2211: On “Burn in Hell, Yarny”

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A videogame called Unravel will be released tomorrow. It may be a good game, and it is certainly a good-looking one, with a soft focus and hazy depth of field; tree leaves rustle convincingly and thick snowflakes pile up as the camera pans ever right-ward. It appears to make use of this tactile world for a series of physics-based puzzles, like moving rocks to get up on ledges and creating makeshift vines with which to soar across little ponds. These may be very clever puzzles, building toward a resolution that is very satisfying, but I will never know, because I will never play Unravel, and that is because its protagonist, a little red yarn-man named Yarny, can go fuck himself.

This was the opening to an article from Kill Screen, a site that originally positioned itself at the very spearhead of “new games journalism”, boasting both a print magazine and an online component that would offer something a little different from the usual consumer advice/PR/news, previews, reviews cycle that most games-focused sites had provided up until that point.

I remember Kill Screen launching; it was actually at the first PAX I went to — I even still have a copy of their “Issue Zero” that I picked up at the show somewhere. It looked like it was going to be a great read, and a bold new frontier for games criticism.

Look at that opening paragraph again. Look at the last half of the last sentence.

“I will never play Unravel, and that is because its protagonist, a little red yarn-man named Yarny, can go fuck himself.”

Needless to say, I do not feel the same way about Kill Screen as I did when it was first launched. I hadn’t felt the same way for quite some time, to be honest, since its take on intelligent criticism had started to veer rather too heavily in favour of heavily ideological-based arguments rather than actual analysis of the art on its own merits — a scourge that the entire games press has been afflicted with for the past few years — but this article today has cemented my feelings.

What I did want to talk about, though, is the staggering hypocrisy of some people — within and outside games journalism — when censuring this article, and it most certainly has received almost universal censure from all angles. Deservedly so.

The key thrust of the article is that the author has no plants to play Unravel because he doesn’t like the look of it. He doesn’t like the look of the protagonist, and he doesn’t like the fact that the game looks like it’s going to be a narrative-centric, emotional experience that emphasises artistry (in the traditional sense) over game design.

You know what? Those are perfectly valid reasons to not want to play a game. There are lots of games I don’t want to play because I don’t like the look of them, because I don’t like that type of game, because the subject matter doesn’t appeal or because I know people I don’t like love them. Rational or not, pretty much any reason you can think of not to play a game is an absolutely valid one from your own personal perspective: we’re already living in an age where it’s literally impossible to play every single game out there, even if all you did all day every day was play games, so everyone, consciously or not, has their own set of selection criteria for what they put on their plate at any given moment.

What isn’t okay, though, is then picking on something that 1) you confess doesn’t appeal to you and 2) you admit you have no intention of playing (and therefore speaking from a position of authority on) anyway — and then writing a critical article about how it’s symptomatic of everything wrong with modern gaming. The author has some fair points — that some developers believe emotional manipulation of the player is an end unto itself, and that this isn’t the same as creating something truly artistic — but they are completely invalidated by the position of ignorance from which he is speaking: he’s criticising Unravel and games like it without any knowledge of what they’re actually like — he’s speaking on the basis of assumptions, not taking the time to research it for himself.

Where else have we seen this happen? Oh, right, with pretty much every niche-interest Japanese game released over the last few years. We’ve seen series like Senran Kagura berated for having boobs in them, but little to no discussion of their more progressive aspects such as homosexuality, sexual kinks, forming friendships across ideological barriers and accepting people for who they are. We’ve seen my longstanding favourite Hyperdimension Neptunia all but rejected from any cultural significance for being “hypersexualised” and having characters that both possess breasts and breathe, with little to no mention of the series’ perpetually on-point satire of games and game culture, excellent writing and characters strong enough to carry games in a wide variety of styles. We’ve even seen people branding the “Amie” feature from the Japanese version of Fire Emblem Fates as “creepy” and expressing pleasure that it had been removed, despite displaying no understanding of its context, either in-game or within the Japanese cultural context of “skinship” or “naked association”. And I could go on. For pages.

Sound familiar? Why, yes, in all the above cases, the critics of these titles were speaking from spectacularly ill-informed, ignorant positions — in some cases not even playing the games, or barely playing them for more than a few minutes in the instances where they did bother to boot them up at all — and, thus, were speaking from a position where they were unqualified to offer meaningful, trustworthy criticism of these games. And yet because games journalism is very much a cult of personality, people who didn’t know about these games already take these critics’ words at face value — assuming they’re a high-profile critic like Jim Sterling, or at least from a site seen as “reputable” (i.e. big) by the masses — and don’t bother to question them. And this leads to these games being pushed further into the niches they’re already in, and to a lot of people missing out on experiences that they may well find themselves pleasantly surprised by.

The worst thing it does is contribute to the overwhelming air of negativity and cynicism that pervades modern games writing. Many members of the press are extremely burned out on the increasingly penny-pinching tactics of triple-A publishers — day-one DLC, preorder incentives, platform-exclusive content, betas-that-are-not-betas-they’re-demos-that-you-can-only-play-if-you-preorder — and this causes the exhaustion and cynicism to infect their explorations of anything that might be just slightly outside the norm. Oh, sure, there’s plenty of indie darlings that get elevated to “gaming Messiah” status — Undertale, The Witness and Firewatch all spring to mind in recent months — but poor old Japan repeatedly gets shafted by people who, like the author of the Kill Screen piece, have no intention of exploring them in sufficient detail to provide adequate comment and criticism on them.

Life is too short — and there are too many games out there — to waste time on negative articles about “why I don’t like this” or “why I don’t want to play this” or “why this doesn’t appeal to me”. So why does it keep happening? I’d much rather read a games press that is more positive in tone: willing to criticise where appropriate, but where the thing first and foremost in every critic’s mind is the celebration of this amazing, growing, constantly changing medium that shatters cultural borders into something the whole world can truly understand and enjoy together.

You don’t have to love everything. I certainly don’t. But how about we think about keeping our mouths shut about the things we hate, let the people who do love them enjoy them, and we focus on the things that we love, too. Doesn’t that sound much nicer than “I have no intention of playing this game because I don’t like the look of the protagonist”?

(Oh, and for the record, I have no interest in playing Unravel either; Braid and Limbo were enough to put me off arty platformers for quite some time. I would not, however, dream of attempting to offer criticism on it having not played it — and I wouldn’t even feel comfortable commenting on Braid and Limbo because I don’t feel I played them enough to be well-informed before tiring of them. Now, I’m off to go and play some disgusting degenerate pervert Japanese role-playing games and probably fap myself into a frenzy in the process. Or perhaps just enjoy the things I love rather than bitching about things I hate and have no intention of trying to enjoy.)

#oneaday Day 817: Countdown to a Non-Event

It’s my 31st birthday on the 29th of this month, something which I am neither massively looking forward to or dreading — it’s just happening. (That said, there is the distinct possibility of nerdtastic board game action in the name of celebration, so I guess I am sort of looking forward to it.)

Birthdays are one of those things that seem massively important when you’re a kid but decline in relevance as you get older, with only the big “decade change” birthdays being a particularly big deal in most cases. My 30th was pretty awesome, as it happened, since not only did my awesome girlfriend take me to London for happy funtimes (on royal wedding day, as it happened, but that didn’t make things as inconvenient as I expected it might) but I then got to hang out with a goodly proportion of my UK-based friends (and one US-based friend who happened to be in the country at the time!) and eat lots of curry. Which was nice.

Thinking back on it, though, I’m not sure I can remember that many birthdays from my past. I was never particularly big on the whole “party” thing even when I was little — I remember going to plenty of other kids’ parties at the local village hall, eating cake and playing Pass The Parcel, though I don’t have any traumatic clown experiences to have revelations about in therapy (unless they’re particularly well-hidden and repressed) and I was rarely — if ever, I forget — the actual “host” or “guest of honour” of such an event.

I’m fine with this, as it happens, though it may have begun to carve my personality into the shape it is today. A big “party” full of people I don’t really know very well all putting pressure on me to have a good time is not a situation I particularly want to put myself in, particularly as it’s considered impolite and/or drama queen-ish to tell everyone that you’ve had enough and you’d just like them all to, you know, fuck off right now please.

I think the best birthday celebrations I’ve had were loosely-organised affairs where I maybe had the opportunity to hang out with a few friends, but there was no real pressure on anyone to be wild, wacky or drunk. Oftentimes there was all of the above, but rarely was it forced.

One particularly memorable occasion came during my first year at university, so I guess it must have been my 19th birthday. The halls of residence flat in which I lived had become a pretty close-knit group (most of us, anyway — there was one girl who perpetually did her own thing) and so we decided that we would go to local student hotspot and well-known grot spot Clowns, a “wine bar” that had an attached basement nightclub known as Jesters.

To call Clowns a “wine bar” was to polish a turd, really, since it was simply a “bar”. Okay, it served wine, but the phrase “wine bar” implies a certain degree of classiness that Clowns most certainly did not possess. Rather, it was the sort of place in which you stuck to the floor if you stood still for too long, and its companion nightclub Jesters (which seemed to be perpetually open, even during the day) was the kind of place whose toilets regularly overflowed and coated the dance floor with a sloppy mess of urine, cigarette butts and all manner of other unpleasantness. The theory was that by the time you got into Jesters, you were usually so wasted that you didn’t mind what you might be stepping in/on, so it was something of a moot point.

I digress. This particular birthday celebration was one of those “unstructured” sort of occasions. Clowns was running some sort of summer special whereby they’d provide you with a four-pint jug of its signature “Juicy Lucy” cocktail for about four quid, and as such most people there were clutching said jugs like giant tankards, pouring the luminescent green concoction down their throats with gay abandon.

I remember relatively little about what we were actually doing at the pub — drinking, probably — but for some reason I have oddly lucid memories of what happened upon our return to the flat. My flatmate Chris, for one, decided that the thing to do would be to sit in the corner of my bedroom with a pair of my (clean) underpants on his head. (I believe he was later sick on his door and subsequently refused to come out of his room for the rest of the evening, though this may have been another occasion.) My friend Simon, who did not live in the same halls of residence as us, fell asleep on my bed. All I really wanted to do at this time was fall asleep, too, so I opened up my wardrobe, rested my head on the bin-bag full of laundry that was in there (surprisingly comfortable) and drifted off for a little while.

I awoke a couple of hours later to find Simon just rousing from his slumber, too.

“I’m just going to run my head under the tap and then leave,” he said blearily. He stood up, and from my low vantage point I heard him go into the kitchen, run the tap as he suggested, and a few moments later, the front door banged to indicate that he had indeed left.

This occasion was clearly a silly situation in which almost nothing of any note whatsoever occurred, but for some reason it has stuck in my memory for many, many years. I can only wonder what strange memories future celebrations may burn onto my brain.

#oneaday Day 623: Crime and Punishment

It’s been a while since I told a story from my past life at the chalkface, so I feel it’s about time we fixed that with another real-life tale of What Teaching is Really Like.

I worked in three schools (not counting those I did supply teaching in) during the course of my teaching career — two secondary and one primary. One of the secondaries and the primary were in what could politely be termed “somewhat deprived areas” while the other secondary was right on the border of an aforementioned “somewhat deprived area” and a very middle-class town — the sort of place that has shops that sell nothing but fabric, and tearooms rather than branches of Starbucks, that sort of thing.

All three of them, regardless of location, and regardless of age group, had Problem Children. You could often preemptively tell a Problem Child from the names on the register — generally speaking, if a child was male and called Jordan, female and had some obscure misspelling of a relatively normal name (Kaylee, Abbygale, Rooth) or of either sex and in possession of a completely made-up stupid name (Peaches, Infographia, Cubblers) they were likely to be a Problem Child. Sometimes you were pleasantly surprised — girls named Jordan often ended up being quite nice, and when you got your hands on a new class you often didn’t know the sexes of the pupils, particularly if they had stupid names — but more often than not you’d run into a Problem Child sooner or later.

One particular Problem Child I encountered in the primary school in which I taught had a relatively normal name and, ironically, was one of the brighter kids in the class. But my God he was an asshole. He’d answer back, he’d yell at the teacher, the teaching assistant and his peers, and he’d frequently storm out of the room if he was pulled up on any sort of inappropriate behaviour. When parents’ evening came around, I spoke to his parents about his behaviour — particularly the violent side of things — and I was told that they had simply told him to react to anything he saw as “unfair treatment” by striking back. “If someone hits you,” said the dad, “you hit them back.”

There’s not much you can say to that, really, even with all the Anti-Bullying Policies and Zero Tolerance Initiatives in the world.

Then there was a Problem Child I came into regular contact with during my time at the first secondary school at which I taught. He, too, was an asshole, and this time with no redeeming features whatsoever — i.e. he was a dimwit as well. Again, he’d be aggressive, sweary, belligerent and completely resistant to authority. And again, there was no support from the parents.

“My mum says I don’t have to come to detentions,” he told me upon receiving a detention for being a cunt (obviously not the exact wording I used on the form recording said inappropriate behaviour). “So I’m not coming.”

He didn’t come.

With many of these children — particularly in cases there was no parental support for whatever reason — it was pretty much impossible to instill any sort of discipline in them. There was nothing that they feared. They didn’t fear detentions because they just wouldn’t turn up. They didn’t fear the wrath of the teachers or senior staff members. And they didn’t fear exclusion because that just meant time away from the school they hated so much. There was little to nothing that could be done to discourage these little grotbags from acting like complete bellends.

The teacher training guides would say that punishment is not the way to go — that positive reinforcement is, in fact, the way in which they best learn what behaviours are appropriate and which are not. The trouble is, taken to the extreme, you end up with the ridiculous sight that many schools indulge in — primary schools in particular — which is the weekly Celebration Assembly. Here, the whole school gathers and a selection of children from each tutor group are called up one by one to come to the front and receive a certificate. These certificates aren’t necessarily for academic achievement — and, indeed, usually aren’t. No, these certificates are frequently awarded for “playing nicely with the other children” and “sitting in a chair for over half of the lesson” and “not hurting anyone”. All of those are genuine examples, by the way, unlike the names I gave earlier, most of which were made up.

Now, while it’s nice to celebrate the fact that little Cockbag, who never sits in his chair for more than 5 seconds and loves punching everyone in the neck, actually sat down and completed two maths questions in the last week, it completely devalues the entire concept of “rewards” for everyone — teacher and pupil. When I was at primary school in the late 80s and early 90s, we were rewarded for good work in class or special achievements. Go and colour in a square on your rocket. Have a gold star. Show the class what you’ve done. No-one got a square on their rocket, a gold star or the opportunity to show the class what they’d done for successfully sitting in their chair for more than fifteen seconds at once.

I wonder what on Earth the solution could be. It’s pretty clear from what I saw that the one and only thing that the Problem Children feared was humiliation in front of their friends and peers — something that undermined their “authority”, for want of a better word. So perhaps some sort of Inverse Celebration Assembly would be warranted, where the headmaster solemnly called out the names of the worst offenders each week, brought them onto the stage and forced them to do the Dance of Shame while everyone else pointed and laughed. Anyone who refused to do the Dance of Shame would be fed to the goldfish kept by Class 2, who had developed a taste for human flesh ever since Barry Jenkins kept his hand in there for an entire period for a bet.

But then that’s probably some sort of human rights violation, isn’t it?

#oneaday, Day 324: Humbug

It’s easy to be cynical about Christmas these days, given that it starts in mid-September and proceeds to get increasingly more present in the months leading up to December until it is eventually omnipresent. (Happy, Mr Hussick?) By the time it actually arrives, people are so thoroughly sick of the whole “Christmas” thing that they just want it over and done with for another few months until the whole thing starts over again.

It’s not like that for everyone, of course. I doubt that the kids out there are as cynical about Christmas. I certainly wasn’t when I was a kid; Christmas was a time to be excited. There was a different atmosphere about the whole day, and not just the tangible excitement over getting presents or eating copious amounts of turkey dinner. It felt like a special day when nothing could possibly go wrong, when it would be impossible for Bad Things of any description to happen.

I haven’t felt like that for years now. I forget the last time I felt that way, but I’m pretty sure it was back in my childhood. Perhaps there’s more to be said for the belief in Santa Claus than people give credit for. It doesn’t help that the last few Christmases I’ve had were pretty underwhelming at best and downright unpleasant at worst. The Christmas that I had to work over and then spent the best part of Christmas week lying in bed alone suffering with a strong bout of flu—proper flu, the “can’t get up because your whole body aches too much” flu—was a particular lowlight, but the events of the past year haven’t made me particularly feel like celebrating anything at any point.

I am spending this Christmas abroad, though, away from this cold, grey, depressing land. I’ll be over in the States, where I’ll be spending most of the time with my family, including my brother, his wife and his kids, whom I haven’t seen for some time. I saw John earlier this year, but it’s still been a while. I’ll also be spending at least one weekend with my very good friend Mr Chris Whittington, former host of the Squadron of Shame SquadCast, and hopefully we’ll get the chance to put together a special seasonal/end-of-year show for everyone to enjoy. Then we can kick 2010’s ass out the door and let it rot in the gutter like it deserves to.

I seem to recall having similar thoughts at the beginning of this year; that 2009 had been, on the whole, shitty for most people involved including myself, and many of us started 2010 with hope for the future. I can say with some confidence right now that I’m just happy to get to the end of each day at the moment. Any time I’ve had a bit of long-term hope for the future, what with job interviews for positions I’d give my right arm for, those hopes have ended up being dashed for one reason or another. So right now it appears to be something of a case of taking each day as it comes and hoping something good eventually happens.

Not a great way to do things, but little else I can do right now. So you’ll forgive me if I’m not exactly full of festive cheer.