2015. An Optional Aside

As I write this my country is extending airstrikes from Iraq, which I suppose we feel we’ve sufficiently chewed up by now, into Syria. It’s an early, high ordinance Christmas present to our allies, a bit of international showmanship that, if the bombing in Iraq is any guide, will do very little beyond prove that the UK can still hang out with the big kids in the common room. For me the most sickening aspect was a chancellor who has presided over some of the harshest ideologically driven cuts onto our public services, cuts that have and will continue to kill our own citizens, telling us he has tens of millions set aside in a ‘special reserve’ to kill the citizens of other countries. If this wasn’t real than I would suspect him of being a cheap herald of the apocalypse in a terrible B-movie, presiding over famine, plague, war and death all at once while smiling smugly about necessities in a bad suit.

While the vote to drop bombs in Syria was underway I was escaping from reality by playing the Realtime Strategy game Dawn of War II. I have, apparently, either an overdeveloped sense of irony or none at all. I’d been thinking about writing some sort of reflection piece on 2015 and I’ve realised that my playing a game called Dawn of War on the dawn of a war which I was fundamentally opposed to felt like a good summation of a year in which our fictions have failed to keep pace with our reality. The long lead times and large budgets of mainstream film and games, the key underpinnings of nerd culture, have meant that we’ve had a succession of stories hit our palettes that were, maybe, conceived in lighter times.

I won’t talk much about films because it isn’t my area per se, but in a year in which extra-judicial killings have become commonplace (or at least common knowledge) — from police shootings to drone assassinations to acts of targeted domestic terrorism across the west — the juggernaut that is the MCU has been gearing up for the Civil War storyline. This is superhero storytelling at its most navel gazing and masturbatory, positing a world in which the non-heroic is almost irrelevant. Superheroes become both the cause and the solution to their own problems, operating on a level entirely separate from the world. If we were to be generous we could discuss this as a form of mythology, a hermetic parable where it is the shape of events above that mirrors the shape of events below and that this provides a commentary. In other circumstances I would be charitable, and I would be happy to trace how different ideologies can be worked through in a safer space, but this is not that kind of a year. Or rather, I think that that is still a valid and important way of engaging with fiction, but it just hasn’t felt enough.

Too often we are getting to a point where fictions are too close to real events and situations but they lack the guts to close out the deal and make a real statement, because they are still operating on a logic in which aloof libertarian equivalence and intellectual distance are moral positions of strength, rather than the moral capitulation it truly is. It is a distortion of post-modernism that says that nothing is real and it is all just words, a misunderstanding of logic that forgets the necessity of true premises in favour of the fun and sophistry of pure argument. A true post-modernism is one that highlights the myriad ways of looking at a thing without abstaining from judgement with that ironic shrug so beloved of our industrialised culture. A functioning and brave cultural apparatus will not say, when confronted, that it is ‘just a story’ but instead should demand to be taken seriously as exactly and precisely that. When I look at 2015 in games in review I see a dysfunctional cultural apparatus that cannot quite get a hold of the place of stories in a violent world with a rapidly shifting consensus and sense of awareness.

In 2015 America saw a heavily militarised police clash with civilian protesters following the deaths of civilians at the hands of a police force with a shoot-first mentality and an ingrained belief in the intrinsic criminality of large swathes of the population they are sworn to serve on the basis of racial and ethnic identities. In 2015 American publisher Electronic Arts released a game about a heavily militarised police force with a system encouraging a shoot-first mentality that requires a belief in the intrinsic criminality, and thus expandability, of a vast swathe of the population they are sworn to serve. That the game was ever conceived of as being a good idea is a nasty glimpse into the everyday banality of fascism and the way it hides behind and cannibalises ideas about moral equivalence and the modernist industrial exultation of the need to be doing and producing something, anything, rather than nothing. That it was considered fit for release and not just kicked to the long grass or canned is just unbelievable.

This is not about censorship either — of course a publisher can release whatever it wants whenever it wants — but a mature industry reschedules to avoid hurt and insensitivity on a fairly regular basis. It is also not about free speech, because to be honest the idea that Battlefield Hardline has anything vitally important to say that it couldn’t just as easily say in a form that wasn’t so brutally insensitive is laughable to say the least. Yet a games space that is used to the ongoing arguments between a personal relativism and a narrowly defined, technically-focused objectivity struggled to get to grips with a moral space that defies those two easy poles.

There was, to be clear, some incredible writing interrogating Battlefield Hardline, and the other big releases that, like it, were interested primarily in allowing players to enact in microcosm the iniquities that are enacted all around them on their fellow humans. However, despite a sense of the moral questions raised there feels like there are few moral answers being given, or at least moral stands being taken. The games are indicted for their message but still evaluated, even partially, on their mechanisms; crucially not just aesthetically but from a consumer standpoint. It’s like reviewing Ayn Rand on her sentence construction, saying at least Atlas Shrugged kept me turning the pages; it can be both accurate and made irrelevant by the subject under review and balancing these conflicting critical urges can only be an ethical decision. Where we stand is a product of how we engage, not just what we say. To examine propaganda as if it were art is in and of itself an engagement with and comment on the power of that propaganda, not a position of detached intellectual superiority.

In fairness I find this a difficult line to tread myself. I started this year deciding that I would shift my writing from the mental health and gaming advocacy and interrogation I was doing to this blog and a more consciously post-modern examination of games as art objects. And yet, I feel that I have felt less need to be morally ambiguous, less need to present a ‘balanced’ argument, even as my writing tends further towards an obfuscation of my position. I don’t know if this does come across; if this is a successful reaction against and squaring up to my own complicity in an artistic industry that thrives on death and destruction. I am as much of a part of the problem as anyone, but my conviction is that to accept that I am so is necessary, and my tools for doing so are post-modernism which, at it’s best, I see as a way of accepting and articulating the complexities of our compromised situations.

And yet, I feel like the most important thing I have written this year was a short, uncomplicated disavowal of a way of thinking that, contrary to everything I have said above, overdetermines the importance and impact of the games we play. Except that it isn’t entirely contrary, because I think that at heart it makes the same mistake about art, which is to say it makes a category error: it places art in a category that is incorrect, reducing our ability to talk about it meaningfully. Games are not ‘only games’, but they are games. It is fascinating but entirely understandable to me that, as we flee from the big, difficult questions that the existence of a game like Battlefield Hardline asks of us as consumers of militarised entertainment we seek to shore up our belief in games as culturally important by highlighting their power over us. Holding the position that a game is abusing you, or wasting your time, or enslaving you with addictive feedback loops is to hand over your agency economically, structurally and morally, to the game and the game industry itself. In this way, as with the review that accepts the existence of hateful, racist, misogynistic and ableist content as an inexorable given, the position that games will do what they want to us and we will pay for them and play them because of some ill-defined necessity is a capitulation. It is a self-seeking desire to not be responsible for one’s own actions or decisions.

2015 is the first full year that I have been on the board of a small frontline support services charity. It has been a year in which I have finally found the strength to provide what help and support I am able to for those who are in positions in which I once found myself. The work I have been doing at this end has made me angrier in my writing than I think I might have once been, but also more confident to state my case where I feel it needs to be stated. Writing that piece about Bloodborne felt like a process of exquisitely burning bridges among the critical games community. It certainly helped me realise that I did not belong in the heart of that space and that I should not try to construct an identity based upon being there, so to that extent it freed me up to talk more honestly about things. For what it is worth, every example of abuse I gave was either a first or second hand account.

So, this then is the summary of my thoughts on a year in which nothing has felt like it is actually what people want to claim that it is. It has been a year of sophistry and evasion and lies, a year in which reality has been so brutal that nothing has felt quite real, and so unrealities have stepped up to take its place.