I Don’t Understand Who This Style Of Paranoid, Hectoring Writing Is For
In which I subject you to the present state of Polygon
Three Quick Notes Before We Get To The Main Event
1. Back in December I said I was going to start making an annual donation to GiveWell’s Maximum Impact fund, pegged to the income I generate from this newsletter. Apologies for the delay, but last week I followed through on that pledge and donated $12,000 (I rounded up a bit) to the organization:
It’s insane to me that I’m able to do something like this, but it makes me feel grateful for the success of this newsletter. That money — your money — largely will go to programs fighting malaria and malnutrition-linked blindness. (I was very specific that I didn’t want any of the money going to pro-malaria, pro-blindness causes, so hopefully GiveWell will follow my instructions.)
Thank you, thank you, thank you.
2. I’m going to make a slight tweak to the commenting system. Forever ago, you guys voted to let me unlock posts that are three months or older. I really appreciate that, and I think the system we have going is a nice balance: As subscribers, you get access to the new stuff right away, but once it’s a little bit older I can unlock it to try to get more of my newslettering into public circulation.
In the past, when I’ve wanted to unlock something, I’ve cloned it like this. My reasoning was that I didn’t want your comments subjected to the scrutiny of the internet randos who will be able to read them if I unlock a locked article rather than make a new, commentless copy of it. But in retrospect, I think I’m being too paranoid about this. In more than three years (!) of running this newsletter and publishing plenty of public posts, I’m not aware of any instance in which a rando has actually tried to screenshot/ridicule/engage in any other way with a comment they don’t like. Moreover, most of you use pseudonyms (you can change your displayed name here), and it’s rare that there’s anything posted in the comments section that would cause anyone trouble if viewed by a wider crowd, anyway. And the present system is clunky — it results in two copies of the same article, which hurts the parts of my brain afflicted with mild OCD.
So, when it comes to future posts (and this one) but not any past ones, I’m going to start simply unlocking stuff when I want to unlock it rather than bother with cloning it. I’ll add a sentence to the end of every post noting that anything you post in the comments could eventually be viewed by the public, so even folks who miss this newsletter will know the deal. It seems very unlikely to me this will cause any problems, but on the off chance it does, we can always go back to the old cloning system. And for all those older articles I want to unlock, which have been piling up of late? I’ll clone them, because I didn’t give you guys a heads-up about this. But going forward, consider yourself, well, heads-upped. And of course, members of the public still won’t be able to post comments — just read them. Posting is a premium-only privilege. Feel free to email me or comment if you have any feedback, as this new system won’t technically start until three months from today at the earliest.
3. There’s more coming from Yassine soon! The delay is 100% my fault, as I’m slow with my edits. I think you’ll really like the next one, which is partly about — hope you’re sitting down — SEX.
I Don’t Understand Who Is Reading This Stuff
A Polygon writer is upset about some of the material in Horizon Forbidden West, an open-world action-adventure game for the PlayStation 5 (and 4) that has been racking up good reviews since its release in late February. The article is by Chris Karnadi. “Horizon Forbidden West purports to be post-racial — but it’s not,” lectures the headline.
Folks — we could be in for a slog here.
By way of background, here’s the game’s story summary:
Join Aloy as she braves the Forbidden West – a majestic but dangerous frontier that conceals mysterious new threats. Explore distant lands, fight bigger and more awe-inspiring machines, and encounter astonishing new tribes as you return to the far-future, post-apocalyptic world of Horizon. The land is dying. Vicious storms and an unstoppable blight ravage the scattered remnants of humanity, while fearsome new machines prowl their borders. Life on Earth is hurtling towards another extinction, and no one knows why. It's up to Aloy to uncover the secrets behind these threats and restore order and balance to the world. Along the way, she must reunite with old friends, forge alliances with warring new factions and unravel the legacy of the ancient past – all the while trying to stay one step ahead of a seemingly undefeatable new enemy.
So it’s a far-future dystopian setting consisting of various warring tribes and terrifying mechanical creatures. Seems unlikely this would have much to do with twentieth and twenty-first-century racial politics. Or at least that would be a major stretch, no?
Alas.
Early on, Karnadi complains that “There’s a stereotypical angry Black woman named Regalla, for example, who leads a rebel army and would rather die than seek peace.” I sort of knew that would be a gross oversimplification of the character as soon as I read the sentence. Plus, this seems like a setting that would generate a lot of rebel leaders who “would rather die than seek peace.” If you don’t care about spoilers, you can watch this clip in which Regalla explains her actions and motivations. It’s rather humanizing — if executed with the lack of subtlety unfortunately common to AAA games — and it would be impossible to watch the clip and think the game’s developers are exploiting the American “angry black woman” trope unless you’re… well, unless you’re a Polygon writer, I guess.
Next sentence: “There’s also constant belittling between tribes, who call each other ‘savage’ or ‘uncivilized’ — terms loaded with racial undertones.” Right on its face, this is stupid. Calling outgroup members ‘savages’ or ‘uncivilized’ is just about a human universal, and it would certainly happen a lot in a setting like Horizon Forbidden West’s. Obviously such language can have racial undertones, but the history of humanity is littered with examples of such dehumanization in situations where there are no meaningful racial differences. We’re an inspiringly egalitarian species in that manner.
Elsewhere, Karnadi complains that one mission “brings you face to face with a gratuitous smattering of imagery that you might find in an American Chinese restaurant. There is, particularly, a lot of red: a red dragon hanging from the ceiling, red lanterns, and red decorative knots. The mission concludes with a gigantic light show, and a neon dragon flying at Aloy and the three white male excavators she had previously helped.”
I… um… okay? Sounds pretty cool? One gets the sense that around this point in the article, Karnadi ran out of steam a bit, and began not so much making arguments as gesturing, in a perfunctory manner, at the sort of things that could be seen as offensive by a particularly motivated offense archaeologist.
More:
Later in the game, Aloy discovers the final resting place of Ted Faro (the first game’s main antagonist) below San Francisco’s Transamerica Pyramid. He’s the ruler of the “pyramid,” a survival bunker that he named Thebes, and his name is Faro. It’s a bit on the nose.
The basement of the pyramid contains a multistory metallic statue of Faro, and you find out that back during the 21st-century plague that he caused, he actually tried to prolong his life and became a monster — a mummy, if you will. Egyptian mythological imagery, including an Eye of Horus, is peppered throughout the quest, reducing religiously significant images and rituals to mere aesthetic texture for the game’s villain.
I’ve seen a lot of crazy stuff online, but I believe this is the first time I have ever seen someone claim that a piece of content is offensive to followers of ancient Egyptian religion. I feel like I’m exploring my own Forbidden West of internet arguments just by reading this essay!
I won’t torture you much longer with excerpts. But here’s the best/worst bit of the article — the excerpt that lays bare the sheer excruciating pointlessness of the whole exercise:
That brings us to the war elephant. When Aloy first meets a rebel Tenakth faction led by Regalla (voiced by Angela Bassett), Aloy is surprised that they have the ability to override machines. She’s even more concerned when she stumbles upon the rebels riding a Tremortusk, a massive mechanical elephant.
Terrifying machines are a hallmark of Horizon Forbidden West’s world, and the Tremortusk is one that Guerrilla Games is clearly extremely proud of. The studio highlighted it in the game’s story trailer, and included a Tremortusk figurine, complete with rebel riders, in the collector’s edition.
The elephant is a surprisingly pervasive symbol of the Orient, and the taming of elephants for use in war is common in European and American fantasies about the Orient. Peoples in India, Africa, and Southeast Asia did sometimes employ elephants in combat, but in the context of British colonialism, the West saw the use of elephants in war and in religious ceremonies as savage and irrational, and imported elephants for British curiosity about colonial India.
Consider also The Nations of the East, a sculpture group by three white male American sculptors from the 1915 San Francisco world’s fair, which actually centers a man riding an adorned elephant. The sculptures are all racial caricatures of “the East” — the elephant is flanked by stereotyped “Buddhist” monks on foot, “Mongol” men on horses, and “Middle Eastern” men on camels. The mounted elephant itself looks strikingly similar to the Tremortusk. Choosing to have these unreasoning rebels ride a Tremortusk in Forbidden West and then be outsmarted by Aloy repeats and perpetuates Orientalist tropes.
I’m not suggesting that Guerrilla Games made these aesthetic choices with malice; I’m arguing that the choices end up being impactful regardless, both in what they convey to the player, and how the resultant symbolism fits in with our world. When I played Horizon Forbidden West, the game asked me to identify with Aloy and support her mission to save the planet. But to progress in the game, I ended up role-playing different kinds of cultural violence, including Orientalism, which founds and fuels a lot of the racism I experience as an Asian American. Even though Aloy’s world is supposedly post-racial, its developers still repeat Orientalist tropes in their design choices, which paint Asian cultures, and therefore people, as perpetually foreign, mysterious, and threatening.
You’ll notice that Karnadi really doesn’t bother to form an actual argument here. It’s honestly just “There were elephants in the game, and at other points in history other people have used elephant imagery to prop up racist ideas, and therefore I am upset.”
Who is all of this for? Who is the reader who finds this to be insightful analysis, or who is in the market in the first place for such an exhausting effort to comb through a big, sophisticated-by-the-standards-of-the-medium video game in search of outrage fodder? What is any of this?
What’s annoying is that as video games have gotten bigger and better and more interesting, games writing has gotten increasingly unreadable. There’s a lot of stuff like this — a lot of very basic point-missing. A lot of “this bad character did a bad thing, so therefore the creators of the game endorse the bad thing.” A lot of genuinely infantile thinking and reasoning. In many cases, it feels like the paranoia and addle-brained thinking of the young-adult fiction wars are getting imported to games writing.
I do think part of the problem is the belief, on the part of games writers, that they need to take an active role in our present reckoning — they need to show that they and their outlets take racial justice seriously. Of course there are places where video games and writing about race and identity intersect. And we benefit from sophisticated writing in those instances.
But offense archaeology — I love that term and won’t apologize for using it twice in one post — is not the way. To pore over a big, rich game and search for stuff that, if viewed in the most uncharitable and paranoid light possible, could be seen as offensive, is not a good use of anyone’s time. It also devalues the whole enterprise of fighting racism, because it’s so transparently silly and mindless. If you want people to take the reckoning seriously, publishing this stuff doesn’t help.
I really wish we had better data on who reads what and why. Pageview data is pretty closely held by websites, for understandable reasons, but my guess is that to the extent an article like this one circulates at all, it’s due to hate-clicks. I think only the tiniest fraction of people who normally read Polygon read an article like this and say, “Yes, this makes sense.” It creeps right up to the line of expressing outright contempt for games and those who play them, because Karnadi’s stance is so clearly I am going to do whatever I can to be offended by this.
I don’t know how well Polygon is doing. I do know that there appears to be a much more vibrant, happening games commentary scene on YouTube. If I’m correct, there might be some pretty obvious reasons for that.
Questions? Comments? Ideas for open-world games in which you get to live my life, write emails, buy bagels, fight with people on Twitter, and so forth? I’m at singalminded@gmail.com or on Twitter at @jessesingal. Remember that if you comment on this post, your comments might be viewable by the public later on if I unlock it. The image of a bunch of characters facing down some giant machines is from the game’s media page.
This post is about ethics in video game journalism.
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