Zeitgust
Jumping on the Contra Scott on Taste bandwagon.
G-get it? Because gust is a latin root for taste? ( ͡° ͜ʖ ͡°)
Anyways, continuing our symping with a little inspiration from Sympathetic Opposition’s Contra Scott Alexander on Taste. The title refers to Friendly And Hostile Analogies For Taste, which is one of the latest posts for Scott Alexander’s occasional hobby horse of wondering why influential people hate pretty things.
Sympathetic Opposition takes issue with one aside in which Scott wonders aloud why people might incidentally care about quality craftsmanship-in-production1 (framed specifically there as “taste”) since it only ever seems to make people miserable vis a vis causing them to zero in on the flaws in things2. Summarizing her post3, she counters that “taste”—as we’re using it here as a proxy for the skill of appreciating something—is an essential part of enjoying something to its fullest.
My initial reaction in the comments:
Very tempted now to write something like this but for video games, +/- to wonder if I can tease out whether there's a sort of generic taste gentrification going on there in real time (or has maybe already come and gone).
Also, I wonder if there's some sense in which "taste" as we're using it here is a subset of the kind of generalized "passion" element that I've written about before as an aspect of the "getting gud" duality of innate talent + conspicuous passion. Maybe not; I can't say I'm getting quite the same transcendent pleasure that you seem to be describing from my corresponding hobby.
So we’ve got a couple forks to navigate here:
Does what Sympathetic Opposition say about taste apply universally? Does “taste” as a high brow concept fit for me and my pet passion in the same way that she’s describing for her enjoyment of literature?
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.
I’m going to save everything in #2 for a separate post since that’s a little spicier.
In my hastiness to mirror this post’s inspiration, I’m tempted to ask “do you need ‘taste’ to enjoy video games” except I don’t think that’s quite the correct question; if you asked “do you need ‘taste’ to enjoy literature” I’m sure Sympathetic Opposition would also say no, of course not. Here’s the touchstone:
This makes sense in a world where everyone experiences exactly the same quantity of exactly the same things, so “taste” can only mean “being picky” and “disliking most of what you encounter.” But the world doesn’t work like that. Actually, some people are much more interested in some field of art than most people are. They’ll interact with more work in that art form, and they interact with each of those works more, and spend more time scouting the art for works they like (and they’re more likely to be working in that art themselves). The obvious reason is that these people are getting more pleasure out of that art form than most people do. They will also often think that some “art which normal people don’t appreciate” is better than some art that normal people do appreciate, and that some art that normal people like is actually terrible—but it’s also true that when they agree with normal people about some work of art being “good,” the normal people are getting less pleasure out of it than they are.
This unambiguously also applies to video games. In fact, her ongoing explanation wrt her love of literature maps pretty cleanly onto video games in the abstract. She notes:
A 2022 Gallup poll has American reading a mean of 12.6 books per year; this distribution has a long tail off to the right, and the median American reads five books or fewer. I don’t keep a books-I’ve-read list, but I just went through my borrowing history for the year on Libby & counted the books I read through for the first time. So far this year, 40 (again, not counting physical books, books I reread, books I read on Project Gutenberg, books I downloaded elsewhere). Revealed preferences indicate that I probably enjoy books more than the average American.
There’s a difficult-to-source bit of gaming rumor/trivia that the average person with a gaming console only buys two games per year. This reddit poll has the majority in the 1-8 range. I mean look I don’t have to belabor this point, according to my Steam 2023 year in review which is both non-exhaustive (since it’s only including games run through Steam) and from a year I was entirely employed full-time, I played 58 games, 44 of which were new with 45% of my total playtime in games released that year, compared to a Steam median of 4 (the 2022 median was 5 and the 2024 median is also 44). So yes, people who like the thing do more of the thing. But!
Good taste is usefully defined as the capacity for deep aesthetic pleasure, and the discernment to judge whether a given thing is capable of inducing deep aesthetic pleasure. (Bolded because this is the point of this post.) Not necessary to good taste but something that people with good taste desire and admire, is knowledge of the field they care about—knowledge of the craft and technique if it’s a field of art, but also having a general lay of the land, what there is to be enjoyed, and already knowing at least some of the things that are deeply enjoyable, and some which can be safely dismissed. The first two require some natural talent, but all three are trainable—and the training is worth it, because it allows you to get more pleasure out of the same amount of resources.
This is something that does kind of speak to me as someone who has played a lot of games in a culturescape where frankly playing a lot of games isn’t especially unique.
Do I think I have better taste than the average person who engages video games? The short answer is yes, both tautologically and in the same way that Sympathetic Opposition is describing wrt appreciation of the art, but the long answer is me convincing myself that this is actually true without starting from a de jure assumption that this is the case. For one, Sympathetic Opposition above notes that a component of this kind of taste is appreciation of the craftsmanship-in-production, and this sort of doesn’t fully hold for me:
The one thing I’m unambiguously passionate about is simply just playing video games. Not making them, not even really talking, thinking, or writing about them, not collecting them, not even playing them particularly well. I don’t care about finding bugs or exploits, pushing games to their limits, achievement hunting, recording, streaming, or speedrunning, though those are all things I’ll occasionally enjoy as additional entertainment.
My enjoyment of all of those ancillary components, up to and including the making of video games, is mostly instrumental. But in my defense, they’re instrumental inasmuch as they’re important to the enjoyment of the game. I care about design because good design makes good games, and I do kind of enjoy writing about it because it’s part of that process of appreciating what design does and doesn’t work for me. Thusly, does it become palatable for me to assert that I have good taste in games: that I don’t have the hubris to assert my taste preferences and some ordained holy Correctness of Taste. Still, there’s definitely patterns.
I imagine this holds for everything ever where taste-as-described-by-Sympathetic-Opposition is concerned. It’s probably pretty uncontroversial to say that taste never has an objectivity-of-truth but chances are there is some degree of universal controversy over what constitutes good taste in any given domain. There’s also likely to be some trending agreement over commonly-preferred features, and I suspect that the degree of unintuitiveness to those not in-the-(taste)-know is probably the source of Scott’s dissonance on taste broadly. The menswear dude is once again our shining flagship example of this. There is a precision to what constitutes good style, but that precision is only superficially apparent to the uninitiated—to those of us who haven’t made it a part of our lives5; we might understand that something looks good without deeper understanding of why it looks so good.
Scotts responds to Sympathetic Opposition’s post, here:
If I understand correctly, her thesis is that taste doesn’t just make you hate bad art - it also gives you the ability to love good art more deeply, which can be a transformative experience. I’m not so sure - people seem to obsess over (to the point of centering their lives around) various forms of lowbrow art from Harry Potter to Marvel to anime. I think that distinguishing this from the deep love and transformation of highbrow art risks assuming the conclusion - the guy who says Harry Potter changed his life is deluded or irrelevant, but the guy who says Dostoyevsky did has correctly intuited a deep truth. But we believe this precisely because we know Dostoyevsky is tasteful and Rowling isn’t - I would prefer a defense of taste which is less tautological.
I think the subjectivity of (good) taste is why this is elusive. I also think he’s overlooking the wiggleroom whereby something that is lowbrow or low status might still have an obvious qualitative merit. There’s elements of Harry Potter and Marvel that gesture at grand mythological tradition, but they’re also patronized by low-status internet sociopolitical activists and nerds who clearly have no taste.
My take on this, if we want to be charitable (and as per the post I just linked to), is that the people who get deep transcendental joy from what we’re calling lowbrow entertainment are people with high taste in bad taste. The ones getting deep joy from Harry Potter and Marvel slop are describing an experience that is probably more akin to religious transcendentalism, a phenomenon that is more socially-attuned than inwardly-turned6. Instead, I would suggest that what makes this “lowbrow” is that this is often not a considered, refined use of taste. Except in some extreme niches where good-bad is the point, there aren’t many principled discussions of what makes good versus bad Marvel slop. Taste can be a status game, but typically it’s a race to the top, not the bottom. If we want to get more granular on this, my thesis in the follow-up, All the subculture are undead, is that “hipsters” are taste cultures focused on quality versus “nerds” being taste cultures concerned primarily with superficial markers for status.
Why does it make sense to lose interest in something because it’s become more popular? If it’s the dilution of quality, you’re probably a hipster. If it’s the dilution of status, you’re probably a nerd.
So I sort of dodged fully explaining what I mean when I say I think I have good taste in games by running off on the actual discussion on taste, but I think here’s a good place to wrap on this and maybe leave that for another post7.
I think I must be oversimplifying a little overmuch here because when I frame the Scott quote like this it seems kind of excessively dismissive of anyone who cares about things in a very un-Scott way.
I already have a personal objection here via the “nerd rage as love” concept I’ve touched on elsewhere a few times but we’ll get back to that later, maybe.
Accurately, I hope, because I fear I got possessed by this idea early on and speedread the rest of it in excitement to discuss it with some of my own ideas. I forced myself to reread it a little slower to try to avoid missing what it was saying when I commented on it there, and will again in the course of writing this, but I do worry I’m being a little hasty in a lot of ways that are kind of unfair. Anyways, definitely read it yourself, and then feel free to tell me how wrong I am.
Funny story, I originally scheduled this midday to post in the evening with my 2023 one cited primarily, not wanting to wait for the 2024 one to come out, and then immediately looked at Twitter to see that the 2024 Steam year-in-reviews had just gone up. Relegating this to a lil footnote on the goofy coincidence since I spent part of 2024 unemployed.
Though, I actually played fewer total games in 2024 according to this year’s review; it could just be random but I think that’s because there were more games I played longer (especially Palworld, Helldivers 2, and Book of Hours) and there was a Cyberpunk 2077 playthrough via GOG Galaxy that I started at the end of December last year that might have taken me through most of January this year.
Derek frequently describes how many of these topics have been the subject of ancient arcane menswear forum discussions.
This is an explanation that I hope works if we don’t go further than the surface level because I think there are people who have “good taste” in terms of their approach to religion and are having genuine “transcendental joy” with regards to their religious experiences.
Zvi Mowshowitz also has a fresh big post on taste that I have open in a tab to read later but will not have gotten to by the time I publish this and so might warrant another post to react to. Okay never mind it wasn’t as long as I thought and I skimmed it kind of quick but it also caused me to realize I hadn’t re-parsed Scott’s original post and so there’s some fertile ground to retread that and Zvi’s reaction.
youre trolling me w that picture