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Contrapoints - Opulence
- Thread starter CoolOff
- Start date
At like ~twenty minutes in, it's a discussion about ways in which Class manifests in America, particularly in the context of Things As Status Symbols.
Wasn't she recently chased off Twitter by the Twitterati? But she's back now, I guess. Still, I remember some cancel-culture bs not too long ago involving her. Personally, I think that a Leftist movement without nuance or layered voices is wholly tone-deaf and I welcome interesting content like hers that picks apart an analyzes an argument rather than just preaching to the converted. About half way through the video and I have to get to some errands, though it's very well done. I haven't reached the end—obviously—but I'm of the belief that 'class'/ status is the ultimate social divide so I'm curious to see where this goes.
It's impressive how dramatically she's improved her whole presentation.
She came out with some shitty complaining about cis people sharing pronouns, trying to be inclusive, and after many people took offence she admitted that her take was indeed shitty and decided that she was rubbish on social media (after having bad takes multiple times) and so handed her account over to someone else to avoid doing it further.
Sounds thoughtful. It's hard to always be right in the moment.
That was an excellent video. Really broadened my horizon on class and few other things.
Also hot damn production values.
Also hot damn production values.
So, still only halfway through, but I had to pause the video at the moment where Natalie jokingly (I think?) refers to Anita Sarkisian as "the most notorious art critic of the 21st century."
And it's like...waitaminute. If you still consider games to be this thing "for kids" with no significant cultural impact, you might not get it. But if you view "Games" as this multibillion industry that both employs and entertains countless numbers of people, with untold societal impact, the bedrock from which movements (bad and good...mostly bad) have formed and by how culture has been significantly shaped...and the way Anita Sarkisian basically functioned as a bomb going off in the middle of all of that...
...holy shit, she might just be right. Trippy to think about.
And it's like...waitaminute. If you still consider games to be this thing "for kids" with no significant cultural impact, you might not get it. But if you view "Games" as this multibillion industry that both employs and entertains countless numbers of people, with untold societal impact, the bedrock from which movements (bad and good...mostly bad) have formed and by how culture has been significantly shaped...and the way Anita Sarkisian basically functioned as a bomb going off in the middle of all of that...
...holy shit, she might just be right. Trippy to think about.
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"Punished for having opinions" is a rather shitty way to frame her questionable habits.
it's a pretty accurate characterization of the inciting incident. She did end up digging her heels in and saying some real dumbass stuff, but the initial thing involved people saying she's too famous to vent about how things effect her specifically.
It speaks to the utter perpetual infanthood of the gaming industry as an art medium that Anita's Intro to... 101 level analysis was and is so controversial lol
Seriously. Also I suppose just general failure of the public to comprehend feminist concepts (at the time. Now it's just misogyny generally.)
It's hard to argue that she isn't. I can't think of any other critics that managed to single-handedly unmask the consumers of an entire medium as insane. Gaming discussions simply aren't the same as they were before Tropes vs. Women.
I'm forever in admiration of Natalie's aesthetic, writing, and delivery. It's entertaining as hell to watch someone who's fluent in academic idiom and millennial memespeak mix the two forms with such savvy.
I die every time she drops dank memage or queer slang smack in the middle of some scholarly discourse. What a mood.
I die every time she drops dank memage or queer slang smack in the middle of some scholarly discourse. What a mood.
The best argument against the claim wouldn't be aimed at Anita specifically but that probably that games as a medium are commodities and not art. I spent a lot of time in my 20s keyboard arguing that games were art but I don't know that I believe that anymore.
Not trying to detail the thread on "are games art" lol
I believe that games are art but it's in a weird place where many of the people who partake in gaming have zero interest in appreciating and artistic quality the medium can provide (see; the "get politics out of my games!" argument)
Because they're fucking children.
What's worse is that a lot of devs are the same.
good video, the end made me remember that marx liked a lot the vampire analogy, using to the bourgeois or capital.
While books and cimena have had their own parallels to gamergate, I feel like in those mediums it's easier to find pieces where you can have adult discussion whereas with gaming you're met with reactionary weirdos wherever you go.
See, i feel in both books and cinema, that stuff is more confined to genre fiction. While with games, it the whole fucking thing.
Quality video, and surprisingly relatable. Kinda put better articulation on some identity crises I have when it comes to both race and class. It didn't SOLVE anything, nor is that even remotely Natalie's responsibility, but it did help make sense of some things I previously didn't have the tools to articulate or work around.
I'm pleasantly surprised by how cohesive this one was considering the length and subject; I still think The West video was scattershot and The Apocalypse one exceedingly underwhelming. I am also happy she talked about drag and her relation to it since I've kind of wondered why she would love it so despite some of her other views on aesthetic and the like. I thought that and some of the other comparisons she made to be interesting.
That said, as a very long time watcher of her content, I just feel like there's a lot more tiny jokes and asides and tonal things in her recent videos that keep popping up that I just kind of bristle at. I don't know if that's me or my outlook on the newer (let's arbitrarily say the last 6 months) content underlying the continued controversy about her personally, or if it is her changing (or being more vocal about certain things) or Theryn's more direct influence on the actual writing and directing of the channel. I don't care for Theryn but I don't want to saddle her with all the small things I am not caring for in new videos, and it could just be a bias that I'm seeing them more now that I'm aware that for a while she's been having a more pronounced and active role in the creation of episodes.
That said, as a very long time watcher of her content, I just feel like there's a lot more tiny jokes and asides and tonal things in her recent videos that keep popping up that I just kind of bristle at. I don't know if that's me or my outlook on the newer (let's arbitrarily say the last 6 months) content underlying the continued controversy about her personally, or if it is her changing (or being more vocal about certain things) or Theryn's more direct influence on the actual writing and directing of the channel. I don't care for Theryn but I don't want to saddle her with all the small things I am not caring for in new videos, and it could just be a bias that I'm seeing them more now that I'm aware that for a while she's been having a more pronounced and active role in the creation of episodes.
I mean before people handwave let's just say straight off that this is the guy that outed Lana Wachowski for money.
Yeah, just to make it clear: I think her featuring this guy in her video is indefensible.
That's fair. Games are like music or movies in that way, in that they can be made with artistic intent and the desire to spread a message or convey something that the artist/designer/team wishes, or it can be a heavily refined and focus-tested PRODUCT, with no real intention for artistic thought but rather just an intention to make money.
Hey, thanks for writing this—it helped me reflect on similar thoughts I had about this video after watching. Especially the latter half of your reply.
It is a sad comment status on the state of criticism in general if "picking out tropes" is what it takes to rise to notoriety. Sarkeesian's work is largely just an easter egg hunt of trope-finding that rarely engages a single work directly or at any length.
By the same token I would say that CinemaSins has as much or more influence as Sarkeesian, and is similarly a ton of low-effort nitpicking (over plot inconsistency rather than gender dynamics). I don't think their notoriety has anything with the "perpetual infanthood of the film industry" though --- it's just that shallow and dismissive criticism is more popular on the internet than anything thoughtful, nuanced, or positive. Especially if you can claim to be objectively "correct" from either a moral or logical angle.
EDIT: To put it a little more succintly, CinemaSins and Sarkeesian are big precisely because they never rise above the level of a Freshman/Sophomore liberal arts student. They know enough to sound smart and authoritative, but never go much further beyond their assumed dogma into topics and ideas that would confuse or bore people.
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Did she ever actually apologize for her Twitter comments before? This is bugging me. Couple that with this and she's making some bad judgment calls.
Uh do you remember gamergate?
Anita's work is not remotely cinemasins, come on.
But you absolutely are helping prove my initial point by going off about dogma and low effort about Anita, her work isn't low effort it's just a broader intro to feminism theory not meant for folks like me who already understand core feminist theory.
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In general more simpler criticism will always be more popular tho; a two minute movie review tacked in at the end of a newscast pre-internet would have had more social 'weight' to most people than what you would get in the arts section of the Nytimes. Id make an argument even having this kind of base level criticism popular is something that wouldn't happen in any space ten years ago.
I think what's excelsiorlef point is that for a medium that is art, and by and large creators and fans of agree is art most of the time...suddenly had a heart attack when basic non-gaming specific criticism was leveled at it.
Obv. a glut of it was due to alt-right neanderthals that make up society nowadays who were shocked women actually have opinions, but it was weird watching people who collect LP re-releases of thirty year old videogame soundtracks and amass a large amount of videogame art pull the, 'its just a game bro' when looked at it by a wider lens.
They aren't the same. They both just strike me as an obsessive exercise of hunting-down of some particular quibble (a plothole or a trope). They are more concerned with finding examples than doing the more difficult work of analysis. It's easier just to say "Here's an occurrence of a thing that I have predetermined to be bad" rather than taking a harder longer look at the dynamics of an individual work.
For a lot of people, criticism now is either plot-nitpicking or hunting for tropes/cliches. The more of these problematic elements you can find, the worse something is.
YouTube was largely just a way to push that style of criticism to an audience that really wasn't used to it, in an age where people have their own identity tied to particular media properties. "It's just a game" is I think a rejection of assumptions made about how games actually affect people's broader social perceptions, rather than a denial that games are art. When media is blamed for some larger societal ill there will always be pushback claiming that its influence is somehow limited, and those limits usually align with whatever biases a person has. "It's just a game" is also just a dumb kneejerk reaction - someone's instinctual sense that "A thing I love is being criticized and that is therefore a criticism of me!"
Amongst a YouTube audience you see pushback of similar criticism in areas that are undeniably already defined as art (films, novels, comic books). Why the pushback from gamers is inevitably so much more toxic, hostile, and venomous I can't explain, other than that the hobby tends to attract a certain sort of misanthrope who can spend all day on the internet lashing out at people and has already assembled social structures where these attacks can be coordinated (4chan, reddit, or whatever).