Here's an idea.
Let's explore the meaningful difference
between reviews and criticism.
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In March of 2015, here on Idea Channel,
we talked about The Sims and gender performance.
And I talked about how, even though The Sims has always
been a socially-progressive game series, at the time,
each players' semi-autonomous people-pets had
to adhere to the gender binary for seemingly
no reason other than, because, and in spite of the fact
that a masculine Sim in a dress is not exactly absurd, even
in The Sims' own terms.
Well, as of June 2016, that is no longer the case.
This Sim gets to wear a cute tank top.
This Sim gets to wear a tuxedo.
You want high heels?
Done.
Cargo pants?
All yours-- except, I mean, cargo pants, really?
OK.
You do you.
Who am I to judge?
Cargo pants for everyone!
You can still create a male or female Sim,
but there are more options if you want them.
You can create a Sim with a masculine or feminine frame
with a preference for masculine or feminine clothing.
You can decide if you can get other Sims pregnant,
get pregnant themselves, or neither.
And you can choose how your Sim uses the toilet.
And all of these things can be changed at any time.
Instead of, say, providing a slider
with strictly male and strictly female on either end
or a litany of radio-button options
for all potential gender identities,
Maxis's solution to their gender trouble
treats gender as a set of lower-level decisions.
Your Sim's gender doesn't have to be a top-down choice that
determines what they are.
Their gender emerges from a number of decisions
based on how they appear and what they do.
So instead of saying what your Sim's gender is,
you make decisions about things that tend to signify gender.
And one decision doesn't dictate the next.
Your Sim can look male, dress masculine, pee standing up,
and get pregnant.
Your Sim's gender also emerges unlabelled.
After deciding some characteristics,
the game doesn't pop up Clippy-style
and say, looks like you are trying to make a trans woman!
It just lets your Sims live, unlabelled.
Effectively, Maxis's solution demonstrates
the ways gender is perceived based
on persistent, though by no means permanent, actions,
preferences, and appearances-- i.e.
performance.
It also hints at how such an understanding can meaningfully
exist outside of language and taxonomies.
It's possible, and in many situations maybe preferable,
to understand non-gender conforming Sims-- and humans,
for that matter-- without preoccupation
over what gender-expression subheader they fit into
and how that subheader relates to their anatomy.
Of course, it would be great if Idea Channel could take credit
for these adjustments, but that would be very unfair.
Lots of people have written many thoughtful and much more
visible things about this game, which
has a massive and massively diverse followup,
and they been doing that since long before we came along.
Critics and fans have written and made
videos about the game's treatment
of gay marriage, same-sex parenting, and even
restrictions on Sims' names and descriptions.
And in each case, Maxis has listened, responded, adjusted,
and improved.
In effect, this is the purpose of criticism,
not to tear down but to gesture towards what
has yet to be built and encourage its construction.
There can be an aspect of disappointment, it's true.
But disappointment and deep-abiding respect
aren't mutually exclusive.
They're frequently a package deal.
It's often what critics love the most
that they want the best from.
Dig into most criticism, and the first thing
that you learn is the people who have
high expectations for something are
invested in its success, not its failure.
I'm going to suggest a rhetorical distinction and one
that I think is important.
A review is concerned with how something is.
Criticism is about what it is, how it functions,
and what it does, both itself and to us.
The former makes a judgment of something's worthwhile-ness.
The latter takes its worthwhile-ness as granted,
which is exactly what makes it worthy of criticism.
When games generate reviews, it's
a sign that they are for sale.
When games generate criticism, it's
a sign they're important, impactful, and influential.
The Sims is.
Prison Architect is.
Dark Souls, Inside, Kentucky Route Zero,
No Man's Sky, and Overwatch are, so they generate criticism.
And similarly, RimWorld is yet another impactful game.
And criticism surrounding it has, in the recent past,
generated some debate.
I'm not going to get into the details-- links
in the doobly-doo.
But the reader's-digest version is this.
RimWorld is a story sim often compared to Dwarf Fortress.
You control a small band of colonists stranded
on an alien planet who must survive
hostile environments and each other for as long as possible.
Like Dwarf Fortress and The Sims,
you can tell your colonists, or pawns, what to do,
but you can't tell them how to feel.
And this factors into your success.
A sad pawn is a useless pawn.
For what it's worth, I really like RimWorld.
I have played it a fair amount.
RimWorld is unfinished.
It's currently in open alpha.
And it has one developer, Tynan's Sylvester,
who you may remember me quoting in our No Man's Sky episode.
Recently, the conversation around RimWorld
got heated when MIT Comparative Media Master's student Claudia
Lo wrote for Rock Paper Shotgun about RimWorld
in a way similar to but better and more
thoroughly than how we spoke about The Sims.
Lo, a RimWorld player herself, addresses
a problem that is well-known to the player community.
Straight male pawns repeatedly hit on gay female pawns
who turn them down.
Barring any changes to the colony,
the straight male pawns will repeat their mistake
again and again with their mood meter dipping downward
each time until they eventually fall
into a crippling depression.
They may even snap.
The situation has spawned a hilariously titled post
on the RimWorld subreddit which, until Lo's piece,
was top voted.
Lo dug into the actual code of RimWorld
to see how this attractive lesbians' problem occurs.
She was curious how, or if, some social code found
its way into game code, and she found exactly that.
Certain game elements reproduce, in her estimation,
non-nuanced assumptions about people who are gay or bi.
She found a list of things about how the game treats
gender and sexuality, and she thought
people would be interested.
Her premise is simple.
Code is never neutral.
Her contention is that RimWorld's is
a system whose base structure has literally
encoded assumptions about how men and women operate.
And that while the causes may be subtle,
the effects have an enormous impact on how you play,
which does, in fact, seem to be the case.
Unfinished, temporary, alpha release,
known problem-- its all sort of besides the point, she writes,
if those impacts are present and being experienced
by players, people who exist in the world
and are affected by things in it.
The code of the game itself may be invisible,
but its effects aren't.
It represents ideas about how the game
world and, to hear Tynan's defense,
the real world operates.
And those ideas are then passed on to players through play.
Lo admits, most of the time, that passing on
is fairly benign, but questions whether such
is the case in this specific situation.
Because RimWorld is impactful, she wants to ask, how?
Her take is readable, and it's interesting, and the back
and forth about her piece in the comments
and elsewhere is heated.
The piece is described as an "anger-farming witch hunt."
There's some discussion of editorial practice and balance,
and there's also lots of discussion
about the purpose of the piece.
To complain?
To dissuade people from buying RimWorld?
In the end, Lo doesn't claim that the game
is bad or unplayable, beyond what has already been widely
discussed in the community.
She doesn't give it a 4 out of 10
and say, don't waste your money.
She addresses, in detail, a situation
experienced by a plurality of players
and its potential impact.
She begins to imagine a version of the game
with differently encoded pawn identities.
In other words, her work is criticism, not review.
But still, there's a vocal contingent
which characterizes her work as a "hit."
There are complaints that Lo brought politics to a game
where previously there were none.
And it's that last thing that I want to focus on and conclude
with, the idea that RimWorld and other media
are politics-free until some enterprising crybaby shows up.
I would like to suggest that there is, in fact,
no media without politics.
Not governmental politics, but politics politics--
the distribution and maintenance of power.
One way to see if something has politics is to ask,
is there money involved?
Money and power romp hand-in-hand
through the field of life, so if there's money,
there's a power dynamic between people interacting with it.
So anything involving money involves power,
and, viola, it's political.
Another way to tell if something is political
is if it has an audience.
Creators and audience members have differing types
and amounts of power, some but not all derived from money,
but also visibility, thought leadership, cultural capital.
And so the audience/creator relationship is political.
But, OK, when someone complains about bringing politics
to media, they probably mean identity politics.
If I had more time, I might argue
that there's no real difference between politics and identity
politics, but I don't, and Olly over at Philosophy Tube already
made that video, so bases covered.
So what I want to say is this.
If a piece of media involves people who necessarily possess
identities, even if they're fictional,
then it has identity politics.
What kinds of people the media depicts
and how they're depicted involves
visibility, and audience, and all of those other things,
so it involves power.
And that's why The Sims's and RimWorld's treatment of people,
even simulated people, is meaningful and subjected
to criticism, because critics often want
the best for what they love.
They know games are both powerful and capable of being
responsible with that power.
To demand that media not be politicized
is sort of like demanding that fire not be hot.
There may be some possible experience of it
where you don't get the thing that you don't want.
If you stand far enough away from a bonfire,
it's orange, but not warm.
If you stand far enough away from video games,
it's got people, but no politics.
But by their nature, fire, hot; media, political.
We would, all of us, I think, do well
to remember that thoughtful criticism isn't bringing
politics but uncovering it.
And it's not a judgment of something's worth,
but acceptance and evidence of it.
What do all think?
What are the differences between review and criticisms?
There will be no Comment Response
video for this FURTHERMORE video,
but I'm going to be here.
I'm going to be answering some comments throughout the week.
So let me know what you think in the comments below.
In this week's Comment Response video,
we talked about your thoughts regarding sexy, Overwatch fan
art.
If you want to watch that one, you
can find a link in the doobly-doo,
or wait for the end screen.
We have end screens now!
It's nice to be back.
I hope everybody had a good two weeks,
and for those of you who celebrated Thanksgiving,
I hope that you've had a fun and family-filled--
if that is what you so choose-- Thanksgiving dinner.
In case you missed it, over the break, my podcast,
Reasonably Sound, finally returned
from its one-year hiatus.
So if you want to check that out,
there's a new episode out about the type of sound
the inception sound is, and there
is going to be a new episode sometime this week about dog
whistles and how those work.
Another thing to keep an eye on for is that Project for Awesome
starts this week, and I'm going to be doing some things
with them, so keep an eye on the Project for Awesome
Twitter and website to see when I'm
going to be on the live stream and the kinds of perks
that we're going to be giving away.
It's going to be super fun.
We have a Facebook, an IRC, and a subreddit.
And the tweet of the week comes from David Gunkel,
who you may remember us quoting back in one of our AI episodes,
who points us towards a piece about how it's hard for us
to understand our relationship to AI, or robots,
before we move fully understand animals relationships to us.
It's very interesting read.
But then also every tweet from someone
like @unique35, who pointed us towards all
of the B-movie nonsense that is currently going on on YouTube.
We have a whole back catalog of things
we're going to have to get to in 2017-- Westworld, the Gilmore
Girls, B-movie.
All kinds of stuff.
It's going to be a busy-- it's going
to be a busy first quarter.
And last but certainly not least,
this week's episode would not have been possible or good
without the very hard work of these enterprising crybabies.
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