These chapters (mainly responding to the first chapter since the second was more instructional than thought-provoking) comprised a good read and the author, Anna Anthropy, makes some good points, especially those regarding the importance of representation. As a person of color, it feels good seeing people who look like me in movies and video games playing lead roles rather than being relegated to support characters and sidelines. However, I find it hard to agree with many of the author’s other takes. I think the climate of video games may have shifted in the past ten years since the time of writing, but even so, I feel that some of her criticisms are somewhat contrived.
The first and foremost critique made in this chapter is that the video game industry is a selfish, self-sustaining, and self-serving group. The author argues that video game distribution should be more accessible to makers, and provides the analogy of YouTube, which made video sharing widely accessible. I can’t disagree with the claim that gamers are an insular group, but I feel that the comparison to YouTube is invalid because it is impossible to build a functional game as quickly as one can take a video. Even with the most user-friendly programs like Scratch, it takes time to make even the most basic web applications. Thus, a platform to rapidly share games wouldn’t help much in my opinion. Additionally, anyone can upload their finished game to Steam. I’m not sure if this was the case back in 2012, but it is possible for PC today, so I’m not sure the argument still stands, or perhaps the author would view this as a step in the right direction?
One argument I took extreme issue with was the complaint that controllers are getting more complicated and thus are gatekeeping video games. While empirically the number of buttons on the Xbox controller is going up, this again does not take PC gaming into account, where the overwhelming majority of games are played with the mouse and keyboard. Additionally, some of the top gaming platform developers have created various accessibility interfaces and controllers for users with mobility needs, so that anyone who wants to play can. The author continued this thought with the complaint that a PlayStation game had over 70 hours of gameplay, because “who has that much time to invest in playing a videogame?” I became viscerally upset reading this in 2023, when most AAA-game storylines end with a seasonal paywall after the first few hours (though that’s a different problem). The argument that because a video game is long, it is inherently inaccessible to those without the time to complete it quickly is frankly ridiculous. If you can’t play that much, that just means you can enjoy the game for longer! Maybe it takes you a year to beat it instead of a month. To me, that doesn’t eliminate you from the game’s potential audience.
I would like to pause here and state that, while I’m an avid gamer and game developer, I can’t condone the behavior and language expressed often in the gaming community. The author mentioned in the chapter some vitriol posted by a writer for Destructoid, a popular video game media outlet. The rampant sexism, racism, homophobia, other -isms and -ias and general bigotry exhibited by some gamers is despicable and sad, as well as embarrassing to the point that I definitely wouldn’t say out loud that I’m a “gamer.” I’d say “oh I play some video games but I wouldn’t call myself a gamer,” because of the negative connotations the community has conjured. This is an issue that I think lies rooted in general American society – if you give enough teenage boys a platform where they can anonymously interact, sometimes cooperatively and often violently, with one another, this kind of behavior eventually rears its ugly head. Soapbox tangent: note that here, I am not arguing that this behavior is inherent in teenage boys like I’m not saying “haha boys will be boys!” because boys don’t have to be racist boys. I’m saying in light of Western society’s systemic -isms and behind-closed-door allowance of casual discrimination, gamers acting this way is not surprising when their only accountability is a 30 minute ban of their gamertag.
Returning to the main points of the chapter, I wonder what the author’s opinions on modding would be? Many triple-A titles have so many fans that they attract modders: tech-savvy fans who use dark coding(?) magic to make the game change in appearance and/or rules. Many games have found new life through their mod communities, and people share them on internet forums. Perhaps mods are a feasible middle ground; though again the technical barrier to creation is high (I think? I really don’t know much about making mods), their shareability approaches what I imagine the author envisioned for games themselves.
