Bioshock Infinite as Art: Your Argument is Invalid (Part 3-Human Condition? Subtext? It's in there.)

Two quick reminders:

1- This is Part 3 of a multi-part article, and I’m jumping right in from Part 2 without recap.

(Or go all the way back to part 1)

2- While I’m not decoding the end or discussing the plot directly, there will be spoilers.

A brief real-time caveat: this is a snippet of conversation I had with an artsy geek friend since beginning this article. But since I have to lay this out as me being awesome, I'm going to call him "Art Snob" and cut a slice out of our broader interaction so that the whole thing looks a lot more antagonistic than it really was it totally happened just like this.


Art Snob:  You know that a game can ever be real art. You’re wasting your time with that article.

Me: Dude, I haven't even finished. Wait until you see what's next.

Art Snob: The rules of games are too arbitrary. You have to have levels. You have to have a difficulty curve. You have to have random dudes with chocolate and ammo in their pockets. You have to have an epic end fight. It’s all these constraining artificial… “rules.” (“Art snob” is also kind of a geek, so he knows these things.)

Me: How is that any different from, say, an Elizabethan sonnet? 14 lines. Specific rhyme scheme. Iambic pentameter. Three quatrains. Shift in the 9th line. Ending couplet. How are those rules less constraining? You know as well as I do that when art colors inside the lines, it becomes even more creative. Especially if it bends the rules of the convention in a way that works with the themes.

Art Snob: (after a very long pause in which he—I shit you not—kind of picked his teeth with his tongue and I thought Duel of the Fates was going to start playing) Very well then, Christopher of the Brecheen clan. (As he said this, his body seemed to stretch and shadows filled the room like Gandalf in Fellowship of the Ring.) Finish your article. But mark my words and mark them well... (He extended a gnarled, bony finger directly at me.) Should you fail, the world of video game art fails with you, and there will be a reckoning such as never has been. No pressure, dude!

That's totally exactly just how it happened.

So we’ve established that Bioshock Infinite is excellent in its technical execution. From its eye-popping graphics, to its spectacular play experience, to the voice acting and facial expressions, to the intriguing 19th-century stylistic covers of modern songs (which actually have an in-game explanation), and even the mechanics of gameplay. Somewhere out there there might be a Comic Book Guy discussing the “clearly visible rogue pixel in the baptism scene” or something, but short of that, I think the quality seems pretty well verified by everyone who has played through.

What about the other three aspects we discussed that TEND to make for great art?

There are lots of artistic elements within B.I. that I could examine, but to avoid a thirty-five-part article and y'all force-choking me around Part 7, I will focus on one element in which we can hit two birds with one stone.

So first, let’s look at whether Bioshock Infinite deals with any fundamental (human condition) type philosophical questions.

Looking back on the 80s in hindsight,
I can sort see why this turned into a pregnancy joke.

Uh...yeeeeeeeeeaaaaaaaaah. It's in there.

Perhaps Bioshock Infinite’s most prevalent thematic concern is free will, and the question of whether or not we really have any. (A case could be made that the overarching theme is redemption—“wipe away the debt”—but I believe that the redemptive aspects of the various character arcs are tangled in with their free will—can they, in fact, actually ever make the choices that will redeem them? Besides, it's not like redemption isn't a human conditiony thing.)

The nagging anxiety that Bioshock Infinite seems to slam into with more force than a Handyman on crack is that we may actually make no decisions more significant than whether we want coffee or tea. Our lives may be written for us and we are puppets just acting them out––whether we are Dimwit or Duke (the Goofus and Gallant of the Bioshock world), good or evil predetermined by forces outside our control.

Knowing what we knew, when we knew it, would we always do the same thing in the same set of circumstances? Or do we have the ability to make different choices? The entire unfolding plot reveals the idea that the characters may have indeed walked past whatever precious moments that their fates were sealed, and that the only way to make new choices lies in undoing previous ones. Booker’s past continually locks him into only one possible course of action, and the same thing ends up being true of Elizabeth’s dark future.

It turns out that free will is a major anxiety in our current society. B.I.’s writers didn’t just throw “philosophical conundrums” into a hat and pick out one at random. Predetermination looms larger and larger as social sciences have shown that more and more ideas of meritocracy and exceptionalism (usually weaponized to blame the poor and marginalized for their poverty and marginalization) are far from the truth. As we delve further and further into life science and behavioral psychology, we start to learn that so many decisions we think we are making consciously are products of genetics, early development, social acculturation, and environment, and that there may even be less free will involved in our existence than we ever imagined. Since the moment the Twinkie defense actually fucking worked, and liberal/conservative traits were found to have genetic proclivities, we’ve been questioning if we are truly capable of being anything greater than a composite of our DNA and environment.

This isn’t the first time that our society has struggled with the concept of free will. Before the rise of rationalism, the concept of divine predestination had people ill at ease about their free will. If God knew what everyone was going to do before they did it, and had the power to change anything…did we really exercise free will at all? But philosophies (at least the so-called "Western" philosophies) diverged from religious determinism in the 19th century, and focused on humanity's indomitable will. We conquered nature. We subjugated people who were not like us. Science won. We were walking examples of free will—gods of the universe.

Rawrrr!

And it was not until the late 20th century that we began to slip back into the uncomfortable realization that this might not be true. This time our anxieties came not from the omnipresence of God, but from the unfolding discoveries of science.

It is absolutely no coincidence, then, that Bioshock Infinite starts in a religiously laden 19th century filled with predestination within religious imagery, but also hybridizes in a futuristic world of quantum realities and multiverse dimensions without the 20/21th century science mucking up the middle. That determinism is taken from God and prophecy about halfway through the game and handed to quantum physics and science, but the main conceit of the game from its first moment remains the ability to definitively prove that in the same situation, the same person would make the same choice over and over (and over) again––be it to sell a baby or destroy a city.

Kind of like our growing cultural anxiety.

In fact, exactly like it.

Because of the bantering of the Lutece twins and a few other clues, we know that the player takes control of the 123rd Booker DeWitt to come to Columbia, and that New York has always ended in fire. We know he never rows. We know he always flips the coin the same way. He always picks 77 (despite the warning). There is even an implication in the dialogue that even though the player sitting at home gets to make a choice between cage and bird, Booker has made that same choice over and over again.

He helplessly plods along a path of determinism, unable to change his fate. Every choice the player makes (or thinks they make) is revealed to be just another illusion. It doesn’t matter at all to the ending. From decisions about whether to draw first at the ticket booth to decisions about whether to kill someone begging to die. They are all details that in DeWitt’s words, “wouldn’t change a goddamned thing.” One of the Lutece twins even says at several points where you must do something to progress in the game: “He will do it. Eventually.”

In this way B.I. weaves an element of video game storytelling into the broader themes that it’s exploring.

The characters in B.I. all do terrible things as their lives unfold, and each literally feels powerless to make different choices. At one point Elizabeth stands in front of a burning New York, and says she could not have done otherwise. Apparently convoluted plots involving time travel and the key to Songbird are doable but just saying “Why don’t we go to Disneyland and have a Coke instead?” when it’s time to wipe a city off the map is unfathomable.

But hey, who am I to judge? I like pineapple on my pizza. THAT'S the real crime.

And yet Bioshock Infinite does not leave us with such a bleak statement about free will being an illusion. Its final message is one of hope and choice. Even if it takes 123 quantum times to shine through, there is something above and beyond just our genetics and our upbringing. Because after 123 times, both father and daughter make the same choice. Maybe they cannot stop the railroad violence that has determined their lives, but they can go back—back to a moment before it became too late—and make a different choice.

In this way B.I. might even be said to have some undertones of a didactic lesson. Life has a way of locking us in. So perhaps we might be reminded to consider well those few choices we really do have.

And golly gee willikers, doesn’t it seem like maybe there’s a book or two that deals with the concept of young folks' choices making old folks' destinies? Yes, I’m certain a tweed-jacketed English teacher or two has assigned me JUST such a book.

Okay, so Bioshock Infinite has a theme that is important in the human condition. One of the age-old philosophical questions. But a deep theme doesn’t mean much by itself. Prometheus was a film that tackled several deep themes yet still managed to be one of the most poorly fucking written movies of the last decade.

However, when we're discussing art that is mostly considered GOOD most of the time (by most?), what is more important than the themes simply being THERE, is whether the discrete technical elements of the art form a cohesive vision that echoes this theme.

Does Bioshock Infinite do this?

Do its separate artistic elements reinforce the themes of free will vs. determinism?

Lana is taking this article into the....danger zone.

Bioshock Infinite is the story of the 123 “loops” of a repeating pattern. It’s basically like Groundhog Day or that déjà vu episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation, except that the player is only playing through the final loop. Before you showed up, 122 Bookers have come to Columbia, fought Comstock, made decisions that didn’t end the cycle, and started all over again. The Luteces' banter can be analyzed to reveal that they have begun to realize they might be caught in a loop that will be infinite.

Hence the name of the game, if you didn’t realize.

So the plot and the dialogue already reflect the theme. Again, I'll just analyze ONE thing so you know it's there, but it's actually part of a list. (Seriously, I think someone could do their master's thesis on this game.)

Let us consider one of the game's most salient criticisms. In the modern era, most people want big sandbox games. Games like Bethesda makes (Skyrim or Fallout) where you can run around and explore gigantic landscapes full of all kinds of side quests and adventures. Many reviewers’ and critics’ main complaint about B.I. is that the game is FAR too linear. You can’t explore all the shops and stuff—you just grab the money and move on. It’s only a 15-hour game and that’s if you poke through every possible nook and cranny. You can’t really interact with people. There’s only one way to go. Even when it feels like you have a choice, it doesn’t matter. The alternate ways to explore turn out to be a bunch of dead ends with only one truly viable path. The entire game seems like you’re just acting out a predetermined course of actions instead of having any real control.

Sound familiar?

If it doesn’t, maybe this line from Elizabeth may help: “So many choices. They all lead us to the same place.”

And lest you think this was just a coincidence between thematic exploration and slapped-together game mechanics, I offer you this counterpoint. The first choice you get (between cage and bird) is also at the beginning of the first map where there are actually byways to explore beyond a straight shot to the next plot point. At each step beyond this, choices begin to grow almost exactly on par with map complexity. It is even possible to get lost in the run-up to Comstock house. In the final moments in the sea of lighthouses, Booker literally can choose any combination of rights, lefts, and straights the player wishes and go in infinitely different directions.

And each time the path is clear and straight, something happens (like a Songbird attack) to remind them of how few choices they really have.

The idea that it is a coincidence that with each successive map, Booker has more free will to move away from a nonlinear path is one of those absurdities of thinking the artist stumbled upon such a metaphor. It's not like the idea that maybe the curtains were just fucking blue, but actually patently ludicrous to imagine that this was all a big series of interlocking coincidences. This game design aspect perfectly reflects both the scope and urgency of Booker and Elizabeth struggling against their fates.

And yet, all choices end in the same place.

And yet, that is a place with a choice…a choice that actually does matter.

Still not convinced? There’s more….

I will leave you with one other artistic game-based aspect cleverly woven into the game that reflects the theme of destiny.  Consider for a moment the skylines that are so integral to the combat in so many areas. These are supposed to be for troop transport and cargo transportation. Right?

Did you notice that they don’t actually fucking GO anywhere?

Except for a couple in the cinematic sequences, all the skylines Booker can interact with are nothing more than loops. It is a design that would be preposterously inefficient for moving cargo or troop transport. No real tracks would ever be so poorly designed. They don’t go from one area to another. They don’t have connecting tracks. Most of them don’t even have multiple “stations” where they stop. They just go around in a circle. Like anyone would want to move their cargo down the block and back all day without actually building more tracks.

If you build a track system to help with transport, you want it to go, you know, maybe across town or at least to another station so they could unload it once it got where it was going. These are the worst fucking skyline designs in the history of anything, if they are looked at pragmatically. They just go around in a big circle and end up where they started. However, as a thematic reinforcement that most people probably didn’t notice, they are strokes of genius. These skylines are just like Booker and Elizabeth. They just go round and round on a predetermined track, unable to ever really leave. And even though they get more and more convoluted with each successive map, they always end up right back where they started.

So yes, the elements within Bioshock Infinite were reflections of the theme. For realsies.

On to Part 4

Bioshock Infinite as Art: Your Argument is Invalid (Part 2- What Even IS Art?)

Return to Part 1  

Just a reminder, while this isn’t a “what does it all mean?” post analyzing the plot of B.I., I cannot avoid some spoilers. I also have some mild Inception spoilers, so if you haven’t seen that yet, go find out why all the critics were wetting themselves in 2010. I’m going to hit the ground running from Part One without any recap, so please check that out before digging in here if you haven’t already. 



In order to haughtily declare that something "isn't art," it's important that we all have a working definition of what art ACTUALLY IS that goes beyond "What I like is art" and "What I don't like isn't." Unfortunately for an awful lot of cookie-cutter academics and art snobs, "What I was taught to like is art" is a pretty close approximation of their best guess. But let's see if we can break "art" down past what these champions of bourgeoisie aesthetic who look for what conforms to their ethnocentric and back-in-the-good-old-day, past-revering sense of artistic merit say it is.

Is it simply a completely subjective matter of opinion? I have a friend who likes trashy movies (actually likes them, not just appreciates how terribad they are), and so has decided rather than confront the idea that he might like bad things (which is totally fucking okay), that good and bad is utterly meaningless and utterly subjective and there's no way anyone could possibly figure out art end of line thanks for playing pleasesigntheledgeronyourwayout. However, if that were the case, there would be no way anyone could agree on how to make something "better." There would be zero consensus. The entire art world would be anarchy and no one would ever know how to improve their craft. Perhaps there is a reason that people the world over and from many different cultures seem to have a general level of agreement about a lot of good art. What is it that makes art connoisseurs mouths go dry—whether schooled in New England or Uganda or Tokyo—when they look upon the statue of David by Michelangelo, The Persistence of Memory by Dali, or Spring Morning in the Han Palace by Qiu Ying. Even if they had not before been taught to like THAT work or style.

Is there some way to consider an offering of something totally new to the artistic world without getting a million people to upvote it on Reddit, or calling up your old Humanities professor to double-check that you're allowed to like it? Can an individual human look at some bit of art and decide if it is good at some level beyond their personal opinion?

“What is art?” is a complicated question wrapped up in the philosophical idea of beauty, and there’s no way anyone can definitively answer it—especially not while keeping geeky and making lots of threesome jokes.

The good news is that I don’t have to.

While there are problems at either end of the spectrum of “art is only narrow definition X” vs. “art is totally subjective", and a large grey area of personal taste and slippery definitions in the middle, there do tend to be certain factors that consistently play into art crossing the “real" art Rubicon, in a way that most people agree with most of the time. We don’t need to spend a lot of time examining the murky grey area between art, “high art,” and consumable entertainment. We can just look to see if the art that most people agree is fabulous has certain commonalities. You aren't going to see "rules" per se, but we can find some useful guidelines.

And we do*

*I would like to pause here to point out one very critical bit of dialogue from this conversation that has only JUST begun to reach the mainstream of academia in a meaningful way. "High art" has been defined for generations as white (mostly male) art. A highly Eurocentric, colonialist, and Orientalist view seeded deep into the pedagogy of much academia where European art was "high art" and art from other places was "folk art." And the colonialist legacy of stealing art from indigenous peoples and even MELTING IT DOWN TO SEND BACK TO SPAIN, has echoes that inform this imperious rubric. It is not impossible to still find a Humanities professor who believes that they aren't prejudiced, but the only "real" art happens to be European or European-style. Even after everyone in academia happily declared they were past all that, the aesthetic and methodologies that conveniently exclude most of the world's art live on as the metrics for what counts and doesn't.  Similarly there is a gender valuation in the labor of art vs the labor of "crafts." Frankly very little was traditionally considered art before the fifties or so if a white guy didn't do it, and don't think for a moment that that legacy doesn't endure.

Here's what we can say about most "real" art, most of the time (and while some of these can get a little.....elastic when it comes to art forms where they don't quite "fit" [like music] they still tend to have some identifiable threads :

1) It is technically excellent in either its realism or its abstraction. If it is writing, it is superior prose. If it is painting, it is masterful painting. If it is sculpture, it is nearly perfect. If it is film, it has seamless editing and audiovisual elements. If it's music, it is done in tune, to the beat, and with no wrong notes. Whatever the art is, it’s execution borders on flawless. Or at least as flawless humans are capable of.

2) It has subtext. Whatever the form of art, it goes beyond itself, with a meaning that is greater than its absolute. Its gestalt is greater than the sum of its parts—even if not explicitly in the mind of the artist during creation. There are things within the art that mean more than simply themselves. In a video game, as in a movie, this can take place by means of symbols in the visuals, subtext in the dialogue, or both. In a sculpture like David, there is an embodiment of power, prowess, and traditionally "male" virtues (according to the ancient Greeks). If it is Andy Warhol's 32 Soup Cans, its subtext is consumerism and commercialism. Within music, even without lyrics, elements weave to evoke feelings or occasionally (even more directly) are written with a deliberate subject in mind like Magic Flute freemasonry themes or Brahms' love letters.

3) It is relevant. Yes, the old famous “human condition” that has become a cliche of art departments round the world for the frequency of its parroting. "Good" art touches something within us in its examination of humanity. It can be politically relevant, socially poignant, or simply an expression of our longest standing philosophical struggles with our own existence. And music is so fundamental to human experience that it's hard to even think of separating the two. But at some level, the art explores something about humanity that we all share. This is why, within science fiction, infinite Star Wars clones fail to impress most “high art” sommeliers, but Ursula Le Guin and Philip K. Dick are grudgingly allowed to sit at the "literary" table.

4) The composite elements that make up the art form help reinforce (either by working with or through the relief of contrast) a thematic vision of the art itself.  Here's where things get harder to explain and you start seeing a lot of four-year degrees among those with the knowledge to track entire movements with their historical contexts and such. But to put it as basically as possible: every art has elements that make it up. Painting has color and texture and form and content and imagery. Literature has setting, plot, character, tone. Film has cinematography, soundtrack, acting, costuming, and visual effects. Music has instrumentation, tempo, melody, and harmony. In many arts these elements themselves have further elements (like cinematography has lighting, focal points, composition and such) that all lead up to a massive composite of skill and artistry (or not) within the final work. If this artistry is haphazard, the work can be extremely technically proficient, relevant, and have subtext, but there is a strange discordance between the elements. What we tend to notice in “good art” is that these elements work with some of the work’s central themes and form a cohesive vision.

Consider John Steinbeck, an author I picked because most Americans have read at least some of his work. You probably had to do some homework at some point about how Steinbeck’s settings always mirrored the psychological struggle of the characters within the chapter. Rooms with old lamps that caused one half of the room to be lit and the other half to be in shadow became chapters where both the best and worst of humanity were revealed. Several books of his in which nothing has changed except a lot of suffering to no good end begin and end in essentially the same place. Steinbeck constantly used his settings as a kinetic landscape for the themes he explored.

However, this idea may be easiest to demonstrate rather than explain. Take the example of Inception. Critics went happyfeet over this soundtrack and it was nominated for the Academy Award for best original score (though it didn’t win). Here’s one of the best songs in that soundtrack:

It’s a simple song, reiterating a single theme over and over, but at each new iteration, it adds in a new layer of instrumentation. Most of the score involves songs that are very similar in execution. This is actually a pretty basic and overdone musical technique called “looping.” It’s considered to be pretty uninspired most of the time. Why did critics like looping so much for Inception? Because that layering effect both increases the complexity of the score and adds to the sense of danger at each new level….

…in an exact mirror of the movie itself.

At each level of the dream, a new layer of dramatic problem was added and the stakes increased.The music was a perfect reflection of the themes of the movie. Also, the movie itself was exploring the way that once an idea gets into your head, it goes around and around picking up steam—much like the songs themselves were doing—becoming louder each iteration. The soundtrack represented and enhanced the movie’s themes.

So those are the four elements. They aren’t comprehensive, and there’s a lot of room for personal aesthetic, but the works consistently deemed to be “high art” tend to have these things in common.

This is why Star Wars is always listed as one of the greatest films by all but the most snobbish of film critics—even though it gives most literature professors an eye twitch when they think about it. That movie is breathtaking. The flawless execution (for 1977) of audio and visual effects was a masterpiece, and every single frame reinforced the thematic core of good versus evil, from the costumes to the music to Han’s divorce from moral ambiguity at the end. And though it took a generation to consider the historical context of Star Wars, we now appreciate its response to a post-Vietnam-era world where culturally there was a lot of anxiety about good and evil and if either of those things were really real forces in the world. George Lucas gave us that world in a space opera steeped with mythological subtexts.

I will leave others to nitpick Bioshock Infinite’s technical excellence if they wish. I am neither a game designer nor a programmer, and I can’t really say if there were mistakes (as such) in its execution.

I will say this: I have played through perhaps 50 games per year since I was five or six. And probably turned on and PLAYED a hundred or so more in each of those years. So that’s like…um…carry the two…uh…a lot of games. I fought my first-grade friends with bouncy bullet tanks for a victory in Combat on my Atari. I got the Triforce and rescued Zelda back when that was an 8-bit quest—(and again at sixteen bits, and again at 32….) I’ve played every iteration of Final Fantasy (2019 edit: including that sausagefest road trip that was the most recent one). I have hunted the giant boatfly in the DLC of Fallout: New Vegas. I know the pain of the jumpy parts in Castlevania, and the triumph of beating the C&C General’s boss on the highest difficulty.

If gamer dudes look at me and say “Do you even game, bro?”, I have the honor of stoically nodding my head like the grizzled veteran I am.

My sense, as an experienced gamer, is that Bioshock Infinite was as close to flawless as I’ve seen a game. I have been watching acting in games since Malcolm McDowell blew us away as Admiral Talwyn and listening to non-midi soundtracks since I bought my first 3DO nearly 20 years ago now. I was there when the chill went up the collective spines of gamerdom as we realized that there was a choral accompaniment for the battle with Sephiroth. I was there when we had to plug our controller into the second player slot to beat Psycho Mantis. I was there when the mountain began to move and the fight with the first Colossus began. If there’s a game with a markedly better technical execution in terms of graphics, voice acting, or soundtrack, I’ve not seen it.

On to Part 3

BioShock Infinite as Art: Your Argument is Invalid (Part 1)

Note: this is an Ace of Geeks rescue and a multi-part piece that was fairly ....uh...indulgent of me. So for my reposting of it, I've got an eye on places I can trim it down from a six part article. Except for today (because the revision caught me off guard), I will be revising it and posting it piecemeal on the days that Writing About Writing usually takes off––should take me a little over a week to get it all posted.

Among many geeks, it is a source of some tenderness that video games are not typically recognized or generally considered a “legitimate” art form.

Of course, geeks themselves know this epic jackhole pomposity needs to be taken out behind the chemical shed; however, as with trying to get Science Fiction a seat at the big kids' table, it seems a bunch of arrogant blowhards haven’t gotten the fucking memo yet. Among prudish tweed-jacketed Humanities professors, there are those who deny that interactive media could ever be true art. They say it in the same tone of voice that their long-dead compeers used to say that TV wasn’t art; and before that they used to say Rock and Roll wasn’t art; and before that they used to say that movies weren’t art; some of them still insist that computer animation isn't art; and they still haven't quite grasped that overarching historical irony that everything that now fills the very Humanities halls they haunt was at one time passionately decried as not art.

Surely THIS time they are right to be elitist, gatekeepery, and exclusionary, though. Surely this time their prejudice is spot on.

Ancient humanities prof: "Ug think good if like bison,
but not high art worthy of consider."

Plus, seriously, I don’t really think too many have actually played video games since they were pumping quarters into Tempest and Q-bert. I really have my doubts.

Usually I don’t give two landbound shits or a flying fuck about the divide between what the great Eurocentric ivory tower dwellers think is "real art" and what they don’t. They serve a narrow aesthetic at best (too busy patting themselves on the back for their open-minded, post-colonial theses to notice how overwhelmingly white and middle-class their defense committee was). But some days they seem to be ever stuck in an endless cycle of praising the prior generation’s ingenuity as “the right way to do art," and doing modern artistic movements more harm than good.

If they want to lock themselves in their cloistered halls, turn their discussions into exclusionary circle jerks, pat themselves on the back for having it all figured out, appoint themselves the guardians of the bourgeois aesthetic, hate the art and artists of the current and younger generation (who—bafflingly*—end up going on being canonized in the next generation), and then scratch their heads that no one A) could have predicted such a Shyamalanian twist and B) seems to still give a shit what they say about art.....  If they want to do all that, normally, that’s their business.

*This is irony. It's not really baffling.

Today.....ugh. Today is a little different. You see, not so very long ago, I watched one of these snide academics tell a friend named Jessica that her MFA in game design—an MFA not officially offered by the university, but one she designed herself by cobbling together classes in computer art, 3-D art, graphic design, literary theory, film, and independent study—was little more than a piece of paper and that her lifelong pursuit to bring artistic merit to video games was futile, as they would never be respected as true art.

Fuck that tweed jacket in particular.

“These…video games,” he said (and yes, you have to give it that sneering little pause to get the timbre just right), “simply don’t have the ability to be real art. They’re fun. They’re entertaining. Some of them are very pretty. My son plays this one on the X-box that I swear is just like being there. But they’re not art. Understand that good art actually does have a definition.  It’s not completely subjective—the people that say things like that usually haven’t studied art, but I know you have, so you know what I'm saying is true. The composite of the elements has to support a directed vision.  There has to be a theme that is enhanced by the technical aspects of the art form itself.  Video games just don’t have that.  They are just….games.”

I'm paraphrasing. Dillhole was a lot less articulate. It took him like ten minutes to get this out and there was at least two minutes about Edvard Munch that made no sense. Towards the end, I was actively hoping paratrooping Cubans would take over the campus.

For me, all he did was prove he was a complete status-quo-loving tool, without an original thought in his institutional skull for what art even is. Like, I'm pretty sure if HIS boss had heard that speech, he would have instantly earned his sew-on elbow patches. It takes a particular kind of disingenuousness not to be aware of how closely developments in art have tracked with developments in technology. Even if you missed things like the proliferation of literacy and writing after the invention of the Gutenberg Press or the popularity of longer fiction tracking almost exactly with the technological cost of printing it (in those early days, novels were "not art," by the way), and even if you were unaware of how the 20th Century’s technological developments changed art with everything from amplified music, to film, to television, you would have to be straight-up fucking asleep not to notice that computers are changing every art they touch. From CGI, to computer animation, to auto-tuning, to the entire MDA movement in canvas art.

I'm not hoping Atari's Combat wins an Academy Award, but the very idea that video games couldn’t possibly be art is patently absurd.

Yet Dillholicus McDill got under my friend’s skin, and he made her wonder if she was wasting her life and an inheritance that could have gone towards a better car.

“Jess, these are the same guys who thought theater could never be high art—it was just mindless entertainment for the masses. It was ‘fun.’ And then in 1589 my boy, Billy, wrote a little ditty called The Two Gentlemen of Verona.  Maybe you’ve heard of it.  He made them all look pretty sillypants.”

“I know,” she said. "I just wish I could show them one game that is....unquestionable. That’s all it would take. If one game could be high art, they would have to admit that the potential is there for the whole medium.”

Thirteen months later, I played Bioshock Infinite.

I could drop any number of titles to show how video games are breaking the “high art” barrier. The idea that Shadow of the Colossus didn’t weave its elements into a single poignant thematic vision is laughable. I myself am doing literary analysis of Skyrim that I will absolutely finish this year. (Morgan Freeman Narrator's voice: "He wouldn't.") And we don’t even need the fancy computing power or übergraphics of today to cross this Rubicon; Myst was a game, now over 22 years old, whose breathtaking visuals at the time, mind numbing puzzles, and dark soundtrack created a powerful sense of foreboding mystery, which worked with the game’s dark themes of guilt vs. innocence, unclear villains, vengeance, and familial strife.

But Bioshock Infinite is a slam dunk. It's an....okay game. (My opinion will be somewhat hard to obfuscate in this article.) Some love it. Some hate it. Some are pretty meh. But perhaps more than any other game I could unpack (or at least just as much as any other as of this writing), it can end this argument. Every molecule of it tried for something higher, and whether you think it succeeded or not, I can make its case. (I can also write a 30 page paper on the powerful literary elements in The Bell Jar while wishing I had that six hours of my life back, so this isn't about my opinion.)

In this essay.....

Haha. See what I did there. Since that's a meme these days?  Okay but seriously in this essay, I can show by way of its criticism, its symbolism, its composite elements, its mechanics, and even its breathtaking failure at sociopolitical commentary, that every frame had the ambition to be more than “just a game.”  In the end, any sad remnants of fossilized sentiment that video games can’t be real art will be completely invalid, and Dillicus Maximus will go extinct like the dinosaur he is.

This one’s for you, Jessica.

This will be part one of what was originally a six-part series on Bioshock Infinite. (I'm kind of hoping I get it down to five in revision.) It’s not going to be your typical “What did the end REALLY mean?” article. There are enough of those as it is. Instead, I’m going to analyze the artistic elements—with a focus on the literary and writing side since that’s where I have experience and training.  However, this discussion will be impossible to have without giving away some spoilers so proceed with caution.

On to Part 2

Ten Flavors of Gamergate Fail

CN: this article unabashedly discusses misogyny and some of the words commonly used as sexist slurs. There are also some screen captures of some of the actual sexist and abusive things people have written and they are horrific.   

Note: This is one of my Ace of Geeks "rescue" articles that was topical at the time I wrote it. It's a little dated now, but looking back we can see that the pattern of "finding I'm-the-real-victim-here pretense to excuse bigotry" was precisely the small minded hatred it looked like all along, as many of the exact people who were Gamergate edgelords have now become literal fucking Nazis or white nationalists or members of misogynist hate groups––complete with all new rationalizations for why they still are the aggrieved party. Turns out Gamergate was the canary in the coal mine, and everyone saying it was just about being bigoted white men were exactly right. Gamergate turned out to be a pretty spectacular study in how "bigotry-adjacent issues" are seized upon to deflect opprobrium and come up with plausible deniability for intolerance. Patterns that continue today in the persecution complexes of white supremacists and open misogynists and those scripts by Status Quo Warriors (SQWids) who will twist themselves into BDSM knots to consider literally anything before the idea that a prejudiced human might simply be rationalizing their prejudice.

In the history of fail, there have been few examples quite as thorough as Gamergate. Whatever momentum they briefly held in their championing the ethical treatment of video game journalism has been fully eclipsed by an increasing awareness that they are behaving like toddlers with overfull diapers. Sexist toddlers. With potty mouths.

You may have noticed that they're kind of becoming a joke these days.

Let me help you notice.

You almost have to feel bad for the sincere. (I mean the genuinely sincere, not the ones who came along later and really just love to use the word c*nt.) Their struggle is like watching a two-year-old get more and more incensed at the adults laughing at their meltdown. The more red-faced they get, the more they scream and stamp their feet, and the more the adults giggle. "Awwwwwwwww. Who needs a nap and their baba?"

If they weren't literally terrorizing their detractors with utterly-not-cute death and rape threats and causing very real harm with their rampant misogyny and doxxing, they really wouldn't be much more than a footnote of one more sub-culture of manbabies losing their Boys Only clubhouse to actual equality (rather than just insisting that we're past all that while changing literally nothing). Unfortunately, despite the overwhelming urge to infantilize their shrill cries, these are men having their masculinity challenged, and the playbook of masculinity for being challenged is anything but trivial.

Nothing says "Feminists are don't matter to me" quite like threatening mass violence if they are allowed to speak.
Can you see why we actually PREFER the two-year-olds?
Source: Womenwornoutdaily

If you're the last geek in the universe unaware of what Gamergate is, Gawker put up a pretty good primer. Bustle has another. Personally, I like Vox's article the best because they tried very, very hard to cobble Gamergate's disjointed message into a cohesive, fair representation of the Gamergate side.

However, today we ask the questions, "Where did Gamergate go wrong? How has their ostensible cause been so thoroughly perceived by the world at large as wanton misogyny (and not even the clueless, invisible, institutional kind)? Why can't they define themselves? Why can't they convince anyone not to judge them by their most extreme members? Why are they fettered to this horrible image that has doomed their movement? Where did they drop the ball?"

"Where didn't they?" might actually be a better question. Because where Gamergate failed was everywhere. Everything they touched turned into pure fail. They had the Midas touch of fail. They failed so hard that Captain Edward Smith would look competent next to them. They created massive economies of fail. The check was in the fail. They're fighting tooth and fail. They were just completely beyond the fail. They've completely undermined themselves in two shakes of a lamb's fail.

Okay, that's entirely too much fun. I better get on with this article.

1) They tried plausible deniability. And failed. 

The familiar cry of "Not all Gamergates!" went up almost immediately when the death and rape threats rolled in. Several members have tried to suggest that most people in Gamergate simply care about ethics in video game journalism, and they shouldn't be held accountable for the unconscionable actions of a few bad apples. If this sounds to you like an exact parallel of "Not all men," it is because they have used that playbook almost exactly–and with the same clueless lack of understanding about how power dynamics work. (To say nothing of how opting out of being associated with a movement is easier than opting out of being male.)

On the bright side
it saved a lot of time in whipping up
the latest batch of memes.

Newsweek debunked the "few bad apples" idea. There are some flaws in Newsweek's methodology that make a strict numbers game pretty impossible (like that people engaging a hashtag will naturally receive more tweets in return), but the fact that harassment and misogyny is a central pillar of Gamergate "ethos" has been very clearly demonstrated time and again by multiple sources.  The Southern Poverty Law Center has even put the group on their hate watch.

Gamergate's fail here is particularly telling and extra failurific. They honestly don't understand what all the fuss is about. They doxx women who dare to speak out, drive them from their homes, drive them out of the industry, threaten to kill them, threaten to rape them, tweet the most misogynistic tripe imaginable, snidely deride anyone who speaks out about representation in games, openly discuss trolling, hacking, and harassment as legitimate ways to silence their critics through fear [the link here no longer works but it was all there], do it all in the name of their movement, and then honestly can't figure out why those of them who aren't acting like utter jackholes aren't being associated with a deep and abiding concern for ethics.

I can't imagine why they associate Gamergate with misogyny.
Source chainsawsuit.com

If you brave the comments of that Newsweek article (and I don't recommend it without some kitten memes on standby), you will find that people look at the statistics and don't actually think there's anything wrong. They literally can't see how far beyond the fail their behavior is. If they themselves aren't issuing death or rape threats, they do not understand how the world at large can blame them for the movement they're directly associating with.

Let me make this crystal clear: if your religion (to which you were born into by virtue of geography) had a billion people and .001% were extremists, it would be absolutely reasonable for you to be annoyed that you were being painted with the same brush. If you were in a group where maybe 1 person in a hundred were doing something repugnant, people would probably call you to task. But if SEVEN percent (that's about one out of every 14 people) of any movement...ever....were engaged in the worst sort of bigotry imaginable, that movement would be defined by nothing else. Period. Without exception. No matter WHAT they felt like their message ought to be about or wanted it to be about. It's not "just a few trolls," it's a significant portion of their movement. All compounded by the fact that you OPTED INTO that group. Gamergate, for reasons I can only assume have to do with their immunity to irony, only seems to understand this concept when it comes to pointing out how the anti-Gamergate crowd is hurting them in the feels with their meanie meanfaced meanness.

Their worst fail is acting innocent. With plate-sized anime eyes, they wonder why it's not possible to have a sensible discussion that isn't focused on those trivial ol' death threats that have nothing to do with them. They truly believe that they have no culpability in a culture of violence and hatred toward women. They honestly can't figure out that they may have provided the undertones (and overtones) that those who went "too far" have been steeped in for years.

I can't possibly imagine why people think we're violent!

The worst part is their ratio of legitimate concern to sexist troll is getting worse. Most of those who were actually serious about problems of ethics in games journalism cut ties with Gamergate as soon as it became clear what they really stood for. Many sincere critics placed as much distance between themselves and Gamergate as they could (of course a lot of said folks aren't a whole lot better–they're just better at hiding it). But whether really sincere or just good at hiding the deep down sexism they don't talk about at parties, folks who weren't naked misogynists realized immediately that the best thing they could do if they really cared about ethics in games journalism (or about bringing that issue to the table in the next ten years without being laughed off the stage) was to start over with a clean campaign and nuke Gamergate from orbit.

It was the only way to be sure.

2) They tried to convince us that they weren't sexist. And failed.

They kicked off the movement with fail, and never let it go.

It started with the fail of Eron Gjoni and what should have been laughed at as the pathetic backlash of a jilted lover. It was a personal story of a bad breakup that was nobody's fucking business, but he made it everyone's. If any woman had published the same about a man, she'd have been laughed off the internet and told to get a life. Yet, the gaming community seized on Gjoni's girlfriend, Zoe Quinn, focused on her, derided her, made the topic her sexual history, and even spread nude photos of her, and only later tried to work in a non-fail reason for their anger.

Their tweets and posts are filled with some of the most vile misogyny imaginable (in a culture that actually can imagine quite a damned LOT of vile misogyny). Women are routinely called "cunts, bitches, sluts, whores" and more just for expressing their opinions, and responses hoping that they get raped or killed are not at all unusual. There were open discussions about trying to get Zoe Quinn to commit suicide to which one of the most "measured" responses to the plan being that it would be "a bad PR move."

No sexism here! I said so. 

Want to know the icing on the cake? The reviewer Quinn allegedly slept with during her relationship with Gjoni DIDN'T. EVEN. REVIEW. Quinn's game.

Gamergate fail went on to target Anita Sarkeesian, Leigh Alexander, Brianna Wu, and even Felicia Day–all women; none journalists in gaming (the last of whom had the temerity to write a blog post about how she was afraid she would be targeted for saying anything at all). When I say "target," understand that I don't mean strongly worded tweets or counter-points with colorful language. I mean doxxing (in F.D.'s case less than an hour after she posted), rape threats, next level harassment, people coming to their house, and even death threats. In one case, Sarkeesian, a mass murder threat.

No one here but us ethically-concerned death threateners.

Gamergate's focus on women to the exclusion of both men and apparently their vaunted concern for ethics has been noticed by pretty much everyone, and their failtacular faux innocence that it's not about sexism has been debunked over and over.

Felicia Day wrote an article saying she was disappointed that she no longer felt comfortable around gamers because she was afraid of what Gamergaters might do to her. Chris Kluwe called Gamergaters "slope-browed weaseldicks," "slack-jawed pickletits," and "paint-huffing shit goblins." They attacked Felicia Day. You do the math.



[By the way, I was just a game lover with a dim (but low volume) view of Gamergate's sexism until those a-holes doxxed Felicia Day, one of the most genuinely nice and sincere people in the whole geek universe. That's what pissed me off, and when I decided to write this article. So this one's for you, Felicia!]

It's not that they don't care that men are disparaging their movement. (I'm sure this article will generate some lovely tweets.) It's that they care a lot more every time a woman does it.

3) They tried to find an ostensibly acceptable face. And failed.

Gamergate claims it is about ethics in video game journalism.  At least the few voices you can pick out of the fail seem to hammer this single talking point like the drum beat in a Muse song.

The problem is that they don't actually seem to care very much about ethics in video game journalism. Not enough to write about it or focus on it, anyway. What they do seem to care about, based on what they spend an inordinate amount of time writing and responding to, is how awful they find women (or to a lesser degree anyone who cares about representation or inclusion in video games). That is to say that what they actually discuss is an irreconcilable mess of conservatism and anti-feminist reactionism.

Even journalists with fully open minds, prepared to let Gamergate define itself can't find anything other than hatrerade, pretense chips, and failburgers at the Gamergate barbecue. Another could not find a cohesive list of Gamergater demands in 20 pages of searching–a testament to how poorly defined the movement really is.

You'd think by now most of them would realize that there are several examples* of unethical behavior by game journalists that they could list at a moment's notice (even one of their staunchest critics is capable of articulating it better than they can––because nothing says "Srs mvmnt!" like having your opponents do a better job of pointing out what you claim to care about), but really this is the pinnacle of their fail (the "Holy Fail," if you will). They haven't yet realized that incessantly repeating the tissue-paper thin rationalization like a doll with a string ("Actually, it's about ethics in video game journalism. My diaper is full now.") wasn't going to hold up in the hurricane of their own harassment and abuse. And then, of course, there were Men's Rights Activists, like Milo Yiannopoulos, who found Gamergate to be a good battleground for their latest round of attacks against feminism. These are the same MRAs that the SPLC has called a hate group and who helped create Eliot Roger and who want to dial back gender roles to the fifties in the name of "equality."

*For bonus points, however, watch the "it's-not-about-sexism" high ground crumble in the very first comment and get even worse from there.


It's almost....I mean it's ALMOST like ethics are not really what Gamergate is all about.


4) They tried to make it about ethics. And failed. 

One of the failiest bits of Gamerfailgate is their war cry of ethics. To listen to their incessant bloviation on the moral turpitude they are attempting to expunge, one would imagine they are paladins charging headlong into a den of corruption. And that's not too far off the mark for how they talk about themselves. (Seriously, maybe they play just a few too MANY video games?) They really do have a few complaints and gaming journalism has some shit to answer for.

The problem is that their behavior is completely. fucking. unethical. They rode the fail boat into the fail station of Fail City in the country of Failtopia. These people wouldn't know an ethic if it bit them in their ass. Most people would rather literally anyone else on Earth tell them about ethics than these unethical trolls.

If they were about ethics––even a little bit––things like abuse and harassment and especially casual discussion of rape, doxxing, and death threats would trouble them deeply. They would be twisting themselves into pretzels to police their own with thunder and fury and distancing themselves as dramatically as possible from anyone who hinted at that sort of behavior. They would be rallying around those figures who suffered attacks and offering sincere apologies to the victims instead of petulance, defensiveness, saying things like "Welcome to the party, pal," or insinuating that the targets of their harassment have enjoyed it, profited from it, brought it on themselves, or even engineered it.

5) They tried to keep partisan politics out of it. And failed.

While a few liberals have taken the time to voice that they are against social justice warriors (because fuck equality if it means you have to self reflect or listen to someone else's story, apparently) most of the Gamergate movement has taken such an incendiary stance on social justice and liberals that they immediately framed themselves as predominantly a partisan (bitterly so) conservative movement.

By placing themselves against the concerns of feminism specifically and social justice in general, and by hurling "liberal" around like a sneering barb, they immediately ensured that nothing they said would transcend a general left vs. right mentality in the way they hoped it might. In fact, anyone concerned about the ostensible issue is immediately aware that they are siding with a group predominantly composed of young, VERY conservative men who fear change and are openly hostile to liberals, feminists, women who disagree with them, or people who give a shit about social issues.

Do you have any idea how far to the right you have to be to still buy into the myth of a liberal media?

6) They tried to take on journalism. And failed.

One thing you can't do for very long (at least not with national attention on your movement) is make vague and nebulous claims about "journalism" and not expect...you know.... a journalist to eventually show up and check out your story. Understand, the media is not some monolithic single facing, lock-armed entity. Any individual journalist would have WET DREAMS about being the one to break a mainstream story of massive top-to-bottom fraud and corruption in any industry.

Except there was a little thing missing....called evidence. Gamergate is able to point to a few troubling timelines, a couple of websites doing reviews despite obvious conflicts of interest, some "journalists" who are clearly PR mouthpieces for new games releases, a few "old news" scandals like the Duke Nukem release promising blacklists for poor reviews, and a lot of accusations of collusion, but not much in the way of actual proof. As earlier links have demonstrated, Gamergate has largely depended on the rage of young men towards a vague, nebulous, and ill-defined problem for its legitimacy, often invoking convoluted conspiracy theories with no actual proof. As it became more and more mainstream (especially after Sarkeesian canceled a speaking engagement because of an e-mail promising the worst school shooting to date if she was allowed to speak), more journalists took note and checked out the claims. And journalists are exactly the sorts of people with the skill sets to investigate such claims.

Or in this case to DEBUNK such claims.


Have a few websites acted unethically, especially towards a few products?

You bet.

Do video game reviews (along with movie reviews, book reviews, television reviews, music reviews, and basically any entertainment industry reviews) have unreliable critiques of new high-budget products?

They absolutely do. (I think the last time I was fooled by such a review was in the pre-release of Eraser.)

Is it a massive conspiracy of corruption that is particular to games or that can't be circumvented by finding venues and/or reviewers one trusts?

No.

But riling up journalists with the claim that they're all unethical and have no integrity is never a capital idea.

Instead of trying to find evidence with which to frame the narrative, Gamergaters used the 20-year-old-tweeter's playbook of getting horribly nasty with anyone who said anything they didn't like. The resulting failstravaganza was predictable.

Hey boss? There are some news outlets outside that would like a word with us.

If you have truth on your side, some journalist somewhere will be very interested because journalism is competitive as all fuck and everyone wants to break a story. Not that the industry doesn't have its problem with truth and spin, but the problem is if you're just doubling down on unsubstantiated claims or holding up half a dozen minor infractions over a decade as your "proof" of a massive conspiracy, those same journalists have much wider reaching mediums through which to tell the world that you're completely full of shit and (barely) hiding your misogyny behind something that isn't really an issue.

With that, Gamergate failed at any chance they ever had to control the story of their own existence. Even Wikipedia's Gamergate entry is unambiguous that the movement's rationalization is a thin veneer of pretense over a hotbed of male entitlement experiencing a fairly minor challenge in its waning hegemony. Unless they literally film a game reviewer getting a blowjob and saying: "This will take you from a four to four and a half stars, easy! Five if you do the swirl," their fail is hung around their necks like a millstone.

Now the only place their conspiracies are taken seriously (largely by each other) is the back alleys of Twitter, Reddit, and 4chan. They have no venues to reach a broader audience because they've systematically burned every bridge around them. They have to doxx people or threaten school shootings to get any attention, which is exactly the wrong sort of attention.

7) They tried to dismiss their critics. And failed.

Gamergate is renowned for its reasoned and measured response to criticism that it...

Wait...hang on.

What I meant to say is that Gamergate is notorious for nasty and savage attacks and totally losing its shit on anyone with the slightest bit of criticism about their approach, overall philosophy, or specific claims. They get really mad if you aren't "getting the point" (their point), or are letting that pesky misogyny stuff distract you. And I mean they will read the title of your article (only) and start wishing for your death and dismemberment.

They fail at having a reasonable discourse. (Do you sense the THEME here? The MOTIF? The RECURRING IMAGERY?)

The problem is that almost every time they try to dismiss their critics' claims, what several of them actually do is end up reinforcing the criticism. They say that they're not sexist, and go on to say sexist things. They claim that they aren't misogynist, so those bitches need to get back into the kitchen and make them a sandwich. They claim that they aren't a movement defined by their opposition to feminism, but that they hate feminism and fucking feminists really need to stop trying to change the industry.

And this is from the best of the bunch! These are the "not trolls." This is their "reasonable" vanguard who are REALLY pissed off that people are judging them based on just a few fringe voices.

Every time they take to their keyboards to dismiss their critics with their patented brand of face-melting vitriol, they end up making matters worse.

If you don't want to be harassed, stop daring to complain about the male dominated market
Sheesh, why you gotta be so sexist about not seeing that?

8) They tried to claim they were the ones being mistreated. And failed.

The playbook of abuse, bullying, bigotry (and fascism incidentally) is all the same. No matter how shitty you're being, claim it's you who are being attacked.

Several members of Gamergate have tried to call out every passing disparagement as irrational, unfair, generalizing, sexist, racist or otherwise reverse-bigoted. They gleefully point to cases where they have been threatened or doxxed as evidence that anti-gamergates are just as bad. (Or actually, to their mind, even worse.) Often they work very hard to try and prove how unreasonable the other side is being to lump them all together, even constructing Glen Beckian flow charts and statistical analyses with lots of photoshopped red arrows "proving" how they are the real aggrieved party here.

Of course when they do this, it is usually ignoring the folks behind them calling everyone c*nts and b*tches, and threatening corrective rape or mass shootings, so it's a bit hard to take their moral high ground seriously (but that goes back to point #1). Instead of being seen as a legitimate call to have a clean discourse, it came across far more like they gave it out like terrorists and bullies only to fall over and cry like soccer players when they finally goaded their victims into an angry reaction that paled in comparison.

ETA: The absurdity of this tactic–piling on and harassing detractors with urbane reasonableness while ignoring violence going on in the name of your movement–has now been called "sea lioning" after this hilarious comic by Wondermark.

And if you think that sounds kind of like arguing with a teen-ager who has motivated reasoning but not quite the brain development for critical thinking skills yet, you're not the first person to make that connection.

I want to be clear that I do not support in any way the tools who are trying to give Gamergate a taste of its own; however, the problem with Gamergate's claims of reverse discrimination is a sad echo of most claims of reverse discrimination made by misogynists, racists, homophobes, cisgendered folk or basically those at the top of social hierarchies: not one critical person who looks at what is happening sees anything but spectacularly unequal abuses.

Even without getting into a conversation about how institutional power-backed slurs are always worse than powerless invectives (a complex point that usually takes a basic, open-minded understanding of social issues and a few minutes to an hour of good faith study to be parsed), there's just no way in which being called a "whining manbaby" is on par with death threats, or that calling out misogyny is as destructive a force as the misogyny itself.

The term "neckbeard" (though definitely body shaming) is not "just as bad" as "slut," "whore," or "cunt" no matter how offended men are to be insulted. (If they cared half as much for the harm they were causing though....)

Journalists, mainstream gamers, people who've finally noticed Gamergate due to its mainstream attention, even the SPLC, all took one look at the power dynamics and realized that Gamergate was abusive, hateful, destructive, misogynistic, bigoted, and even violent with its speech, and giving far far far more than they were getting.

Their claims that they are the victims are pathetic and laughable, and not a little bit ironic since they bloviate at incessant lengths about how playing the victim card is so contemptible.

9) They tried to tokenize outside of their overwhelming demographic. And failed.

I am very much in favor of marginalized people being given space and voice. And #notyourshield began as an important vocal movement against the opponents of Gamergate standing up against misogyny and racism in their names. Unfortunately, like everything else in the Gamergate failstraveganza, its launch had several key epicfails before even clearing the troposphere.

A) Listening to marginalized voices is important, but you can't only listen to the ones who agree with what you say. That's called "tokenizing" (or less formally "I have a black friend who thinks this is okay.") To really listen to marginalized voices in a way that matters, you have to listen to all of them–not just hold up the ones who are saying what you want to hear. Gamergate's problem was to champion those tiny few who seemed to agree with them (see below) and call the overwhelming majority on the other side "over-sensitive and easily offended."

B) The #notyourshield movement did highlight a few usually-marginalized voices, but what it has also done is draw attention by relief to how overwhelmingly male (and to a lesser degree white) Gamergate is. A movement thought to be "mostly" young (white) men was outed by this movement as actually being better characterized as OVERWHELMINGLY young (white) men. Like over 90%.

C) In their continuing campaign to be utterly immune to all forms of irony, Gamergate held up the #notyourshield movement in front of them as a means of deflecting the incoming criticism of misogyny and racism. Like....some sort of....attack parrying....device...type...thing.

D) Perhaps worst of all was that not all of these #notyourshield people were even real. Obviously some are (you can watch their Youtube videos), but a number were exposed to be sock-puppet accounts of pure fail. Nothing says "My argument is naught but a goulash of fail" quite like catfishing your own astroturf movement.

Because ethics?

10) They tried to accomplish something without real centralized leadership. And failed.

For one "that's-not-a-moon" moment, it looked like it wouldn't simply be possible to let the froth spew from their MANdibles, as they rant ceaselessly in their own insular worlds at the ass end of the internet while the adults got on with their lives. Gamergate's aggro campaign managed to knock some advertisers from high profile gaming sites.

And Gamergate took a victory lap.

However, between that and the Sarkeesian threat, a lot of eyeballs turned to the movement, and those same advertisers realized that while they want very badly to remain above this sort of drama, the total scorched Earth tactics that absolutely will end up involving boycotting products on the "wrong" side will make it impossible for them to ignore the dust up completely. They realize that capitulation to the terrorism tactics of Gamergate cannot, within the broader consumer public's mind, reasonably be anything but an endorsement of violent misogyny and unsubstantiated conspiracy theories and using death threats to silence dissent.

Even that victory for Gamergate was short lived. The tide has turned.

The problem with leaderless movements is exactly this. When a movement yokes the anger of thousands of young men without a single voice or focus, there are hundreds of responses (or more) to every perceived slight, criticism, or challenge. Some are reasonable, some on par with "Die c*nt," and some the equivalent of cyber terrorism. The reasonable will be lumped in with the cyber terrorists because they're all holding up the same banner. It is pure fail to not realize that's how decentralized movements work, have always worked, and will always work––some benefit in some ways from this structure (notably legal liability); most don't.

Gamergate can't define itself, so others define it. They can't normalize their reactions, so their extremists set their timbre. They can't agree on anything, so the impression they give is that they agree on nothing (other than, of course, the misogyny that defines them). They can't be coached on talking points so the only thing they manage to parrot for months on is a largely unsubstantiated claim.

Gamergate has collapsed under the weight of its own rudderless rage. No matter what it wants to be or wishes it were, it has become a poster boy for young angry white men frothing at the mouth that the women (who are in what was once their space) are now asking for representation and inclusion.


Here's who I do actually feel bad for. The gamers who may sincerely worry that there something is wrong within the world of the hobby they love dearly. Those who are actually interested in shoddy media practices, and not the corruption of the industry by scummy "liberals" and "SJWs".  (Seriously, do they know that SJW isn't actually an insult?) These sincere folks can't seem to be taken seriously since their broader movement has been utterly hijacked by abusive teen-age boys.

This why I almost (but not quite) feel bad for them. Misogyny so overt and revolting is an albatross that ensured failure from the beginning for a cause that could stand to have some attention. Those who are genuinely concerned..... they have likely never had to be a part of a movement where things like public relations were important, where it was vital to coach members on the talking points of how to respond to certain criticism, or where a leadership could issue statements condemning the words or actions of renegades or hold a press conference where they state their goals officially.

They don't get why they can't just stamp their foot and shout that they're not about misogyny and have that be the end of it. They don't get why they can't just dismiss criticism and never have to hear it again. They don't get why they can't just shrug at the death threats because it wasn't them personally, and get back to steering the conversation where they want it to go. Instead, they are literally befuddled as to why those pesky harassed women keep showing back up. The ability to declare what is important and what is trivial is a power they used to command...at least in the gaming world. Sea lioning is supposed to work (because it always has) and now they can't figure out where they dropped the ball, to say nothing of getting it back.

They've never been in a situation where they had to work hard to control the narrative because, until now (in this world where they were kings) the narrative has always been whatever they said it was.

For the rest of them, they have stacked fail upon fail, stuffed fail into the cracks, and covered the whole thing in a thick covering of failfrosting. They have failed even to understand why they failed, and instead just gotten angrier and angrier with a wider and wider audience that wouldn't fall for their failtastic, petulant bullshit. They failed to rally support, failed to not be hypocrites, failed to police their own movement, failed to even define their movement, failed to not be reprehensible humans dripping with the most disgusting misogyny imaginable, failed to rationalize their sexism with even the hint of propriety, and failed to even acknowledge that outside of their slimy internet cesspools, wishing people dead or raped, threatening to do so, or in fact, taking steps to make such things far more likely by revealing people's personal and private information is NOT ETHICAL BEHAVIOR .

You can't even pretend to care about ethics when that is the face of your movement.