Media literacy and the lack of it on show by much of traditional games journalism

Update: I actually ended up speaking to Dean Takahashi on twitter and this blog came up, he was a decent guy and took this quite harsh criticism in this piece very well and I have no ill will towards him at all and actually wish him all the best. 

Do you remember when you were back in highschool English class and your teacher was on about what was meant by various things brought up in plays of the past? The symbolic escalation in Of Mice and Men? The idea of love being able to overcome even the most bitter rivalries in Romeo and Juliet even if those rivalries ultimate doom said love?

The idea of media literacy is the be able to look at media and try to find meaning in it. When people say these days "Everything is political" they often pretty quickly end up showing their complete lack of understanding of what that phrase is truly about. According to the Oxford English Dictionary Politics has a number of definitions.

The most interesting one being:

Activities aimed at improving someone's status or increasing power within an organization.
‘yet another discussion of office politics and personalities’

So even a simple act of let's say a detective determined to solve a tough case could be said to be political due to solving said case potentially benefiting him in terms of actual status or social status within said organisation. This is what "Everything is political" truly means. What people crowing this phrase often mean however is "Everything should be partisan". This idea that one way or another people will still make their art "influence people" and as such "we" had better make sure it influences people to "do the right thing" by which they generally mean support their politics and ideas.

@draxid - Art is just another tool for communication. Its not automatically sacred, valuable or meaningful. The message is what matters.

— Jonathan McIntosh (@radicalbytes) August 9, 2012

The reason I'm bringing this up is because Dean Takahashi, best known for being less competent than a small child at Cuphead and for failing to understand that Mass Effect had the ability to upgrade yourskills for much of the game, has put out a piece on about politics in videogames. In the piece he proves that his English degree was a complete waste of time and that he learned little to nothing from it in terms of actual interpretation of theme, ideas and symbolism in works of art.

Oh and if you think I'm being overly harsh here this is a piece where Dean tries to portray Detroit: Become Human as some grand work of art in the video game world. Even forgetting for a moment that Detroit Become Human has likely taken a lot of inspiration from HUM∀NS  the UK show and the Swedish original it is based on Real Humans. Detroit: Become Human is considered by many to be extremely on the nose with its messaging and symbolism with little real nuance to it as such. I mean there is a reason people make so many jokes about David Cage games even if I do personally enjoy said games. I can see where the criticism comes from and understand it. To me I don't see David Cage games as some kind of high art I see them as silly often pretentious pieces that think they are grander than they are while in reality coming off as a bit trashy, as an example from film, David Cage games are the video game equivalent of the film Kaboom.

The thing is this isn't about Dean Takahashi as a person, I'm bringing him up as the name of the latest person in a long line of people who represent a larger problem in video game journalism and commentary as a whole. The seeming complete lack of media literacy or understanding beyond a surface level of a work. Now I'm not claiming to be some great thinker able to see deep meanings but it's worrying to me when I'm able to look deeper and find deeper layers in works than professional paid video game journalist who claim to care about video game artistry and meanings in games. To me it seems like they're just entirely missing all symbolism and commentary in video games, such as the quite obvious parallels between terrorism in the real world and "bioterrorists" or "conduits" in Infamous Second Son. Using said game to explore concepts about the nature of terrorism and what approach if any ever truly work.

What we're seeing in the industry is not a push for better or more complex bits of artistry or discourse but calls for message mongering and blatantly explaining meaning and ideas to the audience to make sure even the Garmz Jurnalizts can understand it. Worse so that said works are called to align with said Garmz Jurnalizts beliefs or they get called Sexist / Racist or biggoted and see review scores docked. It was either Oscar Wilde or Charles Dickens who wrote in their essays on the nature of criticism that it shouldn't be the job of a critic reviewing a work to judge said work on the basis of agreeing or disagreeing with the politics of it. The point of rating it not based on agreeing or disagreeing with politics expressed within it was because as was pointed out in said essay that politics moves on such that the politics of today will likely become the history books of 5-10 years. Focusing on modern politics doesn't create great works that will last, most of the great works tell us something not about politics but about the nature of humanity itself both good and ill.

You want an example of what I mean by talking about the nature of humanity itself? It's pretty simple, do you remember the political joke in Romeo and Juliet? There's one joke that was highly political did you really not remember it? Well chances are you don't remember it because the joke is so far from being related to present society or current year politics that even if the version of the play you read or saw had the joke in it no-one laughed even if they did understand what it was about. The joke is no longer funny because it is now so far removed from the politics and culture and society that created it. The joke for those wondering was about a collier and right at the start of Romeo and Juliet. In many versions of the play the joke is removed simply because it's irrelevant to modern audiences.

Media literacy is important because when Anita Sarkeesian was talking about how Watch_Dogs sex slave auction sequencewas designed to make straight male players horny, anyone with even basic media literacy could have looked at the scene in context of what came before

Then seeing what came before was a hallway of women on the verge of tears and a CCTV camera showing a woman burst into tears having presumably done a porn audition (not caught in my video above) then basic media literacy would tell you "No people aren't meant to feel horny seeing nude women they're meant to feel sorry for them and see them as suffering an awful fate as the girls in the hallway before were nearly in tears and not being subjected to something this extreme, though still subjected to something they didn't want to do." A lot of the arguments in support of Anita were that her work was proving video games were growing up and being subjected to academic art criticism, only they really weren't. A lot of art criticism has moved on from the days of what could be called "School based" criticism which was more looking at the piece through and ideological lens and determining how much said piece agreed with the beliefs of said ideology. As an example Brechtian analysis. Modern art criticism, or at least my plebian understanding of it is that there often isn't an obvious right answer and so multiple answers are argued over with points and evidence presented to support various claims as to what said works and elements of them mean.

The idea that not only must everything overtly say something but that thing being said must be relevant to modern socio-political discourse is, well it feels like it's calling for all modern media to take their lead from G.I.JoePSAs. It might sound well and good to people whose whole main hobby seems to be politics to have overt partisan games acting as little more than hitpieces or dare I say propaganda but there's saying that goes "You don't talk about Religion, Politics and especially not Football" as those tend to be great dividers of people. The idea being people don't always want to talk about those things unless politics is literally a major hobby to them and or they have little else to say, and by politics I mean partisan politics.

The additional hilarious irony of people pushing for overt partisan politics in video games likely (given their propensity for calling things racist and sexist at the drop of a hat and getting very tetchy and Dean actually referencing the Guardian on about how to make games progressive now) wouldn't be very happy if more games were partisan political if it didn't agree with them. Heck it's worth pointing out a game I find to be just in concept alone and what little I've heard of it the most vile, repulsive and egregious game I've heard of is a title that does push partisan politics. That game is called ZOG's Nightmare and the party whose politics it pushes is the Nazi party, well Neonazi. I've not played it, I only heard about it on an episode of Extra Credits.  As an additional side note: it's kind of funny to me how with all the claims or White Supremacists using games and gaming as a recruitment platform or even claims gaming is infested with Nazi's that none of these publication actually bring up an actual vile (IMO) game pushing ideas that I as I'd think every other sane person would also find vile that exists and instead talking about some supposed spectre of recruiters somehow planning to use Fortnite to boost their ranks of idiocy.

A while ago people kept saying how gaming needed to grow up. Honestly I think it's time a number of Garmz Jurnalizsts did too and stopped thinking that grown up meant super serious moody pieces or ones with overt politics. That's the kind of thing I'd expect from an angsty teenager or maybe a college Freshman. As C.S. Lewis once said

"When I became a man I put away Childish things, including the fear of Childishness and the desire to be very grown up."

So to you Dean if someone sent you this and you've read this far, or to anyone else like Dean reading this. Video gaming may already have had some of its great classic pieces of art made, but no-one noticed. Most of you lot were too busy asking why every game didn't have some version of the idea "Orange Man & Gamergate Bad" in it one way or another and were too blinded by your desire to see a gaming takedown of Trump you couldn't see any other themes of things being said by games. I get it, you don't like him. To use a phrase certain groups who keep on about how games should be more political and meaning partisan, let me just say, please do better, be better and prove you have some actual media literacy skills once in a while.