Gamers can't read

A journey through the psyche of the dumbest and most illiterate subculture on the internet

It’s very funny to imagine that there was a time when gamers believed that, when video games as a medium finally earned the respect it deserved, they as gamers would suddenly be imbued with limitless cultural capital, as if their mastery of Dead or Alive Xtreme Beach Volleyball would somehow translate into sophisticated dinner party chatter overnight. That really was the impression you used to get! It had the vibe of the whole Iraqi Dinar scam, where MAGA dipshits bought up buckets of Dinars out of the expectation that Donald Trump would suddenly make each Dinar equal to one American dollar, because the gamers who felt disrespected did not seem to realize that the specific video games they consumed weren’t really the sort of work that would go on to garner artistic reappraisal. Much of GamerGate felt like a reaction to this disappointment, to realize that, when video games started to be taken seriously, the tastemakers of the new video game cultural elite would not be so omnivorous, and that the skill of even rudimentarily analyzing the themes in a “walking simulator” like Dear Esther would command a lot more cultural capital than say being really good at playing Guilty Gear.

This isn’t to say there was never anything reactionary about video games prior to GamerGate, obviously—like many in my age-bracket I spent a lot of my adolescence being called the n-word because I’d killed someone in Halo—nor was it the first time gamers had “gone too far”—doxxing and death threats were regular occurrences in the realm of online games, with a friend of mine even recently telling me about a time an adult man tracked down his MySpace and sent him a photo of his exposed asshole after beating him at Counter Strike. These were simply the ways that gamers, antisocial freaks that they are, generally expressed displeasure. But the pus was firmly inside the pimple. It was only once the outside world finally lanced it that it all came pouring out.

The ongoing video game culture war that has ensued has been exhausting to say the least. I basically try and ignore it all, which is easy as someone who no longer plays new AAA games, but occasionally a bug goes splat on my windshield as I’m speeding past the hornet’s nest. Most recently it’s been the brouhaha surrounding Ubisoft putting a Black samurai in the latest Assassin’s Creed. Amused, I went straight to the YouTube search bar, because you can’t really get the full effect without the audible symphony of tired squaking. My first though: why does every single one of these people now use red and white font on their thumbnails?

How quickly these people have abandoned the handy ol’ yellow Arial Bold. No loyalty these days. Sad.

Apparently this is it. This has killed Assassin’s Creed. A game series most people don’t think has been good for over a decade. Didn’t the last one feature actual adverts? Like, ads inside a game some people already spent $100+ on?

This thumbnail came up too, although at a glance it doesn’t involve the controversy at all and seems to predate the whole thing, but it was amusing anyway—

Based on the thumbnail it appears she’s mad about the inconsequential pride flags in Call of Duty. I don’t get it. It’s not like gay people don’t serve legally in several militaries. And even if they didn’t, why would you care about some stupid fucking pride flag? If I had to point to something DESTROYING Call of Duty I’d probably point to the experience of getting domed by Frank the Rabbit from Donnie Darko in the shadow of fucking Godzilla completely destroying the game’s tonal consistency, or possibly micro-transactions that eclipse the price of a game itself, but I suppose I’m maybe underselling the importance of Call of Duty vanity calling cards. God forbid we ruin the sanctity of Call of Duty vanity calling cards. This whole ordeal seeks to make a mockery of this one they made for a promotion they had with Little Caesar’s in which pizza itself is shown bringing about a nuclear holocaust.

This isn’t to say that I don’t find cynical inclusivity in media unpalatable. Making Middle-Earth so multiracial as they did in The Rings of Power—a show I haven’t and will not watch—doesn’t make sense from the outset simply because the kind of economy we see in that world would not allow for much diversity and requires more nuanced handling than the showrunners seem capable of. Peter Jackson went with an approach that made characters’ appearances alone something which could distinguish where they were from, because the sort of world they inhabit is not one which has the material conditions that underly widespread travel and much other than general racial homogeneity. There are races that stand in for non-white ethnic groups—the Easterlings and the Haradrim, for instance—and you could easily contrive of a reason for someone from one of those regions to find their way into the scope of the story, and maybe use it as an opportunity to interrogate and critique some of the more orientalist or otherwise racist elements of Tolkien’s world if you really feel the need; perhaps you could even deal with the fact that orcs in Tolkien’s world are exclusively framed through the lens of their enemies, possibly even humanize them.¹

Instead, of course, they seemed to choose at random and we wound up with, for instance, a Black dwarven queen—except that there haven’t been many generations of dwarves since their creation, as they’re so long-lived, so how did some of them turn out Black exactly? The Harad in Tolkien are darker-skinned than men to the north and live in a land approximating the deserts of North Africa, a region that is very hot and sunny (the hobbits even call it “Sunland”) suggesting there is a correlation in Tolkien’s world, as there is in our own, between environmental factors like these and the developments of darker skin tones. The dwarves all inhabit rather temperate regions and live under the fucking ground. How much sun are they exposed to? How the fuck would a race of dwarves ever turn out Black? Maybe this is explained in the show, who knows, but do they also explain why the Black elf has a fucking fade? Who keeps that up for him? Who forged the magic clippers? Was it Celebrimbor? If you somehow think I have to “suspend my disbelief” about that because “he’s an elf” then you miss the entire purpose of world-building and the “relative suspension” of disbelief it is supposed to promote in the first place, the fact that fantasy worlds are supposed to cohere to their own logics. When a world introduces suddenly too many questions without sufficient answers that sort of have to be hand-waved away, it chews on the integrity of that world. There was a thoughtful way to go about the whole thing, but instead the decision was made entirely so that you and I could fight about it in the first place.

This is all to say that I get why this shit makes people mad, because they intuit that it’s heartless and cynical, which it is, and it is as a result of that cynicism often handled very poorly (or even just intentionally poorly when they really want to stir the pot). The conclusion that these people have arrived at, however, is that this means any and all attempts to produce a more diverse array of media are bad and should be shunned, even when they make total sense. What is so particularly funny about this new one is that the guy they’re mad about for being in the game is completely real. He existed. He is not an obscure figure. This is far from his first appearance in pop culture. In the last decade or so in particular “did you know there was a Black samurai?” has taken on new life as a perennial historical fun fact. And fun facts don’t care about your fun feelings. Is Yasuke’s inclusion an attempt to pander for marketing? idk, I mean I wouldn’t put it past them, but as far those things go this is probably a pretty tolerable example of it, and Yasuke is a legitimately fascinating historical figure who I’m sure you could make a great game out of. It’s not as if you need to invent a Black samurai to get Black guys to play your game about feudal Japan. Blerds fucking love samurai. You ever talk to a nerdy Black guy about Samurai Champloo? Quite frankly, if there’s going to be many corrective “um actually” utterances after that game comes out, it will primarily be coming from Black guys with Naruto headbands. And bless them for it.

A very, very long time ago I watched Charlie Brooker’s Gameswipe, and a moment that has always stuck with me was this comment from Graham Linehan (or, if you prefer, Hatsune Miku):

I have a theory about what’s happening, which is I think a lot of writers, not only in games but also in films, have stopped reading books, they’re just watching films… the only thing that will give a game world and a story a bit of texture and depth and bit and traction is research. And by research I don’t mean watching Scarface twenty times in a row.

Self-styled “gamers” are on the whole ignorant and incurious people, and so have been, historcially, most of the people who make the games that cater to them. Gaming is the entire world to them. Many gamers even believe that the fuck-awful Borderlands film adaptation failed because it didn’t cater to gamers enough. I’ve seen gamers accuse fucking Space Marine II, a game where you play an elite member of the Space Waffen-SS, of being “woke” because there’s a woman in it. I’ve played the game. She exclusively refers to you as “my lord” and bows in your presence. Apparently she’s too much of a girlboss. Do these people have syphilis in their brains?

Touch grass? Not good enough. Touch fucking paper. Hold a fucking book in your hands. Learn to fucking read.

1. Austin Walker wrote a great article some time ago regarding the humanization/dehumanization of orcs in Lord of the Rings that is really worth reading and less stupid and cloying than that description sounds.