I was tempted to title this "Woke Video Games"
I can't bring myself to do it earnestly but am willing to settle for being tongue-in-cheek about it.
Zeitgust starts with a few suppositions, one of which I immediately realized I needed to quarantine off into its own post lest it consume that one:
Has the sort of gentrification that Scott seems to think occurs for most aesthetic pursuits occurred in video games?
If yes, what does it look like else what might it look like?
As somewhat of an aside to this, I’m going to think out loud about whether social justice/progressivism/”woke” is fitting that bill and why I think it only kind of does (though mostly doesn’t) and has successfully failed.
So here goes.
Were games ruined by “woke”? The short answer is yes, kind of yes, and no. Social justice tried to invade video games, succeeded completely unchecked for quite a while1, but then suffered a single incredible, protracted near-proximity setback (chances are you’ve at least heard of it) and has been floundering along with its influence on the broader culture ever since. The picture won’t be complete without touching on that setback2.
Now, to start: when I suggest that social justice ideology is a culturally gentrifying force, the parallel I’m trying to draw here is between 20th century Le Corbusier-style high modernism and the late-2000s/mid-2010s era culturally proscribed radical social justice progressivism that can be packaged as “woke”. I really really really hate using that word to describe social justice ideology because it bothers me how “woke” has become a lightning rod for lazily nonspecific reactionism, but it is unfortunately effective at encapsulating an otherwise-difficult-to-concisely-package set of sociocultural tropes. I worry that it lets social justice and critical theory off the hook by allowing everyone to forget how we got here but I’m also clearly fighting an uphill rhetorical battle against a broadly successful specific meme.
Since this is my shitpost we’re going to locally coin a different, less embarrassing epithet to package this idea: critical theology3.
However, I’m writing this at the same time that I’m working on a draft piece with notes and thoughts on the Uruk Series, and one of the key points there is that often the empirically-established culture that came before (in shorthand, the metis) lacks the ability to properly register complaints to the incumbent authority in the language of the authority—in the language of the episteme that is often trying to do something to replace or subvert it—and I think mass adoption of “woke” is a reflection of that. It’s not strictly that the anti-woke aren’t sophisticated enough to have a more refined encapsulation of the concept, so much as they’re forced to fight a rhetorical battle on foreign soil and are forced to use the most available improvised weapon. It’s not difficult to understand that the conservative-leaning metis culture is caught flatfooted and late to the identity politics game, not just in terms of raw sociocultural positioning but in how to engage in a reasonable rhetorical rebuttal to your enemies just calling you racist without actual cause4.
Alright5, so, GamerGate. I still think one of the best, even-handed recountings of GamerGate is this article by Cathy Young6. I was there7 and so can give it a solid thumbs up inasmuch as it’s a pretty fair and accurate telling of the story.
I think GG deserves credit for being the first social movement that successfully pushed back against critical theology. But I also don’t think it’s necessarily that outrageous to connect the dominos between GG and Trump.
Cathy Young’s article definitely kind of glosses over the involvement of Milo Yiannopoulos and Breitbart8, though on the other hand merely mentioning them sort of overstates their actual involvement with GG directly. Milo was partly responsible—and frankly does deserve faint praise—for the GameJournoPros leak9, which was honestly one of the wildest things from GG that never really got the attention it deserved. But that was basically it, Milo was among the first in a very long conga line of people from all over the ideological spectrum who very very desperately tried to parlay GG into permanent influencer status and then threw tantrums when they didn’t get the attention they felt entitled to. I’d love to name names because I think this was the stupidest thing about GG overall but that would be a senselessly long diversion to the point I’m trying to make here10.
At the time and for quite a while after I would have insisted that GG did not spawn the alt-right. Nowadays, I’m slightly less sure. It’s at least fair to say they showed up and were also trying to use GG for their agenda, and they succeeded inasmuch as GG succeeded, but I very much would not lay the success of GG at the feet of the alt-right. It’s worth reiterating that most of GG was a mix of bleeding-heart and classical liberals who were merely not critical theology adherents.
If anything, the blame for pushing most people rightwards—and this applies to more than just GG—lies mostly on the spectacular failure of social justice to live up to its advertised virtues. It turns out when you lie about causes and exaggerate harms you will tend to push people away when they discover this, regardless of how pure your intentions are11. My own arc was a microcosm of this; GG began in the fall of 2014, but I’d discovered men’s rights activism sometime in 2012. I went through a period of noticing that feminism was very bold about telling convenient lies, being bewildered by how successful of a conspiracy it was, then went through a short period entertaining various competing political philosophies before deciding they were all varying degrees of just-as-stupid. But I saw quite a lot of this among people who were pro-GG, many people were ideologically orphaned but not memetically well-equipped to do the sorting-through-competing-philosophies run safely.
You could go in circles for quite a while arguing over who “won” GG, but it basically got most of what it wanted—games journalism was heavily discredited and slightly cleaned up, social theology’s influence on gaming culture is diminished and it’s now largely on the back foot in the broader culture. However, GG’s opponents more or less successfully poisoned the public record on what took place and I mean look, notice how I’m so passively embarrassed by it that I pretty much immediately stopped using the full word?
So, has critical theology ruined video games? In my opinion, no, for the same reason they haven’t truly ruined most other entertainment media: the good stuff still exists stretching pretty far into the past and they’ve never had the clout in the west to successfully destroy the old works. I’ve made this case elsewhere: the problem was never that all new works would be ruined, rather that the personal risk to make new media outside of the ideology would be raised high enough that the output would drop very sharply—art as subversion was never in danger of not existing. My interests in GG were never about swinging the cultural pendulum back, but in stunting anyone’s ability to use the cultural pendulum’s momentum as a social cudgel going in either direction. I still remember the socioreligious panic around games and other nerd media in the 80s and 90s.
Is critical theology ruining video games? That’s a more interesting question. Also no, partly because the broader culture has turned against them (ie they more or less lost GG) and partly because there are so many games getting made on multiple platforms that are free enough (and games journalism as an enforcement mechanism has been weakened enough) that it’s more difficult to enforce a pre-GG style social embargo. They would need more hard power than they’re currently likely to get to crush cultural output at this time.
Were some games ruined by critical theology? Almost certainly, though some of this is going to come down to taste. Some people made bad creative decisions because they were part of the cult, some made bad creative decisions to avoid making the cult mad, and some made bad decisions because they wanted to make the cult mad. Some of these are all ongoing, none of these are strictly exclusive to critical theology.
Have games been gentrified in some manner like architecture and post-modern art? Yes and no depending on where we look. Clearly critical theology has done damage to the large companies that make games in the same ways they’ve done damage to the western economy through HR generally. However, I don’t think so broadly, and I think we can infer that the reason here is because games don’t require social approval to distribute to the same degree that you would need the right social clout to make your career in architecture and other arts. I think there’s a danger that it could have been and there’s always danger that today’s open platforms become avenues for censorship in the future12, but the biggest danger in the short term has passed and the future looks pretty bright currently.
There are some specific areas that are still heavily colonized, where rooting it out is going to require new institutions that haven’t yet been built to compete them out. For example, there’s still a lot of Japanese translations being done by bad actors interested in polluting original work with their own obnoxious political opinions, but I have some faith that this will come in time.
Part of my motivation for writing this is that I think there’s a lot of room for disagreement and discussion here. I’m open to being convinced otherwise, but 2024 was a great year for games and 2025 is looking quite bright as well. Critical theology institutions are failing and the goofy new right hordes aren’t yet trying to pose any significant threat to the ongoing ascendancy of games13. We’re gonna be eatin good for the foreseeable future.
Well, again, kind of. Games weren’t uniquely hypercolonized by social justice it’s just that this is true inasmuch as it was true for everything for a time.
GamerGate. I’m talking about #GamerGate. I feel I don’t actually want to talk about GamerGate and probably shouldn’t, but it’s Time and I was there at ground zero so we’re doing it, god help us.
My first candidate was “soju” which I thought was a more-clever-than-”socjus” portmanteau of “social justice” and would be a great stand in to give an impression of pretentiousness, until I realized it inconveniently was uncomfortably close to “so Jew”, which would only distract people who are probably already having trouble paying attention.
For example, the “black friend” meme is not only extremely legitimate, but if you were the kind of person who actually cared about dampening societal racism you’d want this to be everyone’s situation. Daryl Davis famously deconverted hundreds of Ku Klux Klan members simply by befriending them—and this isn’t even an example that the left feverishly attempts to downplay or hide, note the NPR link.
If you’re not attuned to academic social theology you might not be equipped to notice the mix of kafkatrapping and moving of the goalposts that is occurring here by insisting you can like any number of black people and yet still ruthlessly hate capital B capital P all Black People.
This is sort of beside this specific point but you’ll also maybe fail to notice this is being used to drive wedges between underclass subsets by people who nominally claim to be pro-underclass but are actually engaging in behavior intended to preserve the upper classes. This need not be a conspiracy; the people trying to cancel others are selfishly and desperately plundering their own identity to enrich their own status at the cost of the diaspora they pretend to support.
I ended up cutting a long section here that didn’t quite fit the flow so I’m going to instead dump it into the footnotes and let you know this part is entirely optional reading:
Now, we need to do a runback on high modernism for most of the rest of this post to make any sense. I’m not going to do a full commentary on Seeing Like a State (yet), though I will point to Scott Alexander and Lou Keep's respective commentaries (the latter of which points to several other good posts on it if you want to go the extra mile). I don’t even want to make grand claims about what James Scott was trying to say by metis and episteme since I’ve seen a few people accuse rationalists of getting it totally wrong. (There’s an insane amount of irony in using that word here, but anyways I don’t want to get bogged down in playing word games around it again. IYKYK, else whatever, at this point.)
But anyways, afaik there’s little actual controversy around the history it tells. Centralized governments in many times and places thought they could harmlessly replace the parts of their society they didn’t like, the people inconveniently occupying the parts of society that were being replaced frequently discovered it was not actually harmless, and then those responsible were basically not held accountable for it and in most cases were rewarded because the true prize was some mix of legibility and social control.
Lou Keep’s made-up-example of urban complexity does a great job illustrating the problem (warning: long!):
The urban center of an old city is a hopelessly chaotic slum. The denizens can navigate it without trouble, but without proper street names (or even streets) it’s much harder for the state to get a proper reading. Now, the government was elected on the promise of better healthcare for all, and they’ve partially delivered. There are more hospitals, and they’ve increased the number of ambulances. But people in the densely packed center still aren’t getting proper aid. Ambulances keep getting lost, or they’re losing critical minutes because of the labyrinthine old streets, or unmarked buildings and houses make it impossibly difficult to determine who is actually in need and which apartment they’re in.
The citizens themselves don’t understand this – they grew up in there, so it’s obvious who’s where. They try and explain this to the city, but it’s based in highly specific information and historical details that don’t make sense to outsiders (go left at Greg’s place, right at the spot of the Best Marble Game of All Time, straight through to what-used-to-be-the-old-pool-hall-but-isn’t-now, etc.). But the ambulance dispatch and the state use a different model: they view things from the perspective of a map, which is only reasonable given that they have a much wider area to concern themselves with. They need some ordering mechanism that will mesh with those of other districts.
At first, the state just puts random names on the streets. This helps some, but the residents still colloquially go by the old terms they know, which causes problems for dispatch. Moreover, most of those alleys are still too narrow for ambulances to get through. The state decides on a more radical project: it’s going to plow through what it can and build new, ordered streets based on a grid. While they’re at it, they decide to make one commercial district and one residential district – it’s just a better system.
Now you have a pretty resentful populace. “But why?” The local economy has been disrupted, for one, even if no one else sees it. Turns out that a lot of the interweaving between commercial and residential was actually necessary for those local businesses – not to mention the young people who hung around getting paid to help move a thing here or there when the shipment arrives. But that’s a State’s reason. More pressing to the residents is the loss of their local knowledge, what we might call “folk monuments” that create senses of identity. Most pressing is their loss of power.
This last one is important in two ways. The first is both obvious and not. A large part of our powers lie in our familiarity with surroundings. When those have changed, we lose a lot of the familiarity that brings us that. Here’s an example: an old man has occupied an apartment for his whole life, and he’s maintained his self-sufficiency due to familiarity. He’s always been able to hobble to the store (right down the way) without aid, and when he does need it the same neighbors are always there. But the new plan places a commercial zone some ways away from the residential, and the new neighbors aren’t familiar to him. Moreover, the old store would always stock [thing] because it knew the old man and expected his business. But the new one has to deal with everyone, so it diversifies in a way that can’t suit his needs. The old man has suddenly become dependent on someone else (in this case, probably the state itself). Weird, small effects like that happen all over. “Small” is the key word, because they do look meaningless in the grand scale.
The second only reveals itself when things get really bad, so let’s work up to it.
To fund the ambulances you have to tax. That’s always been a problem in the slums (who lives where? how do you tax?) but suddenly you find that it’s much easier to get quantification. It’s a small amount, but people unused to paying taxes are suddenly hit with it. Not to mention, many of them are poorer in total because the local economy was interrupted. At the same time the district looks wealthier on average, because the few who successfully transitioned to the commercial zone now have a larger (alien) clientele. They employ less from the neighborhood, and the money is shared less often (the old man no longer has anyone to tip a dollar for helping up the stairs), but from the outside everything looks better. Either way, the citizens get angry, and they still aren’t seeing the benefits, and all of their local knowledge has been messed with, so they riot.
We all know the cliched MLK quote: “A riot is the language of the unheard.” I think this is true, but a better way to phrase it in Scott’s terms would be: “A riot is the language of the unintelligible.” The citizens may be rioting over taxes, but it’s not really that, and if they could even explain “why” they were rioting, it wouldn’t make sense to outsiders. “They tore down the old-pool-hall!” is actually a better summation of it than “taxes”, but that just seems… well, weird and petty. After all, to understand why that’s important, you need to have an intimate knowledge of the history and economy of the society that no one outside it has. Even that old man’s complaints look odd. He lost autonomy, but he’ll probably live longer because of the ambulances. A statistician might be able to look at all the confounders and draw out these explicit economic effects to determine what side they fall on, but even that wouldn’t really get to the heart of it. The heart of it is a lot more psychological, to use a word that mostly fails to capture it.
Either way: the slums riot. Suddenly you find that your ambulance routes are highly efficient for combating these riots. In the old slums, citizens had all the power. They knew where to run, and how to dodge out of the light, and who would hide them, etc. Now it’s in the hands of the police. And, of course, the police force costs money, but luckily the new names and addresses make it much easier to tax the citizenry, so taxes go up to combat the riots from the taxes going up. But to ensure that citizens pay those taxes…
One wanted to establish efficient healthcare, but to do that you had to create a state apparatus that was able to control people enough to develop it around them. It’s about ambulances, technically, but somehow ambulances and cops and increased taxes and housing development all blended into one process, and every single part is required to make the others work. If you stopped just one, the whole project is lost, and all you did was cause damage with no benefit. At a certain point, it starts looking weirdly humane to accelerate it, if not just to finish and get to the benefits. But, of course, accelerating it can mean exacerbating the bad effects. And it definitely means removing more power from the hands of the populace.
If, like me, you think it’s very obnoxious that it’s hidden behind a login, see here. I have some suspicions that this link has been moved around a few times and suppressed in some ways otoh I was still able to find it pretty much immediately so who knows. I also wouldn’t be surprised with Cathy just doesn’t want to be associated with GG at all any more, which was an extremely common arc at the time.
You can even search my twitter history for the hashtag and find some frankly pretty embarrassing stuff.
If you don’t recognize these names, you can think of Breitbart as a very-slightly-more-high-brow Fox News. Slimy far-right conservative shit.
Somewhat self-fortunate in that I can link back to my ancient gaming blog for this one. Old blog was also partly quoted in All the nerds are undead.
I only go as far as pointing out that just about everybody named in the Cathy Young article was among them and basically all of them have now dropped into obscurity.
This isn’t even to say anything about the broader culture war. I’m leaving out the targeted canceling and the constant thinkpieces, but I think even without that critical theology was on borrowed time along a long-enough timeline.
May Gaben live long and prosper.
I say this, though it frankly is starting to get obnoxious how reactionary people are getting with labeling certain games woke.