"video games... i love you"

June 26, 2018 7:17 AM

Hareton Splimby (aka Harris Bomberguy, aka hbomberguy) discusses Ctrl+Alt+Del... plus also Penny Arcade, The Room, Sonic the Hedgehog, gamer culture, puppies, Jack Thompson, Visceral Games, "it's just a video game," making art that says more than you thought it did, popular art as a means of cultural self-reflection and the rejection of art as indicative of an unwillingness to participate in that self-reflection, and some very silly jokes.

A choice quote from the end of the video, if you can't quite muster the energy to sit through a 34-minute video (you should though, it's great):

When we look at ridiculous behavior within our sphere, instead of trying to project it out of ourselves -- say it's just some random idiot somewhere, doing something dumb -- maybe we should accept that CAD, Penny Arcade, Visceral Games, and even EA's business decisions are aspects of a wider culture that can be reflective of our own feelings and beliefs and values, even if we don't like what comes out of them. And maybe if we learn to criticize ourselves and change our own behavior, we can start to change the wider culture.

Some endnotes:

• Loss, as if it needed a reference -- now one of the most notorious web comic pages in history
• Jack Thompson, crusader against violent video games
• The collapse of Visceral's ambitious Star Wars game

Penny Arcade, the comic most often referenced as the superior alternative to CAD, has had its share of controversy, particularly surrounding a comic with a rape joke, the creators' poor response thereto, and the resulting effects on their now industry-defining convention PAX:

• PAX East needs to stand up for women
• Why I'm Never Going Back to Penny Arcade Expo
• Quit Fucking Going to PAX Already, What Is Wrong With You

posted by Kybard (16 comments total)

Also: Penny Arcade and PAX, previously previously on the Blue.
posted by Kybard at 7:19 AM on June 26, 2018

If one wanted to skip past the skit part of the video to the content, what timestamp would one use?
posted by tobascodagama at 8:39 AM on June 26, 2018

I assume we are not mentioning the toxic thread of gamer gate in gaming here for some reason?

no reason except that the video I used to make the thread really is only talking about stuff like GG tangentially/implicitly, since it's really a call to those people in the gaming community who might want to communicate in good faith

but yeah that stuff definitely feeds into this -- part of the gaming culture's toxicity is its broad unwillingness to self-reflect and its high-strung defensiveness whenever any entity points out even the slightest of issues with its handling of its own social or cultural context. something as horrific as GG can only be bred in such a wittingly oblivious cesspool
posted by Kybard at 8:40 AM on June 26, 2018 [2 favorites]

tobascodagama -- 1:48 skips at least the opening stuff. there's a lot of silly skit stuff peppered in between the analysis/essaying, but liberal use of your right arrow key would probably be the best approach with that stuff
posted by Kybard at 8:42 AM on June 26, 2018 [2 favorites]

Thanks!
posted by tobascodagama at 8:50 AM on June 26, 2018

I assume we are not mentioning the toxic thread of gamer gate in gaming here for some reason?

Seconding Kybard on PA's attitudes being pretty representative of gaming culture's defensiveness. It's not the main focus of the post but PA have historically been real shits on a much wider set of issues than the public campaign and backlash of gamergate, even apart from the incredibly awful stuff they've done themselves in the links. It's worth contrasting their quick-off-the-mark tough guy fronting about lootboxes (link is to twitter, not their website) with their silence about diverse representation or labour relations in the industry or, yeah, gamergate.

They are in theory the biggest gaming-centric webcomic (if largely disregarded by most webcomic creators worth reading) and they've been silent on gamergate for foure years/
posted by ocular shenanigans at 8:53 AM on June 26, 2018 [7 favorites]

The story about Visceral's Star Wars game was very interesting. Game Development sounds like a nightmare. The worst part is you have all these different folks together to collaborate on incredible art works but the people funding them literally do not give a single shit about the art whatsoever. It's just business to them, a trick to hopefully make money. I guess that's a problem nearly as old as art itself, though. Still, always a little depressing when you have to confront it.
posted by GoblinHoney at 8:57 AM on June 26, 2018 [1 favorite]

It's easy to forget that when PAX started, it was the "progressive" conference just by dint of leading with a "no booth babes" policy. Not that I'm saying it is in fact progressive; just, good lord, if you didn't experience the '90s and early '00s tech conference culture firsthand, you cannot imagine how gross it was towards women.

As a person who attended from the first PAX East, and has run booths a number of times, I've kinda had to watch the PA guys a lot over the years. The both of them are white dudes who lucked into success wildly beyond the effort they put in, including having at one point accidentally sold the rights to their comic when they intended only to publish a book of their comics. They have ... sorta matured? Kinda? But not really. If anything, they've just transitioned from angsty gamer teens to manpain mcfeels gamer dads (all those games from the last 5 or so years about beleaguered father figures are basically aimed right at their demographic).

At some point it became clear that Robert Khoo (their business manager) was the only thing keeping Krahulik (Gabe) from just getting up on stage and spouting nasty shit all over [pick whatever minority you want] because of defensiveness over ... who fucking knows. (I recall the year they pointedly switched from unstructured Q&A to pre-vetted questions for the make-a-strip panel because Krahulik couldn't not respond gleefully to softball questions about how mean [women or minorities or trans people or pick a group] were to him.)

I haven't attended in a few years, and Khoo moved on, so who knows what the fuck filters are there at this point.

Sorry for the meandering, just, yeah. Many thoughts, most bad.
posted by tocts at 10:07 AM on June 26, 2018 [10 favorites]

ocular shenanigans, that comic in the tweet that you posted shows that Holkins and Krahulik haven't really changed. Both the dickwolves fiasco and that rant about Söderlund are based in egotistical outrage; "how dare you, [people complaining about the comic|executive at a huge gaming company], presume to not put us first and foremost in your [opinions|decisions]." I'm not saying that EA doesn't make shitty decisions; I've complained often and at length about their shutting the Mass Effect single-player franchise down and turning what was left into yet another loot-box pimp. But Holkins seems to give the impression that, if they hadn't shut down his baby, he'd otherwise have been fine with them, or at least not nearly as ranty. Entitlement is, of course, at the heart of Gamergate.

tocts, that sounds just about exactly right. I didn't know that Khoo had left; googling for news about it, I'm struck by how absolutely committed he and PA Corp. were to not giving a single clue as to why he was leaving or what he might be doing next. I'm also struck by how many of the strips that he appeared in (linked in his Wikipedia page) are related to his being the grown-up in the room, particularly WRT Krahulik.
posted by Halloween Jack at 10:39 AM on June 26, 2018 [5 favorites]

Forever ago someone told me that as a gamer and comics nerd that I'd enjoy Penny Arcade. This was when I was still actively using an RSS, (oh wow I still have Feedly installed), anyways, I gave it a subscribe and while I chuckled occasionally, there was something very arrogant about their "takes" on whatever the current subject/topic/controversy was in the so called "nerd community". And it felt very mean. That's the main reason I walked away from that stuff.

There are plenty of other comic artists/creators/bloggers that aren't so nasty or mean-spirited in their approach to culture. I'd rather give them a follow or a like.
posted by Fizz at 11:15 AM on June 26, 2018 [1 favorite]

But Holkins seems to give the impression that, if they hadn't shut down his baby, he'd otherwise have been fine with them, or at least not nearly as ranty. Entitlement is, of course, at the heart of Gamergate.

Exactly, he more or less fluked into being correct about a topic (just like the past few week, EA can be a bad company and the vocal gamers who whine about female representation in games are nonetheless awful) and still managed to present himself in the most arrogant way possible.
posted by ocular shenanigans at 12:01 PM on June 26, 2018

Hbomberguy also did the great video on the history of Dragon's Lair, previously.
posted by AlSweigart at 3:54 PM on June 26, 2018 [2 favorites]

Also worth watching are the first two parts of the Serious Lore Analysis:

Part 1

Part 2
posted by AlSweigart at 4:15 PM on June 26, 2018 [3 favorites]

Oh dear lord, that video had everything I hate about youtube nerd videos: painfully unfunny humour, bargain basement "analysis" and as seems to be de rigeur, the author's inability to contain his desire to create some sort of slapdash sci-fi story through his videos.
posted by MartinWisse at 3:06 AM on June 27, 2018 [2 favorites]

My takeaway is about that temptation when there's something you don't understand, to tell yourself a story where someone is to blame, who isn't you. Maybe because The Room bit was my favourite part.

But maybe also because that does feel familiar for the gator crowd. Even when they're angry at a big company, they'll often find someone to blame (probably a woman) like a Bioware writer or Nintendo localizer. They reject the concept of systemic problems, because they can't harass a system.
posted by RobotHero at 10:19 AM on June 27, 2018 [4 favorites]

I loved the Room tangent, too, for exactly that reason. also because it's an interesting angle on how art is both separate and inseparable from its artist -- about how your art can not say what you think it means and also say what you didn't realize you were saying. art as an expression of the unconscious mind.

which, yeah, is right up the gator alley of cognitively dissonant "it's about ethics in fhewfhffdddddd" bullshit -- seeing the tree and not only not seeing the forest, but not even recognizing that the tree is a tree.
posted by Kybard at 11:33 AM on June 27, 2018 [1 favorite]