This Week in Video Game Criticism: The 'gamer' problem
This week, our partnership with game criticism site Critical Distance brings us picks from Kris Ligman on topics including the harassment of Zoe Quinn and whether the term 'gamer' is worth saving.
Games cannot just be stats and routines and hierarchies of actions and responses ii for many players, like myself, it is impossible for me, for us, not to identify with the world that we are participating in. This is one of their central qualities – that they enable narrative and meaning and identification even when, in their rawness, these things are not immediately obvious. Rome is easy for this, because there are characters, with postage stamp sized portraits and names and habits.
Nomenclatures
Simon Parkin kicked off an energetic discussion this week with this piece written for the New Statesman. In it, Parkin contends simply and emphatically, that the term 'gamer' has become too charged to reclaim, and the idea of a 'gamer community' is a non-starter. "If you love games," Parkin says, "you should refuse to be called a gamer."
Writing in her own blog, Mary Hamilton maintains that the term 'gamer' is not beyond reclamation, and indeed there is a lot of value in doing just that. Meanwhile, Stephen Beirne -- while agreeing with Parkin's larger point -- takes issue with the class assumptions behind some of Parkin's remarks, in particular the idea that games are "the great contemporary leveler."
(In fairness to Parkin, I believe his remarks in the New Statesman piece actually refer back to this 2010 piece written for Boing Boing -- one of my favorites of his, by the way.)
In summing up some of these discussions, Australian games scholar Brendan Keogh maintains that the term 'gamer' is fraught with problems largely for how gendered it is, and avoiding its use is an important symbolic gesture:
Not using the world gamer doesn't solve everything. But just as using the male pronoun in a paper about policepeople perpetuates the idea that every policeperson is a man, using the word gamer in a paper when you are not actually talking just about people who self-identify as gamers perpetuates the idea that ever person who plays videogames identifies as a gamer, which is far from the truth…
My issue with 'gamer' is not that people identify as gamers. My issue with 'gamer' is it is a word that when used in discourses around games is not actually representative of everyone who plays games and its uses as such often excludes and obscures a much broader and diverse spectrum.
So how do we start the conversation on racism in video games? We start with the right question: "Are gamers willing to call out video games for their racist elements?" We start by confronting the stifling, retaliatory climate that forecloses all conversation. We start by questioning our comfort with other players' erasure. We must examine why massive anxiety is triggered by accusations of racism and sexism, but not by the huge disparity in the treatment of players according to their race and sex. We start by believing this is a medium bound only by the limits of users' imaginations and not by the limits of racial palatability.
The goal of these games isn't peace – it's the restoration of the status quo, with America's military dominance reasserted and its enemies utterly vanquished. That's a disturbing message to propagate – the digital equivalent of the World War propaganda posters of caricatured, malevolent foreigners that can only be stopped by other caricatures of our brave, devoted men and women in uniform.
On Kill Screen, our own Erik Fredner muses on Typing of the Dead: Overkill as Dada-inspired surrealist art. And on Gamasutra's member blogs, law professor Greg Lastowka has shared a valuable overview of his recently released report on user-generated content in games and player communities.
Independencies
On PopMatters Moving Pixels, our own Eric Swain has become taken with the idea of certain games as "critic bait" -- perfectly tuned games which nevertheless manage to feel disingenuous.
And back with Gamasutra's Expert Blogs, Ben Serviss decries the idea that games -- particularly the current independent scene -- are headed for a collapse.
Dialogues
In honor of the 20th anniversary of Doom, Wired's Chris Kohler sits down for a retrospective with id Software co-founder John Carmack. And on PC Gamer, Philippa Warr interviews Charles Cecil on Broken Sword 5, the Gnostic Gospels, conspiracies, and religion.
Dispatches from Vienna
Here's the latest and greatest from the German-language games blogosphere, via our correspondent Joe Koller.
Superlevel has released the full text of a Choose-Your-Own-Interview with Thomas Hillenbrand and Konrad Lischka, co-authors of Drachenvater: Die Geschichte des Rollenspiels und die Geburt der virtuellen Welt (or: Dragon Fathers: The Histories of Roleplaying and the Birth of Virtual Worlds, if you'll forgive my 4 am translation).
On Krautgaming, Christoph Volbers discusses the popular subject of the ephemeral nature of digital games. Meanwhile on Videogame Tourism, Rainer Sigl has a useful holiday gift-giving guide -- geared specifically to buying games for non-players.
Letters from Paris
Critical Distance is also pleased to introduce our new French-language correspondent, Laurent Pointecouteau.
Two new French-language games publications have recently sprouted up, each supported by veteran writers. JV Le Mag, edited largely by former writers of Joystick magazine (now defunct), has an interesting feature on the inception of Grand Theft Auto. Here's a review by French blogger Cyril Berthout. Meanwhile, the new French Games Magazine appears to offer some great opportunities for French-language bloggers shooting for print. You can follow them on Twitter.
As for online features, Canard PC editor-in-chief Ivan Gaude sat in for an interview with Ragemag, and has a few strong words for the state of games criticism and certain American publications.
"We don't think that video games are art, so we don't see exactly why they couldn't be given scores," says Gaude, who in particular says that American games websites such as Polygon are "eating themselves up" through controversy. How do you say "shots fired" in French?
Invitations
Thanks once again for reading. As always, we greatly value all your support and submissions. Be sure to submit your weekly recommendations to us by mentioning us on Twitter or sending us an email.
Second order of business: if you haven't yet, please swing by our call for reader submissions for our upcoming This Year in Videogame Blogging roundup, curated by longtime contributor Eric Swain.
Also, a little bird (really, the blue one that twitters a lot) tells us that Engagement Game Lab has opened a new scholastic journal, Level 257 -- and they're looking for your submissions.
That's all from us! See you all next week!