Art can increase and decrease the viewer's heart rate depending on how entertaining it is, so the answer is "yes". That's an effect
What you mean to ask is "Does art inform, influence, or subvert our worldviews?". In most instances, no, but it depends on how much credibility the viewers project onto it. You can let a Hollywood movie tell you everything you care to know about a foreign country, or absolutely nothing at all. What we do know from the research is that all forms of art, propaganda, and advertising lose their efficacy over time, which forces the messengers to create new messages.
Whether or not a specific game changes someone's politics for the worse, or makes them more violent is a claim of tangible harm that would require some evidence. At least, I think so.
Whether or not a specific game changes someone's politics for the worse, or makes them more violent is a claim of tangible harm that would require some evidence. At least, I think so.
I don't take much umbrage at people who feel that the types of entertainment products that I enjoy consuming (and my tastes are likely unconventional for a girl like me) are unpleasant or disturbing, as long as they just keep their preferences to themselves and go about enjoying stuff that they like while leaving me to enjoy stuff I like.
Sure, but why? Nobody has to keep their preferences to themselves. We can say they're obnoxious (they often are) misguided (also) etc, but they have the right to do it, and I have the right to ignore them.
But calling certain review pieces silly or obtuse on internet forums is an act of hostility that warrants reminders of human rights? For as inconsequential as critical pieces might be, anonymous internet comments are even less significant. We can all agree that no one's words should be banished from the internet, obvious legal exceptions aside.
Also remember when despite there apparently being reviews about The Division glorifying authoritarian regimes (or something. I haven't read them. All I know is the game had a handy Objective Morality Indicator, where anything I could shoot was an evil criminal preying on innocent civilians, and anything I could not shoot was good), 99% of the articles about it were about how it was either a) a really fun game with great gunplay, b) a game with garbage itemization, thin endgame content, and rampant cheating and exploits.
Or both.
From what I recall the game did allow you to shoot unarmed civilians and other agents in the PvP area, and all the enemies in the game would shoot you first on-sight. Also stray dogs could be shot, which is the worst of crimes
Extra Credits also did a pretty good episode on the Division, though they did describe the enemies as "minor criminals", which just means that Ubisoft didn't leave enough audio recordings around featuring the rioters talking about killing kids.
There's a phone recording chain of a guy who turns out be a rioter that spans his transition from "average dude trying to survive a disaster" to "guy beating up old people for their luggage." It's really good.
I shot one dog in game just to see if the game would allow it.
Never again.
Though the pigeons were fair game.
There's a pretty big gulf between "The Division doesn't tangibly change anyone's opinion towards rioters, union workers, inmates, and private-sector militias" and "art doesn't affect people".
I've played it with my preteen cousins and even they were making fun of the game's setting. Such as why no one thinks to use any of the cars in the game.
They've probably all run out of gas or had it siphoned out. Or been stripped for parts.
Or had all their tires, lights, windows, and anything else destructible riddled with bullets by players waiting for their teammates to zone in...
I'd have way more sympathy for the "union workers" if they weren't going around using napalm on refugee camps.
I'd like to get a yes or no answer to the question of whether you feel art can affect people.
You're not going to get that, and your use of rude cornering tactics is noted
It's not "rude cornering tactics," it's rather fundamental to the discussion at hand. Learning where you stand on such a matter is a rather standard step in a debate. Your reluctance to answer in could be viewed as bad faith, frankly.
Anyway, unless the rest of that post wasn't intended as your answer to the question, it seems your answer is no?
That being the case, I think I'll withdraw from this discussion. "Whether art affects people" is such a fundamental part of this discussion that us disagreeing on that matter makes this significantly more complicated, and I just don't feel like getting into that complicated a debate right now.
I'd like to get a yes or no answer to the question of whether you feel art can affect people.
You're not going to get that, and your use of rude cornering tactics is noted
But, anyway, I am yet to see high-quality evidence of a directed and sustained "media effect".
Most are anecdotes or highly-fragile studies. The most commonly (and uncritically) accepted flagship case is "suicide contagion", which , for a flagship case, is riddled with silly low-quality research (Phillips, IIRC, counted deaths officially considered accidental as "actually, induced suicide" if they just so happened to fit "the profile", and Cialdini treats this kind of methodological shenanigan completely uncritically), and comical predictive failures of suicide contagion models (like case of Kurt Cobain which was widely expected to cause a wave of "media-induced" suicides and embarrassingly failed to deliver).
Is it hypothetically plausible that some game/movie/book might hypothetically have dangerous effects? As a purely speculative hypothesis, why not.
But I will, in case of every such claim being made about every media phenomenon (be it a game, a movie flick, a lewd jpeg, or even bizarre graffiti that looks like something straight out of SCP wiki), I will ask the claiming party to present high-quality evidence of the alleged perilous effects.
And unless they present said evidence, I will label their claims as unsubstantiated fear-mongering
I feel like you are conflating academic literature with video game reviews. Video game reviews reflect personal opinions and aren't required to establish a burden and level of proof. You are bringing apples in this talk about oranges.
Besides, it's not like you have presented evidence on how such reviews actually harm our hobby besides offending you... just some vague assertations about potential harm (politicians? metacritic ratings?). I mean, the examples you used (GTA V, The Division) are among the best-selling games recently, so their sales aren't being affected. "These are bad people!" isn't very compelling, either. Bad people with bad agendas play video games, too (10 seconds on YouTube can verify this pretty quickly)! They are part of the consumer crowd.
I think most of us get your argument about academic media studies, but that's not what any of this is talking about. You brought it up. The rest of us are talking about video game reviews.
Whether or not a specific game changes someone's politics for the worse, or makes them more violent is a claim of tangible harm that would require some evidence. At least, I think so.
Bingo.
Internet hugs.
Give this person a cigar and a car
No one disagrees with this. But we aren't talking about this. We are talking about video game reviews, which amounts to personal opinion and artistic critique
RE: 'couch fainting reviews', I suppose the one that comes to my mind would be Polygon's review of Bayonetta 2. In which Arthur Gies had nothing but praise for the gameplay and graphics, but docked it down to a 7.5 due to the sexualization of the main character. Although it was hard to discern whether it was the quality of the sexualization he took issue with, or the context, or if he believed it was making a statement about women in general, or if he just took a moral issue with including sexualized content in a game in the first place. These are all perfectly valid opinions to have, but his stance could have been explained better, as shown by all the comments generated demanding to know why it was bad and if he just hated porn or whatever (he doesn't).
This comes down to the fact that games (and art reviews in general) would be better served by removing arbitrary numerical judgements because numbers mean different things to different people. This is best seen by people who whip themselves into a frenzy when a game gets a 5 or 6 even though, according to the reviewer itself, that is average or slightly above so. Like, is a 7.5 that bad? Even if we go by a scholastic grade scale, that's still average at worst.
Like...what is the penalty for misogyny? Two points? A letter grade? If a game plays mechanically superbly but is a blatantly misogynistic piece of work played without a hint of irony, then most people wouldn't play it! Likewise, a truly brilliant story that has unintentional horrible controls and is also laden with bugs would likely suffer in score as well. This is why numerical systems don't really work out because games aren't like your chemistry grade where there are specific categories and fulfilling the expectations of each guarantees you a specific overall score.
But since reviewing is at the mercy of aggregate sites like Metacritic, which in turn exists because publishers prefer plastering high numbers and stars on a box, it's just kind of a crap thing we have to live with. I feel like if Gies had no score attached to his review, then people wouldn't have cared nearly as much.
Specifically in this case Polygon scores are not assigned by the reviewer. They are assigned by other editors based on readings of the review. I'm guessing it's a measure to to preemptively show readers the site stands by any controversial reviews.
It's not "rude cornering tactics," it's rather fundamental to the discussion at hand. Learning where you stand on such a matter is a rather standard step in a debate. Your reluctance to answer in could be viewed as bad faith, frankly.
NO U
But seriously, some questions can not have single-word answers without outright comical information loss.
Anyway, unless the rest of that post wasn't intended as your answer to the question, it seems your answer is no?
More like "pretty close to a no, but perfectly willing to update my opinion for each individual affect claim or a coherent group of claims based on empirical evidence" :P
That being the case, I think I'll withdraw from this discussion. "Whether art affects people" is such a fundamental part of this discussion that us disagreeing on that matter makes this significantly more complicated, and I just don't feel like getting into that complicated a debate right now.
I feel like you are conflating academic literature with video game reviews. Video game reviews reflect personal opinions and aren't required to establish a burden and level of proof. You are bringing apples in this talk about oranges.
I happen to think that personal view [X is toxic, has broad negative effects] made in a public medium, does carry with it an implicit burden of proof.
Not in the sense that evidenceless claims made by private actors in their capacity as employees of some media entity should be banned
But in the sense that it's entirely reasonable to dismiss such claims as horseshit opinions.
If a website chose to pay money to a guy who, say, claims that Ubisoft is staffed by zombies made by tiny black helicopters*(maybe he draws a lot of clicks, hey), it's entirely in their right to do so and in his right to write that, but it is also entirely reasonable to dismiss that as weird satire or insane horseshit. And lampooning such guy in a PA comic would be entirely okay, especially if he gained any sort of media prominence
You don't need to be in an academic environment for some basic sanity and evidence checks to apply to stuff you claim.
Besides, it's not like you have presented evidence on how such reviews actually harm our hobby besides offending you... just some vague assertations about potential harm (politicians? metacritic ratings?). I mean, the examples you used (GTA V, The Division) are among the best-selling games recently, so their sales aren't being affected.
I didn't claim the effect is somehow vast or devastating (now), merely that it is a mechanism for converting "harmless dissenting opinion some DudeMcDudeface is having on the internet" to something, sadly, more tangible and consequential.
And it's not a purely theoretical, speculative affair.
Uncharted may not have suffered all that much (and ND might not be subject to any penalties based on idiotic Metacritic metrics, in which case good for them, woo!), but its score was measurably affected.
No one disagrees with this. But we aren't talking about this. We are talking about video game reviews, which amounts to personal opinion and artistic critique
At least one person in this very thread believes that The Division's perilous fascism is "obvious"
_____________
* on an almost unrelated note, tiny black helicopter stuff is hilarious.
I'd have way more sympathy for the "union workers" if they weren't going around using napalm on refugee camps.
True, the game tries to justify using force against all the groups. But from what I've seen people just tend to empathize with certain groups more than others, depending on their personal exposure, hence some people drawing parallels between BLM and the rioters. Even though there were very few violent crimes linked to BLM, whereas the rioters kill anyone who isn't them on sight- there's a fear that players might carry those views with them into real life.
I did feel a similar pang in seeing public workers getting turned into another goon caricature in the Division. Like in the Dark Knight Rises, oftentimes in the media union workers are portrayed as being selfish, insular, and resorting to mob-like tactics. My dad was a union worker and I credit organized labor with the initial formation of America's middle class. So for a few years I got irrationally upset whenever Fox news or anyone else demonized them. That didn't go away until I realized that I was assuming that the outlet had more power than it actually did.
Despite it's popularity, cultivation theory is yet to make a single good prediction (falsifiability blues ), or for that matter to offer an explanation that would not be subject to cause effect inversion (aka "this media type makes people more likely to believe the world is dangerous, criminalized place and make them anxious about it" explains data as well as "this media type is being favored, perhaps as a form of self-therapy, by people who believe that the world is dangerous, criminalized place and who are anxious about it")
In other words, it's a pretty shitty construct irrespective of how often it is used or how much certain researchers love it.
[EDIT: Postscript removed. Must refrain from adhoms wrt Gerbner and his late weird advocacy groups]
No one disagrees with this. But we aren't talking about this. We are talking about video game reviews, which amounts to personal opinion and artistic critique
At least one person in this very thread believes that The Division's perilous fascism is "obvious"
It is obvious. Authoritarian figures taking a control of a situation by military force is basically the story of the Division. The person probably meant that the fascism displayed in the situation is perilous if it were real, and not in the "think of the children, infecting their minds" sense.
It is obvious. Authoritarian figures taking a control of a situation by military force is basically the story of the Division. The person probably meant that the fascism displayed in the situation is perilous if it were real, and not in the "think of the children, infecting their minds" sense.
Well, if we apply this kind of perspective consistently, playing terrorists in CS is obvious, well, terrorism. Literally so. It even says that right on the can.
Generally, "would it be legal/moral/normative if it were real" is a perspective bound to yield highly entertaining results if used for satire/entertainment, but pretty ridiculous in any halfway straight-faced argument
Despite it's popularity, cultivation theory is yet to make a single good prediction (falsifiability blues ), or for that matter to offer an explanation that would not be subject to cause effect inversion (aka "this media type makes people more likely to believe the world is dangerous, criminalized place and make them anxious about it" explains data as well as "this media type is being favored, perhaps as a form of self-therapy, by people who believe that the world is dangerous, criminalized place and who are anxious about it")
In other words, it's a pretty shitty construct irrespective of how often it is used or how much certain researchers love it.
[EDIT: Postscript removed. Must refrain from adhoms wrt Gerbner and his late weird advocacy groups]
I don't think that it's much of a stretch to take fact that consuming some forms of media can influence people, no matter how small of an influence that might be. Certainly it can't make people violent, but it can reinforce it an individual with violent tendencies. Albeit I doubt video games were the shove over the cliff that caused say The Columbine Shooters to go on a rampage.
I don't think that it's much of a stretch to take fact that consuming some forms of media can influence people, no matter how small of an influence that might be. Certainly it can't make people violent, but it can reinforce it an individual with violent tendencies. Albeit I doubt video games were the shove over the cliff that caused say The Columbine Shooters to go on a rampage.
I don't think it's that much of a stretch to believe that a particular pattern of intersecting shapes can cause a fatal failure in the human brain, Langford Basilisk style :P
However, making such claims about any specific pattern of shapes would carry with it a certain burden of proof, without which such claims can be safely dismissed out of hand.
Otherwise I would have to harbor an indefinite and unbounded concern of accidentally running into such highly hypothetical (but not fundamentally impossible) stimulus and becoming its hapless patient zero
It is obvious. Authoritarian figures taking a control of a situation by military force is basically the story of the Division. The person probably meant that the fascism displayed in the situation is perilous if it were real, and not in the "think of the children, infecting their minds" sense.
Well, if we apply this kind of perspective consistently, playing terrorists in CS is obvious, well, terrorism. Literally so. It even says that right on the can.
Generally, "would it be legal/moral/normative if it were real" is a perspective bound to yield highly entertaining results if used for satire/entertainment, but pretty ridiculous in any halfway straight-faced argument
Sorry, I should be more clear... the person was identifying it as "yes, it is fascism, that's an obvious part of the plot", not "Oh noes! Fascism!". That's what was obvious.
It is obvious. Authoritarian figures taking a control of a situation by military force is basically the story of the Division. The person probably meant that the fascism displayed in the situation is perilous if it were real, and not in the "think of the children, infecting their minds" sense.
I don't think it can be called fascism if the mobs themselves are the first to violently reject any form of a civil society, or participatory government. It's at best fascism vs a smaller-scale fascism, except one is operating openly as a branch of a publicly-accountable federal government.
Unless maybe the proper course of action would be to air drop ballots. "PROP 321: OUTLAW HANGING PARAMEDICS FROM BRIDGES Y/N?"
It is obvious. Authoritarian figures taking a control of a situation by military force is basically the story of the Division. The person probably meant that the fascism displayed in the situation is perilous if it were real, and not in the "think of the children, infecting their minds" sense.
Well, if we apply this kind of perspective consistently, playing terrorists in CS is obvious, well, terrorism. Literally so. It even says that right on the can.
Generally, "would it be legal/moral/normative if it were real" is a perspective bound to yield highly entertaining results if used for satire/entertainment, but pretty ridiculous in any halfway straight-faced argument
Sorry, I should be more clear... the person was identifying it as "yes, it is fascism, that's an obvious part of the plot", not "Oh noes! Fascism!". That's what was obvious.
Hm, on one hand, fair.
On the other hand, this is a claim that can't be coherent without first establishing which definition of fascism we use. (there are several)
I think it would be, for instance, pretty damn hard to stretch Division to qualify Umberto Eco's criteria for fascism (especially since things like "obsession with conspiracies" map weirdly to The Division's intradiegetic environment)
But hey, this is gonna be a huge derail, isn't it ?
It is obvious. Authoritarian figures taking a control of a situation by military force is basically the story of the Division. The person probably meant that the fascism displayed in the situation is perilous if it were real, and not in the "think of the children, infecting their minds" sense.
Well, if we apply this kind of perspective consistently, playing terrorists in CS is obvious, well, terrorism. Literally so. It even says that right on the can.
Generally, "would it be legal/moral/normative if it were real" is a perspective bound to yield highly entertaining results if used for satire/entertainment, but pretty ridiculous in any halfway straight-faced argument
Sorry, I should be more clear... the person was identifying it as "yes, it is fascism, that's an obvious part of the plot", not "Oh noes! Fascism!". That's what was obvious.
Hm, on one hand, fair.
On the other hand, this is a claim that can't be coherent without definition of fascism, of which there are several.
I think it would be, for instance, pretty damn hard to stretch Division to qualify Umberto Eco's criteria (especially since things like "obsession with conspiracies" map weirdly to The Division's intradiegetic environment)
But hey, this is gonna be a huge derail, isn't it ?
Too late for that. You still haven't provided any evidence that such artsy reviews or critiques actually cause meaningful harm to the video game industry. I'm just asking you to apply the same intellectual rigor to your own opinion that you seem to require from the opinions of video game reviews that read like art critiques.
EDIT: If you are really concerned with a derail, then you can take your opinion to Debate and Discourse, which welcomes such conversations and discussions. I'd lurk a bit in there, first, to figure out how to write a good OP for it, though.
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It is obvious. Authoritarian figures taking a control of a situation by military force is basically the story of the Division. The person probably meant that the fascism displayed in the situation is perilous if it were real, and not in the "think of the children, infecting their minds" sense.
I don't think it can be called fascism if the mobs themselves are the first to violently reject any form of a civil society, or participatory government. It's at best fascism vs a smaller-scale fascism, except one is operating openly as a branch of a publicly-accountable federal government.
Unless maybe the proper course of action would be to air drop ballots. "PROP 321: OUTLAW HANGING PARAMEDICS FROM BRIDGES Y/N?"
It's really easy to make fascism look like an appealing option when you make the other side arbitrarily and absurdly violent. That's kind of the point.
I think we disagree on what constitutes meaningful harm.
I think we both agree that the whole screwy metacritic system is fundamentally exploitable when it is tied in any way whatsoever to a developer's compensation or IP's future outlooks.
I think we both agree that in all documented cases so far, it has not been a particularly effective way to harm developers (even Hatred, with its low metacritic score and a shipment container worth of pearl-clutching controversy, is quite far from being a sunk ship)
I think I explicitly compared being harmed by combination of scoring crap+shitty incentive structure+weirdo reviewers to a lightning strike (a few pages ago or so)
I still think it is entirely plausible and meaningful way of "breaking stuff", which makes me refrain from just treating these fine guys I happen to strongly disagree with as "just duders with different opinions"
And for the record, I think that the best way to solve this issue (And reduce "weird reviews" the comic lampoons to "just duders with opinions") is to reduce the degree to which devs and IPs are affected by ridiculous brown numbers based on a voodoo methodology, and not throw dudes who disagree with Okayest off a cliff
P.S.:
That wouldn't make the opinions in question any less worthy of ridicule in a PA strip, which I would still totes "stand by", to the extent one can "stand by" a humorous webcomic strip
I don't think that it's much of a stretch to take fact that consuming some forms of media can influence people, no matter how small of an influence that might be. Certainly it can't make people violent, but it can reinforce it an individual with violent tendencies. Albeit I doubt video games were the shove over the cliff that caused say The Columbine Shooters to go on a rampage.
I don't think it's that much of a stretch to believe that a particular pattern of intersecting shapes can cause a fatal failure in the human brain, Langford Basilisk style :P
However, making such claims about any specific pattern of shapes would carry with it a certain burden of proof, without which such claims can be safely dismissed out of hand.
Otherwise I would have to harbor an indefinite and unbounded concern of accidentally running into such highly hypothetical (but not fundamentally impossible) stimulus and becoming its hapless patient zero
So basically what I'm getting here is that ads don't work. That nobody in the history of consumption never bought anything because they saw something on TV that tried to convince them otherwise. That all the Trekkies and Bronies never were influenced by the specific shows that they watched but by something else.
It's really easy to make fascism look like an appealing option when you make the other side arbitrarily and absurdly violent. That's kind of the point.
Well yeah, because then it's no longer fascism, just 1000+ instances of justified self-defense strung together in a contrived narrative for the purpose of making a shooty game. Unless you stretch the definition to include any police use of force.
So basically what I'm getting here is that ads don't work. That nobody in the history of consumption never bought anything because they saw something on TV that tried to convince them otherwise. That all the Trekkies and Bronies never were influenced by the specific shows that they watched but by something else.
Ah yes, the "but my ads" argument (should have preempted it, lol ;-) )
1) that business does something or even claims it consistently works does not automagically constitute any particular evidence as to a given measure effectiveness, or effect consistency.
Ad effectiveness and consistency of said effects is subject to quite some debate, and even relatively straightforward issues like "are TV ads loosing effectiveness" are not settled
2) I am not claiming that nothing can have any effect ever :-)
I am, however, arguing that such claim needs to be evidence-based.
Claiming a particular way of making and deploying ads in a medium X is effective at driving people to make a consumer decision Y?
Why, that's great, but what would be even more great is for the claiming party to provide solid evidence (with both data being gathered and conclusions being produced by a third party that has no interest in having me pay money to any particular company for advertising using this fine and totally trustworthy methodology in this very fine and totally promising medium known as X)
P.S.:
The extent to which trekkies and bronies are something more than cosmetic ad-hoc tweaks to very basic human groups dynamics is debatable and would likely constitute an interesting avenue of research that would, indubitably, produce the evidence I'm so fond of
I think we disagree on what constitutes meaningful harm.
I think we both agree that the whole screwy metacritic system is fundamentally exploitable when it is tied in any way whatsoever to a developer's compensation or IP's future outlooks.
I think we both agree that in all documented cases so far, it has not been a particularly effective way to harm developers (even Hatred, with its low metacritic score and a shipment container worth of pearl-clutching controversy, is quite far from being a sunk ship)
I think I explicitly compared being harmed by combination of scoring crap+shitty incentive structure+weirdo reviewers to a lightning strike (a few pages ago or so)
I still think it is entirely plausible and meaningful way of "breaking stuff", which makes me refrain from just treating these fine guys I happen to strongly disagree with as "just duders with different opinions"
And for the record, I think that the best way to solve this issue (And reduce "weird reviews" the comic lampoons to "just duders with opinions") is to reduce the degree to which devs and IPs are affected by ridiculous brown numbers based on a voodoo methodology, and not throw dudes who disagree with Okayest off a cliff
P.S.:
That wouldn't make the opinions in question any less worthy of ridicule in a PA strip, which I would still totes "stand by", to the extent one can "stand by" a humorous webcomic strip
This is an assertion that using Metacritic metrics to govern the industry is terrible, which isn't what anyone was arguing against here. This is a common opinion throughout the industry (multiple scholarly articles and opinion pieces show up on a search). It is not evidence that reviews that contain opinions that you don't like are the issue, nor is it evidence that they cause overall harm to the industry. This is aside from the fact that most artistic critiques of video games aren't even aggregated by Metacritic because those writers don't generally assign scores to their reviews. This feels like deflecting rather than producing evidence for your claim "Harm is being caused by these reviews or critiques".
This is aside from the fact that most artistic critiques of video games aren't even aggregated by Metacritic because those writers don't generally assign scores to their reviews. This feels like deflecting rather than producing evidence for your claim "Harm is being caused by these reviews or critiques".
I think that it's a good point to remind that my initial claim was pretty much precisely "harm by means of metacritic" and not more generic "these kinds of opinions are inherently (magically ) harmful" (I have later ventured slightly further, but conceded that possible political angle is extremely remote concern in so-called "west")
This is aside from the fact that most artistic critiques of video games aren't even aggregated by Metacritic because those writers don't generally assign scores to their reviews. This feels like deflecting rather than producing evidence for your claim "Harm is being caused by these reviews or critiques".
I think that it's a good point to remind that my initial claim was pretty much precisely "harm by means of metacritic" and not more generic "these kinds of opinions are inherently (magically ) harmful" (I have later ventured slightly further, but conceded that possible political angle is extremely remote concern in so-called "west")
You have since diverged from that initial claim and expanded on that claim in new and unusual directions, so I don't think that's a good point at all. *shrugs* Sorry. It goes back to evidence of harm, not vague thought experiments or a slippery theoretical slope.
You have since diverged from that initial claim and expanded on that claim in new and unusual directions, so I don't think that's a good point at all. *shrugs* Sorry. It goes back to evidence of harm.
I'm perfectly willing to concede that, outside Metacritic and/or idiot corporate motivation mechanics, people expressing crankish views (be they "reshpekhted media critics" or simple youtube commenters) are not harmful to anything except their keyboards, as far as the modern USA and a significant portion of so-called west is concerned
(though I would not rule out cases of idiotic legal interventions outright, silly political cascades unimpeded by evidence and common sense have been documented in the west, too, though perhaps so far mostly not in regards to videogames)
It is obvious. Authoritarian figures taking a control of a situation by military force is basically the story of the Division. The person probably meant that the fascism displayed in the situation is perilous if it were real, and not in the "think of the children, infecting their minds" sense.
I don't think it can be called fascism if the mobs themselves are the first to violently reject any form of a civil society, or participatory government. It's at best fascism vs a smaller-scale fascism, except one is operating openly as a branch of a publicly-accountable federal government.
Unless maybe the proper course of action would be to air drop ballots. "PROP 321: OUTLAW HANGING PARAMEDICS FROM BRIDGES Y/N?"
It's really easy to make fascism look like an appealing option when you make the other side arbitrarily and absurdly violent. That's kind of the point.
It's basically the superhero problem. Superheroes (usually) operate outside the law, as vigilantes, and would in any normal circumstances be criminals (insert J Jonah Jameson picture here), but the villains they fight are so powerful and villainous that the normal legal structures can't deal with them. And so we get comic books/movies.
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What you mean to ask is "Does art inform, influence, or subvert our worldviews?". In most instances, no, but it depends on how much credibility the viewers project onto it. You can let a Hollywood movie tell you everything you care to know about a foreign country, or absolutely nothing at all. What we do know from the research is that all forms of art, propaganda, and advertising lose their efficacy over time, which forces the messengers to create new messages.
Whether or not a specific game changes someone's politics for the worse, or makes them more violent is a claim of tangible harm that would require some evidence. At least, I think so.
Bingo.
Internet hugs.
Give this person a cigar and a car
I shot one dog in game just to see if the game would allow it.
Never again.
Though the pigeons were fair game.
They've probably all run out of gas or had it siphoned out. Or been stripped for parts.
Or had all their tires, lights, windows, and anything else destructible riddled with bullets by players waiting for their teammates to zone in...
I'd have way more sympathy for the "union workers" if they weren't going around using napalm on refugee camps.
Anyway, unless the rest of that post wasn't intended as your answer to the question, it seems your answer is no?
That being the case, I think I'll withdraw from this discussion. "Whether art affects people" is such a fundamental part of this discussion that us disagreeing on that matter makes this significantly more complicated, and I just don't feel like getting into that complicated a debate right now.
Besides, it's not like you have presented evidence on how such reviews actually harm our hobby besides offending you... just some vague assertations about potential harm (politicians? metacritic ratings?). I mean, the examples you used (GTA V, The Division) are among the best-selling games recently, so their sales aren't being affected. "These are bad people!" isn't very compelling, either. Bad people with bad agendas play video games, too (10 seconds on YouTube can verify this pretty quickly)! They are part of the consumer crowd.
I think most of us get your argument about academic media studies, but that's not what any of this is talking about. You brought it up. The rest of us are talking about video game reviews.
No one disagrees with this. But we aren't talking about this. We are talking about video game reviews, which amounts to personal opinion and artistic critique
Specifically in this case Polygon scores are not assigned by the reviewer. They are assigned by other editors based on readings of the review. I'm guessing it's a measure to to preemptively show readers the site stands by any controversial reviews.
NO U
But seriously, some questions can not have single-word answers without outright comical information loss.
More like "pretty close to a no, but perfectly willing to update my opinion for each individual affect claim or a coherent group of claims based on empirical evidence" :P
Fair.
I happen to think that personal view [X is toxic, has broad negative effects] made in a public medium, does carry with it an implicit burden of proof.
Not in the sense that evidenceless claims made by private actors in their capacity as employees of some media entity should be banned
But in the sense that it's entirely reasonable to dismiss such claims as horseshit opinions.
If a website chose to pay money to a guy who, say, claims that Ubisoft is staffed by zombies made by tiny black helicopters*(maybe he draws a lot of clicks, hey), it's entirely in their right to do so and in his right to write that, but it is also entirely reasonable to dismiss that as weird satire or insane horseshit. And lampooning such guy in a PA comic would be entirely okay, especially if he gained any sort of media prominence
You don't need to be in an academic environment for some basic sanity and evidence checks to apply to stuff you claim.
I didn't claim the effect is somehow vast or devastating (now), merely that it is a mechanism for converting "harmless dissenting opinion some DudeMcDudeface is having on the internet" to something, sadly, more tangible and consequential.
And it's not a purely theoretical, speculative affair.
Uncharted may not have suffered all that much (and ND might not be subject to any penalties based on idiotic Metacritic metrics, in which case good for them, woo!), but its score was measurably affected.
At least one person in this very thread believes that The Division's perilous fascism is "obvious"
_____________
* on an almost unrelated note, tiny black helicopter stuff is hilarious.
True, the game tries to justify using force against all the groups. But from what I've seen people just tend to empathize with certain groups more than others, depending on their personal exposure, hence some people drawing parallels between BLM and the rioters. Even though there were very few violent crimes linked to BLM, whereas the rioters kill anyone who isn't them on sight- there's a fear that players might carry those views with them into real life.
I did feel a similar pang in seeing public workers getting turned into another goon caricature in the Division. Like in the Dark Knight Rises, oftentimes in the media union workers are portrayed as being selfish, insular, and resorting to mob-like tactics. My dad was a union worker and I credit organized labor with the initial formation of America's middle class. So for a few years I got irrationally upset whenever Fox news or anyone else demonized them. That didn't go away until I realized that I was assuming that the outlet had more power than it actually did.
Despite it's popularity, cultivation theory is yet to make a single good prediction (falsifiability blues
In other words, it's a pretty shitty construct irrespective of how often it is used or how much certain researchers love it.
[EDIT: Postscript removed. Must refrain from adhoms wrt Gerbner and his late weird advocacy groups]
Well, if we apply this kind of perspective consistently, playing terrorists in CS is obvious, well, terrorism. Literally so. It even says that right on the can.
Generally, "would it be legal/moral/normative if it were real" is a perspective bound to yield highly entertaining results if used for satire/entertainment, but pretty ridiculous in any halfway straight-faced argument
I don't think that it's much of a stretch to take fact that consuming some forms of media can influence people, no matter how small of an influence that might be. Certainly it can't make people violent, but it can reinforce it an individual with violent tendencies. Albeit I doubt video games were the shove over the cliff that caused say The Columbine Shooters to go on a rampage.
I don't think it's that much of a stretch to believe that a particular pattern of intersecting shapes can cause a fatal failure in the human brain, Langford Basilisk style :P
However, making such claims about any specific pattern of shapes would carry with it a certain burden of proof, without which such claims can be safely dismissed out of hand.
Otherwise I would have to harbor an indefinite and unbounded concern of accidentally running into such highly hypothetical (but not fundamentally impossible) stimulus and becoming its hapless patient zero
I don't think it can be called fascism if the mobs themselves are the first to violently reject any form of a civil society, or participatory government. It's at best fascism vs a smaller-scale fascism, except one is operating openly as a branch of a publicly-accountable federal government.
Unless maybe the proper course of action would be to air drop ballots. "PROP 321: OUTLAW HANGING PARAMEDICS FROM BRIDGES Y/N?"
Hm, on one hand, fair.
On the other hand, this is a claim that can't be coherent without first establishing which definition of fascism we use. (there are several)
I think it would be, for instance, pretty damn hard to stretch Division to qualify Umberto Eco's criteria for fascism (especially since things like "obsession with conspiracies" map weirdly to The Division's intradiegetic environment)
But hey, this is gonna be a huge derail, isn't it
EDIT: If you are really concerned with a derail, then you can take your opinion to Debate and Discourse, which welcomes such conversations and discussions. I'd lurk a bit in there, first, to figure out how to write a good OP for it, though.
It's really easy to make fascism look like an appealing option when you make the other side arbitrarily and absurdly violent. That's kind of the point.
I think we both agree that the whole screwy metacritic system is fundamentally exploitable when it is tied in any way whatsoever to a developer's compensation or IP's future outlooks.
I think we both agree that in all documented cases so far, it has not been a particularly effective way to harm developers (even Hatred, with its low metacritic score and a shipment container worth of pearl-clutching controversy, is quite far from being a sunk ship)
I think I explicitly compared being harmed by combination of scoring crap+shitty incentive structure+weirdo reviewers to a lightning strike (a few pages ago or so)
I still think it is entirely plausible and meaningful way of "breaking stuff", which makes me refrain from just treating these fine guys I happen to strongly disagree with as "just duders with different opinions"
And for the record, I think that the best way to solve this issue (And reduce "weird reviews" the comic lampoons to "just duders with opinions") is to reduce the degree to which devs and IPs are affected by ridiculous brown numbers based on a voodoo methodology, and not throw dudes who disagree with Okayest off a cliff
P.S.:
That wouldn't make the opinions in question any less worthy of ridicule in a PA strip, which I would still totes "stand by", to the extent one can "stand by" a humorous webcomic strip
So basically what I'm getting here is that ads don't work. That nobody in the history of consumption never bought anything because they saw something on TV that tried to convince them otherwise. That all the Trekkies and Bronies never were influenced by the specific shows that they watched but by something else.
Well yeah, because then it's no longer fascism, just 1000+ instances of justified self-defense strung together in a contrived narrative for the purpose of making a shooty game. Unless you stretch the definition to include any police use of force.
Ah yes, the "but my ads" argument (should have preempted it, lol ;-) )
1) that business does something or even claims it consistently works does not automagically constitute any particular evidence as to a given measure effectiveness, or effect consistency.
Ad effectiveness and consistency of said effects is subject to quite some debate, and even relatively straightforward issues like "are TV ads loosing effectiveness" are not settled
2) I am not claiming that nothing can have any effect ever :-)
I am, however, arguing that such claim needs to be evidence-based.
Claiming a particular way of making and deploying ads in a medium X is effective at driving people to make a consumer decision Y?
Why, that's great, but what would be even more great is for the claiming party to provide solid evidence (with both data being gathered and conclusions being produced by a third party that has no interest in having me pay money to any particular company for advertising using this fine and totally trustworthy methodology in this very fine and totally promising medium known as X)
P.S.:
The extent to which trekkies and bronies are something more than cosmetic ad-hoc tweaks to very basic human groups dynamics is debatable and would likely constitute an interesting avenue of research that would, indubitably, produce the evidence I'm so fond of
I think that it's a good point to remind that my initial claim was pretty much precisely "harm by means of metacritic" and not more generic "these kinds of opinions are inherently (magically
I'm perfectly willing to concede that, outside Metacritic and/or idiot corporate motivation mechanics, people expressing crankish views (be they "reshpekhted media critics" or simple youtube commenters) are not harmful to anything except their keyboards, as far as the modern USA and a significant portion of so-called west is concerned
(though I would not rule out cases of idiotic legal interventions outright, silly political cascades unimpeded by evidence and common sense have been documented in the west, too, though perhaps so far mostly not in regards to videogames)
5/7 for me.
Also Polygon reviewed Doom and gave it an entirely boring 8.5/10.
An 8.5! Their doomed....
It's basically the superhero problem. Superheroes (usually) operate outside the law, as vigilantes, and would in any normal circumstances be criminals (insert J Jonah Jameson picture here), but the villains they fight are so powerful and villainous that the normal legal structures can't deal with them. And so we get comic books/movies.
And eventually the Sokovia Accords.