Satire is a very tricky line to walk, yet it’s also an important tool for social change. It can bring a hearty, cathartic laugh along with much needed reflection, but it can also be a false-flag to raise by those seeking to indulge in behaviors that society looks down upon, usually for good reason. “Ironic” racism has often been a calling card of disingenuous white liberals who give no care to how the victims of said racism have no way of telling the difference.

Many defends of Jason Rohrer’s nonsensical The Castle Doctrine have claimed it’s a masterpiece of satire on the subject of home defense culture, putting it on the level of Paul Verhoven’s Starship Troopers - a comparison to how to Rohrer and his defenders so many are “misreading so much about the game.” That it’s laying society bare, that it’s somehow a takedown of American masculinity by being an overzealous indulgence into those behaviors and characteristics.

Satire has a long history, from Horace of the Romans, to Daumier of the French Renaissance, to Kubrick’s Dr. Strangelove. Their targets were everything from social vices, to the rich and powerful, to even the futility of Cold War mentalities. The targets are typically those in power and their foolishness, and are outspoken about decrying their targets and ideals. What’s interesting is how videogames as a medium over the years have claimed this banner time and time again, yet time and time again failed to comprehend the fine line between satire and indulgence.

2012’s Far Cry 3, by it’s gameplay mechanics alone, was an indulgence. The thrills of sneaking around compounds and silently eliminating their armed occupants, hunting wild animals from afar, and ripping dirt around corners in trucks are a fun action-adventure romp through a beautifully rendered environment. The story, however, was a racist, sexist screed of a privileged white man slaughtering his way through the “exotic” natives to find his own enlightenment. The lead writer, Jeffrey Yohalem, facing criticism cried the typical “but it’s satire!” defense - that the game’s story is somehow a satirical work speaking out against colonialism and racism by completely and unironically endorsing them over the course of playing the game, both through narrative and gameplay.

Games as an artistic medium, from top to bottom, have a massive problem with race. A plague of whiteness dominates the mainstream narratives, from AAA blockbusters to supposed indie gems, and people like Jason Rohrer have raised the Satire banner as some sort of defense from having to take a step back and actually analyze how their views fit into a larger societal narrative.

Intention is irrelevant - one can write a thousand blog posts declaring the intent of one’s art, but in the end the way it is received is up entirely to the audience. This is the liberation of art as a mode of communication - multiplied tenfold by the internet - that meaning is defined by the collective audience instead of the singular artist. In this newfound age of transparency, one can unintentionally lay themselves bare. An artist’s misunderstanding of satire is no longer the fault of the audience for not seeing the work in how the artist wants it to be received, but instead a grave display of ineptitude.

This is Jason Rohrer’s downfall, and the center of his misunderstandings of the world - going so far as to entitle himself to continually misrepresent the words of a Polygon reviewer for the sake of having a seemingly positive quote from the establishment on their Steam page. This same entitlement runs a current through the entirety of Rohrer’s character - from the naming of the game “The Castle Doctrine” without a hint of understanding of the racial bias behind castle doctrine/stand your ground laws to his diatribe about how Steam sales are somehow bad for the industry because his previous game, Inside A Star Filled Sky - a 2d pixel art shooter with an hour long tutorial - has a number of people who paid only a few bucks and put little time into it leaving negative reviews. Rohrer insists that Steam sales compromised the artistic integrity of his game, and only wants some sort of mystical “true fan” paying money and actually playing his games, hence his supposedly brave declaration to never lower the price of The Castle Doctrine.

At no point does Rohrer in his diatribe against Steam sales consider that maybe Inside A Star Filled Sky was simply a bad game - the world doesn’t owe anyone success, and sometimes, sadly enough, people make a bad game that nobody really wants to play. He feels so entitled to a loyal, dedicated fanbase that he dares to try and eschew those who aren’t already emotionally invested into his work from purchasing. Even though Valve has put out an endless amount of data of how much sales have helped developers, he assumed his negative reviews were because players didn’t care about it enough to slough through an hour long tutorial.

One could argue this mentality is largely the fault of the upper-echelon games criticism community which has put him up on a pillar ever since Passage - a side-scroller which was all about how your life is meaningless, you’ll never accomplish anything that makes a difference, and relationships are nothing more than obstacles between you and going places in the world. This nihilistic perspective is common in the games industry, but the largest takeaway is insistence on rugged individualism as an acceptable approach to life.

The fact of the matter is that as much as games academics like to prop him up with the allure of choosing a life of poverty for his family and how supposedly mysterious he is - his perspectives are a danger to society as a collective whole. From actively choosing not to vaccinate his children, to his fetishizing of action hero tough guy fantasies where he would totally take on the crooks invading his home with his heroic kitchen knife skills and spill their guts all over the kitchen floor - he is the type of person Fight Club is satirizing, full stop.

You can’t satirize something you actually believe in - and when you have a contest which involves giving out dog clubs and gadgets to keep The Feds from breaking down your door (as if this has ever stopped them) you’re not commenting on the shit - you’re rolling around in it, gleefully indulging in the power fantasies this toxic culture have worked up in your mind.

This isn’t even getting to the heart of the matter with The Castle Doctrine - the game is, as a whole, not at all a “satire” of home defense culture. The hard-hitting part of the game is the name alone, a desperate grab at declaring itself as commentary. At no point in Castle Doctrine does Rohrer bother to even acknowledge the endless research proving how racial bias plays a large part of the consequences of Castle Doctrine and Stand Your Ground Legislation.

Fear of the invader, typically non-white, has had frightening consequences across the country - including private security firms being employed that openly engage in racial profiling to “secure the area” and “add value” to the community. White people like Rohrer are so goddamn terrified of threats like feral dogs, “thugs,” and other stereotypes of people of color they go to ridiculously extremely lengths to feel “safe.”

For example, if Rohrer actually cared about protecting his family from a dog he wouldn’t have bought a “tactical” club - he would have sought out a professional that would have taught him how to prevent dog attacks or even stop one in easier methods than the perverted, masculine catharsis of beating the life out of another living creature. Stocking up on weapons and fancy doorjams are not a guarantee of safety when one doesn’t have a goddamn clue what they’re doing and are forced into a panic situation without the luxury of preconceived imagined bravado to back them up. Instead, Rohrer chooses to wrap himself in the robes of masculine fantasy and telling himself he’ll be the calm and collected hero that’ll save the day if harm ever comes to his family, without ever considering the consequences of this foolhardiness.

It’s an illusion he is, once again, convinced he is entitled to indulge in.

As far as actually playing the Castle Doctrine, Rohrer’s supposed brilliance in game design has resulted in high-level players adopting a master strategy which ultimately comes down to rushing houses - most of which lacking defenses - for enough money to actually justify constructing a supposedly elaborate series of traps.

At the end of the day, The Castle Doctrine is to home defense culture and masculinity as Call of Duty: Modern Warfare 2 is to realistic simulations of infantry combat. Yet you can kill dogs in both. Quick, somebody call Kotaku!

For those in the games community that think Castle Doctrine is somehow still satire, I beg of you to find the moral courage to practice some basic comprehension and learn of what satire actually is, and what reduces Castle Doctrine to nothing more than the delusions of one man’s indulgences into societal attitudes that benefit people like him, while hurt others not fortunate enough to share his identity.

A prime example that ties in quite well to this issue of the indulgences of masculine bravado was a television sitcom from the late 1980s that played off the popularity of Dirty Harry and the stereotype it inspired - the sharply dressed, oversized firearm toting hunk of a man who spoke only in one liners and abuses of police procedure. He didn’t play by the rules, and the entire world revolved around him and his .44.

Dirty Harry was two things at its release in 1971: an instant classic, and unironically fascist. The stereotype ran wild throughout media - the angry white dude who doesn’t play by the rules and takes the law into his own hands, talking with his gun first and asking questions never. It’s such an easy character to write and wrapped in the shining armor of supposedly upholding the law and protecting the innocent, it’s hard to criticize when you’re someone who benefits from the ideals it proposes.

Running against The Cosby Show in 1986, a little known show called Sledge Hammer! appeared out of nowhere on ABC. It’s main character was certainly based off Dirty Harry, yet even in the design of the character it was outright satirizing the absurdity of the concept. For starters, cops aren’t typically known for their fitted suits and slicked back hair - Sledge (yes, the main character’s name is Sledge Hammer) sticks to the loud, clashing patterns that would make any menswear blogger weep in pain.

His love life consists of a failed marriage and his long running relationship with his trusty .44 magnum revolver, which happens to be the focal point of the show’s opening that consists almost entirely of long, pornagraphic shots in extreme close-up, as if it was a nude woman on a Playboy shoot. It’s the personification of the object that ever so elegantly displays the main character’s relationship to his sidearm, which he not only talks to as if it’s a living being - but also sleeps with it at night - not under his pillow, but atop it’s own beside him.



This is the key point Jason Rohrer and his supporters fail to grasp - satire is not only showing destructive behaviors and ideologies, but actually coming out and saying that those behaviors and ideologies are a negative presence in society. Sledge Hammer is blatant, and outright about it’s feelings on the problems of toxic masculinity - the end of the intro is Sledge pointing his lover at the screen, declaring “Trust me, I know what I’m doing,” before pulling the trigger without a second thought, leaving a bullet hole in the television glass.

What’s even more masterful about Sledge Hammer than the entirety of Rohrer’s work is that the main character hardly ever shoots anyone over the course of the show, which is an unspoken yet constantly running joke of the series. He has an onscreen body count of two over the course of the show - the first being a dangerous sniper atop an apartment building, who he eliminates by holstering his lover and deploying a M72 LAW (ha, get it) bazooka, destroying the entire building in the process. The second being an armed hitman who tries to kill him in his apartment, hiding in his closet - which he fails to realize has a target practice sheet tacked to the front of it as part of Sledge’s morning pre-work ritual.

Sledge’s inability to function in society as anything but the Dirty Harry stereotype is a constant running joke of the show, and the justification for his remaining on the police force - he’s simply too dangerous to society to be left on his own. His clumsiness, his brutality, and his insistence that he knows when he’s doing, especially when he doesn’t have a damn clue, constantly wreaks havoc and destruction upon the world around him. He even (spoiler! skip to the next paragraph if you plan on watching this fantastic show) goes so far as to inadvertently destroy the entirety of Los Angeles in his misguided attempt to dismantle a nuclear warhead for the finale of the first season.

How more blatant (and hilarious) can one be? How artistically efficient can one be in communicating the fact that the same brutish, stubborn masculinity Sledge represents and is such a core part of the identity of men like Jason Rohrer, has destroyed so much in the world? More importantly, how does one even go on to have a second season after such a cataclysmic event?

By making it a prequel which takes place five years before the events of the first season. Which while it lost some it’s luster and some of the jokes ran a little dry, it managed to end on such a note, thematically, that is such a masterful statement on the ineptitude of masculinity that delusional wannabes like Rohrer could only ever dream of accomplishing. That’s the crux of satire - an artist has to actually speak out against an ideal through their work, instead of simply reveling in it and declaring it’s an “ironic” rolling around in shit. To work towards actually dismantling the evils of society through satire, there has to be a punchline, an actual smashing against the walls of structural oppression.

Sadly, looking at Jason’s recent words and actions, he seems more content to stand his ground within the doctrine of a castle that grants passage to his entitlement over the world around him.