First — as a side note, not really relevant itself to the blog post about A SHORT HIKE — I have some deep qualms with how Kagan critiques games. There is a distinct tendency in contemporary leftist discourse to revalue or devalue art in terms of its politics, aka., demonstrating whether that piece of art holds the correct “noncanonical” values of the professional-managerial class, aka. the symbolic capitalists. (Symbolic capitalists: the group of people who are the knowledge workers/current winners in this economy/benefit DISPROPORTIONATELY from “symbolic capital”: knowledge, skillsets, network.) The problem is that Kagan is mistaking the piece of art itself as a “holder” of those values, in sentences like this: “In another sense, we could say that Eastshade positively reclaims many of the same philosophies and ideologies that have been rightly recognized as toxic, racist, or discriminatory in contemporary discourse.” As John Guillory says, works of art do not “reclaim” ideologies. These ideologies are not simply imparted upon the player, transmitted easily as if indoctrinating them; these ideologies are a result of pedagogy (discourse around the art itself). It would be more accurate to say that Kagan, through her discourse, “imbues” the work with a particular political valence. It is always a mistake to think that art can somehow “enact” politics; politics enacts politics.
Kagan also says (I think disparagingly): “Successful indie game developers are definitionally a population of artists who have turned themselves into business professionals.” YES! What? What the heck? Obviously. Artists have never been exempt from the economy in any way; to think that artists should be “afloat,” separate, from business would be to fall into the same fantasy that Kagan is critiquing. Kagan does discover an interesting thread in it, the fantasy of late capitalist work, which I think is accurate. HOWEVER. That does not mean we should denigrate it for that. Her evidence leads to purely a descriptive claim: it cannot, and should not, lead to a normative one.
To pretend that art can somehow “resist” economy is a logical fallacy. Who are the consumers and producers of video games? Symbolic capitalists. Kagan is herself an academic: a product and reinforcer of economic inequality. Art NEED NOT be “subversive and critical”; in fact, by nature, it CANNOT be subversive. Unless you’re using your art and the products from it to fund legislation or providing services or something. Even then, if you want to do politics, just do politics.
By the way, I say this all as a leftist myself. Anyways.
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Let me give you an alternative, then, if I am unconvinced.
First, I will make a Kagen-inspired claim: that A Short Hike is an anti-capitalist game, in the sense that it foregrounds an exploratory, altruistic perspective towards the world by emphasizing story, relationships, and mutual-gift giving rather than completion or action. Then I will use the same evidence to make another claim that A Short Hike is deeply capitalist. Let’s see which one is more convincing.
Rather than a scarcity-based, competitive zero-sum economy, the economy of the game is gift-giving, mutually-oriented, relationship-based. You find resources by exploring the map and talking to NPCs. By resources, I mean coins, but also clams, feathers, etc. These resources then facilitate interactions with other NPCs that center giving: when you help others by gaining resources. For example, the guy on Hawk Peak scalps you for golden feathers (as a means of progression). Instead of paying 40 at the tourist center, you must pay 100. However, he does so because (as you find out) he is subject to the constraints of a larger economy: student loans. He is “scalping” you, but you’re helping him by allowing him to scalp you.
Another example of the games’ subversion is the clams guy: in the very beginning of the game, he sends you off on a task (as how NPCs normally do) to collect 15 clams. Once you do so, he gives you another task — give a clam necklace to Aunt May. When you give the clam necklace, you are selfless, and omit the fact that it was you who went through the effort to pick up all those clams. Then, Aunt May coincidentally gives you a golden feather. You are rewarded for these tasks, but not explicitly: instead, your action is an altruistic one. You have no explicit incentive to complete the tasks (give me this, then I will give you this); rather, you almost seem to be helping others purely of your own accord. These relationships are not purely transactional as one might expect in a more action-based game, where you merely buy in order to upgrade your character, fight, etc. Instead, “upgrading” your character is also good for the other birds in this world.
Moreover, completing these tasks is not necessary for the “completion” of the game. You can climb the peak with few feathers if you wanted to, as a “speedrun,” but the game is more rewarding and satisfying if you take your time. The real incentive of the game is not actually the feathers (the resources); it’s the relationships you foster/build throughout the way. These are the “side-quests” of real life that we would want, the random interactions we hope to have with strangers, altruistic and fulfilling.
Now I think this is where Kagen would go a step further and claim that because of this, the game subverts the capitalist drive for completion, encouraging us to take our time in life to discover these random interactions, and explore our world like the world of A Short Hike. Thereby making the game anti-capitalist. Subversive. It’s not a white male cis game, whatever that means.
This I think is a sociological error. The reality is that playing A Short Hike, an altruistic game, changing our hearts and minds, does not translate to real-world altruism. The more time that we spend playing video games, the less time we are actually in the outside world, actually doing the side quests that A Short Hike is a fantasy of. Playing A Short Hike does not make us nicer to the grocery clerks, the cleaning ladies, the “NPCs” who actually staff our world. We are not any less likely to want to be scalped for the sake of someone else’s student loans. In other words, the game is not really enacting politics in a real way: instead, it’s a fantasy for a world free from the constraints of capitalism, whose ghost lingers at the edges of the game, an escapist fantasy from our terrible drudgery work-filled lives. It’s a world in which there are no hard choices: everything that you do helps someone else. Unfortunately for us, even just buying food at the grocery store means we’re destroying the world in some way. In practice, A Short Hike functions as TV for the neurotic white-collar worker: it soothes us enough to live in a world where we can play video games and suffer under capitalism.
The thing is, I don’t think that’s a reason to hate the game, though. Games need not be political; they need not try to overthrow the order and usher in the revolution. They just can’t do that. I will go on playing A Short Hike because it’s well-designed, mechanically satisfying, and the stories are cute and wonderful. That’s great. But it’s not, and will never be, truly subversive.
