You know, YCS is still in its infancy. That means there’s a lot of stuff that I haven’t really gotten worked out, like dealing with spacing, the categories system, and what exactly I’d be covering. See, my intention was riffing on political stuff that gets published in National Review or Washington Post or the New York Times. But sometimes I see something so abjectly awful, regardless of where it’s from, and I have to say something about it. In this case, the target of my ire is an editorial from a nobody shitlib named Clayton Perdom of third-rate video games site Kill Screen entitled “Burn in hell Yarny”. And trust me, I have good reason to do this.

Okay, so first off, some background. Every year, around June, I, like many other gamers, subject myself to the half-hypefest, half-trainwreck that is the Electronic Entertainment Expo, also known as E3. E3 is marked by a number of corporate press conferences by the biggest companies in video gaming, massive 1st party developers as well as 3rd party publishers will get up on stage and spend an hour engaging in some combination of a sales pitch, a tech-demo, vaudeville, and gratuitous masturbation. It’s coming among gamers to get together, bust out some drinks, and hope that in the midsts of suits bragging about how much cash they made and Z-list celebrities trying to be funny and hip, an interesting, entertaining new game is announced.

Last year, however, one game by the name of Unravel caught my eye. It’s hard to really describe the reveal of Unravel without showing it, so I’ll just post the video here for your own pleasure:

Unravel really caught me off guard. There was something incredibly innocent about the whole thing- here was this SWPL-looking guy shaking on stage as he nervously described the origin of his little yarn creation in the very huwyte Swedish countryside. For a cynic like me who grew up on Calvin and Hobbes and was watching the most soulless corporate presentation possible (seriously, after this guy you can hear the beginning of their attempt to be funny with the new Plants vs. Zombies game) the sheer innocence and goodwill in the game caught me and many others off guard. We saw Yarny as a sort of surrogate for our own youthful innocence and curiosity, and the pictures of Yarny checking out E3 captured our hearts.

But evidently, it seems that one Clayton Perdom is above all of this. He’s not falling for this red devil’s tricks, no sir! As an enlightened, conscious individual, he’s willing to show us that he is smarter than us simple sheeple whose wool and blood was probably even used to make Yarny!

A videogame called Unravel will be released tomorrow. It may be a good game, and it is certainly a good-looking one, with a soft focus and hazy depth of field; tree leaves rustle convincingly and thick snowflakes pile up as the camera pans ever right-ward. It appears to make use of this tactile world for a series of physics-based puzzles, like moving rocks to get up on ledges and creating makeshift vines with which to soar across little ponds. These may be very clever puzzles, building toward a resolution that is very satisfying, but I will never know, because I will never play Unravel, and that is because its protagonist, a little red yarn-man named Yarny, can go fuck himself.

There’s already an unbearable smarmyness. The praise is faint and obviously insincere, meant to mock the people who like Unravel and actually think these positives are distinct selling points. And of course, as the paragraph comes to a close, there’s a stinger of unneeded vulgarity to give his article some shock value. Because really, this is what passes for “edgy” nowadays on the left- open profanity regarding a family-friendly character. It’s the verbal equivalent of those ghetto blingee’d pictures of spongebob with a do-rag, gold teeth, shuttershades and a glock.

Now, I’ve used the masculine pronoun to describe Yarny, but this may be entirely inadequate. The game’s designer, Martin Sahlin, has said that Yarny represents nothing less than “love, and the bonds that we make. And it unravels”—get it—”because that’s what happens when we’re separated from what we love.” Well okay, sure. I’m not gonna shoot spitballs at the metaphor here, it all sounds very nice. Another video of the game, purportedly debuting the game’s story, briefly shows an old woman looking at a photograph. Other videos show the little yarn man bouncing through the forest to somber stringed instruments as images of childhood appear and disappear behind him. So: we will experience the old woman’s life and at the end there will be a delicate yarn metaphor. Okay!

Again, more sarcastic derision of the themes of Unravel and its artistic aspirations. I’m guessing what has Clayton so riled up is that Unravel has a fairly universal, wholesome theme about the journey of life, and isn’t about a lesbian riot grrl getting molested by her lover before running off to join her or a mystery-meat housekeeper cleaning a gay art critic’s apartment or whatever the fuck Bientôt l’été is supposed to be about. After all, what value does art have if it’s not a direct rebellion against the cishetero patriarchy, am I right?

I’m fine with cuteness—I am a cat person. My issue with Yarny is that he doesn’t represent love but instead the commodification of childhood and emotion as some sort of antidote to “popular videogames.” Sahlin set the stage for Yarny’s reveal last year by introducing Unravel with the “need to do something more than entertain,” saying it “was born out of the need to make something more personal, something with a heart.” This is an increasingly common, and troubling, sentiment in interactive art: that somehow emotion is an end unto itself, and diametrically opposed to the baser pleasures of entertainment, rather than a byproduct of it. We see this consistently, in particular, in virtual reality, which trawls through disaster pornography and blithely important “empathy projects” as a means to use the technology Seriously, rather than for earthier, more human pleasures.

There’s a funny sort of thing going on here- Clayton is questioning the sincerity of Unravel while in turn, of course, showing his own lack of sincerity. He’s accusing Yarny and his creator of simply trying to create an emotional product to sell to people at the expense of the rest of the video game industry. He even tries to deride VR empathy projects, as if he wouldn’t leap at the chance to promote a VR program where you can experience Dindu Nuffin’s plight of getting his ass beat by the police or poor Nicholas’s suffering as people refuse to call him Sarah and instead think he’s just a weird dude in a dress. The transparent need to attack Unravel is obvious- to safely signal against “pretentious” art games without looking like a bigot for daring to criticize something like Hurt Feelings Quest: Crippled Mulatto Lesbian Tranny Prostitute Edition. It’s a safe target to take potshots at to signal that “I’m an edgy critic who will go against the grain and won’t do what everyone else is!”

Yarny, then, is a mascot for this false binary. 2014’s Child of Light trafficked in the same storybook sentimentalism, and I suspected at the time that it was putting air-quotes around the experience of being a child; it was a children’s game made for adults to play and chortle and sigh at. Yarny is that sentiment crystallized, turned into a marketing plush—a sort of dark-universe Mario, who would sacrifice “fun” at the altar of “emotion,” thereby reinforcing the false binary that says you’re either dumb or you feel things. Fan art, of which there is a lot, frequently paints Mario and Yarny together, but this makes no sense. Imagine these two sharing a world: Mario would set that motherfucker on fire and keep on running. Mario has shit to do. Yarny just wants you to cry. Fuck Yarny.

There’s such an overwhelming cynicism in this whole article. I mean, looking at the E3 conference, I don’t think Unravel is supposed to make me cry. And given how the poor bastard was literally shaking due to stage fright, I don’t think it was a cheap cash-in either. There’s no reason not to take the game at its word- it’s a fun little game about life and living. And I don’t think it fits into the current binary that games media wants to establish: your game is either cheap, commercialized “fun”, or a deliberate activist subversion of social norms. There’s no room for a sincere game that doesn’t fit the binary, and so, in the minds of critics, Yarny Delenda Est. What an absolutely sad, pitiable existence one must live to have to adopt that sort of attitude.