text by No Escape

In The Land of Endless Greed

CW: Sexual assault and harassment mention

Lately I’ve been seeing a meme spread Online with greater prolificity every day. It’s a slogan over some glitchy visuals, makes for a real good bumper sticker:

I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who were paid more to work less and I’m not kidding.

A lot of folks I follow in video games media have shared it. So have a lot of folks I follow in video game development. Hell, I’ve shared it. Something about it has been bothering me, though.

My parents were magazine publishers in the motocross industry from the late 1990s to the late 2000s. One of their friends/colleagues/competitors/enemies had a slogan he liked to say:

It’s only a party if everyone’s invited.

I didn’t get why he said this, and I didn’t get why my parents liked to repeat it, until long after their motocross magazine had been dead for years.

When I got into college I learned about the Industrial Workers of the World, a radical labor union that organized industrially (hence the name) instead of by business group. While their membership has waxed and waned over the decades, they have never fully gone away. They have a slogan, too:

An injury to one is an injury to all.

Solidarity. It’s a concept I think we all innately understand, yet use incorrectly sometimes. We can use solidarity to uplift, but also to keep down. We are at a party, and who wants to ruin the party?

The meme “I want shorter games…” is right, in a sort of twee way you might call “wholesome,” as in “wholesome games.” It’s basically saying “let’s fix the video game industry,” which, yeah. We should do that. It even kind of offers a path forward: stop fixating on high definition, resolution, polygon counts, etc., pay people a fair wage and don’t make them work fucked hours in the process. It feels nice to share.

I suppose it might even feel a little bit ideologically daring if the idea of “let’s fix the video game industry” has just arrived on your front doorstep for the first time. And hey, there’s nothing wrong with calling for more roughage in your digital consumption habits. I have to say, though: it feels a bit like President Biden’s “Build Back Better” slogan.

You can’t really disagree with it because there’s no immediately apparent meaning to it, just a sense that you agree generally if you, like, squint and turn your head sideways.

Industry. Milieu. Scene. Community. It’s only a <insert your favorite word here> if everyone’s invited.

I want to tell you about the last time I missed seeing Bad Religion in Oklahoma City.

2012 or 2013. It’s been a long time and I can’t remember some aspects of those years anymore for reasons I will not get into. I had just gotten a car, a 2001 Chrysler Sebring with no air conditioning. I’ve been arranging to meet a friend to go to see Bad Religion at an outdoor arena here for about two weeks. I bought a ticket in advance. I have merch money. I’m driving around my town. It’s the middle of one of the hottest summers on record. I have the windows down to at least get the air moving. Sweat isn’t even rolling down my temples at this point, it’s so hot. I’d just eaten a sandwich somewhere. I’m beginning to feel sick.

Every time I think about the show I feel worse. My head is swimming and my gut feels detached from my body, resting about two feet above its normal position and three inches to the right. I think about who I might see. I used to be in a band. I might see someone who knew me from then. I used to be part of my local punk scene. I might see someone who knew me from then.

I think about the man who shared a PHIL-1000 class with me, who followed me from the classroom across campus to the media studies compound one day, just to tell me to stop “talking shit” about a local band he liked. He liked to wear a jacket covered in bottlecaps. He always smelled like Pabst Blue Ribbon, even at school. The drummer of this local band sexually assaulted my best friend. I feel my stomach flip and almost throw up. I don’t throw up. I drive home. I text my friend and let them know I can’t make it. Something has come up. I don’t sell the ticket online. It’s $30 down the drain. I lie down and fall asleep, tears streaking down my face.

That is the last time I missed Bad Religion in Oklahoma City.

The Positive Aspect of Negative Thinking

Punk rock runs through sociopolitical, aesthetic and cultural spaces. While new punk and hardcore albums are being made every single day, it’s a genre whose significance is tied unfortunately directly to a period from about 1977 to 1985, and then again from 1992 to 2004. These are wide swathes of time with very little connective tissue directly between them from punk itself, however they’re when punk gained “mainstream prominence.”

Bad Religion is a band from Los Angeles, CA that got its start directly in the middle of the first “Definitive” punk era, and then rose to popularity in the second. They released their first album in 1981, How Could Hell Be Any Worse? on Epitaph Records, and it was pretty good and sold pretty well among punks. It’s held up alongside other prominent Southern California punk and hardcore classics like Black Flag’s Damaged (1981), Descendents’ Milo Goes to College (1982), and Adolescents’ 1981 self-titled LP. Bad Religion’s second album, Into the Unknown, came out in around 1985, and while it wasn’t bad, it also wasn’t “punk” enough, and so almost immediately Epitaph bought almost all the copies it sold back. This led to an almost five-year hiatus.

The main nucleus of Bad Religion is lead singer-songwriter Greg Graffin and lead guitarist and songwriter Brett Gurewitz. While other members (especially drummers) have come and gone, Graffin has been in the band the entire time, and Gurewitz only left for a few years in the mid 1990s while their contract with Atlantic Records was finishing up. They were the main writers and composers behind 1989’s Suffer, which introduced the world to a revitalized Bad Religion. The lyrics were wild, polysyllabic, and Graffin sung them at an auctioneer’s pace.

From then on the band wrote songs generally about society in decline, and paid special attention to Christianity and its relationship with the state. Songs like “American Jesus” and “Skyscraper” off Recipe for Hate, “Sorrow” off The Process of Belief and “Sinister Rouge” off The Empire Strikes First all carry these themes, buoyed by the anger in Graffin’s voice and the ferocity of the backing instrumentation. Songs about other themes, like climate change, overpopulation and reckoning with the ever-nearing specter of death, appear frequently as well. If you’re wondering why people who listen to Bad Religion aren’t horribly depressed it’s because Graffin got into bluegrass in 1998 and so every song he’s written with Gurewitz since then also kind of sounds like it could be an upbeat little ditty to be square-danced to at the shindig.

Also I am still horribly depressed, thanks for not asking.

Portrait of Authority

Quick. Close your eyes and tell me where you think punk rock as a monolithic musical genre-cum-subculture lies on the political spectrum. If you said “liberal” or “left-wing” or even “explicitly radical left,” you win a prize! Come get this Chumbawamba Greatest Hits compilation from the concierge on the way out (there’s only one song on it). It isn’t even remotely true, of course, but it’s a convenient lie people inside and out of the broader scene like to tell ourselves, each other and the world.

And hey look, it’s not even that you’d be wrong to think that punk is situated in a left framework; a bunch of bands explicitly skew anarchist, many have members that help out with mutual aid projects and food not bombs, are anti-war and pro-choice, and are worried about the effect people are having on the environment and climate. There’s an entire subsection of straight-edge hardcore called hardline that values veganism and explicitly radical green-anarchist groups like the Earth/Animal Liberation Fronts.

But a close reading of the lyrics of bands like Bad Religion may uncover a deep conservative (relative to the rest of punk) streak that isn’t really even that far under the surface.

Bad Religion, to be honest, is pure Amy-Klobuchar-Pete-Buttigieg-Bill-and-Hillary-Clinton-ass nihilistically smug centrism, man. Often through their discography, you can hear snide comments made at radical activism’s expense, with Graffin often literally asking “what do you think you can even accomplish here? You mean nothing; your actions are literally going to be worth nothing.”

What I’m saying is that one of the most celebrated punk bands even to this day, a prime feature in many Tony Hawk video games, may not actually be all that punk, but the illusion they are is important to keep up. When they go on tour, they play in major venues, concert halls and stadiums, not shitty little dive bars where all six opening bands and the touring band have to share the same twelve feet in the back for a merch table. They headlined the Reason Rally in Washington DC in 2012, alongside Eddie Izzard and Richard Dawkins, for fuck sake.

Bad Religion is easily digestible rock music for people who fucking love science and who tell people they will only fuck partners with bookshelves full of books without remembering that we’re only eight years out from the climate change-spurred total meltdown of civilization and they should really consider getting an e-reader app for their smartphone. It’s made for critics who really want to show you that they have a degree in English or a degree in Music History. Almost every punk loves them. I love them. It’s fucking despicable. It’s The Way Things Have To Be.

Because the big lie here hides a bunch of little lies that are, on balance, much worse.

The Grand Delusion

We are at the Party.

We are in the Industry.

We are a part of the Scene.

We make up the Community.

The Party has been going on for a long time, but you just got your invite recently. Or maybe the invitation was, in fact, open to all: it’s not a party if not everyone is invited, etc. You get there, or maybe you’ve been there for a while, and the sun has been going down. It looks bustling. A quick scan of the faces as you walk in from the long, sloping driveway tells you explicitly that everyone is Having a Great Time. This is an Excellent Party.

You walk in the door and someone takes your jacket. You might have underdressed or overdressed for the occasion but it’s too late to take a raincheck and change into something more appropriate. One of the party organizers notices you and gives you a big embrace, guides you with arm around shoulder out of the foyer and into the main gaggle of folks, all grins. You listen to their words and laugh at appropriate times. You drink what they hand you. Everything they’re saying sounds great. But soon your mind and eyes wander from this conversation. You notice for the first time that some folks aren’t smiling.

There’s a backyard porch. A firepit is smoldering low. You wander outside. The evening air is cool and crisp, a contrast with the scorching heat earlier in the day. Smaller groups are gathered here and there. People don’t talk very loud out here. In fact, when you walk past some of these groups they give you sidelong stares until you’re once again comfortably out of earshot. Someone is sitting and crying, alone, on a planter. Nobody supports them.

The backyard is big. A forest marks its furthest boundary from the house. You see a couple of groups of three or four out there, smoking cigarettes and whispering to each other angrily.

Everyone is dressed like you. This is the first time you’ve noticed.

The evening has fully transitioned into night and cool air has become cold, with a small slash of bitterness to it. You turn to walk back inside. The others don’t move. The drink is starting to kick in. You don’t feel good. Inside, you rejoin the big circle, are handed another drink. The uneasy feeling goes away.

Sometime later, you excuse yourself once more. The night has dragged on, and there are still so many people here. Suddenly, you hear a scream. You turn around, and there is the partygoer you saw crying alone outside earlier. They are sitting on the floor in the middle of the party space, and they scream again. Nobody from the main group, in fact, nobody at all, comes to check on them, to see if they’re okay. They scream again. And a fourth time. By scream number five, you see their eyes searching the room. They lock eyes with yours, expectant. You panic. Should you help them? Nobody else seems particularly bothered. You really just got here, is it really your business? Then, they are looking elsewhere. You hear yourself exhaling. A new friend from the main group tells you not to worry about it. Drama.

The screaming, crying partier slowly picks themselves up and trudges back outside.

Someone in the circle says, this just happens from time to time. You get used to it.

Destined for Nothing

Here’s a question for you: why do we call things – often serious problems – that affect ingroup cohesion “drama?” I have never understood this. I’ve heard it in a supposedly professional context here in the video game industry (either this or the equally-loaded term “discourse” – oh we’re coming for discourse), I’ve heard it in school, I heard it all the time when I was in the punk scene, I have even heard it in the context of official union communications. “Oh, no doubt you’ve heard about the drama over here” or “Ope look at that discourse over there, better just avoid being online today.” We do this so often. I am truly fucking baffled by this behavior.

A celebrated, award-winning video game designer and artist was raped and that rape was massively misreported by a major video game outlet, and this becomes “drama.” People were sexually harassed and worked nearly to death at several major video game studios and it becomes part of “labor rights discourse” or, of course, “drama.” Dozens of Twitch streamers, including some who worked closely with or directly at Twitch, were outed as abusers over the summer and that simply vanished. Ubisoft’s entire office culture of sexual violence was uncovered in 2020, and we’re all so fucking gung-ho for Assassin’s Creed: Valhalla.

Racism in the video game industry? Our PR teams will put out some wonderful copy on a black background to address it, not forgetting to use the right hashtags. We’ll say we’re creating diversity workshops and hiring groups just to make sure nobody’s missing, but we’ll only mention it this one time so that folks can forget it and we don’t have to make the expense again in the next quarter. Sexism in the video game industry? We’ll get our company’s CEO on camera to say we’re committed to doing better in the future, and then forget to put it in the package with our yearly game announcement livestream. Our game causes literal seizures in people? We mentioned this in the EULA! It’s fine! Talking any more about it is just drama, drama, drama.

Focusing on any of this for longer than one news cycle makes you drama-obsessed and simply wanting to cause problems.

A couple weeks ago, Brendan Vance posted an article whose premise was essentially: the video game industry is made of bad. All of its component parts are bad down to the molecular level. The people who get fired for sexual assault and harassment allegations will simply be replaced by eager cultural clones, so-called “Boss-guys” and “Winners” whose entire purpose and personality is to perpetuate the Way Shit Is. This is to say nothing of “tamer” shit, like crunch and other workplace abuses.

Imagine going to a party and finding out that one of the partygoers was hurt by a party organizer in a meaningful sense, something terrible was done to them. What would your reaction be? Would you leave? Would you try to change things? Would you try to tell someone? What if every single day a new partygoer got hurt, in the same way, by the same organizers? What would you conclude? We are trapped in the belly of this horrible machine, and the machine is bleeding to death.

When I hear “I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who were paid more to work less and I’m not kidding” I feel disappointed that it won’t go far enough. No matter how nice it is as a sentiment it simply can’t address the fact that this entire industry is built on a rotting foundation, and this rotting foundation is bigger than the industry. It’s capitalism, of course it is – but it’s more than capitalism. It’s more than just misogyny, white supremacy, nationalism, ableism, homophobia and transphobia by themselves – it’s all of this and more. I’ve seen this same rotten shit in every radical milieu and subcultural scene I’ve ever “been a part of,” in every Industry I’ve ever worked in and every Community I’ve called home. And you’ve seen it too. Maybe you ignored it because it didn’t effect you specifically, or maybe it did and you were forced to let it happen because your only alternative was isolation, unemployment, disenfranchisement. Maybe we reduce everything down to “drama” because if we didn’t, if we took all this shit as seriously as it should be taken, we would be forced to come to the conclusion that the foundation was rotten and the whole building should be razed.

But what would happen after this razing?

I Want Something More

The party must end.

It’s become a cliché at this point to simply point out that 2020 was a terrible year. My fear is that it was so bad we’ve become desensitized: “yeah that <insert horrific example of abuse here> was bad, but compared to 2020? bring it on!” Every new story elicits a tired shrug and a groan, because how often can you react with anger and sadness and then see nothing happen as a result? You can’t be a live wire forever, because eventually the energy runs out.

What I saw in the games industry in 2020 was supremely upsetting. And it’s continuing this year: an independent studio’s director was accused of sexually harassing coworkers incessantly. Activision-Blizzard says it can’t commit to a diverse hiring pool because it would be too hard for one of the biggest companies in the world to do. Nathalie Lawhead is still fucking waiting for either an apology and retraction of the story of their sexual assault from Kotaku EIC Stephen Totilo (or his resignation). It will be 365 days since they first started asking for accountability from that website on March 28, 2021.

And yet the thing I can’t fucking deny is that video games sometimes… are good, in spite of all of the neoliberal capitalists’ attempts at making them bad. Lawhead just uploaded a new version of their game/website/art installation Tetrageddon, and it rules. Michael Saba’s latest Dreaming in Neon video, “SHAME OF THE YEAR: The Utter Failure of ‘GOTY,’” reminded me that Animal Crossing: New Horizons did a lot to bring people together last year when almost nothing else (except maybe the fucking Q conspiracy) could. Honestly every good memory I have of the last eighteen months – every new friend I’ve made – is tied to something video game-related.

Those good moments cannot come at other people’s expense. In Brendan Vance’s piece they said that this industry was separated into sycophant winners, and losers who spoke truth to power regardless of how it hurt their career opportunities. If there’s one thing I’ve learned from Blaseball it’s that sometimes losers win. Solidarity can no longer be a four-letter word. We need to organize, not just in labor groups or consumer groups, but across the boundaries of our industries and roles. We have common interests and common desires. Our common enemy is the bosses and Boss Guys who think the status quo in this industry is fine. Beneath the cobblestones, the beach! If we have to rip up the very foundation of this industry to create a better world, then so be it. The collective joy will be worth it.

I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who were not abused by their collaborators, co-workers and bosses, who were paid enough to live comfortably not because of the value they brought to the company or the scene or the whatever but because they’re a human fucking being; I want shorter games with worse graphics made by people who didn’t have to make GoFundMes to pay rent or put out their Ko-Fi links just to get enough money to eat on a day-to-day basis. And I’m not kidding.

 

DISCLAIMER: you can find No Escape at http://noescapevg.com/ and on twitter dot com @noescapevg