Today, in response to critical outcry on a certain disgusting videogame trailer making rounds on the internet (relevant links here, here, and here), Tycho of Penny Arcade fame responded saying that rather than complaining about it, people should instead be making their own art. As a creator of my own art for the last decade or so, this particular silencing tactic — because let’s face it, “silencing tactic” is exactly what it is — angers me on a very personal level, if only because I once bought into it completely.
Don’t get me wrong. I love creating my own art. It’s an activity out of which I get more joy than almost anything else. I love encouraging people to create their own art too, because the art I enjoy most is the kind that’s personal and intimate. I haven’t even so much as touched a big-budget videogame in quite some time, simply because none of them interest me very much, these days. The book Tycho linked to in his post, Anna Anthropy’s Rise of the Videogame Zinesters, is absolutely fantastic and empowering and I wholeheartedly recommend it to everyone reading this. And yet… that’s not all there is to the story.
For one thing, not only are sexist and ultraviolent videogames still continuing to be made in spite of better alternatives, they also happen to have some of the highest development and marketing budgets in our industry, to the point that when laypeople think of “videogames”, they immediately think “immature adolescent male pastime”. To say that this doesn’t have any kind of effect on the medium as a whole is absolutely ignorant. When you’re an industry professional, like myself and others I know, trying to hold videogames to a more mature [1] standard, it gets really frustrating when orders from above dictate that you produce for the lowest common denominator. These are, after all, the People Who Buy Videogames. Trying to appeal to underserved demographics? Well, that’s a risky proposition, isn’t it? We all need to make money so we can eat, you know, and look at all those other games that tried to do something risky and didn’t sell. We can’t have that!
And the more this happens, the more confirmation bias you get. The videogame industry believes that the only people who will buy games are straight white men with an immature adolescent mentality, and as a result, the only people who do buy games are straight white men with an immature adolescent mentality. This, then, extends to people who wind up driven to be creators in this medium, because people tend to want to make games because of the games they’ve played, and it becomes a feedback loop, shutting out those of us who don’t belong. Even the well-lauded “indie” scene isn’t immune from this fate, since almost all success stories on that front are, you guessed it, straight white men creating games about being straight, white, and male [2] — pretty much the same thing you see in the more commercial segments of the game industry, except maybe slightly quirkier.
Those of us in the margins, making our own art through the medium of games… well, I can only speak for myself, but seeing all this happening around me can be overwhelming, disheartening, and exhausting at times. I create for myself, yes, but I also want to speak to the rest of the world, engage in a dialogue… otherwise, what’s the point? I need to be heard, but how can I be heard through all this noise? How can I compete with their budgets, their armies of talented technical craftspeople? How can I polish and hone my skills when so much of what I’m trying to do is practically uncharted territory and I have so few mentors? When I release a game and the response is crickets — or if I’m lucky, fifteen minutes of fame before the collective attention span of the internet gets diverted to the next “ooh, shiny” thing — it can often feel like I haven’t made any kind of a difference at all.
I’m still going to make my own games because I love doing it and it’s important to me, but to make any kind of real change to our industry, that’s not going to be enough. I don’t claim to have any concrete solutions — and if I did, I’d be filthy rich by now — but I do know that pointing out and calling attention to the things that are wrong with our industry, as opposed to sticking our heads in the sand and ignoring them is, if not necessarily a better approach, then at least a more honest one. And hey, who says you can’t critique and create more art, or even critique in the form of art? Satire is a pretty neat tool, if I do say so myself.
So, in short, in case it wasn’t absolutely clear, not only do I not mind critics of violent, sexist media, I welcome and encourage them. They aren’t impinging on my ability to create my own art; if anything, they’re helping it. Let’s put the “if you don’t like it, make your own” non-argument to rest, because all it does is shunts those of us who do make our own art back into the margins, where we can’t really do much of anything.
- Here, I mean actually mature as opposed to what I like to call “M for Mature”. ↩
- Let’s not forget that our society sees stories about straight white men as “universal” stories that can appeal to everyone. Consequently, all other stories are about specific kinds of people, or “issues”, and therefore not “universal”. ↩
To me, that inane little argument stopper is indicative of someone who is incapable of examining their own work (or that of their pets) with a critical eye. Reasoned criticism of content, style and execution is something that they simply aren’t equipped for, and by extension it’s something that they aren’t equipped to respond to without trying to shut the critic out entirely. It’s like the Penny Arcade kids portraying Ebert as an irrelevant, doddering old fart when he raised the opinion that games were not (yet, at least) art. Argument? No! He’s wrong!
I think it speaks of a larger problem, that entertainment is perceived as something not just to be consumed but inhaled. If you’re objecting to the ‘nuns’ in the Hitman trailer, then at the very least you’re overthinking things. They’re there, they’re trying to kill him, he kills them back, end of trailer, hurray! The same argument goes for movies, books, and is at its purest when people complain that they don’t like traditional visual art because they don’t ‘get it’. It’s not shoving itself down your throat like a game, or a movie, or spelling itself out in easy-to-skip subtexts like novels, it’s just hanging there as maddeningly opaque and mocking as the Mona Lisa’s smirk or the Voice of Fire. The nuns in the Hitman trailer are meaningless, by the developers’ own admission, as mindless a visual as the parody Japanese energy drink commercial at the beginning of Saints Row 3. There’s no reason for it whatsoever, not even a framework for critical consumption, and that’s why the people who like it (for whatever reason) are trying to defend it in the most primitive, chest-beating way possible.
Thank you for putting this into words. I read Tycho’s post and felt I strongly dissagreed but could not quite elaborate as to why I knew he was wrong. While making more art is one of the ways of combating bad art, suggesting it is the only one is absurd and in truth it is simply not good enough becouse people clearly already are making more art and it just as clearly isn’t working. He completly ignores the fact that not all people have the same opportunities to create and distribute their work. It is, as you say, a silencing tactic.
While I agree with the article, its reasoning, and its conclusions, I feel like its jumping off point is a bit uncalled for. Boiling Tycho’s entire argument down to “If you don’t like it, make your own” gives his thoughts far less credit than they deserve. That tidbit only rears its head in the final paragraph, and it’s in response to a very specific trend he identified earlier on. From my interpretation, the main thrust of his opinion was both shock at the disproportionate response to the trailer, and disgust at the “one side or the other, there is no middle ground” mentality so many critics displayed.
In both those points, I agree with him. I’m surprised he didn’t point out his earlier sentiments that the “you’re with us or against us”/”this just proves all games are horrible” mindset and sexism/racism are similar, just two different forms of sweeping generalizations about people or ideas that aren’t similar to yourself or your own ideas. Furthermore, I’m pretty sure his line “You can certainly find things you don’t like, but those things aren’t anti-matter; when they come into contact with things you do like, there is no hot flash which obliterates both” is a pointed response to the claims that Hitman: Absolution is going to “set gaming’s maturity back by years” (A gross exaggeration I actually saw more than once on twitter).
Overall, I feel like he’s trying to point out how malicious some responses to the video has become, stepping past thoughtful criticism into something that’s caustic and ends up stifling discussion about the topic. So Tycho’s not dismissing anyone who doesn’t like the trailer, he’s decrying those who dismiss anyone that doesn’t agree with them. It’s the people who adopt vendettas against anyone who dares to be anything but outraged that a trailer like this exists, the mob mentality that ridicules anyone that doesn’t share its viewpoint, and the people using “silencing tactics” themselves that he’s writing to, not the level-headed people presenting rational arguments.
So, from his tone, his stance against mob rule, and the offer to talk about the meaning of a nun pulling an RPG out from under her habit at great length, I would surmise he’s okay with people disliking the game or even dismissing it as terrible. What prompted his response was the people unable or unwilling to talk to anyone that dares disagree. “Make your own” is a proposal sent to those people, the ones caught in the churchlike mob mentality he mentions and those with extremist opinions, not to anyone who doesn’t agree with him completly. His pointed argument is aimed at those whose shouting matches are drowning out the constructive discussion.
So if his intent is to foster rational discussion, how could his conclusion be silencing? And if his conclusion was unwittingly too extreme and did try to stifle, it was done without forethought or planning. Without those things, how could it be a tactic?
Cole, I was addressing the “if you don’t like it, make your own” non-argument in general terms; Tycho was just the latest in a long line of people to use it. Discussing the rest of his post is kind of beyond the scope of what I want to talk about in here; however, I’ll say that criticising the tone of criticism rather than criticism itself, by referring to it as a “mob mentality” and “churchlike”, is what I would consider a derailing tactic and therefore not something with which I want to engage. So, if you have further words to say on this topic, please take them to your own blog. Thanks!
Yeah, reading back on what I wrote, I got completely myopic and focused on something that’s incidental to what you were writing about. I mistook this to be a response to Tycho’s post, instead of a topic that was merely triggered by it. I’m a bit ashamed that I made such a basic mistake.
I like your point about how much it marginalizes the people already, I had never looked at it in that light before. One thing I was curious about before I got so sidetracked is that you mentioned that you used to buy into it completely. If you don’t mind me asking, was there a specific moment or event that made you realize it was a fundamentally flawed and oppressive argument to use?
I think it was a combination of many microaggressions: noticing that when I worked in the industry, the contributions of women and other minorities were more likely to be devalued, and then seeing, as I mentioned, that the “indie” scene wasn’t much more welcoming. Drops in a bucket. It’s kind of amazing how much more bright-eyed and bushy-tailed I was when I started out, compared to now…
Criticism in general encourages a lot of misunderstanding and resentment, particularly with what some see as non-talents trying to score points at the expense of hard-working developers, storytellers and artists. I’ve dabbled in critique, as you know, and while I generally avoid anything approaching roast levels, I do occasionally make a public statement of dislike or at least disinterest. I try not to broadcast such comments as if they are authoritative and fully-formed critiques, simply because that’s not my thing and I don’t want to be known for that. I don’t mind pointing people to stuff I like, but if I can’t think of anything nice to say, I’ll just keep schtum. Not a lot of people see it that way, though. To many, criticism is some deity-of-choice-given right. ‘You made me look at it, and now you must feel my pain’.
The corollary, of course, is that some folks are just a wee bit too hypersensitive to criticism, and take all comers with axe in hand. Me? I take it a little better than I used to, but I still get stung a little too easily. I think the difference between me and someone like Tycho, who sees a LOT of criticism, is that I don’t think creating stuff makes us any better at telling when our critical faculties are a little out of whack. I would like to believe it helps, but I’m just cynical enough to see it otherwise. Even creative people fly off the handle and get worked up about stuff that may or may not be a real world issue.
None of this speaks to the problem of entitlement, though. That’s just something I don’t think I’m fully equipped to tackle without gloves and a Hazmat suit. I know that, despite my upbringing and racial mix, that I still experience some misplaced feelings of entitlement when racial and sexist issues are unveiled in popular media, but I at least try not to jump to the aid of every poor schmuck who puts his foot in the trap. I haven’t seen the Hitman video, but if they misrepresented nuns to tell their little snippet of non-story event, then they can take the lumps for displaying their lack of taste and sense without my help. Call me when some young sensitive idiot who needs a friend stumbles into the tiger trap. Let the corporations fend for themselves.