Cancel Culture, Reputational Harm and Deplatforming

It's really difficult to talk about cancel culture without the conversation turning into a swamp.

I'm going to paraphrase Hank Green here, but there was an insight he shared that I think is really relevant. He said something to the effect of "You'll navigate the conversation much more successfully when you replace the word 'cancelled' with 'had some harm done to their reputation'."

It's a bit of an oversimplification but that's also the truth. Left of center we don't talk much about being cancelled, we tend to distinguish between reputational harm and deplatforming. The definitions of those words being kinda self-evident but for the sake of being thorough, when I say reputational harm, I am talking about what everyone thinks of a person, and when I say deplatforming, I mean an entity taking away a person's platform. An account banned on Twitter, being locked out of posting videos on YouTube, being blacklisted from speaking on college campuses. A body that determines a person's speech is harmful enough to not provide them with a platform.

And make no mistake of it, I think that there are people who we think should be deplatformed, who should lose their ability to continue doing harm. The big example being Woody Allen, a convicted sexual abuser who fled imprisonment and is living mostly consequence free. Or Alex Jones, who spread his Sandy Hook hoax conspiracy theory so far and wide it ended up harming the parents of the children victimized in a school shooting. And I don't take deplatforming lightly, to me it is the hammer of last resort reserved for when the evidence against a person is very strong and no other recourse for justice is available.

Reputational harm is different. This is your garden variety cancelled. Someone sees you said some shit online and distance themselves from you. You're still allowed to post or whatever but folks decide you are not worth their time. Losing good-will with the people.

And if your job is contingent on not losing people's good will, that's a harder problem to solve, but it is yours.

Posting on the internet can suck if your job is dependent on your reputation and you have enemies or you're just a bad public speaker or you have nothing in terms of public relations. There's a reason people spend six figure amounts on a good PR Team or a good PR Campaign. It's hard to gain people's trust and very easy to lose it.

We live in a low trust media environment, both in that we can't trust a lot of our news outlets and in that there is so much misinformation and disinformation online that you can't be sure of the truth of anything you read. And people launch misinformation campaigns, someone out there can decide that you are their enemy and you must at all costs be stopped.

Should we forgive online figures for messing up? Honestly, yes. I believe that people should be able to make mistakes, make mistakes repeatedly, and as long as they are making a good faith effort to fix the issue, we shouldn't dole out infinite punishment. That's not to say I don't think some mistakes are beyond coming back for. No one wants to bat for a sex pest, no one wants to bat for an abuser. But people make mistakes and people are human.

There isn't a clean note to end this on. I might change my mind on this a bunch more in the future. But what I know about this in the here and now is that we can't keep going on like this. This isn't going away and we're destroying the mental health of creators who are constantly walking on eggshells.

We need better solutions to these problems.

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Game Immersion, or Why You Need To Stop Staring At Traffic In Games And Drive

I love The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim.

It's one of my favourite games of all time. Specifically on PC. What makes Skyrim so special is how unabashedly moddable it is. You can practically change anything in the game, it's so robust that it's almost become a game engine of its own.

But one thing that Skyrim players often go to absurd lengths to protect is their immersion. And if you look on Nexus you'll see some truly unnecessary mods. There was one that actually crashed my game from the strain it put my PC under just to simulate flocks of birds.

All in the name of immersion.

Immersion in a game is kind of a strange thing. When people talk about something breaking their immersion, they usually mean that they've seen or heard something that took them out of the experience. Sort of like a wrestler breaking kayfabe. The game isn't supposed to acknowledge that it is a game. The NPCs shouldn't do things that are inhuman and uncanny.

Keep the mask on.

When I was in school we did film study. I remember there was a kid in the back who would yell and interrupt the film every few minutes, until the teacher eventually go fed up, paused the film, went to the whiteboard and wrote in big black letters

SUSPENSION OF DISBELIEF

Where that line is for everyone is going to be different. For some it's not seeing hanging signs in Skyrim sway realistically in the breeze. Other people can interpret the 16x16 sprites of an NES game as full living breathing world.

There's something that stuck with me. I remember MovieBob saying it but I don't think he's the first, that's where I heard it first though.

"Are you guys sure you don't mean engagement?"

It's a lot harder to suspend your disbelief when you're staring at signs instead of doing something engaging. You know why you don't ask worldbuilding questions about the mushroom kingdom? There's a goomba coming to kill you, you do not have the time. Get running. The clock is ticking down.

I have a feeling that modern games are all trying so hard to make complex simulations of real life that we've confused the quality of the simulation with the quality of the game. What pedestrians do in Grand Theft Auto, what the other drivers on the road do in Watch Dogs, whatever the moon logic was behind the swordplay in Kingdom Come Deliverance, seriously, what is with the game's combat, why did we bring back Daggerfall's worst feature?

Games are about play. Or at least, they are to me. It is about being playful, it is about playing. Some argue that games don't need to be fun, and I think there are some games that can make an interesting point or be a worthwhile experience by being deliberately unenjoyable, at least for certain stretches.

But it'd really suck if that was every game, or even a majority of games.

I'm not worried about my immersion. Suspension of Disbelief comes easy to me. And it's not stuff like janky AI or broken physics that do it, one of my favourite games is Skyrim. It's usually stuff like bad character writing, people making decisions that don't make a lick of sense. Why can't I send the radiation proof super mutant to go and flip the switch in the big radiation tank, Bethesda? Why must I, a regular wastelander who is very much not immune to radiation, go into that room and die? He's my friend, he'd do it if I ask, it's no inconvenience to him.

I think a lot of people would actually agree. Just make s fun game. We'll figure out our immersion later. And if it's that much of a problem, well...

There's always Nexus.

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There's Something About Undertale's Morality That Bugs Me

 I want to float an idea past you.

A videogame is a conversation between a player and a developer.

I think about that sometimes. I think you can classify most forms of art as a conversation between the artist and consumer. Art is trying to say something and hoping you'll listen. You might not get to respond personally to the artist but you can form a rebuttal, or a rejection, or an agreement.

And I think videogames can allow for the most input into that conversation just in the fact that for the conversation to move forward, there must be input.

And I think I hate what Undertale has to say.

Okay, well, that's hyperbolic. I really only have one small criticism of its approach to morality as an all-or-nothing zero sum game in which the onus is entirely on the player to be moral and it instills this idea where you can only truly be moral if you adopt a martyr complex and let tens or hundreds of monsters of various sizes punch you directly in the face and if you strike back at even one, no matter how much violence or aggression they show towards you, then you are put into the track of a middling ending.

I think the misanthropy also really gets to me, humans are usually the instigators, they wronged the monster population, they killed Asriel and children are the only ones with innocence. It feels very born of Christian values, the idea that people are born with sin and only through acting as Christ would are we able to find salvation and like, I just think morality is more complicated than that.

For one thing, I don't think Undertale is a bad game and I think some of the ways it approaches non-violence is fun and unique. And more games should allow for non-lethal playthroughs but I think rather than it being a developer's litmus test, let players choose for themselves.

If anything, I think it only bothered me so much because of the potential I saw within the game to create an experience that would have been, at least to me, an unforgettable playthrough.

Instead... The best I can do is voice my concerns over a blog post and hope it doesn't make me come off as a condescending asshole who was unhappy with the ending he got in a videogame.

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Making (Art) Is Hard Work

Hey, I'm Matt-Dave, and I have released exactly two videogames, written over 100 blog posts, wrote a novel, and recorded 4 demos with a band that broke up.

And those things were all bloody hard to do.

Any personal project is something that's very hard to get off the ground. You're usually solely responsible for it's completion and holding yourself to task is hard. Often, the reward is... Nothing. Perhaps a small audience, perhaps a couple pats on the back, but most of the time you're shouting into the void and hoping someone hears it.

It's hard to make a career and name for yourself off of passion projects, hell, this blog has been going for years now and I couldn't tell you if any actual humans read my blog or if it's just porn bots.

Why do we do the things we do, even if they're difficult, tedious, time consuming and sometimes not even that cathartic?

Well, I crave creative satisfaction. I consider myself something of an artist. I make music, I make games, I write, all that good stuff and I publish a lot of my work online. Sometimes it just doesn't get noticed.

That's okay though.

Making art for the sake of making art is where the true joy in life lies. I wish I could spend my life just doing that. Just writing, just penning blog posts, just making games, just making songs. It's some of the greatest pleasures I've had as a human being and I wish more people could experience those things.

But it takes its toll.

Sometimes you do wonder if it's all worth it, if screaming into the void means you're just yelling at yourself.

I don't know what to do about that.

I do know I'll continue. I'm trying my best to make something out of nothing here and I hope some day it will pay off. In some ways it already has, so we'll see if there's any further return on investment.

All I can say is, finish your passion projects. Don't let them linger.

We all have too many lingering regrets already.

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Since When Did Fascists Start Liking Harry Potter?

Hey, you know what I love? Harry Potter.

Like, every couple years I watch every movie in a marathon because those were some of my first experiences with the artistry of cinema, rather than the junkfood movies I'd thought were the ceiling. I love the theme song so much it makes me feel a warmth in my chest.

And I still respect the hell out of JK Rowling, for her achievements. She's done a ton of charity work, has given more money to charity than even most millionaires will see and her story as a writer inspires me to try harder with my writing.

However, recently it's been hard. I don't agree with the a lot of the choices she's made lately, and she's disappointed me plenty. And I recognize the tough position she must be in, but I think that power and influence comes with responsibility and one has to try act as ethically as possible.

I don't want this to get too political, and I get that people wanna have a good laugh, but there's this icky feeling I get when I see Rowling criticized for Hermoine's stage play casting with the same fevor as she gets criticized for the queerbaiting stuff. There's an icky feeling I get when I see people call details about Dumbledore's sex life gross, but no one batting an eye about Voldermort's secret daughter. I get an icky feeling when people use a mocked up tweet to criticize JK Rowling when she hasn't actually said anything as egregious as the 'wizard poop' retcon. There's an icky feeling I get when I see criticism for JK Rowling weaponized towards the goal of the radicalization of people who just wanna see themselves represented in the work.

To that end, I just wanna say, be careful when you're disappointed to be a little more scrutinizing? I'm afraid for the future. I'm afraid that there's going to be a co-opting of the discourse by radicalized individuals. I'm afraid that this thing I loved when I was a kid is going to be hard to enjoy because we stopped talking about how we felt when we first read/watched it but instead are caught up in stuff that we know we shouldn't care about, but also can't avoid.

Hey, you know what I like? Harry Potter. You wanna talk about how much you like Harry Potter? I think you should. You wanna talk about what you dislike about Harry Potter? I think you should.

I just don't think you should spend too much time dog piling on JK Rowling. Not accusing you personally of anything, but when you've dog piled on top of someone, sometimes it's hard to see that the people you're dog piling with are radicalized towards rhetoric that you yourself find abhorrent.

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