Some notes on 'The paranoid style in video game culture'

(To wit: I had back-to-back conversations with two guys, one of whom was mad that I didn't devote enough attention to the SBI employee who wanted the group highlighting their games banned from Steam, and another who was pleased that I had mentioned that incident in my piece).

If I had to categorize broadly, there are people motivated by racial hatred; anti-wokes; anti-corporates; anti-media folk; the "we should let game developers make the games they want" crowd; and people motivated solely by the fact that they had been deputized to be shitposting sheriffs by reactionary YouTubers. This is not a comprehensive list, and there's also a lot of overlap between these groups. Now imagine trying to get a bead on the % break down of how many people fall into which camp — oof! Not possible. That's why I stuck with drawing parallels between Hofstadter's essay and the current anti-SBI movement.

That said: I don't think Hofstadter's essay is perfect! (Another thing that I thought about getting into but decided against). "The Paranoid Style" has been invoked and discussed and debated a bunch over the years, and there are some convincing critiques against it. I always got a bit nervous typing out "paranoid," just because I wasn't sure the pathologizing tone was necessarily super constructive. And also, while the essay is a useful diagnostic frame, it's less useful when it comes to next steps. It is pretty easy to say "well, screw these clowns — they're paranoid!" (Which may be situationally true but, again, not super useful when it comes to questions like: "What now?")

There was one last note I wrote that stuck with me as I was drafting, which seemed really sharp and critical but which also merited more thought and research. That note was the phrase "pornographic leaning" and then a bunch of arrows pointing at other unprintable words and phrases.

What do I mean by this? There is a fixation among the anti-SBI crowd on images of women in sexual clothing, poses, etc. Deviations from peak sexualization are seen as violations, and are a big part of what anti-woke crusaders seem to think the "wokes" are doing to video games. (There's a longer lineage here: Gamergaters were not happy with feminist readings/critiques of some female characters and their outfits in video games).

It is honestly not super clear to me what the deal is with this, but it's a recurring theme in these circles that women in video games are becoming less hot — by which they usually mean "they don't look like they could easily be ported into a rule 34-style setting." I'm also not sure how to square RETVRN style politics with an enforced video game bimbo quota.

Maybe I'm being stupid by overlooking the obvious answers — misogyny, hypocrisy, incel-dom — but these answers almost feel like a dodge, an easy out. If I'm looking at the dashboard of creeping societal ills, and the "media is only escapism" indicator is blinking red, and the "wanting visible women in games to be porn-y" overload alarm is sounding, I'm reporting it to my supervisor. I'm flagging that as something to keep an eye out for. That makes me nervous. We will be circling back to this.

On that note, thanks for reading! I'll be back early next week with another newsletter.

Cheers, Mikhail