He Danced Really Wunderbar

On November 18th, 2011, a peaceful protest was held in UC Davis. A branch of “Occupy Wallstreet”, Occupy UC Davis was intended to protest police violence on UC campuses. The police responded by hearing their concerns, agreeing and then pepper-sprayed the protesters. That’s right, they attacked students that were protesting the fact that they attack people. source

If you’re thinking “Oh man, someone got some compensation for this, right!?” Yup. Someone did. The cop. 

The stress of being the poor victim netted him a $38,000 in worker’s comp. 

That’s more than a lot of people make in a full year. source

UC Davis “Investigated” this. And the guy who conducted the investigation was a Police Chief William J. Bratton - Chairman of the private business that provides UC Davis’s security. SOMEHOW there wasn’t enough evidence to charge the officers involved in this incident. source

It just came out that UC Davis has paid $175,000+ to a private “Image Management firm”, who is putting all of that sweet, sweet dollar into manipulating Google’s search engines, as well as other networks, to make it a lot LOT harder to find reminders that this happened. Read that what-proper: 

They’re spending almost $200,000 of school funds to escape being remembered for this awful incident.

source

I mean, for one, teenagers often express themselves in a fairly dickish, ignorant way, because, duh, they’re teenagers, they’re still learning how to handle expressing themselves, and they often screw up and do something cringey, or blame the wrong people (like thinking that not liking femininity makes you better than other women). We all did it as teens, and ideally we learned how to handle things better and with more empathy as we got older and more experienced.

The other reason it isn’t surprising is that for many girls, especially tomboys/gnc girls, puberty and your teen years are when many of the adults around you drop their grudging tolerance of your “unladylike” personality and appearance, and really start slamming you with pressure to Grow Up And Be A Lady™ by wearing makeup, heels, more feminine clothing, dropping your old activities and hobbies for more acceptable feminine hobbies, behaving in a more “ladylike” way, being pretty and charming for the boys so you don’t die alone, etc. It’s totally justified to feel angry at the fact that your personality is getting trampled, and it’s not surprising that many girls would start to resent everything related to this kind of pressure, and associate it with just groveling and faking to appease someone else.

With the controversy about a gaming journo making Cuphead video showing him less intelligent than a pigeon, it’s reasonable to wonder why other gaming journos write defending him think-pieces, circling their wagons around something so absurd.

For the sake of discussion, let’s assume they aren’t throwing a brainlessly childish fit over anything that remotely can make them look even slightly bad. A pretty big assumption, I know, but let’s go with it.

I’ll play the devil advocate and say that being a reviewer of video games is harder than being a reviewer of books, music or movies. With the others, you need to only know how to write, and to know the theory behind the rules of your medium of choice. With video games, you also need an ability to actively play the game, in order of properly evaluating its game mechanics. You don’t need this much of active effort to finish a book, a movie, or a song, but you need it for a video game.

That being said, video games reviewers are rather on the bottom of the totem pole of pop culture reviewers, having only comic books reviewers beneath them. And even this is debatable. In short, the most requiring medium to criticize is the most unrewarding for the critic himself. Which is why so many gaming journalists are rejects from other pop culture journalists, and write about the supposed inferiority of video games in comparison to other mediums. 

In order to gain a real-life notability (outside of gaming circles) as a video game critic, you have to hate video games, and with your rhetoric pander to the politics of your target audience. If you target religious right-wingers, you say games are satanistic. If you target family values right-wingers, you say the games are too sexy and violent. If you target leftists, you say video games are not diverse, are sexist and promote meritocracy.

In other words, the most recognizable to the public video game critics don’t write a shit about game mechanics, thus have no need for a proper set of skills to evaluate them. The general public doesn’t give a shit about game mechanics and the games critic’s ability to judge them.

But, paradoxically, those who care, the gamers, are the most guaranteed to read whatever the video games critic will write. And if the video games critic does not provide clicks for their big corporation sponsored outlet, they will become a reject from pop culture reviewers rejects, and then replaced with another reject.

Which is why there is a push towards non-requiring so much skill games, like walking simulators, and general contempt towards skill-based games, like FPSes. Which is why they give importance to games being “status quo changers” and often forgive or outright omit everything that makes such games objectively a flawed product (example: Sunset ignoring you going against the task of staying in the apartment and continuing as if you’ve stayed in it, even if you had left). Which is why there is such push towards politics being the most important aspect of a game. Because such gaming journalists don’t want their audience to care about things that require unrewarding effort to properly criticize. Gamers aren’t their audience, and they want to change their audience. And the medium they write about, but have to write about. Because they are, and always will be, rejects from the other mediums.

This is where the defense ends. Not being able to tell in a platformer to that if you can’t jump high enough, you need to use another platform to elevate your position, isn’t a matter of skill. It is a matter of very basic competence in the video game genre you write about. Perhaps Dean Takahashi is a point&click adventure guy, which I wouldn’t hold against him. But I sincerely doubt this from his display of a beneath-pigeon problem solving ability. And the pigeon didn’t have instructions written all over the place.

This controversy has nothing to do with skill, unless you count as a “skill requiring action” succeeding at the test of not being mentally challenged. And while I don’t demand from game reviewers to speed-run games, while I understand they might not be paid enough to complete the hardest games by the deadline, the disfunctionality displayed in this video is simply incomprehensible. This isn’t a footage of a highly difficult game, it is a tutorial demonstrating the most basic problem in the genre. It is objectively false to call it otherwise.

But the gaming media call it otherwise, and I’ve already covered their motives. They hate we have towards them an expectation of unrewarding competence, even if it is about competence in not looking like an idiot. This is the level of bullshit they want us to accept, in order to ensure their paychecks. And even if they aren’t paid much for their job, this nonsense does not deserve any sort of payment.

I reject such video games journalism, which we could as well replace with publishing submitted press release PHP scripts. It does no service to the medium, and only drags is down with its ineptitude.

But when it came time to do the movies, the director didn’t pick up on the satire, and so did his own satire of the novels, not knowing that they were also a satire. The result is a satire matryoshka.