The Tone Argument: What counts as an insult?

I

A contentious issue, both within the "social justice community" (to the extent that's a thing) and in relations between the social justice community and the wider culture, is the "tone argument." The idea is that it's in some sense wrong to criticize the tone of people advocating for social justice, attacking bigotry, etc. As Geek Feminism wiki puts it:

A tone argument is an argument used in discussions, sometimes by Concern trolls and sometimes a Derailment, in which it is suggested that feminist would be more successful if only they expressed themselves in a more pleasant tone. . . . 

The tone argument is a form of derailment, or a red herring, because the tone of a statement is independent of the content of the statement in question, and calling attention to it distracts from the issue at hand. Drawing attention to the tone rather than the content of a statement can allow other parties to avoid engaging with sound arguments presented in that statement, thus undermining the original party's attempt to communicate and effectively shutting them down.

Or, as Katherine Cross puts it in this article:

In rule form, the tone argument might be expressed as follows: Any attempt to discuss or criticize the tone of an activist is a deliberate attempt at leveraging institutional power to silence the marginalized and must be avoided at all costs.

In other words: an argument's tone is separate from its content, so focusing on the former is distracting attention away from the latter. Combine this with the fact, also mentioned by Cross, that anti-bigotry activists (especially those from marginalized groups) are often dismissed as being e.g. too "angry" even when they have extremely valid points, and dismissing criticism of tone as an improper "tone argument" may seem quite reasonable.

However, some argue that the tone argument should not be dismissed out of hand, because sometimes the tone of a social justice activist really is improper, wrong, and hurtful. As Cross goes on to argue:

To put it simply: sometimes someone is being too angry. . . . Sometimes you are just being too loud, abusing people verbally, triggering them, and so forth. Sometimes you are just being a jerk and your tone is a fairly reliable indicator of this.

Or, as George R.R. Martin argued in the context of the Sad Puppies incident last year (which I'm not going to even attempt to summarize right now):

The way I have seen it work, dozens of times now, is that a debate or discussion starts out as a reasonable exchange of ideas, but then grows heated. Tempers fray, names are called, the posts get uglier and uglier... and someone, or maybe a bunch of someones, steps over the line and says something truly cruel or hurtful or just nasty. And the target, or maybe a bystander, objects and says, "no call for language like that" or "can't we all calm down" or something along that line... whereupon a loud cry of "Tone Argument, Tone Argument, Tone Argument" goes up, and person [sic] who called for calm is shouted down or torn apart. 

. . . . 

I applaud the Tone Argument. The Tone Argument is valid. Yay for the Tone Argument. 

We can disagree with each other without attacking each other. And no, I am not going to listen to you if you're screaming at me and calling me offensive names. You shouldn't either, no matter who you are. None of us should have to put up with that shit.

This, too, may seem quite reasonable. If X, in the course of an argument, tells Y to kill themselves, it appears that X has done something wrong and we should criticize X's tone regardless of the quality of their argument (and indeed, even regardless of the quality of Y's character).

Of course, with rare exception, I think most would agree that heartfelt violent rhetoric like that is inappropriate and wrong. One of the difficulties with the "tone argument" is that there are many types of "uncivil" tone, but discussions of the "tone argument" tend to ignore specifics and deal in generalities. Most would agree it is wrong to tell someone to kill themselves (much less to actually threaten violence, rape, etc), while most would agree it's legitimate to merely tell someone their opinion is wrong. The question, then, is where to draw the line.

However, in this post I will argue that it is wrong to draw this line based on what level of vitriolic tone we consider acceptable, and indeed, that insisting on a civil tone and lack of insults actually focuses on entirely the wrong issue. Contrary to the usual justifications for rejecting the tone argument, however, this is not because tone is separate from content and so focusing on tone is derailing. Rather, it is because tone is not separate from content: some kinds of argument are inherently insulting, and so insisting as Martin does that people "disagree with each other without attacking each other" is actually insisting that certain views not be expressed.

To argue this, I will first take a short detour.

II

After the 2008 election, indeed almost immediately after, one of the biggest issues of contention within liberal America became: do you generally support Barack Obama's presidency, or do you generally oppose it (from the left, of course)? The biggest online battlefield between these two camps was (and largely still is) the community blog DailyKos.

I will confess that, sometime during the healthcare reform fight in 2009, I started to lean strongly toward the "critic" camp. But the point of this detour is not that. Rather, I want to focus on one aspect of this fight: in what ways is it acceptable for Obama to be criticized? In particular, many in the "supporter" camp claimed (and still claim) that, while they have no problem with criticism of Obama's policies, they do have a problem with attacks on his character. For example, in a comment on DailyKos, SUNY Professor Ian Reifowitz said:

We should keep criticizing and pushing Obama left, but we must not demonize him, both because he is so closely identified with liberalism (and yes, he is, among the American people at large) and because of what he represents to African Americans as the first black president.

Seeing an opportunity to make a point I had wanted to make for a while (forgive the narcissistic self-citation), I replied:

[W]hat, in your view, is the difference between "criticism" and "demonization"?

Reifowitz replied that "calling him names is demonization," while "content-based criticism" is not. The problem with this, I felt, is that the line between "content-based criticism" and name-calling is not always so clear, so I responded:

For example, let's say one believes that the President's drone program constitutes a war crime. While technically being a content-based criticism, this line of attack essentially calls him a war criminal, which many would consider demonization. Similarly, if one critiques Obama's economic policies and calls them "corporatist," that's easily taken to mean one is calling Obama himself a "corporatist," which again is often taken to be demonization.

While I still think my point was sound (which Reifowitz never responded to, though I was just some nobody commenter so I can't blame him for not engaging in extended argument), I didn't state it as well as I should have. What I should have said is: calling Obama a war criminal is demonizing him; calling his economic policies corporatist (or pro-austerity, conservative, or whatever) just is calling Obama himself a corporatist (austerina, conservative), which--at least on a liberal blog--is also demonization. To put it in broader terms: any harsh criticism of Obama's policies is an insult to him, because if accusing a politician of promulgating evil through their policies is not an insult, nothing is. This means that calls to not insult Obama personally or to not demonize him, while seemingly "neutral" and targeted merely at rhetoric, are in reality calls to not make certain kinds of criticisms. Minor critiques of specific policies are probably OK; broad-based critiques of major policy initiatives are iffy; harsh criticisms are disallowed.

Now, perhaps one might justify such a dictum against too-harsh criticism of Obama, such as Reifowitz's arguments that he's the standard-bearer of liberalism, is symbolically important to black Americans, etc. But at the very least, we should be honest about what we're arguing for: not an end to certain types of rhetoric, but an end to certain kinds of criticism.

Now then, what does this detour have to do with the tone argument?

As I've said, one of the issues here is that people who discuss the tone argument tend to speak in generalities. Cross says that sometimes people are too angry, and are "being a jerk." But when, precisely, is this? Almost by definition, we can agree that it's wrong to be "too angry"--the entire debate is about what counts as being "too angry." Similarly, Martin says that we shouldn't "attack" each other, but what precisely counts as an "attack"?

I'm also speaking in generalities here, so let's get down to brass tacks. Is it wrong to call someone a sexist, or a racist?

As far as I can tell, there are three ways Cross and especially Martin can answer this question:
(a) No, it's not wrong, because "sexist" (or "racist," "homophobe," and the like) isn't an insult.
(b) Yes, it's wrong, but instead you should just say that someone "has sexist/racist views," and that's fine.
(c) Yes, it's always wrong to assert that the person you're talking to is sexist/racist/etc in any way, shape, or form.

I will discuss these possible responses in turn.

III

So the first way someone could answer my question is: "Calling someone a sexist (racist, etc) isn't an insult." To compare, Reifowitz could respond to me in a similar way, that calling Obama a war criminal is fine because that's not an insult.

This hypothetical response by Reifowitz, however, is self-evidently absurd. Calling someone a war criminal is extremely insulting. Indeed, it's safe to say that calling someone a war criminal is more insulting than calling them stupid, or ugly, or other obvious insults. Or, to put it another way, since war crimes are evil, accusing someone of being a war criminal is accusing them of being evil.

"Sexist," "racist," and the like are insults in a similar way. They're not mere labels for ideologies--at least, not anymore. Our modern culture assumes that sexism, racism, and the like are not merely wrong but evil--perhaps less evil than committing war crimes, but evil nonetheless. Thus, calling someone a racist is different in kind from calling someone, say, a "free trader" (outside of certain circles, at least). The latter is an economic policy that we (mostly) think is legitimate to defend; the former is (mostly) considered a scourge that should be wiped out, not debated calmly.

The best proof of the inherently insulting nature of these words is the reaction of those on the receiving end of them. Brad Torgersen, one of the "Sad Puppies" leaders Martin was arguing against, once said:

Words like "racist" and "misogynist" are presently code for "not part of the human equation" thus any man or woman who can be successfully labeled these things, is cut off from polite circles, perhaps even driven out of the workplace, or worse.

I didn't find a similar explicit quote from another major Sad Puppies leader, Larry Correia, but try perusing any of his posts on the topic (such as this one) and it's clear he shares the sentiment.

But really, it's not necessary to deluge you with examples. Observe any internet argument (or real-life argument for that matter) where one of the participants is called a racist or sexist. They will almost inevitably react as if they were insulted, and that's because they were insulted. Racism is frequently referred to as a "disease" or worse. If it's not insulting to call someone a racist, I'm not sure what an insult is.

To be clear: I fully agree that racism is a disease--indeed, that that analogy underplays it--and I think the fact that "racist" (and "sexist" etc) is considered an insult is a sign of great progress. But we need to face the fact that it is an insult. So the first possible response, that it's OK to call people racists because that's not an insult, is a complete non-starter.

IV

The second possible response is to argue that, while "sexist" or "racist" are insults and thus should not be used, instead you can merely say that someone "has sexist views" or similar. The motivation behind this might be something as follows: a racist is something you are, while racist views are something you hold; therefore, calling someone a "racist" is an insult (and thus wrong) while accusing someone of "holding racist views" is merely a description of their ideology. The analogy to the Obama case would be asserting that it's OK to say that Obama has "committed war crimes," you just can't call him a "war criminal."

That analogy should make the absurdity of this defense plain. If you've committed war crimes, you're a war criminal; there's no mysterious extra thing you need to gain to become one. Similarly, if you have racist views, you're a racist--there's no "extra" character trait or whatever that makes you one.

While I think this is essentially obvious, I'll back myself up by liberally quoting a fantastic 2013 post by the journalist Ta-Nehisi Coates. In this post, Coates argues against Wes Alwan, who in defending Alec Baldwin from being called a "bigot" (see this for some details) said:

In fact, the primary function of a word like "bigot" is to very precisely exclude more conflicted, doubtful states of mind, as in: a bigot is "a person who is obstinately or intolerantly devoted to his or her opinions and prejudices; especially: one who regards or treats the members of a group (as a racial or ethnic group) with hatred and intolerance" (Mirriam-Webster). . . . accusing someone of being close-minded and un-persuadable requires that they adamantly hold the beliefs in question in the first place: it cannot be the case that they're conflicted or akratic - that for example they sincerely favor gay rights as a matter of principle yet betray this principle during bouts of homophobic rage.

Coates responds (I'm giving a very long quote because it's great, but for my purposes the second and especially third paragraphs are the most important):

Very few white people in the 19th century--indeed very few slave-holders--were without conflict and without doubt when considering black people. Many of them were persuadable and akratic. (A great word, by the way.) Some manumitted the enslaved. Others taught them to read, even though it was against the law. Others bore children by them, and sometimes even loved those children. And others still argued that white people should be enslaved too. These people were conflicted, complicated and bigoted. I suspect that the same is true for many homophobic "love the sinner, hate the sin" bigots today. 

Perhaps we are now entering a new age wherein we will do violence to our language and Osama Bin Laden will no longer be a terrorist, but "a person who enjoyed a career killing innocent people." Rush Limbaugh will not be a racist, but "a man who has made a career saying racist things." Nathan Bedford Forrest will not have been a white supremacist but "someone who seemed to believe that things would be better if white people held most of the power in our society." Louis Farrakhan will not be an anti-Semite but "someone who exhibits a pattern of making comments against people who identify themselves as Jewish." 

I am doubtful that such an age is dawning. In the meantime, I hope a self-identified "self-critiquing liberal" like Alwan--and I mean this--will see that while some people reach for labels simply to conduct a mythical witch-hunt, others reach for labels because in their world witches are very real, and are not the hunted, but the hunters.

I will add one thing. What's important in the end is not the semantics of what "bigot," "racist," or "sexist" mean. What's important is the moral status of "making a career saying racist things," or more pertinently, believing racist/sexist/etc. things. As long as the latter is generally considered to be bad in itself (which I indeed believe it to be, but arguing for that here would take me too far afield), then accusing someone of holding racist views is very much an insult. So option (b), too, is a non-starter; no matter what your definition of "racist" is, it's impossible to say that someone's opinions and statements are racist without insulting them.

V

The final response--which, for reasons argued above, I believe is the only self-consistent position tone argument defenders can take--is: Yes, it's insulting to call someone a sexist/racist or a holder of sexist/racist views, and therefore you shouldn't do that. The analogy would be Reifowitz hypothetically arguing that, since it's insulting to call Obama a war criminal, you shouldn't call Obama a war criminal.

Let me clarify something. This hypothetical Reifowitz is not making the case that Obama isn't a war criminal. He is instead arguing that it's wrong even to make the case that Obama is a war criminal. Similarly, the tone argument defender here is not merely saying it's wrong to falsely accuse people of being sexists, which is so obvious as to be almost banal. Rather, they're saying that, even if you honestly believe someone is being sexist or racist, it is wrong to say so. Presumably, one should just make much more mild criticisms (perhaps "I disagree with your contention that whites are genetically more intelligent than blacks").

Now, Cross, Martin, and other tone argument defenders clearly believe their stance is "neutral," in that they'd likely insist they're not forbidding people from stating their opinions--they're merely requiring that those opinions not be insulting (as Martin says, "we can disagree with each other without attacking each other"). The problem is that some opinions are by their nature insulting; sometimes, it's impossible for us to say what we truly think about an argument without attacking the person who made it. As children, some of us (especially women) were taught "If you can't say something nice, don't say anything at all." This admonition at least has the virtue of being honest in its intention to censor. At the very least, defenders of the tone argument should be similarly honest.

Well, that last bit was pretty insulting, so I guess I just violated the tone argument myself. Let me back up a bit, then, and give a less rhetorical argument against this third option--that is, I will defend calling people racist or sexist if one honestly believes them to be.

First of all, note that "racist" and "sexist" aren't the only words that, while theoretically referring to ideologies, are in reality insults. "Fascist" is similar in that these days it tends to mean "person who holds a political position I disagree with"--and it would clearly be disingenuous to call someone a fascist and then deny that you meant to insult them. Republicans insult Obama by calling him a "socialist" all the time, and "liberal" and "conservative" are certainly insults within certain circles. As implied above, "pro-censorship" is very insulting for many, and beyond politics, being a "creationist" is almost as bad as being a "racist" in much of the internet.

One way to understand what's going on here is the "Overton Window." The basic idea is that, in public discourse, we can consider each idea as having a certain degree of mass acceptability, ranging from "unthinkable" and "radical" to "popular" and "policy." All of these ideological terms that are also insults refer to beliefs that, either in the culture at large or in particular subcultures, fall in the "unthinkable" camp. In this regard, Torgersen is only somewhat exaggerating when he says calling someone a "racist" takes them out of the human condition. What you're really doing is accusing them of holding an unthinkable view, a view so out-there that only a bad person could possibly hold it. The goal, of course, is to use peer pressure in order to encourage them to abandon that view.

And you know what? It works. While racism and sexism are still massive problems in our society, it's much less common for people to be explicitly, unambiguously racist or sexist than it was 40 or 50 years ago. This is progress, of a sort. And it was accomplished precisely because it's no longer considered acceptable to (openly) hold these views, and people who express them in public are shamed for doing so. If this public shaming does not take place, if people who say racist or sexist things are met with a mere "I politely disagree with you," the Overton Window will shift and bigotry will move from being "unthinkable" to "radical" or even "acceptable." Indeed, we can see this process occurring in real time with Donald Trump's presidential campaign.

Your average internet commenter is far less influential than Donald Trump, of course. Nevertheless, if people are not consistently called out and shamed for saying racist or sexist things, racism and sexism will become more acceptable to express. (Spend enough time looking at the chat of your average popular twitch stream if you want proof.) To put it bluntly: insults are one of the ways cultural standards are enforced, they are extremely effective at doing so, and it is morally justifiable to use them if those cultural standards are themselves good and essential. To oppose their use is not to be neutral, but to favor the views that the insults are targeting (because your position will move them toward the "acceptable" category). Sometimes, this is the right course of action; "atheist" used to be an insult par excellence, after all. But sometimes it isn't. Since anti-bigotry is an extremely important cultural standard, is is morally acceptable to insult people by calling them bigots.

VI

So am I advocating a free-for-all against suspected bigots? Is it OK to not merely call them bigots, but also to threaten violence, tell them to kill themselves, etc.? No, of course not. But the wrongness of that kind of rhetoric is not that it's insulting, but that it's unnecessarily insulting.

I will explain. The problem with the tone argument is that it blocks people from expressing certain views that are inherently insulting, under the guise of merely targeting rhetoric. But sometimes, insulting rhetoric is not used to express a view, but is merely substance-less rage.

Nothing is gained by telling someone to kill themselves or threatening violence against them. (Contrast this with something like "Fuck off," which makes clear that the bigot is not welcome in the community in a way nothing else can and is therefore an acceptable insult.) It is publicly shaming them, yes, but unnecessarily so; merely calling them a bigot is sufficient for that purpose. All they do is, maybe, allow the insulter to let off some steam while likely negatively impacting the mental state of the one being insulted. That is why it shouldn't be done.

The key point here is that the line between "you're a racist" and "kill yourself" is not that the latter is more insulting; calling someone "stupid," after all, is probably less insulting than "racist" but is still unnecessary. The line is: does your insult actually express a substantive opinion, or is it merely letting off steam? "Your'e a racist" expresses an opinion that cannot be stated in any other way. "You're stupid" is just pointless grandstanding.

Another important note here is that these substance-less insults are not different in kind from any other sort of shallow argument. If, while engaging in debate, I ignore my opponent's point to attack their spelling/grammar, or their username, or I bring up something entirely unrelated, I am similarly doing something wrong. Insubstantial insults are worse to the extent that they tend to hurt peoples' feelings (I mean this non-ironically for the record), but their insulting quality merely exacerbates their wrongness; the wrongness itself comes from their lack of substance.

To summarize: the tone argument is a bad argument because expressing certain opinions is inherently insulting. Insults are not necessarily bad, and are only bad if they do not express a substantive view.

A New Start for the New Year

While my plans for this blog sort of fell through last year, today is a new year, and while Neil deGrasse Tyson is correct that January 1 is astronomically insignificant, its importance being purely an arbitrary choice on the part of humanity, does that really matter as long as we humans can use this arbitrariness for good?

On that optimistic note, one of my New Year's resolutions is to post on this blog at least once a week. I will try to keep to the "Thursday preview/Sunday post" schedule outlined earlier. I will begin with the tone argument post I planned to write half a year ago. Don't worry, it'll be a lot more about George R.R. Martin than John Stuart Mill.

The Tone Argument Preview: John Stuart Mill

I'm starting to realize posting twice a week was a bit ambitious, so I think I'm going to focus on posting once a week on Sundays. Instead, on Thursdays I'll offer brief "previews" for what I'll be writing about that week.

This week, I'm going to write about the tone argument. From reading articles on the internet about it, one might get the impression that criticism of the "tone argument," critique of the idea that we should always be civil, is something new, perhaps cooked up by those "SJWs" a bunch of people seem to be upset about these days. I believed this too (well, not the SJW part), which is why I was quite surprised when I re-read the British philosopher John Stuart Mill's famous defense of individual freedom of speech and action, On Liberty, and found he spoke on precisely this topic. Considering On Liberty was written in 1859, and is usually considered one of the chief achievements of liberal political theory, I think what Mill has to say on this matter is very much of interest. It can serve as a "teaser" for my own discussion of the issue in a few days. (Note: I've introduced paragraph breaks into the original text for reason of readability.)

Before quitting the subject of freedom of opinion, it is fit to take some notice of those who say, that the free expression of all opinions should be permitted, on condition that the manner be temperate, and do not pass the bounds of fair discussion. Much might be said on the impossibility of fixing where these supposed bounds are to be placed; for if the test be offence to those whose opinion is attacked, I think experience testifies that this offence is given whenever the attack is telling and powerful, and that every opponent who pushes them hard, and whom they find it difficult to answer, appears to them, if he shows any strong feeling on the subject, an intemperate opponent.

But this, though an important consideration in a practical point of view, merges in a more fundamental objection. Undoubtedly the manner of asserting an opinion, even though it be a true one, may be very objectionable, and may justly incur severe censure. But the principal offences of the kind are such as it is mostly impossible, unless by accidental self-betrayal, to bring home to conviction. The gravest of them is, to argue sophistically, to suppress facts or arguments, to misstate the elements of the case, or misrepresent the opposite opinion. But all this, even to the most aggravated degree, is so continually done in perfect good faith, by persons who are not considered, and in many other respects may not deserve to be considered, ignorant or incompetent, that it is rarely possible on adequate grounds conscientiously to stamp the misrepresentation as morally culpable; and still less could law presume to interfere with this kind of controversial misconduct.

With regard to what is commonly meant by intemperate discussion, namely invective, sarcasm, personality, and the like, the denunciation of these weapons would deserve more sympathy if it were ever proposed to interdict them equally to both sides; but it is only desired to restrain the employment of them against the prevailing opinion: against the unprevailing they may not only be used without general disapproval, but will be likely to obtain for him who uses them the praise of honest zeal and righteous indignation. Yet whatever mischief arises from their use, is greatest when they are employed against the comparatively defenceless; and whatever unfair advantage can be derived by any opinion from this mode of asserting it, accrues almost exclusively to received opinions.

The worst offence of this kind which can be committed by a polemic, is to stigmatise those who hold the contrary opinion as bad and immoral men. To calumny of this sort, those who hold any unpopular opinion are peculiarly exposed, because they are in general few and uninfluential, and nobody but themselves feels much interested in seeing justice done them; but this weapon is, from the nature of the case, denied to those who attack a prevailing opinion: they can neither use it with safety to themselves, nor, if they could, would it do anything but recoil on their own cause. In general, opinions contrary to those commonly received can only obtain a hearing by studied moderation of language, and the most cautious avoidance of unnecessary offence, from which they hardly ever deviate even in a slight degree without losing ground: while unmeasured vituperation employed on the side of the prevailing opinion, really does deter people from professing contrary opinions, and from listening to those who profess them. For the interest, therefore, of truth and justice, it is far more important to restrain this employment of vituperative language than the other; and, for example, if it were necessary to choose, there would be much more need to discourage offensive attacks on infidelity, than on religion.

It is, however, obvious that law and authority have no business with restraining either, while opinion ought, in every instance, to determine its verdict by the circumstances of the individual case; condemning every one, on whichever side of the argument he places himself, in whose mode of advocacy either want of candour, or malignity, bigotry, or intolerance of feeling manifest themselves; but not inferring these vices from the side which a person takes, though it be the contrary side of the question to our own: and giving merited honour to every one, whatever opinion he may hold, who has calmness to see and honesty to state what his opponents and their opinions really are, exaggerating nothing to their discredit, keeping nothing back which tells, or can be supposed to tell, in their favour. This si the real morality of public discussion: and if often violated, I am happy to think that there are many controversialists who to a great extent observe it, and a still greater number who conscientiously strive towards it.

(These are from pages 54-55 of On Liberty and other writings, edited by Stefan Collini, first published in 1989. For people with access to other editions, it's the last paragraph in Chapter 2.)

To end with, I will provide another quote from On Liberty, which may in its own way provide an even better view into Mill's views on the proper use of "invective, sarcasm, personality, and the like" (page 33, same edition):

What is boasted of at the present time as the revival of religion, is always, in narrow and uncultivated minds, at least as much the revival of bigotry; and where there is the strong permanent leaven of intolerance in the feelings of a people, which at all times abides in the middle classes of this country, it needs but little to provoke them into actively persecuting those whom they have never ceased to think proper objects of persecution.

Mill places a footnote at the end of this sentence. The footnote reads (page 33, same edition):

Ample warning may be drawn from the large infusion of the passions of a persecutor, which mingled with the general display of the worst parts of our national character on the occasion of the Sepoy insurrection. The ravings of fanatics or charlatans from the pulpit may be unworthy of notice; but the heads of the Evangelical party have announced as their principle for the government of Hindoos and Mahomedans, that no schools be supported by public money in which the Bible is not taught, and by necessary consequence that no public employment be given to any but real or pretended Christians. An Under-Secretary of State [William N. Massey], in a speech delivered to his constituents on the 12th of November, 1857, is reported to have said: 'Toleration of their faith' (the faith of a hundred millions of British subjects), 'the superstition which they called religion, by the British Government, had had the effect of retarding the ascendancy of the British name, and preventing the salutary growth of Christianity. . . . Toleration was the great corner-stone of the religious liberties of this country; but do not let them abuse that precious word toleration. As he understood it, it meant the complete liberty to all, freedom of worship, among Christians, who worshipped upon the same foundation. It meant toleration of all sects and denominations of Christians who believed in the one mediation.' I desire to call attention to the fact, that a man who has been deemed fit to fill a high office in the government of this country, under a liberal Ministry, maintains the doctrine that all who do not believe in the divinity of Christ are beyond the pale of toleration. Who, after this imbecile display, can indulge the illusion that religious persecution has passed away, never to return?

Games and Art: The Case of Magic The Gathering

Well, I might as well continue on the "games" theme. This time, I'd like to examine the rhetorical question most often asked by gamers, "Are video games art?" I call it a rhetorical question because the answer is almost inevitably "yes." For example, take a look at the Wikipedia page on this topic which, while theoretically neutral, pretty clearly ends up taking a stance. I think, to get a better handle on this issue, it will be useful to look at a non-video game--the trading card game, Magic: The Gathering.

This will be a bit long so I'll split it up into parts.

Part 1: Magic The Gathering

I used to play Magic: The Gathering a lot when I was younger. I will briefly describe the game, for two reasons: I want this to be accessible to non-players, and some of its particular features are important to highlight for later purposes.

Magic: The Gathering is a trading card game; indeed, it is the first trading card game. Like regular card games, such as poker, it uses cards; it's different from games like poker in that it has a much, much larger variety of cards, with many new cards being made and released every year (which is how its company, Wizards of the Coast, makes money off of it). Players choose 60 of these cards (well, technically you can have more than 60, but there's almost never a reason to), construct a deck out of them, and play against other people who have done the same. As a game, this feature gives it several advantages over games like poker, including:
1) Variety - There's a much larger range of possible game states, thus making each game much different, which naturally makes being able to adapt to new situations on the fly more important;
2) Identification - People often identify with the deck they made, since after all they made it, and thus care more about it and subsequently care more about the game itself;
3) Change - Texas Hold 'Em will never change its rules; the "rules" of Magic change with every card that's released, as every card that's released allows the players to do things they couldn't have done before.

Of course, there are several weaknesses of this feature as well. I think there are probably three major ones:
1) Difficulty - Poker is hard to master, but easy to learn; Magic is definitely not easy to learn. Poker can be simple and elegant precisely because of its lack of change and (relative) lack of variety; Magic by necessity is much more complex.
2) Innovation - The entire business model of Magic depends upon its continually changing with new cards getting added. This means that, well, new cards have to be made all the time. Poker doesn't have that problem.
3) Balance - Furthermore, poker is a symmetrical game, meaning everyone who plays it is in the same position (aside from the amount of money they have, of course). Magic by nature is an asymmetrical game, which means balance becomes important--if one card or one strategy is far more powerful than others, that is if one deck becomes the "best" deck, the game becomes degenerate. Avoiding this state of affairs while keeping the game fresh and fun with each new set of cards is the main goal of the people currently making the game.

One of the people making the game right now is Mark Rosewater. He's currently the head designer of Magic, meaning he's the one in charge of point #2 above (#3 is the job of other people, called "developers"; #1 is sort of a collective task of everyone--see here for more information). More importantly for this article, though, he's also the de facto face of Magic: The Gathering R&D (the name of those who make the game). He writes a weekly article for their website, and has been doing so since the website started in January 2002; furthermore, since his article has always been about Magic's design, most of what people know about how and why Magic is designed comes from him. This is why he tends to be blamed for just about every part of the game someone doesn't like. On the flip side, though, it means, in the words of Jesse Mason:

I still don’t know who the most important non-Rosewater designers are. I assume that they make some cool things and have intriguingly unique ideas about design, but our Magic design philosophy is so Rosewater-centric that no one knows anything that they didn’t in some way gather from Rosewater himself. . . . In Magic design, Rosewater is such an omnipresent figure in design, design criticism, design theory, and so on, that literally no conversations about it can happen that don’t involve people either flat-out rejecting him or attempting in some way to live up to his ideals. And the ones who publicly reject him make bad sets and don’t get hired by R&D.

Speaking of Jesse Mason, he has a blog where he reviews Magic sets. Here's his most recent review, where he calls Rosewater's writing "inherently bad" and ends by baldly asserting, "Magic design is art."

I suppose it's obvious, now, where the inspiration behind this post came from.

Part 2: Mark Rosewater and Advertisement

This is Mason's argument that Rosewater's writing is, by its nature, bad (though I should emphasize that Mason clearly admires Rosewater and his writing in many ways, which he more or less explicitly admits in the article itself):

Advertising, by its nature, is a dishonest medium. This doesn’t mean that what an advertisement says is fundamentally false, but that, as an advertisement, it can never be fully honest with the reader. It must phrase its statements, make its arguments, and work toward always convincing readers that The Product is supreme, that The Product is worth your money.

In one of my favorite essays, David Foster Wallace discusses a paid essay by a writer whose other work Wallace quite liked. The essay in question, a travel-writing sort of thing about the cruise ship he was getting paid by, was found by Wallace to be inherently bad. This wasn’t because the quality of writing was subpar, but because, as an advertisement, it was a piece of writing which did not intend to serve the reader. The writing works against the reader, in service of the company paying for it. It does this while attempting to pull the wool over the eyes of the reader, who is reading the essay looking for genuine information on the topic.

It is with a similar line of thinking that I think of all Rosewater writing as inherently bad. This isn’t because of one specific line of argument he made, or his ideas, but that his writing for DailyMTG has never sought solely to serve the reader. It is in the service of Wizards, to sell Magic.

To someone unfamiliar with Rosewater's writing, the radical and indeed shocking nature of this criticism will likely be unclear. Here's an article of his summarizing his first 100 articles. I'll briefly describe a few of the ones he rated as his best work:
-#5, where he argues for why some Magic cards should/must be bad.
-#11, where he explains "player psychographic profiles"--that is, his assessment of the three main types of people who play Magic. This analysis has been highly influential in the community; I would be honestly surprised if any English speaker who's played for more than a year doesn't know about it.
-#41, effectively a comedy article about goblins.
And then there's this extremely long, extremely personal article, where he talks about ten mistakes he made in dating and compared them to mistakes made in designing Magic cards. It was very popular at the time.

What's my point? It's not like Rosewater spends most his time hyping up the newest Magic set, talking about how great it is, and urging people to buy it now now now! Actually, he spends relatively little of his time doing that--mostly just in the month or so when a new set is announced, which means about 3 months a year (give or take). Much more of his time is spent explaining his own views behind Magic design.

Rosewater also has a blog, and on it he responded to Mason's argument:

I’m a spokesperson. I’ve always been up front and honest about that. It’s my job to get you all excited for new sets. And guess what, I am legitimately excited. I’ve spent numerous years working on the set in question (usually) and I’m eager for you all to experience it and tell me what you think about it. Listen to my podcast. I am genuinely an enthusiastic person.

Do I focus on the positives? Absolutely! But they are things I truly believe are great things about the product. I never lie. And after the fact, I always go back (mostly through my State of Design articles but often in other things as well) and give as honest a criticism as I can about our past work. Note that I truly cannot know how something has performed until after I see it used by the public.

Now, is all my writing somehow dishonest because of the relationship I have with Wizards? I don’t think so. I go far beyond my role to do things like talk about game design and communications and creativity. I don’t understand how all those topics are tainted by the fact that I work in the field. I’m not giving false game design advice.

Now, I have a lot of respect for Rosewater, and I can see how Mason's criticism may very well have hit rather hard; writing about Magic is clearly a passion for Rosewater, and Mason has argued that he basically can't do it in a good, honest way. That said, I think he's misunderstanding Mason. Mason's point as I see it is not that Rosewater ever intentionally lies or that he gives "false game design advice." His point is that Rosewater's livelihood depends on Magic selling, and thus he is almost certainly never going to say anything that might hurt that. As Mason says, "It’s not the demonstrable presence of dishonesty that bothers me; it is the impossibility of complete honesty." I can believe that Rosewater fully believes everything he says in public, but I'm also (almost) positive that there are many things he can't say because saying them would damage Magic's bottom line.

(And criticizing past work is irrelevant as long as it's always in the context of "The last one sucked, but the next one will be fantastic, I promise!" See Jim Sterling's video The Molyneux Cycle for more information on this process.)

In other words, I basically agree with Mason's premise: the purpose of Rosewater's articles is to serve Wizards of the Coast, not his readers. Does that make his writing inherently bad or dishonest? Not necessarily--I think much of it is extremely valuable and insightful, not to mention well-written--but the basic advertising nature of it must be kept in mind, especially when Rosewater talks about topics directly related to Magic. Which is where the rubber really meets the road here.

Some Magic sets sell better than others. One Magic block (a block is basically a group of sets meant to be thematically similar) that didn't sell so well was "Time Spiral." Mason really likes Time Spiral, and in his review of that block he says:

When discussions of this block happen from current employees of Wizards, their starting point is always the same: it didn’t sell well. All their other reasoning flows from that. The job of a Magic set is to sell product, and Time Spiral didn’t.

This is such a spectacularly bad line of thinking that I’m amazed I even need to address it, but since they’ve been saying this same thing since 2008, clearly something has to be done.

Art is not sales. Art is not defined by commerce. The greatness of art is contained in the work itself; art’s quality is not the amount of money it made, and it’s certainly not defined by its accessibility. We’re talking about creative endeavors here, not making spreadsheets to use in a powerpoint presentation for 50-something executives.

This, I think, is the motivation behind Mason's critique of Rosewater. After leveling that critique and talking a bit about art, Mason says:

The difference is what end result we hold highest. Rosewater, as an employee of Wizards, cares about its status as a product, with the bottom-line measurement always being sales. I care about its design in the aesthetic sense, with the bottom-line measurement being whether it appeals to me. His is, obviously, a lot more easily definable and quantifiable. But I’d like to think that mine has longer-term impacts beyond quarterly profits.

In other words: Whenever Rosewater talks about Magic, his primary metric for determining whether a set was good or bad is how much it sold. Mason, on the other hand, doesn't care at all about how much money it made and instead cares exclusively about its aesthetic qualities. To Rosewater--or at least, to Rosewater in his public persona--Magic is basically a commercial product; to Mason, it's an artistic product. Hence his statement at the end, "Magic design is art."

But is Mason right? Is Magic art?

Part 3: Games and Art

It's actually a rather unique question--while video gamers talk about how video games are art all the time, few people who play Magic: The Gathering argue that it's art. Of course, I've also never encountered anyone who says chess or poker is art, either. To get a foothold into this topic, then, let's focus on video games first; specifically, arguments for why they're not art. One of the most famous such arguments is this, by Roger Ebert. Much of his article is discussing definitions of "art" and criticizing the artistic merits of particular video games, which isn't particularly relevant to my purposes here. What is relevant, though, is this paragraph:

One obvious difference between art and games is that you can win a game. It has rules, points, objectives, and an outcome. Santiago might cite a immersive game without points or rules, but I would say then it ceases to be a game and becomes a representation of a story, a novel, a play, dance, a film. Those are things you cannot win; you can only experience them.

This point is echoed in an article by Dan H, on Ferretbrain (a website generally devoted to reviews and criticisms of geek culture stuff and which I overall highly enjoy). He makes the point that, while a video game may have beautiful graphics or a great storyline, in the end a video game is all about the gameplay, and gameplay cannot be art:

The thing is that gameplay just doesn't leave much room for artistic expression. Even the broadest possible definition of "art" doesn't include things like resource management, reflex tests and strategic thinking. "Game" and "Art" are orthogonal concepts: there is nothing in gameplay which allows you to experience art, there is nothing in art which allows you to play a game. It is theoretically possible to imagine an entity which permits both the expression of art and the playing of games, but those two functions would be wholly unrelated. A beautifully hand-carved chess set does not actually let you play chess any better than one you bought from the Works for two pounds, or a free-to-download chess program.

The point seems simple enough. As Ebert says, you can win a game, but you can't "win" a novel or a film, right?

Well...aside from finishing the novel or film, that is.

This point will likely strike the reader as bizarre. To explain myself, let's back up a bit. What does it mean to "win" a video game like Final Fantasy? To play it through until I reach the "The End" screen, of course. This is functionally the exact same as reading a book until I reach the last page.

"But you have to do things to win a video game," someone might object. This is true. You also have to do things to finish a book: turn the pages, understand the language, etc. Again, functionally these are the same process, only the medium is different. One may object that the things you need to do to finish a book are the same for every book, i.e. are a feature of the medium, while I have to do different things to win each video game. Even if this is true, though, I don't see how this difference alone means finishing a book isn't "winning" it, while finishing a video game is.

Consider the following hypothetical example: Alice and Bob get into a discussion about Harry Potter. Bob explains how he liked the first book, until the part where Harry gets devoured by a snake. Alice is confused, since that never happened in the book. Bob explains that he stopped reading at page 127 and simply made up the rest of the story himself, and part of that includes a snake eating Harry.

We probably want to say that Bob did something wrong here, that you're not supposed to stop reading a book halfway through and make up the rest of the story yourself, that you're breaking some sort of rules of book-reading by doing so. That the goal of reading a book is to actually, you know, read it, with the outcome that you accept everything the book describes as being true within the context of the book's story. Or, to use Ebert's words, that reading a book does indeed have "rules," "objectives," and a sort of "outcome."

To be fair to Dan H, it doesn't have resource management or strategic thinking. Then again, video games don't involve turning pages, and I don't see any inherent reason why resource management disqualifies you from being art while turning pages doesn't.

(In this video, Dan Olson makes a similar point in the context of failure, arguing that you can "fail" a book, movie, etc by not understanding it.)

So, to summarize: Ebert is wrong that you can "only" experience books and movies. They, too, have rules and victory conditions; they too involve, in some sense, playing a game. Video games, too, one can obviously "experience." Part of this experience are its graphics and story. But another part--probably the most important part--is its gameplay. The gameplay of a game has a huge impact upon the type of experience one has playing it. So I see no reason to say that gameplay cannot add to the artistic merit of the video game it's a part of.

"Alright," you may be saying, "so what about Magic: The Gathering?" I'm getting there. Let's talk about chess first.

Is chess art? Well, "chess" is a concept, not an actual thing in the world. Let's talk about an actual thing: two people actually playing chess. Is their game of chess "art"?

Certainly we experience something when we play chess. A game of chess has a beginning, middle, and end. It has conflict. It can often be quite emotional. Certainly people are often quite invested in the game of chess they play. Given the above argument, I see no reason to reject the label "art" to their game. And inasmuch as the rules of chess impact the aesthetic experience people have while playing chess, those rules can be judged for their aesthetic merits.

Let's return to Jesse Mason and his Magic block reviews. Of all he's written, I think the following paragraph summarizes his starting point the best:

Storm isn’t just a card for combo. Storm has, by this point, defined what combo can be. Instead of just a dumbass combination of two cards like Pestermite and Kiki-Jiki, Storm provides a deck that functions as one holistic machine, each Sleight of Hand a glimmering cog to turn the Tendrils of Agony. These decks, to me, are the highest form of beauty that Magic has achieved.

When Mason plays a "Storm deck," he clearly has an aesthetic experience that is extremely meaningful and beautiful to him. I see no reason not to call that "art."

Part 4: Judging Magic

In another post on his blog, Rosewater defends his metric of judging a Magic set by how much it sold:

Was [Avacyn Restored] our best design work? No, but it was far from our worst. Plus, and somehow I keep getting criticized for saying this - it sold a lot of packs. A lot! And I’m not just talking in the first month based on the popularity of Innistrad. It sold well the entire time it was on sale.

That means that someone out there liked it. In fact, a lot of someones liked it. And I refuse to call something a total failure that made such a large amount of our players happy.

As I've said, I respect Rosewater. But this is a bad argument, for several reasons. First, just because something sold well doesn't necessarily mean a lot of people liked it, or that it made a bunch of people happy. And even if, in the short term, it made people happy, this may not be true for the long term. However, these are complex topics and this post is already very long, so I'll bracket those concerns (though I'll likely revisit them in a later post) and focus on the final reason: even if a game entertained a bunch of people, that doesn't necessarily mean it was good design work.

One of the possible goals for artwork is to entertain people. But it's not the only goal. Michael Bay's Transformers movies certainly entertained a lot of people, if box office receipts are to be taken as gospel; that doesn't make them good movies. Art is not supposed to merely entertain, but also to cause people to feel strong emotions, to allow them to experience beauty, to teach them about the world, and etc and etc. And since games are art, and since Magic: The Gathering is art, all this is true for Magic as well. If someone, like Mason, criticizes a magic set on an aesthetic basis, responding that it sold well is utterly beside the point. We all know it sold well, the question is should it have sold well? Did it sell because of genuine artistic merit, or because of (what we might consider) bad reasons, like how big dumb blockbuster movies do the best internationally?

It isn't Rosewater's job to think about this, of course. Rosewater's job is to sell Magic; in the context of his job, it doesn't matter to him why the product sells, only that it does sell. [Edit: This is obviously false. I should have said: it doesn't matter to him whether the product sells for a good or a bad reason, only that it does sell.] As a critic, though, it is precisely Mason's job to give his own viewpoint as to what kind of Magic design is good, what kind is bad, and why you (the reader) should agree. In other words, it's Mason's job to argue that while Time Spiral didn't sell well, it should have; while Avacyn Restored sold well, it shouldn't have; and so you, the reader, should presumably demand more Magic blocks like Time Spiral and encourage your friends to do the same.

Which is why, even if I don't always agree with Mason, I'm glad he exists--and I do think it's a problem that Magic design philosophy is so dominated by a Wizards employee like Rosewater, no matter how smart and insightful Rosewater may be.

Part 5: Conclusion

Anything that has the potential to offer an aesthetic experience is art.

Games are art.

GamerGate: Invasions of Gamer Culture

A few days ago I read this post by Alisha Karabinus about GamerGate. I highly recommend reading the entire post, but I was inspired by this part in particular:

I am sitting at my computer with too many tabs open. In one, a friend is telling me a story of a man he knew who lost his way, his only solace, when gaming conventions went too mainstream, when the only haven he knew turned into a reflection of the rest of his life: a place where a “freak” like him was no longer accepted, but instead subjected to the stares and whispers of “mean girls.” He talked about fake geek girls, my friend tells me, and for the first time, I understand, a little, where these accusations come from. I’m able to see the source of bitterness and anger.

My friend tells me he thinks this man is dead; he hasn’t heard from him in a long time, and at first I want to say, but you don’t know. I can’t say it, though. I can’t, because what did this man, the one my friend describes, have left? What would you do, if you felt there was no place for you at all? To what extremes would you be pushed? I suddenly overwhelmed with such a sense of horror and sadness that I have to look away.

Now, let me state from the outset: I am not a member of GamerGate; I think it's essentially a right-wing cultural backlash against the feminism, anti-racism, etc. which is increasingly gaining power and influence in "gamer" culture. I'm not going to defend this position here--probably I will in a later post. (If you have no idea what GamerGate is...well, consider yourself lucky, but if you'd like to take the plunge, this article I think provides a good introduction to the topic.) In this post, I'd like to use Karabinus's post as a jumping-off point to criticize a certain argument often made by anti-Gamergaters.

In an overall very good video (which I also highly recommend you watch), Dan Olson says (starting at 11:40; my own transcription):

The perception, the base assumption, is that these women [Zoe Quinn, Anita Sarkeesian, and Brianna Wu], none of whom are technically journalists, represent the invasion into the cultural space, an invasion of gender, race, sexuality and class issues, politics and awareness. They couch this idea in conspiratorial tones, assembling lists of supposed collaborators and drawing out complex webs of accusations implying that these minorities are all outsiders looking to hijack games as a platform for political ends.

This is, of course, all utter nonsense. Women, queer folk, trans folk, racial, ethnic, religious, and political minorities have been playing games all along. They have been here all along. They did not, as 4chan summarized with this image, suddenly start playing games in 2007. Also, as we've already discussed, games are and were already political in nature, because all culture is unavoidably political. What they see as an invasion is little more than the players who have been present all along finding a voice in the market to discuss politics that were already there.

What Olson says in the first paragraph (well, in the part I chose to isolate in its own paragraph while transcribing) is, I think, accurate. The second paragraph, however, isn't--or rather, it's based on a misunderstanding of what precisely GamerGaters think is being invaded. Olson seems to be implying that the "cultural space" being invaded is simply that of video games in general, or the playing of video games itself. In that sense, then of course non-"white cis- and heterosexual men" have been playing games all along so they're not invading anything. But this, from what I can tell, is not what most GamerGaters are upset about.

(Disclaimer before I move on to my main argument: I'm going to make generalizations about GamerGaters in the remainder of this post. They are based chiefly on my own impressions and knowledge about the usual GamerGate hangouts--4chan etc. They're certainly not based on any scientific data, since, well, there isn't any. So this may very well be inaccurate, and if anyone has a better explanation I'd love to hear it, no sarcasm.)

To understand the motivations of GamerGate, the precise cultural space that's being invaded, we must understand the average GamerGater. The movement was born on 4chan's /v/ board (before the website banned discussion of it so it moved to 8chan), and so that makes a natural starting point for analysis. I've been casually reading 4chan for a while now, and after enough time the website culture, and the likely personality of its average user, becomes fairly clear.

The best way to proceed, I think, is to tell a story of a "fictional GamerGater." I'm not claiming every detail of this story is accurate for all or even most GamerGaters. My intention is merely to give a sort of idea for what motivations I take to be in play here. My hope is that anyone familiar with this issue, or with gaming culture in general, will find this story largely familiar.

Imagine a young, white, cis- and heterosexual man. For various reasons, he has always been sort of an outcast--perhaps he lacks social skills or has social anxiety, maybe he comes from a bad household. For whatever reason, though, he spent much of his childhood without a significant peer group to accept him, to make him feel welcome and wanted--until, that is, he discovered "gamer culture." Not video games themselves, mind you, but the largely internet-based culture surrounding them.

To be sure, he most likely discovered this culture because he enjoyed playing video games and wanted to discuss it with others who shared the same hobby. But eventually, the importance of this culture grew far beyond just that. Perhaps for the first time, he discovered a group of people whom he connected with--who liked him, made him feel valued, gave him a place where he felt at home. As such, when he identifies as a "gamer," he doesn't just mean "someone who plays games." He means something more like this.

Seriously, read that entire comic closely. That comic (and I don't mean to pick on VG Cats, it's just a good example) is from 2009, but the attitude behind it has only gotten stronger since. If you think of "gamer" as just meaning "plays games," if you think the comic is expressing pride merely in how they "memorize the ultra combos" and "wrote down pages of passwords," the comic is obviously ridiculous. On the other hand, if you think of "gamer" as meaning "belongs to gamer culture," if you think that it's expressing pride in belonging to that culture, in going through its rites of passage, then it starts to make a lot more sense.

"Gamer" is an identity not because people identify a whole lot with their entertainment products. I mean, they do, but people also identify a lot with books, and "reader" isn't an identity; at least, not nearly to the same extent "gamer" is. "Gamer" is an identity because people identify with the culture that grew up around that entertainment product, a culture that gave them acceptance, belonging, and a place to call home.

Now, enter Zoe Quinn, Anita Sarkeesian, and Brianna Wu. They have been singled out for the most intense harassment not just because they're prominent women in gaming; they're not the only prominent women in gaming, after all. They've been singled out because they're among the most prominent women in gaming who criticize gamer culture. Let me explain what I mean, mainly focusing on Sarkeesian since I think she's the best example of this.

Sarkeesian makes videos discussing sexism in video games. Let me say that, as feminist criticism of media goes, her videos are very anodyne--that is, they're actually extremely light-handed, mostly sticking to the clearest cases of sexism and bigotry in games and being very polite and calm the entire time. So for a while, I didn't understand just why she gets all the hate she gets (and she's gotten a lot of hate for a long time). Now, though, I think I do, and it's largely thanks to this blog comment:

One of the things [Sarkeesian] says, is that you can criticize things, you can understand why they’re problematic and harmful and still enjoy them.

And just speaking for myself, although quite frankly this issue probably is a strict parallel in terms of personality type. No, just no.

If I thought games encouraged sexual/domestic violence or the oppression of women over and above baseline levels in society at large, I wouldn’t play them. I couldn’t play them. They would squick me the hell out. I’d feel guilt for enjoying that sort of thing. Games that are borderline in that, I don’t play (luckily I don’t believe there’s that many of them).

In other words, it's not that Sarkeesian is particularly extreme. It's that she criticizes the sexism in games at all (or at least claims that they're more sexist than "baseline levels in society at large"--though I'm not sure where this comes from since, in my experience, Sarkeesian never says games are more sexist than society at large). Because if games are sexist, that makes me a sexist for enjoying them. And sexism is bad, so if that was true I'd be a bad person.

By itself, this logic might appear strange. But let's broaden the scope of discussion. While Sarkeesian is only directly criticizing the games themselves, gamer culture is built around these games--that's why it's "gamer" culture, after all. One of the core assumptions of gamer culture is that while individual games may be bad, video games in general are good; they are things worth playing, discussing, being passionate about, etc. So when Sarkeesian criticizes video games for being sexist, I hear fairly soft-handed media critique. But gamers, or at least our hypothetical GamerGater, hears:

"That subculture you belong to, the one that gives you a sense of belonging, acceptance, and meaning? It is fundamentally wrong. It is sexist and hateful and oppresses women, and you oppress women by belonging to it. It needs to be changed from the ground up in order to become morally acceptable, and I'm going to do just that. Either join me or get out of the way."

And, contra Olson, that is very much an invasion into the cultural space of our hypothetical GamerGater.

Karabinus says:

I don’t want to destroy games. I want more games, better games.

But for our hypothetical GamerGater, it's not about the games. It's about the culture. And Karabinus, along with every other anti-GamerGater and "SJW" that GamerGaters hate, are trying to destroy--or at least fundamentally change--gamer culture.

Again, let me make this clear: I do not support GamerGate. Indeed, I think gamer culture is fundamentally sexist (and racist, homophobic, etc) and needs to be changed from the ground up to be morally acceptable. (The same, of course, is true for the wider culture.) But if this is going to happen, the opponents of GamerGate must understand the true nature of the battle being fought, and the true nature of the people on the other side of it.

At the end of her post, Karabinus says:

I want to remember that I am a gamer, too, and passionate about what I like and what I don’t. I want to talk about games with everyone and anyone, all the time, and all the ways we can make games even better, and how we can bring in those people who reject the label. I want to build a community again, but every piece I have is broken, and I don’t know how they can be fit together again, or even if they can. I don’t even know where to begin.

To be frank, I don't think there ever was, or is ever going to be, a single unitary gaming community. People have fundamentally opposed views as to what gaming culture should be. Or, to put it another way: it's not that the pieces broke; they were broken to begin with.

But this is nothing new. As Immanuel Kant wrote, "Out of the crooked timber of humanity, no straight thing was ever made."

Introductory Post

Hello. My name is David Nagy, and this is my blog, "The Beautiful Night." Here, I will mainly be talking about politics, philosophy, and fiction.

1) Politics: Politics is my main theoretical interest, and has been for a while. When I was a teenager, I was a libertarian; until a few years back, I was a liberal; now, I'm a leftist, though I don't identify with any particular stream of leftist thought. If I had to apply a label to myself, it would be "radical democrat" (with a lowercase 'd'). Much more information on all of this, as well as commentary on other political theories, particular political issues, social justice stuff, etc., will be coming in the weeks, months, and years to come.

2) Philosophy: I'm currently studying for a PhD in philosophy (at the ABD stage). As I've said, my main interest is politics, but more political theory than individual issues/activism; moreover, I enjoy other subfields of philosophy other than just politics. As such, I will also be posting about non-political (or at least, seemingly non-political) philosophical topics here, though I will strive to do so in an accessible way.

3) Fiction: I have a huge amount of respect for fiction, both as a way of understanding the world and as a way of seeing how other people understand the world. I also respect, and am interested in, analysis and critique of fiction, especially so-called "pop-cultural" fiction. Part of this blog, then, will be reviews and analyses of various narrative-driven artistic works. Since my favorite type of fiction is Japanese anime and manga, that will be my focus, though Western movies, TV shows, books, etc. will also show up occasionally.

For now, I will be posting twice a week, on Thursdays and Sundays by 12pm midnight. Once I get used to it, I will attempt to speed up this posting rate.

I hope you enjoy reading my blog!