A Writer’s Goal

A few nights ago, I got caught into a late-night Twitter debate in response to a comment that was levied at Leigh Alexander, a writer for Kotaku, Gamasutra, and other outlets. The comment was a criticism of her writing that focused on a feeling that she “complains without posting solutions.” As a writer myself (duh), I decided this was a good place to jump into the discussion and offer my thoughts. We went back and forth until it was way too late in the evening, but the conversation got me to thinking.

What’s my goal as a writer? Why am I doing this?

The request to “offer solutions” is not uncommon. Many writers who point out faults in our way of living are also tasked by their readers with offering solutions to the things they label as problems. I believe that to do this is to miss the point. I’m not here to tell you how you can get game designers to have more thematic variance in their games. Honestly, I’m not sure you can affect that change by yourself. No offense, reader, but your voice is not loud enough on its own to make much of a difference. You can speak with your dollars, yes, but witholding your $60 dollars from Activision won’t make the next Call of Duty less jingoistic. It won’t magically add good female characters to AAA games. It won’t stop the cycle of misogyny and violence that permeate today’s AAA space. It just won’t. Furthermore, focusing on a single issue (such as the Hitman: Absolution trailer) doesn’t work. What happens when that issue is gone?

In September of last year, a man by the name of Troy Davis was scheduled to be executed in the state of Georgia, based on what some people thought was a shaky conviction. This became the lightning rod for many social activists to rail against Capital Punishment, and there was an upswell in support for Mr. Davis’ plight, and a plea for clemency and a stay of execution. On September 21st, 2011, Troy Davis was executed. The support vanished almost as soon as he was pronounced dead. People moved on.

I don’t want to get people up in arms over a single issue and watch as they move from thing to thing, fighting over scraps of the carcasses of social issues before moving onto the next “big deal.” That’s counterproductive, and does nothing but foster hate and anger. That’s not what I want my writing to be about, and I don’t feel it’s how we in the games press should treat you, the readers. You are not pawns to be manipulated into fulfilling the id of a person behind a keyboard. You are intelligent beings who deserve the respect to make your own decisions.

So we complain. We point things out. The goal is not to get any one thing to change, but it’s to get you all to realize that not everything is perfect in gaming or the world. Not everything has to be accepted as “just the way it is.” If you have your own feelings on the way things should be done (even if those feelings are different from mine), then I want you to feel empowered to try and have the change that you want to see in the world. In life. In games.

Sure, games aren’t the most important social issue that we have going on right now. Some people would call this an extremely trivial column, but I disagree (of course, since I wrote it). Speaking up for yourself when it comes to something “insignificant” is a chance to learn how to do that in a “safe” environment. Trying to change something in gaming won’t get you killed, won’t get you sent to jail, won’t get you shunned from society. You will, however, get the practice that you need in order to build up the self-reliance necessary to go out and affect some change in “the real world.” If games can be simulations for things like war and sports, why can’t they also simulate the political process? Or the process of standing up for oneself?

My goal as a writer is this: I want one day for someone to read my writing, and decide that there is something in gaming that they want to change. Maybe they don’t do it themselves. Maybe they don’t have the talent. However, they pass those feelings along to their child, and their child becomes the next Peter Schaefer, or the next Ken Levine, or the next David Cage, and they use their ability and their empowerment to make substantive change in the gaming environment.

There is progress being made. There are articles on major gaming sites that point out the hypocrisy in the messaging and selling of videogames, as well as the thematic and gameplay focus. So yes, I’m going to complain, because that is what I can do to affect some change on the world.

What are you going to do?

http://twitter.com/ethangach Ethan Gach

“The request to “offer solutions” is not uncommon. Many writers who point out faults in our way of living are also tasked by their readers with offering solutions to the things they label as problems. I believe that to do this is to miss the point. I’m not here to tell you how you can get game designers to have more thematic variance in their games. Honestly, I’m not sure you can affect that change by yourself. No offense, reader, but your voice is not loud enough on its own to make much of a difference. You can speak with your dollars, yes, but witholding your $60 dollars from Activision won’t make the next Call of Duty less jingoistic. It won’t magically add good female characters to AAA games. It won’t stop the cycle of misogyny and violence that permeate today’s AAA space. It just won’t. Furthermore, focusing on a single issue (such as the Hitman: Absolution trailer) doesn’t work. What happens when that issue is gone?”

Whether or not you offer a solution to something you see as a problem has nothing to do with the reader’s ability to affect that change. Just because one reader can’t affect that change by having their expectations transformed, does’t mean that several readers, or hundreds or thousands of them, can’t have an important effect on the medium/industry.

In addition, the people who work at studios, publishers, and other journalistic outlets can affect change to a much larger degree, offering a way for them to fix a problem that you have called out would certainly do more to affect change then simply saying, X is an issue, get working on it.

Finally, you offer a solution at the end of that very paragraph (” It won’t magically add good female characters to AAA games”). It is really so hard to say that problem X (sexism in video games) could be fixed (at least in part) by utilizing more well rounded and complex female characters?

I understand you desire as a critic to critique. But pointing to what’s wrong without pointing to how it could be more right seems rather lazy. Have I missed you argument for why doing so isn’t a cop-out? A lazy command to your audience to work out solutions to all of the things you’ve decided are problematic? Is it really so hard to do both?
- http://twitter.com/mrprice33 Marc Price
  
  All good points.
  
  Here’s my thing, though. In a lot of cases, it feels like the solutions to these problems are really quite simple. For example, the solution to the problem behind the Hitman trailer is simply to not fetishize violence and sexuality when it comes to women, and to be more careful about the images we use to sell games.
  
  The problem that I see in the gaming community at large is that (generally) these things aren’t seen as problems in the first place. Of course, admitting that there is a problem is the first step toward solving that problem. What I hope happens with my readers is that they use my work to think more critically about gaming as a whole, not any one issue. In my opinion, offering singular problems and solutions is akin to a parent hovering over a child and constantly telling them what to and what not to do. Eventually, that parent won’t be there, and the child won’t know how to think.
  
  In my past pieces on things like thematic variance, the Hitman trailer, etc, I try to go in-depth on why these things might be problems, and in a lot of cases I offer solutions as a way to juxtapose the two. For example, in the piece on thematic variance, I posited that one of the reasons why we were consistently getting the same themes in games was that games were so expensive, and the all-in proposition was far too great to experiment. My solution, of course, was self-evident: make smaller, cheaper games. But that’s not realistic. That’s not where the industry is right now. So instead of harping on the need to make smaller games (which, contradictorily I’ve done in another post on 38 studios :p), I instead want to offer the reader an examination of a problem in order to give them the thinking skills necessary to come up with their own problems.
  
  Finally, there’s the problem of motivation. Point blank, I feel as if writers who crusade against single issues are doing their readers a disservice. They get their readers into a frenzy that extends itself to one problem. Once that problem is gone, what has anybody learned? It seems to me they just move on to the next problem. Eventually, all that anger just washes everything out. What I hope is that on a Kantean level (that is, dictated by motivations), I can give readers the tools to become crusaders of the things they want to change, as opposed to the things I want to change.
  
  I have no problems with writers who offer solutions to problems, it’s just not what I want to do, and it’s something that struck me as I was going back and forth with people on twitter. That was the motivation for this piece. But thanks for reading and commenting, I’m now following you on twitter :).

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