In my first video I talked about the levels of rhetoric and debate on display on social media, in the gaming press and press at large. I now want to cover where I think those absolutist and extreme stances and arguments have come from and how the very foundations they are built on would be unpalatable to the vast majority of consumers and enthusiasts. I would preface this by saying my strongest damnation is reserved for when these methods and ideas are used to attack a group; be it a culture, racial or a gender, and that simply having esoteric or postmodern ideas on their own is not something I wish to say is somehow ‘evil’. Absolutism is something I wish to combat. I also want to be clear this is about people’s IDEAS and not people themselves. So with that in mind let us continue:

What we seem to be facing in videogames criticism, coverage and the prioritization of certain people and ideas has its foundation in how many in the industry are taught to think about and evaluate information. The political ideas that form their ideology and agenda must be put forward to advance gaming and games writing to what they see as its next logical progression. A little corruption here and there in service of this laudable goal is a small price to pay in their mind. The basic problem we seem to be facing is the presence of radical political ideas and dogma stemming from a fierce postmodernist approach to politicizing the gaming space. “Everything is political” is their mantra, over and over again. This is staunchly a postmodernist idea and one in which their ideologies are elevated to an almost divine status. This is why they see themselves as “Transformative” people who are on a mission to enlighten and re-educate the unwashed gaming masses. This is not a phenomenon unique to videogames and in framing this as a ‘culture war’ they expose their long standing agendas and reliance on faulty ideas.

Like a well-meaning Texas housewife seeing the face of her lord and saviour in a pizza, the postmodernist mind projects politics onto everything they see whether the statements that result seem ludicrous or not. “Everything is political” becomes like “Everything is the will of the lord”, the dogma becomes ingrained; that’s why they scoff at the idea of an apolitical… anything. This faulty logic pervades every facet of their thinking, like a religious zealot saying he was healed by god because ‘God invented medicine’. They can’t imagine something being apart from their politics just as the deeply religious can’t imagine anything being apart from God. “Everything is political” is a truism. If everything is political then any counter argument must also be political. It exists on the notion that the idea MUST go unchallenged as any challenge to it just gets deflected away by the original premise.

But let us indulge in their ideas for a minute. Fine. Games are now a wholly political space. They are open to ALL forms of politics including those of the right wing. When this becomes the case you quickly see that “Politics” really means “My brand of politics” as having a political space in games that is diverse and open to all ideas seems abhorrent to them. You can see that in how much of games criticism is undertaken. There is no variety of opinion. I would love to hear many alternate points of view coming from differing political backgrounds but I don’t. If you don’t fit their dogma you are excommunicated and pilloried as their ultimate pejorative: “right wing conservative”. But what is inherently wrong with being “Right wing”? According to western election results that can cover 40–60% of many populations depending on how you define it. If games are inherently political what is wrong with them reflecting what almost half of the US or European population consistently votes for? I’m as boring a centrist as you can get but hearing diverse ideas always fascinates me and allows me to enhance my own. If we really want games to be inclusive and accepted why not embrace the sections of politics that have derided games for so long? If we bring these “Evil right wingers” into the fold and teach them to love games maybe they will stop trying to ban them.

Something to this effect happened recently. Breitbart carried an article discussing in minute fanboyish detail how the writer would love to see a return to the fore of Digimon and how it seems to have been unfairly overshadowed by the juggernaut of Pokémon. Digimon vs. Pokemon. ON BREITBART. If the gaming press had any sense left they would have thrown a fucking parade! This is what we’ve been striving towards for decades; a situation where videogames were so normal they could be discussed at any strata of society. Many regard the author Milo Yiannopoulos as a vulture or an opportunist but his piece wasn't about political grandstanding and had an in-depth knowledge of the subject matter that demonstrated true fandom. But the gaming press stands aghast as this “Fake Geek Guy” siphons their audience into a place where their political ideas do not prevail. This is the hostility to the outsider they accuse gamers of, A massive hypocrisy playing out right before our eyes.

“You never liked gaming before! It’s too late to like it now!” they shriek in a mirror of the most exclusionary rhetoric they so often assert is directed at themselves. The irony of a privileged clique attempting to marginalize and demonize swathes of people who don’t fit their narrow view of the ideal gamer or games writer never enters into their progressive, supposedly tolerant minds. They don’t want Milo is their club house with his icky ideas, many of which I personally disagree with, and will go to any length to shut him out. We are finally seeing the political right sit up and give gamers and gaming a level of respect unseen before, in my mind a momentous achievement for the medium as a whole, and large swathes of the gaming press are horrified by it as if it is some great calamity to befall the minds of gamers. Their in-build biases and ideology, which people like Alex Lifschitz and Leigh Alexander seem to openly worship, prevent them from being able to absorb new information or engage with people who have different but equally valid world views. They would rather gaming burn to the ground than let these ideas be challenged openly. To them anyone with overly different political ideas is a heretic who must be exposed and condemned.

It really is like arguing with a hard-core theist. Even when you engage them on their own terms their arguments and attacks break down. I grew up in the church, an evangelical church, and I can tell you first hand that the closed-mindedness and sheer arrogance on display with many postmodernists parallels and even surpasses the “Jesus Freaks” I’ve come into contact with. “God does everything and therefore god did this” is the same line of circular thinking as “Everything is political therefore this thing is political”.

This leads me into my own field on expertise; the physical sciences. This mind-set when applied to mathematics, chemistry, physics and engineering, begins to break down and perfectly demonstrates how inherently anti-intellectual it is.

“F=MA” Force is equal to the mass of an object multiplied by its acceleration. A sharp ten year old can tell you this and nearly demonstrate it via experiment. This is an expression of how the universe functions. Some equations on the very large and very small scale refine it but this holds true for observations you can make in every day life. It holds as a mathematical fact because it forms the basis of so many practical applications that work. You could attempt to argue it does not hold true but your argument would not change how the universe itself functions.

Now let us look at how postmodernist fields attempted to critique hard sciences. They attempt to argue that everything is a subjective societal construct. This is the method by which they can swear black is white, up is down and that gravity is racist. There is now an entire academic canon based on the idea. They can’t attack science or technology on its own merits so they attempt a monumental feat of mental gymnastics and attempt to shift the goal-posts onto their own, comfortable turf. They WANT everything to be political because that is the only way they can add their agenda to it. If scientific theory is not political then feminism, oppression theory and postmodern ideas in general have nothing to add to it and therefore no power over the field.

This is where head-scratching statements like “Gravity is racist” or that “Fluid dynamics are sexist” came from. The idea was that white European men came up with most of these ideas and theories (despite the basis of much of modern mathematics, metallurgy and chemistry coming from India and the Muslim empires in the middle ages, including things as instrumental as the zero) and that by virtue of being white, male and generally (but not always) in the upper strata of society that these theories, these ideas modern technology has been built upon, are the product of privilege and therefore are not as valid or as worthwhile as ideas by more ‘oppressed’ groups. This thinking completely disregards that these ideas have been tested, argued over, attacked and re-appraised for centuries. Evil white men came up with them therefore they are evil white ideas and need to be re-evaluated from a societal and cultural perspective for the good of humanity. But as I’ve explained the universe and the language of mathematics does not care about your gender or race; a combustion engine would not function better in an alternate history where Otto or Carnot were black disabled lesbians. A feminist critique would not add or take anything away from the theory of relativity; it would merely be gender politics grandstanding and intellectual masturbation.

If scientific theories are political statements then they are open to the same kind of attack as more indistinct political ideas. Using this method of a slow shift of definitions the postmodernists can justify their existence and theories but also make a mockery of the basis of scientific ideas and methods stretching back before natural philosophy and into antiquity. This is the replacement of rational thought with emotional outbursts. Where ideas are evaluated on their usefulness to a narrative and not vetted for any degree of objective truth. Indeed the ideas of objectivity, impartiality and guarding against bias so prevalent in the scientific method are openly laughed at and derided as nonsensical or unachievable goals.

How does this all apply to videogames? We’ve seen the same toolbox been applied. Forget story, character or narrative where these tools can actually be applied (and even then people need to guard against shoving their heads up their arses); we’ve seen the same kind of “Gravity is sexist” statements made about the Nintendo 64 controller and 3D gaming in general.

Except from The Guardian piece by Jenn Frank

Jenn Frank who freelances for “The Guardian”, who seems to have attended the Rolling Stones school of retirement, wrote in a national newspaper that the advent of 3D games and her perceived complexity problems with the N64 controller caused young girls and women to abandon gaming in their droves and added up to it becoming a “Boys club”. All rationalized on the fact that in her subjective experience it had “too many buttons” and those women were ill equipped to navigate the 3D space due to their genetic lack of spatial awareness sighting an only tangentially related study. This is what it looks like when evidence and critical thought are thrown out of the window for feelings and personal and subjective conjecture. This is postmodernism in practice applied to the mechanical and hardware aspects of videogames and the results are statements almost as ludicrous as when those ideas are applied to sciences. This is the same misuse of studies and grains of supposed truth to craft a narrative.

Let’s really pick this apart, shall we? This is a very bold claim, and one I think highlights just how intellectually bankrupt and out of touch with reality many aspects of games criticism have become. For this claim to function we have to assume that:

The spatial awareness study (that only said women ADAPT slower to new special environments) applies fully and with enough impact to make women have a hard enough time navigating 3D videogame worlds to put them off entirely. That this is adds up to a situation where 3D gaming GREATLY favours males over and above general differences of spatial awareness person to person.

3. That women in general have such poor spatial awareness that would affect their effectiveness at ANY task that requires it.

4. That this supposed disadvantaging of women is severe enough as to warrant deliberately holding back the technological progression of real time rendering and videogame design

Now I think these claims are dubious at best. The study may well show a disparity between male and female spatial awareness but, in the real world at least, it does not seem severe enough to stop them performing tasks men can perform. This ironically also undermines the claims of many feminists attempting to disprove sexual dimorphism. Let’s play along with her faulty logic for a moment. Fine. Women have such limited spatial awareness they can’t play 3D games. Should these alleged disadvantages mean we should abandon the sexist practice of making complex 3D games entirely? Shouldn't this also mean they can’t operate heavy machinery or drive commercially? Surely if this evidence is so compelling as to mean that 3D videogames are somehow sexist that it is also compelling enough to prevent women from being selected for paid tasks that require high spatial awareness?

This is postmodernism in action: you select information that fits how you feel and your conclusion without considering the wider implications. A convenient argument that, when applied elsewhere, looks absolutely abhorrent. In Jenn Frank’s universe women are of limited usefulness compared to men; an infantilizing, patronizing and sexist universe I don’t live in. Because, based on the millions of excellent female gamers who will probably kick your arse at videogames, I think her evidence and argument are utter horseshit spewed forth by a mind incapable of seeing how ridiculous and sexist her statements are if you analyse them for two minutes.

Here’s something lost on the Polygons and Kotaku’s of this world; game design is a fusion of many forms of art and technology. You could rightfully argue many aspects of it qualify as STEM. There are functional and mechanical requirements to how a game works that the postmodern critique simply fails to handle. How exactly do you examine the feminist qualities of a control scheme? How “oppressive” can a water-shader be? What does an FOV slider have to say about racism? What “Societal constructs” is the frame rate based on? Can 720p be transphobic? Is the physics engine homophobic? Is, like Jenn Frank asserts, the entirety of 3D gaming a sexist anti-women conspiracy?

This is the more hilarious and blatant side of how these mental gymnastics are undergone; the more insipid practice of using these ideas as a stick to beat a community with I’ve already touched upon. I hope I have shown how postmodern ideas feed into the woeful level of debate we have seen from those who would proudly quote Samantha Allen or listen to Alex Lifschiz without wincing in pain. Once you start to see the logical conclusion of where gaming critics assert games writing should be headed you see how it falls apart. They insist that by not wanting gaming journalism to disappear up its own arse we are misogynists standing in the way of logical and moral progress. They consider their work as a righteous crusade against the evil dominance of logic, reason and useful consumer advice. I think we should be aware of where their thought patterns are based: not in evidence but in dogma. THAT is why I reject their world view so entirely and that is why I and others will continue to fight their march tooth and nail.

(appendix and further discussion can be found here)