aka "Are there philosophical criticism problems?"
When we examine art and set ourselves to the task of speaking about it critically, the chief question we ask is “what does the thing say?” This simple question is often transformed these days into a much more useless question: “does this say what I want?”
I look back how we've gotten here and see a failure. Why is this the question people ask so often? Could we have avoided this?
As the 2010s passed and games critics applied certain lenses with increased rigor, the ability for games to speak towards our every day experiences never seemed more possible. This framework came side by side with games that eschewed the viewpoints of fantasy heroes in exchange for the working class. Even a game like Tale of Tales’ Sunset, a fairly ponderous work that led to the developer’s dissolution, held a certain degree of edge to them insofar as they positioned themselves against a more toyetic AAA status quo. Not games as ART!!! but at the very least it was games as a more vulnerable and intimate form of communication. Continued reframing of what they do and who they spoke to.
This was a battle that critics and creators were destined to fail. AAA forces consumed these works and repackaged them into dismissive categories like "Games for Change."
The language of diversity and labor solidarity were slurped up by the forces of capital into weapons of tokenization that last until this day. They are, in some ways, now the language of our economic oppressors. Cursory balm applied in hopes of hiding their true nature.
What we don’t talk about, however, are the ways in which the language of solidarity and progressivism were adopted by readerships into a perfunctory critical lens. Looking back on writing leading into the 2020s, I can’t think of a greater disappointment than the ways in which critics passed on terminologies that were then dulled until they became cudgels wielded by puriteens looking to police fandoms. This resulted in players nominally aware critical-reading who nevertheless commit demand works meet their moral approval as their first and perhaps only creative duty. Not to explore but rather to validate.
Ignoring that they still ultimately consume these games in the more derogatory sense, there’s a deeper frustration to be found. The language of leftism itself becomes commercialized and reconfigured by readers and the result is superficial and incomplete engagement with work. They have built a comical shorthand. It's finally exhausted me.
I reach this conclusion after much self-reflection and participation in nominally leftist spaces. The failure mentioned above is one that I was part of. I think that I am among a cohort of writers who, in spite of attempts to speak of games through a leftist lens, did not achieve much other than passing on language that now exists divorced from its contexts. How much of that is our fault, I cannot say, but we’re not blameless.
When a well-meaning progressive player drapes something like the world of Final Fantasy XIV with the cloth of our own political entities, there’s only so much critical work being done and yet this is the approach they take by default. To say the Scions of the Seventh Dawn, the heroes guild to which the player and their allies belong, is analogous to the Central Intelligence Agency scratches the desire to be pithy but mostly functions as a reflexive gesture that assures their conscience that they are being ideologically pure when the truth is that they’re being deeply incurious. It sounds smart and politically engaged for the sake of sounding smart and politically engaged.
Which isn’t to say that a game like Final Fantasy XIV cannot be approached from a political lens or to suggest that such conclusions are false. FF14 can never quite decide what it wants the Scions to really be. They're mostly meant to be The Good Guys Who Fight Bad Guys in a very sweeping sense but they do sometimes function as state actors in a way that's unexamined. If anything else, they're not exactly a mutual aid group.
But I also think seeking radical validation from pop fantasy is a bit of a fool's errand and expecting every single thing they engage with to be ideologically pure only leads to disappointment. It makes an imposition on works and I think it's a very awkward one.
Let's stick to FFXIV. Today I saw chatter about Endwalker's final area being called Ultima Thule and what implications that held. It's nominally being deployed as a cartography reference from ancient Greece (meant to refer to the northernmost points of a map and beyond) but in the early 20th century the term grew a different meaning in occultist spaces, especially Nazi spaces, as the mythical home of the Aryan people.
What were Square Enix THINKING?!
The answer is that they, unlike those of us who plug themselves deeply into political history, were simply not thinking about occultists from the 1920s and the parties that eventually transformed into the Nazis. They probably didn't know the Thule Society existed nor that it helped originate the German Workers Party.
but while I think it's one thing to look at Endwalker and ask "hey, how am I meant to read all this Grecian imagery?" because that IS a very interesting question (antiquity imagery itself having inescapable connotations in today's political climate and the game itself having a messy relationship with depictions of primal gods... wherein "beast" tribe gods are implicitly less "legitimate" than the Twelve, who are themselves given Greco-Roman features..) it's also another to expect writers on the other side of the world and their localizers to have intimate knowledge of early 20th century German political imagery when they're pretty obviously sitting in a room asking "hey, what's a good ancient Greek phrase for shit that's off the map? we could use that for our end of the universe zone."
I think if you're sitting around and getting to the point that you're pillorying a decision like this, you're perhaps a) looking too hard for things to criticize while b) unrealistically expecting that everyone in the world had the same degree of political consciousness as you. and I have to imagine the drive is simply a desire to feel either superior or miserable and I'm dismayed at the amount of people who believe that miserableness is a necessary component of leftist life. (there's so, so many people in these spaces who don't seem to like anything?)
beyond that I often see people put more effort into fighting these battles than doing any actual work for their communities and that's just poor fuckin' praxis baybeeeee. the planet's dyin' Cloud! yes, bigger problems don't meant we can't focus on little ones but some of these mountains aren't even molehills. they're sand grains.
To be clear: FFXIV’s politics are absolutely fraught and sometimes even ugly. When you boil down much of the story, the results are often fairly milquetoast ideas of history being shaped by Great Men who had enough hope in their hearts. The writing very often elides the material circumstances of the setting in favor of a clean solution: there are problems but it is an inevitability that great people will remedy them. Thank you Warrior of Light. It never would have happened without you. The setting's ongoing relationship to "beast tribes" present a problem that will likely come to a head in the upcoming Dawntrail expansion explicitly because it cannot imagine a history determined by peoples instead of singular heroes. the results can be patronizing. mix that with charged imagery aaaand..
well, I don't fault anyone for expecting a disaster. I'm certainly worried.
Is that an unflattering read that some starry-eyed fans might get huffy over? Sure but I reach it by engaging truthfully and broad though it may be it’s still a more defined and useful starting position than "The Fantasy CIA is doing election politics in Magickal South America" which allows me to better explore what the game wants to say about political power and where it resides. As for that initial pithy Dirtbag Leftist read? I would rather we defer to people with the relevant lived experiences and cultural backgrounds rather than make a reflexive over simplifications and present it as hard hitting or novel critique.
If power comes from great men, you then start to look at the qualities of the "great men" in FFXIV. From there you can do the metaphor mapping. For Dawntrail, part of the problem is that the "Great Men" tend to be white skinned humans. (Stormblood avoided this in many respects with characters like Hien or Sadu but does at least run into a visual language problem when Lyse assumes leadership in Ala Mhgo.) A thing we do to add to this read once the expansion launches is to do things like examine who among Tural's populace gets to be great. Especially who is and is not eventually allowed to be king. It's a process.
(all that said: if I was writing Dawntrail, I would not make it about a royal succession contest that the player was meddling in. There's tons of other shit you can do in that setting and I'm at a minimum aligned with folks who say that part is A Problem.)
When I speak of the failures of certain progressive readerships, this is what I mean: the language of politics, the realities of our history, have become a means for players to excuse themselves from asking interesting questions about imaginative spaces or else engaging in the full process. What could these fictional worlds look like? What differences might exist in these spaces when we take them seriously, and what does imagining those alternatives tell us about the work we can do in our own communities? These are the better political questions and they come from a better organized heart. They engage earnestly.
I continue to affirm the position that took I years ago as a freelancer: we make better worlds and more authentic experiences when we include minoritized people in the creation process. that's a fact no one in their right mind should disagree with.
but I do think there's a maladjusted version of this position however, rather present in fan discourses today, that says we cannot ever explore these stories and settings without someone representative present in the labor process from start to finish and I don't know if I really believe that either. Do I necessarily have faith in Square-Enix's ability to navigate their fantasy Mezoamerica pastiche? Not really but they're allowed to try.
ultimately I've been worn out by the idea that there is only one position to take with works. One ideological line that we must adhere to. One "correct" way to experience something. And I really, really fear that at least for a small portion of folks, I helped impart a language to them which they now use to beat down others. either as critics or simply in fan spaces.
We often fault writers and creators for failures of imagination but I think it’s entirely reasonable to fault players for exhibiting that kind of bad faith. When writers use shorthand, it is sometimes called lazy. Can we not say something similar of critical readings built of their own excessive shorthand and repackaged terms? Especially those transforming the language of progressivism into superficial criterion? I should hope so!
The evil general is redeemed and a reader rails they be executed instead. After all, they were part of the fake fascists! This feeling, this reflexive demand, comes from a very genuine real life political position. We shouldn't compromise with fascists in real life because that’s how they win. Through countless capitulations from people who place their own comfort over moral duty, fascism takes root until it codifies itself into law. But at the same time it’s pretty boring to worry about whether or not the Black Knight deserves to redeem themself. It demands a political lesson from a morality play. It misses the point.
It's CinemaSins. you've made a different version of CinemaSins. You have entire worlds spread before you and this is what you want to do?
Wittgenstein and Karl Popper once had a famous back and forth about whether or not philosophical problems existed. by which Popper asked if those problems had real world applicability. if the exercise of philosophy was meant to lead us to real knowledge and real solutions to problems Popper said that it was, Wittgenstein (at that point in time anyway) said it was a purely intellectually pursuit done for its own sake. puzzles and nothing more These kinds of critical conversations, packed with posturing, seem very Wittgenstein-y. they are merely language games. which is not something I particularly abide.
but to reach solutions, we need to accept the thing before us as it actually is. that's crucial.
When we accept the imperfection of games, that is not the same as excusing them or endorsing their politics. It’s simply an acknowledgement that the things we might seek as leftist readers are likely not going to be found in corporate work. Which isn’t to say we cannot want these things but it does mean that once we accept the inherent imperfection, we free ourselves to engage with the thing as it is. This can be deeply liberatory!
There’s suddenly a wealth of spiritually gratifying work that can be done even in ground that seemed infertile. It opens up our analytical framework to a variety of useful approaches and free us to do the thing that many people see as uncouth for a critic but which is ultimately necessary: feel unvarnished emotions. We free ourselves to be more honest about what a work is and isn’t doing. We find ourselves able to engage in criticism that is more empathetic to the creators but not fawning or incapable of going so far as damning their failures. Our criticism becomes more authentic. Our condemnations become more substantial than soundbites. Our solutions becomes more comprehensive.
If the sentiment in your heart is “this is shit oh god it's gonna be shit everything is shit all of this is fucking garbage shit” it might be better for you do find anything else to engage with. I’ve seen outlets turn to more and more vicious headlines that I couldn’t have imagined even five years ago. I have seen burgeoning critics burn with a deep hatred for this medium as their default position. Those feelings come from very true places but it becomes a kind of poison. It puts the thumb on the scale too much. Imbalanced, reactionary.
And look. I'm not telling you that you gotta love everything and that's the only pathway to good criticism. That you must adopt a forced positivism that grants developers infinite benefits of the doubt. What I am saying is that you gotta be willing to actually do the work instead of merely trying to score points with the club. At least if you expect to be taken seriously. Because there are times when we must excoriate works for their politics!
The industry is in a precarious state and whatever emerges from in the next four or five years is going to be very different. Things might be entirely cooked! I kinda feels that way. So I get why there is a drive to swing the cudgel. It can be gratifying! I simply do not find it interesting. At least not when done in this manner. Not when done so superficially.
There’s still fantastic critical work being done. Some folks have really held the line and I am amazingly grateful for their work. Abnormal Mapping persists! Young writers still shoot their shot at Paste Magazine. YouTube is a vicious sea but even in midst the waves of low-effort explainers and chuds, there’s folks bringing criticism to a wide audience. Not just your Jacob Gellers but your Majuulars too. I’m similarly grateful for attempts that have failed. I mourn the loss of a place like Uppercut the same way I miss the Arcade Review.
But something’s off and I don’t want to attribute it simply to late-stage capitalism since that abdicates certain responsibilities on our own end. Yes, criticism has less platforms and that's entirely the fault of businss ghouls but I also think the audience took away some of the wrong lessons from what came before now. A misunderstanding of what criticism does.
There was a moment where, like Rosencrantz and Guildenstern, we might’ve said “no” and prevented that but we missed it. Hell if I know when that was...
