Of Phil Fish and Indie Entitlement

Kris Ligman

New member
Apr 22, 2014
22
0
0
Of Phil Fish and Indie Entitlement


Hello, Escapist readers! As part of our partnership with curation website Critical Distance [http://critical-distance.com], we'll be bringing you a weekly digest of the coolest games criticism, analysis and commentary from around the web. Let's hit it!

Not too long ago, Anita Sarkeesian's Tropes vs Women in Games series tackled [http://www.feministfrequency.com/2013/05/damsel-in-distress-part-2-tropes-vs-women/], where it treats the death of two characters, one man and one woman, very differently.

From Baldur's Gate to a more contemporary series, Stephen Beirne series again [http://normallyrascal.wordpress.com/2014/06/20/and-you-with-it-speck-of-dust/], this time borrowing from German philosopher Nietzsche to describe the game's "optimistic" nihilism:

[D]eath is ubiquitous but it is also deflated as a barrier and as an existential burden. It is no longer the final hurdle of one's life, now it is merely a condition of one's continuing living that you may accept. I have to admit, putting it like that doesn't make it sound so different to death in real life, except for the point that 'one's continued living' in reality remains a point of mystery for those bewildered with existential dread. So I stress: in Dark Souls, death is simply another thing you can do. While all else in Lordran is ruined by decay, you have transcended death as a barrier to worldly life.
Let's move on to discussions of internet fame, shall we? In this widely circulated video [https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PmTUW-owa2w] (at right), Ian Danskin advances the argument that the highly visible negativity directed at Fez developer Phil Fish stems largely from a system of internet celebrity, in which Fish's public statements are only part of the equation.

Problem Attic developer Liz Ryerson directly responds to Danskin's video [http://ellaguro.blogspot.com/2014/06/indie-entitlement.html] as being too charitable toward the primary actors involved, instead asserting that there is a pervasive background noise of masculine entitlement which undergirds the behavior of love-to-hate-them indies like Fish or Jonathan Blow -- and it is part and parcel with the increased commercialization of the indie scene:

[Danskin's video], in its inert, smug navel-gazing, merely reflects back the entitlement of the indie world. in the end it offers no particularly controversial or new insights about celebrity culture, but creates a sense of being a relevant and no-holds-barred commentary to those who are intimately aware of the subject matter. it attempts to exonerate Phil Fish to a lot of the young white dudes who are involved in the indie game community and probably want to identify with Fish. [...] but this sudden well of empathy seems to dry up once it's applied to an outsider like [Anita] Sarkeesian.
Want more? Be sure to swing over to Critical Distance [http://critical-distance.com] to have your fill!

[http://critical-distance.com]

Permalink