11/14/2023 0 Comments Austin walker forspoken![]() ![]() Any time a writer says “this game and games like this should be banned,” or “laws should be put into place to make it illegal to use these slurs in the workplace,” or “employing overseas workers should require the company to pay an additional tax,“ that's a what I'm calling prohibitive legislation. Whether it’s because of concern over content, an interest in addressing labor conditions or market concerns, or a desire to address de facto censorship or discrimination, media critics have definitely spent some time arguing for the need of government involvement in the entertainment industries. That is, a call to make something a creator does illegal or less-legal. Still way over on the “force” side of the spectrum, a critic could call for a sort of “prohibitive” legislation. What does “in between” look like? Well, there's a range. You call my charts "amateurish." Well, I call them "artisanal." But most critique exists in between those two extremes. On the other end of the spectrum is critical work demanding that devs actually be “forced” to do things. On one end of the spectrum is absolute disconnect from influence: A writer pens long form essays about how developers should always do whatever they want. So, what if instead of thinking about all of this in terms of a binary relationship (either a critic forces someone to do something or they don’t), we thought about this on a spectrum. I’m also writing it for a more strategic, selfish reason: Because it’ll give me something to point at every time someone accuses me of “trying to force a developer” to do something. ![]() This applies to the sort of work many people like me do in the sphere of games criticism, whether we’re writing about issues of representation or level design, about 200 hour RPGs or two hour #AltGame experiments. The knee jerk response also misses an opportunity to engage with that specific issue: What does it mean when a writer criticizes a work?Īnd I’m writing this here, as an article, instead of in another blog post because this isn’t just about a single game like The Witcher 3, nor is it about just a single issue, like race. It hitches itself to a binary of “forced” vs “free” while in reality things are a lot more complex than that. I’m not forcing anyone to do anything!” But I know that this sort of response doesn’t get us anywhere. When I see this, something bubbles up in me that wants to immediately shout back a response: “Come. ![]() There are variations on it that use words other than “force,” but they almost always remain words adjacent to coercion: “Make,” “demand,” “order,” “dictate.” It goes like this: “No one should be forced into changing their games just because you want them to.” I’ve seen this in the comments, in my Tumblr’s ask box, on Twitter, and in the few threads on Reddit and NeoGAF. As I said in the second post, that’s really exciting to me! I love seeing people develop and clarify their thoughts–even when those thoughts aren’t ones I necessarily agree with.īut there is one line of thought that I’ve seen a lot of over the last few days which isn’t a refined argument so much as a big, club-like assault. Thankfully, while there were some outliers (and there always are), most of the debate in the comment sections of my blog posts was civil and engaged. These posts were written as sort of short, off the cuff contributions to an ongoing conversation that Tauriq Moosa really kicked off with a piece titled " Colorblind: On Witcher 3, Rust, and gaming's race problem," which netted him a lot of heat–both positive and negative. What you may or may not have seen is that over the weekend, I wrote a couple of blog posts in the community section of the site: First, one about The Witcher, Race, and Historicity, and second, a post expanding on some of the ideas in the first while simultaneously responding to some of the comments and discussions from the community. We've met in video form, I've spoken to you on a couple of episodes of the Beastcast, and maybe you've read some of my news posts over the last week. In this scenario, you're Geralt with the torch, and this piece is the foggy woods. ![]()
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |