Let us play something else: Thoughts on ‘games are different’ and game scholarship in the Trump era

This piece takes its cue from a pair of incidents – a not unfamiliar theme in game studies – relating to game scholarship and its engagement with right-wing politics. In the first case, well-known game scholar Bonnie ‘Bo’ Ruberg called on editors and reviewers to stop insisting that scholars include a reference to a certain online campaign of harassment, doxing and threats of physical violence. In the second case, I had a reviewer insist that I had to include a reference to the ‘ Fortnite to alt-right pipeline’ because clearly games were causing alt-right lunacy. To be sure, these both constitute genre criticism – among others – at its most reductive and cynical, deciding what the institutional and audience expectations entail based on an assumption of the industrial ones. Then, biographical criticism and assertions about authorial intent or the necessary ‘touchstones’ began to appear. There seems to be a consistent and persistent insistence that somehow even the best and most accomplished scholars should forget decades of scholarship because ‘games are different’ and this tendency has been conditioned and shaped by reading games through the ‘lens’ of the Trump presidency. This is important because it confirms that essays about games still tend to fit into one of the two boxes Ruberg ticks: game scholars who are not necessarily adept at the specific content area or specialists in a given field who are not really game scholars. It is telling and symptomatic of the centripetal and centrifugal movements in game studies; that is, from within and without. Admittedly, games are different, but not so different that we should forget or ignore decades of scholarship or worse, do not bother to find out if it exists at all. Not only are many of these positions ahistorical – ignoring the fact that, as some much maligned games quite cleverly point out repeatedly within, the same things have been said about the corrupting power of soap operas, romance novels, comic books, wrestling, rap and hip hop, backwards masking in heavy metal and plain old rock ‘n’ roll – the positions are also tacitly or unwittingly ageist, classist and/or occasionally racist, homophobic and transphobic even as the author purports to be concerned with inequitable representations. Moreover, there are peculiarly US American concerns that are transposed onto ostensibly universal ones. These reveal that even the most ‘woke’ of the American left can be a cultural imperialist and that American exceptionalism is inescapable if not ineluctable.