic?s=t


noun
1.
a controversial argument, as one against some opinion, doctrine, etc.
2.
a person who argues in opposition to another; controversialist.
adjective
3.
Also, polemical. of or relating to a polemic; controversial.

Origin of Polemic

1630-40; < Greek polemik?s of or for war, equivalent to p?lem (os) war + -ikos -ic

A Polemic is not nor has it ever been associated with Intellectualism; It's what you'd call a Warspeech to harden the hearts of your troops against the enemy before you charged the battle lines.

Like with the definition of intellectualism you seem to have ignored the defition you posted and have just made up your own which contradicts what you posted. You even seem to confuse the words etymology with its meaning. For one, a controversial argument, or an argument against some opinion or doctrine can be intellectual. Indeed, it better be, if it is to be a good argument. Note also that both definition 1 and 2 mention that a polemic is ussually against some other person, opinion or doctrine. Most other definitons I found online mention this as well. But as we've seen earlier, hardly anyone is mentioned in the article. The article might be said to polemicise against the division, but without actual people to disagree with a polemic would hardly be the right word. A warspeech is certainly not what you would call a polemic. It doesn't try or pretend to disagree with anyone and it is ussually not an argument. Warspeeches, unlike polemics, are not intented to be public enough for the other side to even know about them.

 

[aspotlessdomain]

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.

I think this is a blatant misunderstanding of the role of "anti-intellectualism" in history. A fundamental aspect of every overtly totalitarian government has been the suppression or outright persecution, often murderously brutal, of the intellectual class. From the purges of the USSR or Franco's Spain, to the deplorable censorship of modern China and North Korea, carefully controlling thought is critical to authoritarianism. Pol Pot famously executed people, simply, for wearing eyeglasses, as it implied literacy.

Intellectuals are often the vanguard of new systems of thought designed to challenge authority.

Even if we confirm your idiomatic relationship, your argument still doesn't work. You'd have to make the case, somehow, that an article written for private purposes, under the pretense of free-speech, was somehow "authoritarian" in character or it's method of delivery.

"Somehow". It's not hard. You're exactly wrong, to start with, about about the role intellectuals--and intelligentsia is probably the better word--play in relation to authority. By far the most elegant and scholarly apologia in defense of imperialism and almost anything else we'd rather the state wasn't engaged in is produced by the intellectual class. Far from being any sort of vanguard of sustained opposition to mainstream ideology (you'd have to point it out to me in the case of Western liberal capitalism), contemporary intellectuals are the same bourgeois flunkies policing the boundaries of acceptable thought that they've been since at least the early 60s and probably a lot longer.

In any case, it isn't necessary that the Kill Screen piece be explicitly authoritarian, although it frankly isn't much of a break from tradition, here. The author isn't exactly a radical--he might have pointed out, for example, how actual emergency powers have actually been used in the very recent history of France (to terrorize activists), or that the player characters of The Division would be indistinguishable from the ordinary junta and death squads which have at one time or another been the scourge of almost any Latin American country you care to name. But even if he did produce something other than the usual crude whining about "representation" which has become fashionable among people who author thinkpieces these days, he's still working within and as a part of an institution that for most of its history has given a pass to exactly this ideology, probably the biggest example of which is virtually any Zombie-themed game where this exact fantasy plays out in less explicitly political terms.

Again, I don't actually disagree with much of what he says, and he says so little in the article that there isn't much to find explicitly "wrong" anyway. What's more interesting is that the comments section that openly challenged and publicly disagreed with the author were smeared as "anti-intellectual". It's a great example of the peculiar tendency of ideology to produce statements which are accidentally true. "Anti-intellectual" is used in a very specific way, at least in the US, as a label favored by center-right liberals who can't understand why they're so loathed by blue-collar types that overwhelmingly prefer the narrative offered by right-wing demagogues--the "paranoid fantasy" of The Division.

Well, actual radicals on the actual left devote some time to figuring this out. See/google: stuff like David Graeber's "Army of altruists". Snotty, sneering liberals settle for "they're just anti-intellectual" (i.e., pathetic stupid victims of propaganda). Seen in this light, anti-intellectual could really mean something like "anti-elite", which is at least a tiny kernel of the kind of authentic class consciousness totally absent from the critiques of ideology currently being produced around videogames. Look what the other side is saying in the comments:

"Yeah, I'm pretty sure that Ubisoft, a progressive developer that has since the very first AC game has made a disclaimer that amounts to, "We swear to God, we're diverse as fuck!" are going to create a game that offers up a fantasy for the type of paranoid nutjobs he they mention. This was a company that was made famous by the Prince of Persia series. This was a company that made its name using the Tom Clancy license by portraying counter-terrorism in a fairly nuanced fashion that didn't amount too, "Kill dem brown peoples." And yet... they're servicing a right wing political ideology?"

Nothing the "anti-intellectuals" have said about the Kill Screen piece is actually dumber than this statement, non?

Edit: I hesitate to even mention the name but probably the best known and easiest to find critique of the intellectual class along these line's is Chomsky's "The Responsibility of Intellectuals". Should be easy to google.

 

[Hair Jordan]

"Somehow". It's not hard. You're exactly wrong, to start with, about about the role intellectuals--and intelligentsia is probably the better word--play in relation to authority. By far the most elegant and scholarly apologia in defense of imperialism and almost anything else we'd rather the state wasn't engaged in is produced by the intellectual class. Far from being any sort of vanguard of sustained opposition to mainstream ideology (you'd have to point it out to me in the case of Western liberal capitalism), contemporary intellectuals are the same bourgeois flunkies policing the boundaries of acceptable thought that they've been since at least the early 60s and probably a lot longer....


Edit: I hesitate to even mention the name but probably the best known and easiest to find critique of the intellectual class along these line's is Chomsky's "The Responsibility of Intellectuals". Should be easy to google.

I was simply making a refutation of your statement that ""anti-intellectual" and "anti-authoritarian" tend to be two sides of the same coin." That some intellectuals play an implicit role in reinforcing preexisting power structures, is not controversial. Your entire argument boils down to semantics, basically.

The amount of intellectuals, such as Rousseau, Marx, and Bakunin, responsible for highly influential anti-authoritarian philosophy is a vast field of study.

Chomsky, himself, is one of the world's foremost living intellectuals, if you need a contemporary living example (he's supported Bernie Sanders in the past, fwiw). In the piece you reference, Chomsky is primarily launching an attack against the self-serving ideology he observes in the "social sciences" and technocratic class. He fully acknowledges that this criticism doesn't apply to all intellectuals, however...(emphasis mine)

"This is commendable, and contrasts favorably, for Kristol, with the talk of the ?unreasonable, ideological types? in the teach-in movement, who often seem to be motivated by such absurdities as ?simple, virtuous ?anti-imperialism,? "who deliver ?harangues on ?the power structure,? ? and who even sometimes stoop so low as to read ?articles and reports from the foreign press on the American presence in Vietnam.? Furthermore, these nasty types are often psychologists, mathematicians, chemists, or philosophers (just as, incidentally, those most vocal in protest in the Soviet Union are generally physicists, literary intellectuals, and others remote from the exercise of power), rather than people with Washington contacts, who, of course, realize that ?had they a new, good idea about Vietnam, they would get a prompt and respectful hearing? in Washington." Chomsky - The Responsibility of Intellectuals.

Antonio Gramsci didn't rot away in a fascist prison because he was an "anti-intellectual" (which, in your view, is fundamentally related to "anti-authoritarianism" - two sides of the same coin, right?).

Anti-intellectualism and anti-authoritarianism are not "two sides of the same coin" in Iran, unless you artificially distinguish between "intellectuals" and what might be understood, in a more technical sense as the "intelligentsia", i.e. intellectuals with power. Anti-intellectualism would then have to be narrowly focused to criticism of this intelligentsia alone, which isn't necessarily keeping with it's common usage, mainly because "anti-intellectualism" would become more about varying political ideology.

This could potentially lead to the somewhat absurd scenario where a person could see themselves going from an "anti-intellectual" to a "pro-intellectual" standpoint, depending on what political scenario is played out locally, entirely independent of their actions or internal thought process.

Chomsky himself acknowledges this point in the following quote...

"If by 'intellectual' you mean people who are a special class who are in the business of imposing thoughts and forming ideas for people in power, and telling people what they should believe...they're really more a kind of secular priesthood, whose task it is to uphold the doctrinal truths of the society. And the population SHOULD be anti-intellectual in that respect."

http://www.goodreads.com/quotes/643848-if-by-intellectual-you-mean-people-who-are-a-special

He elaborates on the concept, specifically in his book Understanding Power...

"These are funny words actually, I mean being an 'intellectual' has almost nothing to do with working with your mind; these are two different things. My suspicion is that plenty of people in the crafts, auto mechanics and so on, probably do as much or more intellectual work as people in the universities. There are plenty of areas in academia where what's called 'scholarly' work is just clerical work, and I don't think clerical work's more challenging than fixing an automobile engine?in fact, I think the opposite.... So if by 'intellectual' you mean people who are using their minds, then it's all over society. If by 'intellectual' you mean people who are a special class who are in the business of imposing thoughts, and framing ideas for people in power, and telling everyone what they should believe, and so on, well, yeah, that's different. These people are called 'intellectuals'?but they're really more a kind of secular priesthood, whose task is to uphold the doctrinal truths of the society. And the population should be anti-intellectual in that respect, I think that's a healthy reaction" (pg. 96)

In other words, whether or not "anti-intellectualism" has the relationship with "anti-authoritarianism" that you prescribe has to do with how we define "intellectual".

In order for your argument to make any sense, you'd have to make sure everyone was on the same page, semantically, with this refinement of the term "intellectual", and that's not what you did. Note that is exactly what Chomsky - is - doing when asked, we can assume, questions similarly dependent on semantics. If you're going to drop references, I'd recommend paying attention to their methodology.

When the OP asked if "gamer culture" are "anti-intellectual", it's not entirely clear that they were asking if "gamer culture is critical of the secular priesthood, whose task it is to uphold the doctrinal truths of society".

That's certainly not the response I had to the post.

Asking if the comments to the OP's article are "anti-intellectual" can just as easily be a debate about their methodology, as it is their presumed ideological underpinnings. In other words, are they making well reasoned arguments, that depend on logic, in the intellectual tradition? That hinge depends on whether or not we presuppose your definition of "intellectual".

It would appear that you're attempting to defend the comments in question from all possible reasonable interpretations of "anti-intellectualism" using one narrowly defined interpretation. That's just a semantical sleight of hand.

You can't really be "wrong" if you're defining all the terms of a debate, secretly, in advance, and then arguing from that place of presumed authority.