This brief resurrection of my old blog is merely to easy my pained mind about a recent Kotaku article brought to my attention by a friend on twitter. She expressed her opinions on the matter, which caught my attention, and asked for a link.
What follows is a list of thoughts that crossed my mind as I read said article, entitled:
How To Stop The Anger About Video Games, From Outside And Within
I recommend you read the article first, otherwise this will not make sense. The number before each paragraph relates to the (un-numbered) paragraph from the main article itself.
-------------------------------------------
4 - Toilet humour- why is this all of a sudden succinct to gaming? This was originally coined for TV- have we moved on enough to accept this in niche sectors of the TV market, but not in niche markets of gaming?
(internet went down, but research prior to reading article suggests) "M rated games only made up 16% of all game sales"
If this is so, then niche "potty mouth" games make up an even smaller percentage of said market shares.
If gamers do not wish to be associated with such toilet humour, they aren't. Except in the eyes of articles such as this, forced to lump all gamers into a neat, singular group - ripe for poking fun at and hold their values in front of an imaginary inquiry of peers. TV (now) has no such debacle. If a show is deemed "immature", "Juvenile" or "offensive" - it is lumped with similar programming, not TV as a whole (although this is only a recent departure from the norm - other forms of media famous crucified TV as cultures downfall, and even recent "events" such as Russell Brand and Jonathan Ross' splooge of indecency (on the RADIO, of all things) caused a wide-spread hate of all things TV; hate spread like the bubonic plague through more flimsy means of social media like the newspapers and, ironically, the radio. But that's another issue altogether... Relevant, but subsidiary.
4 (still) - Yes, as a gaming society, we have somewhat grown tired of the Duke Nukem Fishguard - which is why his forthcoming return has stricken critics on the head, storming to the forefront of "unexpected" ironic male antagonistic protagonist. His entire existence is seen, now-a-days, as a joke - and THAT'S THE JOKE.
5 - "Plenty of gamers would rather not be part of a community where a person, concerned about rape victims, can say she thought a rape joke in a video game web-comic wasn't funny"
This is a horrible - HORRIBLE - example of what life is like on the internet. But I say "internet", and not "the culture of gaming." Although the two worlds often inter-lap, they are different. I am in no way saying that what happened here is acceptable, nor am I saying it's decent in any way, but this does NOT represent or reflect the gaming culture as a whole.
6 - This is a fair enough BROAD statement to bring up as a question, provided you bring in substantial evidence to support/demolish this theory. Sadly, this article instantly side steps away from that, making it seem like it endorses the INCORRECT theory that "some vague amorphous collective of hyper-sexed and over-violent video games is leading today's youth to commit rape". Truly despicable.
8 - The notion of "Games as Art" is an incredibly complex one. By simply throwing it up as a fleeting possibility of something to talk about is, frankly, insulting to the art. I wrote an entire dissertation on the matter and my conclusion was, essentially, that I had merely grazed the surface of the matter. Jason Rohers magnificent game "The Passage" played a part in my dissertation, and I feel appalled that it is mentioned in such rough terms as this. For me, this is like saying:
"We also are part of a world where some people would like to see paintings as art. Some people are having fun with their drawings, thank you very much, and they don't see why Pablo Picasso's The Matadora, a low-res, easily viewed painting where you basically look at a few shapes and walk away, holds any kind of entertainment value."
Obviously this is a crude way of looking at it, but so is how this writer has chosen to approach this subject - trivialising an entire culture into a throw-away paragraph in a ferocious article.
9 - Although this sentence appears to be "I'm on your side!" It's really saying (keeping with the painting metaphor) : "Yeah, I like paintings, for example. (no example given?) I like the range of emotions and pretty colours. But I also like join-the-dots. I colour them in."
I won't get into the sexism thing here and now (that's another kettle of fish, one which men have less to say than women - and by that I mean a LOT of women have INTERESTING and more SUCCINCT things to say about the matter then I - but will simply point out her glaring inconstancies in that closing sentence. I'm not saying women can't enjoy Bayonetta, I'm just saying you can't say "I HATE women being objectified!! ... Except Bayonetta, she looked awesome!" - without offering up a real argument/justification.
14 - "We all make fun of people who play FarmVille"... Who's generalising now? They mocked the general public for generalising gamers, then feel it's okay to do it themselves.
16 onwards - this "love one-another" spiel feels like something to clog up the end of a null and void article- a "feel good message" to make up for the nagging and misquoting of previous paragraphs.
----
Overall I feel this article, although theoretically setting out to "aid" the gaming community with "sound advice", it instead damages it, by further segregating the communities. All "gamers" know their role in the gaming society, and where the fall in the community. If a gamer is hesitant, or dismissive of a game, they avoid it. If, however, the are fans - they praise it.
This is an incredibly loose approximation of the matter, but non more so than the writer of that article is concluding - albeit without the "holier-than-thou" attitude (or I hope, anyway).
I don't know. It's late (6:20am) so I'm struggling to think/write coherently myself. The only difference is this isn't an article for a prestigious and highly regarded website.
Send all positive and negative feedback to @0Spence0 on twitter. Would really like to know what other people thought of this article (the one I'm talking about, not the one I'm writing).
