Epistemic Status: Shitpost

The Gamer identity is not real, but for something that is completely fake-not-real, socially constructed, performative, and intangible, there sure is a lot of academic research and scholarship about Gamers.

There isn’t any scholarship by self-identified Gamers though. There is only scholarship by people who can’t quite define what a Gamer is, but are quite adamant that even though they themselves play games, they aren’t Gamers. It looks like the Gamer identity is entirely constructed from the outside, through exclusion. The definition is a more about ruling people out who aren’t Gamers.

That’s kind of interesting. If I could borrow some jargon for a moment, Gamers look like they aren’t especially organised, although they have common interests and experiences. Gamers are people who play games, but that’s not enough. Gamers are people who play games, and have recognised that they belong to a class with common interests and experiences.

What turns a player into a Gamer is an act of consciousness-raising. Gamers are players with class consciousness.

And now for something completely different: Open source software. In the late 90s and early 2000s, there were many sociology papers about open source projects that didn’t really say anything. Some just described the organisational structure of big, professionalised projects like GNOME, Debian, or Python. Some waxed poetically about social capital, habitus, and meritocracy. Some had one good idea, and a lot of fluff. Many were written for non-coders. Some were written by non-coders.

At first, these papers were very qualitative and utopian, but gradually they became more quantitative and pessimistic. They also started arguing in favour of bizarre causal explanations of quantitative observations like “The more people in the community you personally know, the more code you contribute, and the more likely you are to become the next maintainer”.

Then they got more quantitative, and started including graphs like a social network graph, and measures like number of posts on the mailing lists, number of CVS commits, and number of lines of code written. They often focused on a single large project. Since the measure are usually very abstract and ambiguous, and the projects differ by technology, user target group, community climate and governance structure, the results are usually not generalisable, they were often not even measurable in different projects.

I mean, can you really measure anything useful from the number of commits, without understanding which features they implement, who uses these features, what the program does, whether this is a bug fix or a new feature, whether we are approaching a new point release, or a new major version with breaking changes or if we perhaps have to make a quick bugfix release because the latest OSX has forsaken POSIX compliance once and for all?

The original sin is looking at open source software contributions without considering that some people actually don’t write code for the sake of writing code, or to sell the software, but because they need to use it for something that’s actually productive.

As a programmer versed in digital humanities and the life sciences, I’m sure you could take mailing lists and conference proceedings of sociologists and fit some spicy quantitative models in there, but when they do it they act all smug about their interpellations, epistemic communities, meritocracies, social capital, and institutional modes of knowledge production. You know that you could p-hack until you prove that sociology papers are actually caused by feelings of sexual inadequacy, and the more inadequate you feel, the more likely you are to get tenure in the field of sociology. Unfortunately, you have a fairly normal sex life, and you know your chances of getting this published are nil. You have no standing to publish in their journals, you have the data but you don’t know the shibboleths - the habitus, if you will - and you also don’t know the right people in sociology - you lack the social capital. Don’t tell me, I know what you want to say. I know it’s unfair.







End of digression. Back to Gamers.

Every other month, there is a new paper about GamerGate published, and it’s awful. Whether it’s in games studies, women‘s studies, communication studies, anthropology or sociology. It’s often coming from a left-wing activist scientist, and you know you never had a fair shake. If the next paper comes out and tells us that the amount of times Anthony Burch is called a “cuck“ on Reddit varies based on the phase of the moon, take a moment and think about it. They never even took a moment and thought “What if Anthony Burch actually is a cuck?“ I mean now somebody can write a paper that cites this one and say “Anthony Burch is not a cuck[9]“ and “GamerGate was a harassment campaign[1, 2, 97]” or “Gamers didn’t care about journalistic ethics [Totilo, 2014]”.

Academia is treating Gamers as a hostile environment, not to be touched directly. Everything said by Gamers must be filtered through a couple of layers of theory, and nothing they say about themselves, the world, or the motivations behind their actions may ever be taken at face value. Everything that cannot be explained by these models must be labelled as ”lashing out”, “hate for the sake of hate“ or “senseless cyber-violence“.

This is bulverism.



Every original thought about a game, and every visceral reaction to game mechanics must be “interrogated“, filtered through a thick layer of pure disgust at your own base instincts like masters of skills, pattern matching, and socialising. Every interaction with a game must be tempered by vigilance and self-consciousness. It’s impossible to look at games as games. Games are always something else. Gamers are always something else.

Lefty academics are unwilling to take anything Gamers say or do at face value. Whatever a Gamer says, academics will spring into action and write pseudo-quantitative papers about what that really means.

Nothing on mainstream media represents Gamers as a class, their interests or opinions. Everything somebody says with the label “Gamer“ attached raises alarm bells, and you need to ask an academic to read the tea laves on what the Gamers want, what they mean, and why they say this.

Even those journalists and academics capable of delivering a thick description are understandably reluctant to commit such a thing to paper.







It’s pretty much impossible for a Gamer to say certain things, and for SJWs to hear them clearly. If a Gamer says that Steam has been overrun with shovelware and that games that aim for “filmic“ aesthetics or “realism“ are usually less realistic and suffer from more ludo-narrative dissonance than simple platformers, that gets garbled. If Gamers tell us that microtransactions and product placement are bad, then instead of applying some dialectical materialism to art, the media will resort to artistic auteur theory, or tell us that without Monster Energy Drink™, Hideo Kojima’s poor, non-unionised employees would have starved.

This dynamic can be averted or even exploited. You can pretty much get away with anything as long as you don’t drop any Gamer shibboleths, and don’t display and class consciousness. You need impeccable left-wing credentials, or you can make a good show of your ineptitude at the controls and general ignorance of gaming conventions and Gamer culture, and you can pretty much say that there’s a problem with ethics in games journalism - as long as you don’t say it in these exact words.

If you say “My wife, who usually never plays games, thinks that the latest Fortnite thing is just a dumb PR stunt, but it hurts the meta and the long-term viability of Fortnite as a e-sport”, then you’re good. That’s like saying “My five year old son asked me why…” It lets you recycle opinions and test the waters.

Or you say “The Gamers are mad because they like their microtransactions so much, but I think microtransactions are bad.“ You distance yourself from the label and the idea of class consciousness. Sure, on the object level you are agreeing with Gamer politics, but the label is more important than any particular issue, and you cannot be made poster boy of the Gamers, your person cannot be used by the Gamers in order to coordinate politically. You position yourself as outside of the class, as unable to coordinate, unable to form a broad coalition, unwilling to join them. And then you can say whatever you want, because this is more about signalling where your political commitments are, than it is about communication what you think the status quo is like.

And that’s why Olly Thorn of Philosophytube made a video about the gaming industry, and nobody batted an eye. He is a Gamer, but he joined the oppressors in exchange for scraps.