Pictured here: An insufferable douche and his unfortunate friends.

In my recent interview with Andrew Allanson, the creator of YIIK: A Postmodern RPG, I bemoaned the fact that, even though YIIK has the moniker of “Post-Modern”, it was being taken largely as a political descriptor rather than referencing literary post-modernism. At the time, I was of the opinion that this placed YIIK into the unfortunate position of being egregious to both sides of the political compass, too Post-Modern for the right and not Post-Modern enough for the left, placing it in the perfect place to be the center of outrage.

But that’s incorrect, or not the whole story. At least as far as I’m inclined to believe now. Allow me to explain.

Modern games journalism has been largely maligned for some time now from both sides of the political aisle. Some sites have been criticized for being largely corporate information-tubes that don’t allow their writers to speak their minds. I still keenly remember Gamespot’s controversy surrounding Kane & Lynch: Dead Men. Others feel as though politics have seeped too far into games journalism and is causing all information from said sources to be biased in unfeasibly extreme directions.

I deserve a veteran’s discount just for remembering this image.

Naturally, in a bid for survival, some sites have used the controversy and outrage surrounding them to their advantage, in the process coining the term “Hateclick”, used to refer to someone’s desire to fan the flames of their hatred toward a headline and see if the author was “being serious” or not. The more contrarian journalists out there may claim to take pride in living off hateclicks, but make no mistake, the powers that be recognize the dangers of living off of hateclicks.

On that last point you can trust me.

The key to an article’s success is the amount of viral quality it has. Anger is an extremely viral thing. But to continually direct hatred at your own publication is a dangerous game. Therefore, as has come before them so many times, the industry continually seeks out acceptable targets for hatred. A persona who will receive little backlash for having negative things printed about them but draw in the attention of those who are angered by this figure. There are acceptable targets everywhere these days. Recently the internet welcomed ProJared (Jared Knabenbauer) into the stable of acceptable targets, with little resistance, alongside Randy Pitchford and Bob Chipman. You won’t see me defending them, that’s for sure.

With that, we finally reach our point.

Andrew Allanson, having been seen as an “acceptable target” from both sides of the aisle has pushed games journalism to bring his name up every time there’s a slow news day. And why not? The coverage of YIIK’s projected character of a developer who hates gamers, plagiarizes literature and willingly offends trans people is an easy person to hate from wherever you’re sitting. This article by a fairly talented and handsome (if a little misled and overweight) writer lists out in great detail some of the ways by which Andrew Allanson has done the gaming public wrong.

He’s also a game dev. Not that it matters.

Or does it?

Up until now, Andrew Allanson has been a man beset by a firing squad and has been, I’m of the opinion, perhaps too polite to tell the riflemen to put the f*cking guns down for one God-damned second and listen. Games media has been at best (and probably most often) uninformed about Allanson and, at worst, actively malicious and profiting off the outrage at his heels and has thus not yet provided the strong defense for Andrew Allanson that he deserves. So, here’s the bottom line.

Everything you’ve heard about YIIK and Andrew Allanson is provably false. Multiple sites have printed straight-up libelous claims about him and said sites should be held to task for the way they’ve treated an indie developer they’ve knowingly and wrongfully labeled as plagiaristic and insensitive.

The endless criticisms surrounding YIIK and Allanson are countless, but regarding specifically the way that the media has attacked Allanson, let’s begin where I found myself first thrown into the storm:

Unlikable Characters and The Dick Show

In the wake of The Dick Show episode 144, a podcast run by satirist Dick Masterson, an image began circulating regarding a quote by Allanson which read:

The term “out of context” gets thrown around a lot. This was not taken out of context in the way the internet has come to understand it. This appears to be a sincere expression of frustration by Andrew Allanson. The people, myself included, who became incensed by this quote had no “just kidding” to upend it afterward to convince us that we were wrong to be infuriated by it.

Multiple media outlets rang in on Allanson’s appearance, from Niche Gamer who slammed YIIK with the title “YIIK Creator: Too Many Gamers “Get Triggered” by Unlikable Main Characters”, Dante Douglas, reviewer of YIIK for Paste Games claims:

In fact, the controversy was pervasive enough that even I myself made a moderately successful article harshly criticizing Allanson for his comments, pasted above.

But despite the lack of a clear satirical voice from Allanson, the quote is taken out of context, the context being a good ten minutes of bemoaning, not poor reviews, but of needless controversy.

Below is a quote that would seem to directly contradict the previous heinously self-aggrandizing and pretentious statement:

“I’m just looking to make fun games. […] I didn’t think the game was very political, but it turns out everything’s political in 2019.”

This is a statement spoken in the middle of multiple cases of YIIK being met with numerous controversies all at once. The original quote, in this new context, is not a criticism of the game’s negative reviews, but rather of the voices who criticized the game for its use of intense and adult subject matter.

At no point in the interview does Allanson complain about those who may have found the game unfun, or even lacking in any sort of quality such as gameplay or writing. This is his reaction to games press and reactionaries immediately having cultural complaints with the game or with the simple fact that he did end up including an extremely unlikable main character.

If you take issue with YIIK as a game, that’s fine, I’ve got criticisms of my own, but you’ll find it difficult to locate places wherein Allanson has criticized those who were simply not having a good time. That is to say, the above quote, so largely maligned, is provably not a reaction against poor reviews. If you’re not convinced, Andrew Allanson begins speaking around the 1 hour and 50 minute mark about the controversy surrounding YIIK on that episode of the Dick Show, I highly recommend listening to it.

If you take issue with YIIK’s subject matter or its decision to include an unlikable main character, then perhaps you still have a problem with YIIK, but you are, as Allanson outlines in his quote, limiting what an artform can be about, bringing it closer to a toy for children than a work of fiction.

“Plagiarism” of Haruki Murakami

“Indie Developer Accused Of Plagiarism Says It Was An ‘Intentional’ Reference”

Reads one of the latest headlines from Kotaku, one of the few articles around to have included Andrew Allanson’s statement on the recent controversy surrounded allegations that Allanson plagiarized Haruki Murakami. This loaded headline would turn out to be one of the more charitable responses this would receive.

As many controversies do, this one surrounds a single image macro posted here:

In a public statement, Andrew Allanson has directly stated that this was an intentional reference:

“YIIK contains quite a few homages to the writer Haruki Murakami […] The idea is, Alex has read After Dark, and his fondness for the novel is seeping into his reality with vocal and physical manifestations calling his attention back to the passages of the book now living in his subconscious. In that context, we thought it would not be in-character for “Proto Woman” to cite that their words hail from Murakami’s novel, since they don’t have the awareness that their words are actually an excerpt from a book”

If that wasn’t proof enough that Allanson had Murakami and literary reference deliberately on the brain before beginning work on YIIK, here’s a statement from the The Dick Show, the very same interview cited above before this controversy became public:

“I was trying to make the video game version of a Chuck Palahniuk novel, or a Haruki Murakami novel. To try and do something a little different y’know?”

Should this not be enough to persuade someone from the idea that the “lifting” of Murakami was an intentional and well-natured thing, I reached out to Andrew Allanson directly, who was able to point me to yet further references that have not come up as sources of controversy:

“[Pasting dialogue from YIIK] “You talk things over, do you?” I’d nod. “Uh-huh. Been together a long time so we can read each other’s moods. I understand what makes the cat tick, the cat knows what makes me tick.”, this scene is a reference to Wind/Pinball by Murakami. […] Yuzu in the Essentia Dungeon is a reference to №9Dream by David Mitchell, who wrote an entire Murakami style book…. which is callled №9Dream. Here is another one, in the first dungeon Sammy says “The world has used me so unkindly, I fear it has made me suspicious of everyone.” which is a quote from Mary Anning, a famous English fossil collector from England.”

The line between plagiarism and reference is a vague one, but not a completely indeterminate one. Plagiarism is defined as taking one’s own ideas and passing them off as one’s own. However, Murakami’s characters were not attempting to be, themselves, derivative, whereas Alex’s mind is established time and time again to be feeding off the people he listens to and the media he consumes. The accusation of plagiarism comes with the implication that finding the original source would somehow damage the work and expose it as unoriginal. Allanson takes pride in what he calls his intertextuality, and even separated from his personal opinion, it requires multiple different steps of uncharitability to take clear references and assume them to be attempts at cultural vandalism.

But this is exactly what Andrew Allanson was accused of by the Kotaku article cited above, an article from Niche Gamer (a site who also took its digs during the ‘Dick Show’ controversy) with an article entitled “Indie Game “YIIK” Appears to Directly Plagiarize Japanese Author Haruki Murakami”, and Playstation Lifestyle which has, at time of writing, not yet included Allanson’s public statement in their accusatory article, opting instead for references to The Dick Show once again.

Also, when the hell did we start taking Kotaku at their word?

“Straight White Protagonist”

As it’s been stated before, the term “Postmodern RPG” has been interpreted by many… most… possibly all… as a political alignment rather than a reference to postmodern literature (not unlike Haruki Murakami, but we’re past that) and thus was interpreted as a political dogwhistle. Those on the right geared themselves to dislike it. Those on the left were geared to judge it.

Reviewers en masse were prepared to take YIIK at its perceived word and decided to review it using a politically post-modern lens. These same reviewers found it wanting.

“Alex [is asked] if his quest to save Sammy is a white savior mission since he’s a white guy chasing after an Asian woman he barely knew. Pointing out tropes like these don’t make things better. In fact, the fact that the game draws attention to them and doesn’t deconstruct them makes them more awkward.” -Brian Renadette, Keen Gamer

“The experience I just described is one shared by many, and not even just with video games: those of us who exist somewhere else on the identity scale are often forced to give straight white men chance, after chance, after chance to be anything other than a mixture of awkward, offensive or boring. And we do it over and over again because we are tired and don’t have the energy to do anything else but wait.” -Ruune, Big Boss Battle

“Alex is a white man who has been ignorant of the ways that he has created hardship for those around him, and (as called out seven hours into the game by Claudio and Chondra, your playable team’s only black characters) has had nearly infinite chances to get better, but didn’t.” -Dante Douglas, Paste Games

I’m not arguing that he’s NOT white, let’s get that out of the way.

With the obvious ways in which Alex presents himself as an intentionally unlikable character (going so far as to push a close friend to suicide as well as an extremely self-deprecating ending that I won’t spoil for any interested), it could be argued that it would hardly be post-modern to cast a woman or a person of color into Alex’s role instead. In fact, a straight white male should, through a politically post-modern lens, be the perfect candidate for a character who mistreats the people around him and fails to learn anything through the game’s runtime. However, the cultural complaints came anyway, and I’m simply not convinced that these reviewers aren’t, in reaction, enacting willful ignorance because they have an axe to grind.

With everything else games journalism has ignored about YIIK and Andrew Allanson, I feel as though giving the media the benefit of the doubt regarding undue criticism regarding the protagonist may be far too charitable.

And It Worked

Personal anecdote: no one in my circle of friends and acquaintances reads any sort of article in the current 2019 game media without being hugely skeptical. Time and time again, modern journalism on video games has been untruthful, biased and wrong-headed. Yet I’ve never seen the public eat up misinformation from the industry as quickly and without healthy skepticism as I’ve seen them consume the YIIK story.

Everyone I know reacted to this with “Wait, who?”

I believe that the public had perceived an overly politicized game as being a common enemy they could share with games journalism. However, as it has been so many times before, this is a falsification, and a blatant, disgusting one at that. This is not a defense of YIIK. If it were, it would be a review. It’s the defense of an indie dev who got branded as an acceptable target by the media who’ve fallen for the trap.

Since my talk with Allanson, I’ve talked with many people who had no idea the truth behind YIIK. I’ve actually been thanked for clearing it up. I feel as though there are more people, many more people, people who I agree with and disagree with, who would jump to Allanson’s defense if they could just get past the strawman the media’s created in their mind.

A strawman that maybe looks like this:

Or this:

Or yeah, even this:

And there are far more undue controversies that have surrounded YIIK, the Deadname controversy, the Elisa Lam controversy, the Ginger joke. The media and the ResetEra’s of the world have decided it’s okay to abuse this game and it’s creator.

I’m not asking you to like YIIK.

I’m asking you to please, please, consider who the real enemy is here.

It’s the same outrage-centric hateclick-addicted games journalism industry that lies about everything else.

EDIT: I should probably plug my twitter. Catch me at @MrFunkSandwich.