Bad, bad games
Let's get moralistic
Warning! This text is discourse!
Edit: this post was written before November 5th and the results of the US election, and scheduled to be published today.
I will return to the usual diet of reflections on roguelikes, AI, and games next week.
For now, I want to discuss games.
I start with Frank Lantz's brilliant text about Hideo Kojima, provocatively titled Are Games Bad? The text reflects the beauty of games and their aesthetic promise. Ryan Rigney picked up on this provocation and interviewed Lantz for his excellent Push To Talk newsletter. The interview expands Lantz’s original argument and hints at the work left for games to take a central place in culture.
Usually, I would have agreed with Frank Lantz, enjoyed the banter, and moved on. However, the timing of my reading of Are Games Bad? was peculiar, as it caught me while listening to Robert Evans and Miles Gray dissect the history of American masculinity grifters in the podcast Behind the Bastards. In that two-parter, Evans engages with GamerGate, associating it with the history of the masculinity crisis in America and how grifters have profited from that artificial crisis.
Evans makes an exciting connection that games researchers have pointed out before: there is something about games and toxic masculinity that we should take very seriously.
So, let me ask the not-so-rhetorical question. What if video games are bad? Not from an aesthetic perspective but from a moral perspective. How would we construct this argument?
There are several ways to approach that idea. We could write about the impact of video games on climate catastrophe, highlighting how little the industry thinks about that particular problem. We could also consider toxic workplaces, the unstable and ultimately damaging labor market surrounding games, and whether we want to consider the video game industry a mature industry.
But let me think about it differently.
I am not saying anything new if I start from the premise that some video games are part of a particular mode of understanding masculinity. It’s the Call of Duty masculinity of “tactical” gear, food supplements, neckbeards, a massive inferiority complex, and aggressive self-righteousness. And hey, it’s not easy to be a Western man growing up in the crumbling but still strong patriarchy. We are all broken.
Some video games succeed because they keep us broken. Their success depends on our wounds, imperfections, and doubts. These are games that profit from weakness disguised as gruff cosplay. They are bad games1.
And there are bad games everywhere. Because video games have won a culture war. Everything is seen from the perspective of a video game. There are points, challenges, and role-playing in so many aspects of our computational lives that we are constantly immersed in video games. The images we see, from drone footage to interfaces in the news, are all videogames. We see genocides in the Middle East, and they look like Medal of Honor. We changed the channel to watch sports and cannot tell whether Amazon, Apple, or EA are producing the spectacle. We work, date, and exercise through interfaces of points that quantify our actions and measure us with everybody else around us2.
Those video games of masculinity are wrong in a world of quantifying actions. These video games want to confirm this worldview of weak, gruff masculinity, quantized and measured and calculated to create the right feedback loops at the right times. These games want to glorify competition, reward victory, and never challenge the position that whoever plays deserves to win, above all.
There are games everywhere, but men don’t play.
We don’t play because we don’t learn how to. We turn to games, but they teach us how to win at all costs. They are games of competition that reward narrow worldviews and skill sets. We have games, games everywhere, games for all of us, men3. But we don’t play them.
We complete them.
We beat them.
We master them.
We finish them.
But we don’t play them.
So yes, games are bad. They are bad when we don’t play them because they don’t want to be played or we don’t want to play them; they are bad when we don’t embrace them to think beyond ourselves but to confirm our fragility. Fragile games for fragile people, anger games for angry people.
But are games bad4?
No, not really. After all, without games, it would not be easy to find chances and opportunities to play. Games are revolutionary technologies capable of compressing time and space to allow us to create temporary selves in temporary worlds. That’s why not playing with them feels so wrong, and that’s why games without play, the games of fragility and meanness, are so dangerous. Because they hold the promises of all games but turn them against us, acting as vehicles that convey the worst, the saddest of us.
I don’t trust games you cannot play. I don’t trust games that want to cradle and nurture my insecurities, the polyhedric ways in which I am broken. Those are bad games.
So yes, games may be bad. But it will be playing them that I will have a chance at being better.
And maybe, that’s why games matter.
Sure thing, not all games are bad. But you knew that before you got to this footnote, right? And so, while you are here: if you make games, how do you make sure that your games are not bad? And if you play games, how do you make sure the games you play are not bad?
We’ve gone from Seeing Like a State to Seeing like an Interface to seeing like a game. How far we go to avoid seeing like a person.
All of us.
Are all games bad?