The Apparent Anti-Intellectualism of Gamer Culture

[Maze1125]

That's total bullshit.
If a game has a story then that story is just as deserving of review as the gameplay.

Games have gone well beyond being just a medium for play and that's a good thing. But, equally, it means the value of a game has to be consider by more than just it's gameplay mechanics.

Some games are just games, but when a game purposely includes more than that it absolutely deserves to be judged on everything the designers have chosen to include. If you don't like reviews that do that then just ignore those reviews, don't claim they shouldn't exist.

A story is not a game, if all you're doing is focusing on the story then you're not writing a game review. All games are just games, the differences you see between BioShock and BioShock Infinite are the same differences you see between Monopoly and Star Wars Monopoly.

Maybe YOU only use interactive media for the gameplay. That doesn't mean it's true of everyone.
Other people may very well use interactive media only for the story.

If it's valid to only review the gameplay part of interactive media then it's equally valid to only review the story part of it.

An even more valid review would consider every part of the media rather than only focusing on one part. If the developers include something then it is valid to review it. If you don't want to read those reviews then don't read them. That's a far better option than trying to censor them.

 

[inmunitas]

That's total bullshit.
If a game has a story then that story is just as deserving of review as the gameplay.

Games have gone well beyond being just a medium for play and that's a good thing. But, equally, it means the value of a game has to be consider by more than just it's gameplay mechanics.

Some games are just games, but when a game purposely includes more than that it absolutely deserves to be judged on everything the designers have chosen to include. If you don't like reviews that do that then just ignore those reviews, don't claim they shouldn't exist.

A story is not a game, if all you're doing is focusing on the story then you're not writing a game review. All games are just games, the differences you see between BioShock and BioShock Infinite are the same differences you see between Monopoly and Star Wars Monopoly.

Maybe YOU only use interactive media for the gameplay. That doesn't mean it's true of everyone.
Other people may very well use interactive media only for the story.

If it's valid to only review the gameplay part of interactive media then it's equally valid to only review the story part of it.

An even more valid review would consider every part of the media rather than only focusing on one part. If the developers include something then it is valid to review it. If you don't want to read those reviews then don't read them. That's a far better option than trying to censor them.

"Interactive media" and "video game" are not the same thing, interactive media is a broad category of which video games only intersect a tiny section of, it also has nothing to do with my point that a story is not a game (which it isn't), and writing a review focusing only on "thematic elements" (the story) is not a game review (which it isn't), nor is it treating games as art for that matter.

You're right that a good review would cover both, and the reviewer would need to understand gameplay, story, and how they intertwine or not. A good reviewer would also review things that the developer has actually included in the game, and not things that are absent but the reviewer wishes to talk about anyway because they're a pretentious imbecile.

 

[DudeistBelieve]

The game even started me at the character screen defaulted to Lady-Gender. I only mentioned it because while playing it I noticed it and it felt like pandering, and I contemplated making a topic about it but figured, ya know. Fuck it. Maybe they'll be able to pander with a bit more subtleness next time.

My first character started the character generator as a black man, my second as an Asian man. My take is that the Char Gen simply randomizes a character for you and that it can be either man or woman.

Interesting... I'd still call that a pretty liberal move vs to white guy first route, but not pandering.

 

[Siege_TF]

This shit again? 'problematic narration'? Of course this shit again. No molehill too small, eh?

The Division isn't a deep game; it's not intended for a deep audience. This is the same shit we went through with GTA5 because it had whores, transvestites, ghetto rats, etc. Many of these were cartoonish, oh but think of the children, minorities, couriers, and everyone else in the whole wide world!

This is the real problem; people put on their ideological lenses, grab their spares, demand strangers put them on, then get bent out of shape when they refuse.

Think you aren't like that? Let me spell this out: The. Division. Isn't. Narratively. Driven. If you have a problem with the narrative of The Division then the problem is yours. Not the games', not the players', yours. Wanting to be left the hell out of your problem doesn't make us anti-intellectual, it makes us normal.

We will probably be willing to discuss the narrative of a narratively driven game, so long as you don't annoy us by banging on about lackluster controls, a lack of a sprint function, dated visuals, or other things that would be considered irrelevant for that particular game.

 

[TheMysteriousGX]

Yeah, GTA 5, where a reviewer who gave the game a 9/10 got death threats because they mentioned the wrong type of criticism in her review.

This shit's exactly what we're talking about here. How some things are off limits in a game review. The Division is driven by it's story. You have a story, do missions based on the story, have cut scenes about the story, but for some reason if you criticise the story the wrong way, you are reviewing the game wrong.

This is the real problem; people put on their ideological lenses, grab their spares, demand strangers put them on, then get bent out of shape when they refuse.

Look, this review is on a website. Two, if you count Metacritic. How in the heck are they "demanding" anything when you can, quite simply, not read it?

Think you aren't like that? Let me spell this out: The. Division. Isn't. Narratively. Driven. If you have a problem with the narrative of The Division then the problem is yours. Not the games', not the players', yours. Wanting to be left the hell out of your problem doesn't make us anti-intellectual, it makes us normal.

Some people want this sort of article about the story. You do not. Fortunately, there's literally dozens of other reviews you can go for instead.

We will probably be willing to discuss the narrative of a narratively driven game, so long as you don't annoy us by banging on about lackluster controls, a lack of a sprint function, dated visuals, or other things that would be considered irrelevant for that particular game.

Out of curiosity, what defines a "narratively driven game"?

 

[NiPah]

The game even started me at the character screen defaulted to Lady-Gender. I only mentioned it because while playing it I noticed it and it felt like pandering, and I contemplated making a topic about it but figured, ya know. Fuck it. Maybe they'll be able to pander with a bit more subtleness next time.

My first character started the character generator as a black man, my second as an Asian man. My take is that the Char Gen simply randomizes a character for you and that it can be either man or woman.

I remember in the earlier versions you'd pick out your parents and it'd decide your race that way, I'd never made a new character in the current gen system so that's pretty interesting.

 

[gmaverick019_v1legacy]

Given the context of the review, the comments you cherry picked are stupid. However, I think in the context of a game review, they are spot on.

If I read a review (something I haven't done in years) I want to know what the shooting feels like, how the combat works, what are the "cool" things, what are the graphics like, any bugs, how the game works blah blah blah. What I don't want is, an in depth analysis of the political direction of the game.

It's perfectly ok to dissect a game that way and can make for an interesting conversation but if you're on the fence about whether to buy it or avoid it, then talking about how right wing the story is, is pointless.

pretty much this. If I were to ask a friend about a certain new restaurant that I was thinking about trying and I know they had just gone to recently, and they go on and on about a couple pieces of art on the wall in the restaurant instead of answering my question, I'd be annoyed and call them out on over analyzing something that doesn't matter in this conversation and really doesn't affect my enjoyment of the food or service of said restaurant.

anti-intellectualism is bad, believe me, I live in a city with lots of ghetto people and went to public school, so I know how fucking retarded some people can be, but this is a terrible example to point out.

 

[Silvanus]

I wouldn't say it's anti-intellectualism, exactly; it's a little more difficult to pin down.

Plainly, a review is an expression of opinion, nothing objective about it (other than giving the specifications). Recently, there seems to be this push for reviews to focus solely on gameplay, and to leave narrative/thematic considerations out of it; this seems frankly bizarre, to me, as it's as valid an avenue of criticism or praise as any other. Narrative is an aspect of the product, and one which is as important to some people as gameplay is to others.

The same would not be requested of film or literature, comics, or anything else, really. There's no reason reviews of this medium, specifically, should ignore narrative content and theme. They're a huge element of games.

Still, this isn't anti-intellectualism per se; it's more a sort of strange assertion that reviews should cater to their concerns and exclusively theirs. It's more to do with self-involvement than it is anti-intellectualism methinks.

 

[Erttheking]

This is a bad example, but let's not pretend that gamers don't go flying off the hook whenever something they like receives any kind of criticism. Like alternatejag pointed out, a woman got death threats for saying GTA V was sexist in a review. And still gave it a 9/10.

I wouldn't call it anti-intellectualism. Just an inability to take any criticism about a work they like and not wanting to look at it at any other way than a thing to enjoy, so "Shut up and stop criticizing what I like!"

Ok, we need to sit down and have a serious discussion. Do we think games are art? Because if we do, we need to accept that they're going to be criticized. They're not just toys, we can't just wave away criticism of them because we don't like it/don't agree with it.

 

[Maze1125]

"Interactive media" and "video game" are not the same thing, interactive media is a broad category of which video games only intersect a tiny section of,

Yes, well done, you noticed my point.
Games are only a small subset of interactive media. By calling something a "game" we juvenilize it, it becomes okay to ignore the setting because "it's only a game". By calling it interactive media we can consider these fantastic works that people put years of their lives into as more than just "games" but, equally, it means we need to recognise that the design choices that are made are worth discussing, not just the gameplay ones.

But, hey, you can keep calling them games if you want and keep ignoring everything except the gameplay. No-one is stopping you from doing that.
Live and let live. If people want to play games on a base level, let them do that; equally if people want to consider interactive media as something more important than "just a game", let them do that too.

 

[Silvanus]

That's a misrepresentation of that position. There's no resistance to better games, what there is is resistance to narrow-band regressive American politics being labelled 'progressive' and thus, best for all. There's no one-size fits all view of pregressive, so OF COURSE people are going to disagree with the leftist 'problematic narrative' take.

Well, aye, but we're not talking about those who merely disagree with the criticism. There've been calls for narrative/ thematic criticism to be removed from reviews entirely.

 

[Maze1125]

That's a misrepresentation of that position. There's no resistance to better games, what there is is resistance to narrow-band regressive American politics being labelled 'progressive' and thus, best for all. There's no one-size fits all view of pregressive, so OF COURSE people are going to disagree with the leftist 'problematic narrative' take.

Well, aye, but we're not talking about those who merely disagree with the criticism. There've been calls for narrative/ thematic criticism to be removed from reviews entirely.

Exactly. It's one thing to say "I completely disagree with what you say and the political implications of this." and another to say "IT'S GAME, WHY YOU TALK ABOUT POLITICS!?!"

 

[shrekfan246]

is our culture anti-intellectual?

Short, non-snarky answer: Yes.

Longer, possibly more snarky answer? A lot of gamers (I'm glad Chrome has seemed to decide that that's not a word) get really uncomfortable when they're confronted by anything that challenges their preconceived notions and world views. And then they get really mad, because they feel like the person challenging said opinions is directly insulting them as a person for it, because if they like something it can't possibly be bad or have any worrying parts, right? And if there's something wrong with it but they like it, then something must be wrong with them, surely!

(Of course, that's not how things actually work and it's entirely possible to love something that sucks or has troubling views towards certain subjects.)

That's why we see things like "SJW" get thrown around so often, intended as an insult of all things. The general idea seems to be that people "crusading" for the betterment of narratives are tilting at windmills, because there's nothing wrong with representation in video games because I like it and I'm not racist or sexist or homophobic, so how could these video games be? There also seems to be a fear that calling out troubling aspects will somehow result in a complete overhaul of the gaming industry as a whole and subsequently the only games that will see release any longer are ones like Dear Esther and Gone Home, because... reasons, I guess. (Here let me say that, as someone who gets accused of being an "SJW" and "white knight", I like violent games and games with sexy times in them just as much as anyone else does. That doesn't flipping mean they can't be done better.)

The saddest part to me is this hyper-reactionary element that's seemed to take over practically every video game-centric forum in the past few years. I can't look at any forum or comment section for more than five minutes without seeing somebody tossing around the words "progressive" or "SJW" like they're slurs, all because some of us actually think games and the dialogue surrounding them can be more interesting than "you go into a place and shoot a few guys to pick up incrementally better equipment".

 

[inmunitas]

"Interactive media" and "video game" are not the same thing, interactive media is a broad category of which video games only intersect a tiny section of,

Yes, well done, you noticed my point.
Games are only a small subset of interactive media. By calling something a "game" we juvenilize it, it becomes okay to ignore the setting because "it's only a game". By calling it interactive media we can consider these fantastic works that people put years of their lives into as more than just "games" but, equally, it means we need to recognise that the design choices that are made are worth discussing, not just the gameplay ones.

But, hey, you can keep calling them games if you want and keep ignoring everything except the gameplay. No-one is stopping you from doing that.
Live and let live. If people want to play games on a base level, let them do that; equally if people want to consider interactive media as something more important than "just a game", let them do that too.

By calling something a "game" we are hopefully acknowledging that said thing is indeed a game, I'm not sure where you get this idea that some how "juvenilizes it", perhaps you are confused with the word "toy"? Even so, it's a silly reason to not call something for what it is. Further more video games are not a subset of interactive media, they "intersect" with interactive media, they predominantly fall under the realm of games, because that's what they are, obviously.

I've never claimed that everything except gameplay should be ignored, nor have I seen anyone else make such a statement either, so who you are exactly addressing with that statement is unknown to me. What my initial point was is that a story is not a game, and thus if all a reviewer is doing is focusing on the story then they are not writing a game review (may I add, a point which you have yet to even address). You would wouldn't write a film review and only focus on the audio, would you? It seems rather preposterous that one would put so much emphasise on what is merely an add-on to that which is being reviewed.

 

[Siege_TF]

Snip.

Death threats? On the internet?! Say it isn't so!

The Division is driven by it's loot. You have loot, do missions based on the loot, have cut scenes that lead you to loot, and for this reason if you criticize the game the wrong way, you are reviewing the game wrong.

People can simply not read these reviews for whatever reasons, so why don't they? In these particular cases I become deeply annoyed when people try to politicize my hobbies. It's triggering for me.

I cannot definitively say what is a narratively driven game, but it's probably not a game where you can skip all the cutscenes and follow your waypoint to the next tier of enemies, and more importantly loot.

 

[Maze1125]

Further more video games are not a subset of interactive media,

Okay, name me one single video game which is not a form of interactive media.

I've never claimed that everything except gameplay should be ignored, nor have I seen anyone else make such a statement either, so who you are exactly addressing with that statement is unknown to me. What my initial point was is that a story is not a game, and thus if all a reviewer is doing is focusing on the story then they are not writing a game review (may I add, a point which you have yet to even address). You would wouldn't write a film review and only focus on the audio, would you? It seems rather preposterous that one would put so much emphasise on what is merely an add-on to that which is being reviewed.

Have you even read the article? Because it doesn't call itself a review anywhere in there.
There absolutely have been articles written about the audio of a movie, so why can't there be an article about the implications of a game's setting?

 

[inmunitas]

Further more video games are not a subset of interactive media,

Okay, name me one single video game which is not a form of interactive media.

I've never claimed that everything except gameplay should be ignored, nor have I seen anyone else make such a statement either, so who you are exactly addressing with that statement is unknown to me. What my initial point was is that a story is not a game, and thus if all a reviewer is doing is focusing on the story then they are not writing a game review (may I add, a point which you have yet to even address). You would wouldn't write a film review and only focus on the audio, would you? It seems rather preposterous that one would put so much emphasise on what is merely an add-on to that which is being reviewed.

Have you even read the article? Because it doesn't call itself a review anywhere in there.
There absolutely have been articles written about the audio of a movie, so why can't there be an article about the implications of a game's setting?

I don't see the point of continuing to respond to you when you don't even read what I've posted.

 

[9tailedflame]

I think it's unfair to say it's anti-intellectual. I actually read the article and while i haven't played the game, it seemed fine, if not very limited in scope, which i think is more or less what people are taking issue with it, it would be my issue with it, since it really did only cover the story, with no comment on the gameplay. This sort of constricted review is pretty common, and it's a bit of a kneejerk reaction to condemn such a review for many people, myself included, though perhaps not be as prominent or hostile, but i do kinda roll my eyes at a review when it's clearly coming from someone with a political axe to grind.

I do think a lot of "progressives" and "intellectuals" more or less just create sacred topics for themselves that are free from criticism, which i think largely invalidates those self-appointed labels. If they can't criticize a game because it has a non-straight white cis male protagonist, than they don't get to call themselves intellectual.

I guess the point is that it's not anti-intellectualism, partly it's a defense of dumb games that there's no problem if they're dumb. It's also parly a defense of games who don't ground their appeal in political pandering, and i do mean pandering. You won't find many people harping on bioshock 1 for being preachy, even if a huge amount of the dialogue was pure political ideology by a severely political man, and i think there's at least 2 big reasons for that. Firstly, it was the game's own world, nor was is an overt representation of something in the real world, like the movie avatar was, just to provide an example. It explored general concepts, and it didn't point to real-world things. Secondly, it never really claimed the explored political philosophy was right or wrong. Rapture may have failed in the end, but it accomplished crazy things in that time. It can't be said to be purely wrong or right, purely good or evil, it had it's merit and it's flaws, and this is largely what made it so popular, but it didn't skimp on the game play to accomplish that, nor would a review of bioshock be complete without a nod to, what is in my opinion, a creative and viscerally fun take on the shooter with it's plasmids and variety of weapons and viable tactics.

It sort of feels like game reviewers are flocking more and more towards games with writing akin to a 5th-grade creative writing class, where the child author writes about how a character strikingly similar to themselves, with one character change in the name of their own name as the hero's name. they're a hero and the best person ever, and a villain is a classmate they dislike, and they're evil and disgusting and dumb. That's not intellectualism, and replacing the child with a political opinion being the hero doesn't make it any better. Simply including politics in something does not make it intellectual, nor above criticism, or even casual scorn. If these games don't even have gameplay to fall back on, (and don't get me wrong, i think a game can stand with just story and no real gameplay, but ONLY if that story is strong) then those reviewers that like it may be largely just giving it good reviews because it agrees with their political opinions, regardless of actual quality of story or gameplay, and i think lots of people, myself included, have gotten somewhat irritated at this practice over the years.

 

[9tailedflame]

I do think a lot of "progressives" and "intellectuals" more or less just create sacred topics for themselves that are free from criticism, which i think largely invalidates those self-appointed labels. If they can't criticize a game because it has a non-straight white cis male protagonist, than they don't get to call themselves intellectual.

Look at all of the people you just tossed together in a pile, few of whom would probably agree on much except that they don't like being pigeonholed by the likes of you, right? If you can't bother to put together more than one paragraph without generalizing whole groups of people and what you think they think, what do you think you're sowing?

I said a lot of, not all, or even most. All i'm trying to say is circles that do this exist, and sometimes make game reviews, and some people get annoyed by them.

 

[9tailedflame]

I do think a lot of "progressives" and "intellectuals" more or less just create sacred topics for themselves that are free from criticism, which i think largely invalidates those self-appointed labels. If they can't criticize a game because it has a non-straight white cis male protagonist, than they don't get to call themselves intellectual.

Look at all of the people you just tossed together in a pile, few of whom would probably agree on much except that they don't like being pigeonholed by the likes of you, right? If you can't bother to put together more than one paragraph without generalizing whole groups of people and what you think they think, what do you think you're sowing?

I said a lot of, not all, or even most. All i'm trying to say is circles that do this exist, and sometimes make game reviews, and some people get annoyed by them.

You're going to argue the semantics of how many people you tossed in the pile? That's what you're going for?

So what, you want to pretend that nobody like that exist? I'm not sure what you want from me exactly, to not refer to groups of people, or not describe a set of qualities as opposed to trying to find every individual person who does this? I'm not exactly sure what you expect from me here.