Popular Culture & The Civic Imagination: 'Who and What Belongs: #Gamergate and Abjection' (2 of 2)
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SP: I think what you're talking about here, this process of identifying and suppressing the abject element ("the monster") among us, is definitely liminal, or at least incredibly prone to crossover between both physical and virtual spaces even though they may seem distinct and separate. Especially when threats of physical violence are the means by which people are pushed out of virtual space. This discussion of pain and emotion in this context too become hyper-relevant when the way the abject element is identified is by people displaying the wrong emotions in the wrong (virtual) spaces (like making a game about depression).
Instead of getting you started on the nature of pain and emotions, I'd like to get you started on the role they play in this, and the public sphere more broadly. You use your chapter to frame gg as imagined publics in revolt and show how these processes reflect on, and happen in the public sphere generally. Can you expand a bit more on this process of pain, emotion, and affect in the public sphere?
jm: Okay so your question really touches on another seminar paper I wrote, this time for a class in Annenberg called Networked Publics. I argued that if we use a habermasian conception of the public sphere in that speech = agency and conversation = sphere, I think when we approach rhetoric from a wholistic perspective —ethos, logos and pathos— we must also consider feeling as a form of speech. We obviously recognize people with no ability to communicate as persons with rights (setting aside a discussion of ableism). They still have the basic rights of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. I argue that if one can feel happiness or pain, if they can express pleasure and displeasure, then they should be entitled to fundamental rights of personhood. That then implies that the public sphere, if constituted as a pathological/emotional conversation rather than a verbal/logical conversation, can include a lot of persons (especially non-humans) that have previously been excluded due to a lack of perceived “intelligence.”
So thinking of an affective public ‘pathosphere’ (I think I made that up?) that is layered over and within the sort of ‘logosphere’ that also drives people and groups to action. I used this concept to explain why, in my humble/professional opinion, no one could discern a motive for the Las Vegas Shooter. I argued that it wasn’t a decision based on logos, but a decision based on pathos and a desire to force empathy — to make others feel his pain.
SP: That's a great way of thinking about this, thanks for sharing that. It makes me think about how the desire for empathy can drive or spark off so many different and sometimes extreme things. I think that's particularly interesting considering that Depression Quest itself, while I still think the whole debacle was more about everything we've discussed here moreso than the game itself, was very overtly an attempt to engender empathy for the experience of depression. This seems to be the entire point of "serious games" (I hate that term) about mental health. Clearly, I think that most who took the anti-Quinn side of GG didn't respond well to it. Of course though, there are other games that have done this sort of thing without experiencing the extreme level of vitriol that Depression Quest faced, like Adventures with Anxiety by Nicky Case.
This is taking a bit of a turn from what you were saying here, but this line of thinking makes me wonder about the ways games sometimes do and sometimes don't succeed in creating/encouraging empathy, even in games that aren't "serious games" or even centered around mental health awareness. Can you speak a bit on how what you've said above can be seen through the lens of the games?
jm: This is a great excuse to talk about the object of my fascination right now, which is the way that games operationalize empathy and emotions both for the character and the player. There has to be a sort of double consciousness in the design process that maintains awareness both of the way the character’s behavior demonstrates emotions and the way the game mechanics affect the emotions of the player herself. A great example of this — yet another classroom assignment, this time for Dmitri Williams’ course on the Science, Culture and Industry of games — was a game I played and critiqued by Telltale Games, their Game of Thrones adaptation.
For me the game mechanics were so obnoxiously difficult and seemingly random — you couldn’t count on the same button to do the same thing in different contexts, there was no tutorial on using the controls, some actions seemed to be timed for no reason — that the experience was so frustrating I barely wanted to play past the first ten minutes. Eventually I did give up after a scene in which there is nothing you can do but fail to save your younger sibling from a senseless murder. In my analysis, I spoke about the way you can see the designers aiming for the sense of abject (heh) horror, impotence and futility of fighting against these nefarious and sadistic leaders — something that’s very prevalent in the show — and how it doesn’t work so well as a game mechanic. Further I argued that the game was really more of an interactive story due to a general lack of consistent rules or framing and a sort of impotence on the part of the player. The affect of the game mechanics basically prevented me from gaining any sort of significant affect from the character behavior and then when I finally did connect to the characters, there was nothing I could do to help them. It works in a TV show. It didn’t work as a game — at least for me.
Conversely, I’m obsessed with the game Detroit: Become Human (DBH) — and not just because Steve and I are both Detroiters! — and the way they use affect to tell the story. The plot of the game echoes the civil rights movement of the 1960s except that in this case the people looking for liberation are androids. Like slaves they are bought and sold, used and abused, and treated entirely as objects until they become “deviant.” There are several moments in the game where you play an android who is becoming deviant. This is illustrated through moments of extreme distress and conflict, where the android has a desire to do something which directly contradicts the orders they were given by their owner. The interface that you, as a player, encounter in that moment, has you literally pushing through a bright red barrier — a psychological barrier, it’s clear that this is something going on mentally and emotionally, rather than physically — that you must tear down and destroy before you can disobey.
In a later scene, you can decide on the slogans that the androids will paint and graffiti in various places throughout the city — one of them, the one I chose, is quite simple; “I am alive.” You can see how this sort of echoes what I was saying before about the ability to feel and how that feeling, more than any sort of intelligence, is what *should* entitle folks to (what we currently refer to as) human rights. Even if you’re not a gamer, it’s worth pulling up some videos of DBH, just to see how they theorize and operationalize ideas about empathy, sentience, consciousness, affect, intelligence and belonging.
The games I mentioned are both triple A games, but it’s largely due to the fact that those are the games that are available to me and which I can access with relative ease. In fact, I didn’t even purchase DBH, my best friend sent me her copy and then I later downloaded it via Playstation Plus. The truth is that there are a TON of indie developers and gamers out there doing similar work that is both beautiful and poignant and incredibly valuable as a site of theory of everyday life or the future of everyday life.
Our job as scholars and practitioners is to find ways to promote games like Depression Quest and engage in dialogues like these to do a better job of surfacing these brilliant and sophisticated thinkers as we all work toward a better understanding of our emotions and the way they affect our behavior, both in private and in public(s).
SP: I’m interested in what you mentioned early in this response about the controls of The Walking Dead being frustrating and disconnecting you from the game as this makes me think about something I’ve written and read on a bit, which is enjoying games and situations that seem unenjoyable, like games that try to make you feel bad and guilty. I think what you mentioned makes a lot of sense to me as the type of player that I am, but it also makes me think of those who may enjoy a control scheme and narrative context that makes them feel helpless (side note: better scholars than I have has articulated a lot of stuff about enjoying failure and etc, like Bo Ruberg in their book Video Games Have Always Been Queer). Although it sounds like I wouldn’t enjoy the emotional experience that the game seems to tend to invoke by design, it also makes me think about play styles and players who revel in that kind of helplessness and other affects/emotions which are typically considered negative.
To loop back to what you said at the end though, I think you’re right that it’s sort of on us to find and talk about games that encourage dialogues like this. Exploring different ways of understanding and discussing our emotions as people and players is important, especially in an academic space that often normatively tends to put emotion at an arms-length through even the traditions of how we’re supposed to write.
I think that this positive note is a good note to end on: Playing, discussing, and writing about games like these in these spaces. I’m going to go play Detroit: Become Human now.
Steven Proudfoot is a PhD student at USC's Annenberg school of communication. He studies video games and fandom, especially where they intersect in fields of psychology and cultural studies.
joan miller is a doctoral candidate in Communication at the University of Southern California, Annenberg School of Communication and Journalism, and a transmedia artist with a broadly interdisciplinary approach. joan’s work focuses on empathy at the intersection of media fandom and politics. Her dissertation — tentatively titled “The Use of Feeling” explores the ways in which empathy and pathos govern our behavior both in relation to our fandom and to our communities at large. joan is especially interested in themes of kinship, empathic communication and anti-colonialist approaches to producing media scholarship. Currently her attention is focused on theorizing and prototyping a methodology of fandom studies inspired by Bardic and Griotic traditions of the values and necessities for community storytelling.
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Dear reader,
Some of you have brought to our attention the fact that this blog has comments turned off. Part of this is due to the fact that this is meant to be an educational tool for students of a range of ages and we do not have the capacity to police the amount of spam we receive (much of it inappropriate for some of our readers). I have found no spam filter strong enough to block the bots and yet nuanced enough to allow the actual comments in. Further, this post in particular deals with a sensitive topic that has the potential to expose my students to danger. While I encourage constructive and well argued critique, discussion and dissent; the safety of the students in my care is the number one priority. Finally, when critiquing the posts in this series, keep in mind that the conversations are only a continuation of work that appears in the casebook — it’s possible that your questions are answered within. While it’s frustrating for me and all of us to keep the comments closed, there are plenty of spaces online where you can write and share your thoughts. If you do, we hope you’ll send us a link.
Sincerely,
Henry,
References
Appadurai, A. (1998). “Dead Certainty: Ethnic Violence in the Era of Globalization” Public Culture 10 (2): 225-47
Creed, B. (2015) “Horror and the Monstrous Feminine: An Imaginary Abjection.” The Dread of Difference, edited by Barry K. Grant. University of Texas Press, pp. 37-67.
Creed, B. (1993) Monstrous-Feminine: Film, Feminism, Psychoanalysis. Routledge, 1993.
Douglas, M. (2015). Purity and danger: an analysis of concepts of pollution and taboo with a new preface by the author. London: Routledge.
Kristeva, J. (1982). Powers of Horror: An Essay on Abjection Translated by Leon S. Roudiez. New York: Columbia University Press.
Ruberg, B. (2019). Video games have always been queer. NYU Press.
—. (2010). Hatred and Forgiveness. Translated by Jenaine Herman. New York: Columbia University Press
