Confession Time

[Maddy Myers]

This thread isn't just about using first person -- this is about using first person while discussing personal details or anecdotes.

I think calling these pieces "confessional" implies, well, the religious tradition. The term implies that the author has "done wrong" and needs to "vent" somewhere private ... and that venting to hundreds (or thousands) of people online is inappropriate, but also something that all of these people secretly want to read ... or something. People can post what they think "confessional" implies in the comments, of course.

Conceptually, I'm interested in the idea that one's personal voice or stories might "dry up" later. Mostly because that seems weird. (Emily Gould is the non-games example of people "worrying" about this ... and worrying about her, and her life, and her "oversharing", and her pigeonholing herself as a "feeling writer" -- the list goes on).

In games writing, I don't think that personal writing has been stereotyped as A Woman Writer Thing so much as it has in other disciplines of arts criticism and memoir writing (so many games writers are male, for one, and I see plenty of men writers doing personal writing in games). But gender still plays a role here, because "feelings" still get coded as feminine in our society.

Women feel social pressure to be distant to prove authenticity (I talked about this on a much smaller scale in the other thread), but some editors will pressure women or minority writers to discuss their experiences because those kinds of pieces get a ton of traffic (perhaps we can talk about why that is, down-thread). Or, alternately, a writer might feel like a personal story just makes sense to share, and will need to seek out a place willing to publish it ... and may have trouble getting published at a publication that only publishes "objective" pieces, especially if that writer seems to only write personal pieces, which are seen by some publications as lurid traffic-boosters rather than respected works. I'm oversimplifying a bit ... trying to pack in a lot of concepts and baggage, here. 

Some links:

"It made me uncomfortable. This urge to put such private details out there felt so alien and, as a reader, I was duped into prying. There were not just limits to how much I wanted to tell people about myself, but also limits about how much I wanted to know about others. How many from the heart confessions can you stomach? In my case, not that many." -- http://www.electrondance.com/the-ethics-of-selling-children/

"By way of counter example, there are times in which my personal writing have felt, far from the violation Goodwin continuously suggests, like I was finally able to be myself. Clearly this form of writing brings Goodwin misery, and he only does it because he feels forced. Why does he feel forced? What about it feels violating?"

http://www.mammon-machine.com/post/43187985717/criticism-criticism-of-the-ethics-of-selling-children

"A lot of it boils down to the pejorative term ‘confessional,’ and the discomfort of those reading it. Those who see it as confessional writing equate their relationship to the piece as a kind of therapy for the author, the reader an involuntary psychologist or friend. They feel they can’t critique the piece without insulting the person who had a Very Sad Thing Happen. To them, what should be in a LiveJournal post can’t make a sound argument. As described by others, personal writing is exploiting the intimate experience for a cheap cause or a get out of jail card."

http://borderhouseblog.com/?p=10148

[Bryant Francis]

Interesting, because this is quite frankly my most favorite thing to write about. 

One of my favorite articles I ever wrote was an examination of Wind Waker for me, and how it was a really formative experience in my outlook on life. It didn't feel any less valid than trying to be an "authority" on games, and it seemed to have as valid an empathic reaction with some of my readers (all...6 of em) In part because they're slightly invested in who I am, and in part because they're invested in Wind Waker.

http://writingronin.tumblr.com/post/29804565506/when-i-became-an-explorer

I think part of the valid reaction of "Confessionals" is that readers go "Oh, someone feels that too!" and it helps us talk about shared human experiences in gaming.

[Brendan Keogh]

Hmm. I've never considered the idea that editors might pressure certain writers into writing personal (I'm gonna use 'personal' instead of 'confessional') stories. That's a really interesting and important point, I think.

I think personal writing and writing about videogames go hand in hand. If you're writing about videogames from anything but a dry, technical standpoint, you are writing about an experience. And if you are writing about an experience, you are writing about something personal—even if you decide to go with a (deceptive) third-person voice, you're writing, in most cases, is still based off your personal experience with the game (with exceptions, obviously). So I think videogames simply supply a really excellent muse for persona writing. Perhaps more than other creative mediums (or perhaps I'm just unaware of the personal writing attached to film/literature/etc).

So I think it just makes sense that a whole heap of personal writing is drawn to and gravitates around videogames. As writers, a lot of us have personal stories we've wanted to tell for ages, but we just don't have a reason to tell them or an outlet to tell them in. Videogames and videogame journalism has given a lot of us that chance. I've only really written one strictly personal piece, and that was my piece about GTA:SA and my eating disorder (originally for Kill Screen 3, reprinted online in Five Out Of Ten 1). It was something I always wanted to write about but could never find the reason to (slash, excuse). San Andreas gave me a reason to write about it. Playing San Andreas was an analogous experience of the real-world experience I wanted to talk about. The two merged together. Writing about one allowed me to write about the other.

And that is something I really love about videogame writing, that lens they potentially give us onto the personal. By far my favourite piece of games writing (did I say that Tim Roger's piece was my favourite the other day? Hopefully I said 'one of' because this one trumps it) is Jenn Frank's Second Life story (also in Kill Screen 3 or buy a pdf of the story here, do iiiittt). It's a phenomenal piece of writing, like most of Jenn's writing is. People like to complain that personal writing doesn't tell us anything 'about the game'. Well, perhaps that is true. But so what? Personal writing around videogames allows good writing to exist. Some writing around videogames wants to be transparent, a simple medium onto the games themselves, and that is fine! As someone who is primarily a writer, I'm more interested in how videogames can allow good/interesting writing to be fostered, and I think the personal writing we see appearing around videogames is an excellent example of that.

And then, to tie this back to where I started (I'm just rambling, I have no plan for this post and I've been awake for like five minutes), this personal writing then can easily blend back into more 'game-centric' (or at least gameplay-centric) writing. I've only ever really written one confessional piece, but I'm sure to embed most of my writing that is about the playing of specific games in accounts of personal experience for reasons discussed in the other thread (not wanting to claim a false objectivity, etc). I think, tonally, this kind of writing (with some of its roots in New Games Journalism blogging, to be sure) owes a lot to personal writing.

There is always the risk, I guess, that the writing goes too far one way or the other, and we get the super personal writing that tells us nothing about the game. At least, that's what some people worry about. I couldn't care less. If I am reading a good piece of writing that the playing of a game allowed to come into existence, I am okay with that. Videogames are great muses.

[Zoya]

Games don't exist separately from the player, so the personal is part of the source material. Part of the reason I love reading confessional stuff on games is that it's more honest in that way. Some things are about the game and some things are about you, and confessional writing owns up to that. I think that's why I don't agree with Mattie that confessional is a pejorative term. I guess I don't come from a religious background where confession is only for the mad, bad or dangerous to know, so for me confession doesn't have to be about shame. Having said that, I don't come from a creative writing background like Mammon Machine so I don't have that disciplinary knowledge either.

A lot could be said about the limitations of personal writing. For one thing, games aren't dreams. They don't just happen in our heads and they don't emanate from a pool of our tears like mythical beings. It's challenging to account for both the game and the writer, but there are pieces that do that just fine. I think Mattie Brice does it well in this piece about Persona 4:

http://nightmaremode.net/2012/12/pursuing-my-true-self-24357/

There's the game's use of language, there's Mattie's personal experience of language use around her, and there's this relationship happening between Mattie and the game that is also a relationship between her game character and Naoto. I'm left feeling like I've learned something about dating sims, but there's also a kind of catharsis rooted in socio-political stuff, seeing that gender ambiguity is being discussed as an interpersonal yearning. That piece is really amazing to me.

Even if that relationship between player and game is described well, it's still just one part of the elephant. Confessional writing describes one transaction, where one player gets an emotional experience from a game. It doesn't reveal much about the whole host of other relationships that made that game what it was. For me, a good piece of personal writing makes me want to do some investigative work to understand more, and a good piece of investigative work will always fail to capture the significance of the personal.

We need lots of kinds of writing to get a fuller picture. But really, I think we're going to continue to have lots of different kinds of writing. There's no need to police each other or jostle for space. I'm really confused by how acrimonious the discussion about personal writing seems to be. I guess I'm a noob and I don't understand what's really at stake here.

[Brendan Keogh]

On the contrary, Zoya, I think you realise just how little is actually at stake in such debates :p People seem to think that if we have too much personal writing then we will suddenly not have any 'objective' (urgh) writing which yeah... no.

[Bryant Francis]

Zoya, I'm curious as to your outlook on the phrase "Games aren't dreams, they don't just happen in our heads and they don't emanate from a pool of our tears like mythical beings," and your bringing up the limitations of personal writing. While obviously personal writing's never going to be fantastic for some elements of game writing, do you feel like there's still some inherent disadvantage to trying to talk about games at that personal level?

[psepho]

Does anyone else feel that there is a political undercurrent running through the issue of personal writing?

The liberal/conservative political axis aligns with a tension between valuing diversity over conformity or vice versa. It seems to me that one consequence of insisting on an 'objective' approach is that it encourages reaching a consensus or 'mainstream' view which, by being framed as 'objective', locks out other viewpoints and supports conformity of views (with all that that entails).

[Maddy Myers]

I do think it's political, although I wouldn't say the opposition can be explained by a simple conservative/liberal dichotomy. Jonas Kyratzes's response to one of Mattie Brice's pieces (http://www.jonas-kyratzes.net/2013/01/18/would-you-kindly-not/) deconstructs some of his own political feelings with regard to personal writing (I don't care for his piece because I think he [willfully?] misunderstands a lot of what Mattie Brice has written, and he seems very closed-minded about hearing other interpretations in the comments on that piece, but he does serve as a good example of a person who doesn't see why sharing personal anecdotes about oneself might serve rhetorical value).

Some people who see the use of a personal anecdote as "manipulative", "selfish," "self-serving," "irrelevant," "shoe-horned in" -- these are criticisms I've heard. That's why I linked Mattie's essay above, which she wrote after Kyratzes's (and other people's) criticisms surfaced about her use of personal anecdotes in writing. She asserts that sometimes writing does intend to make people uncomfortable, because people should be uncomfortable about the topic at hand. I don't disagree. If I'm writing about something bad that happened to me, then, yes, I "manipulate" the reader by making them feel sad when they read it. Hell, I sure hope they feel sad, or else I've done a bad job, haven't I? And if people don't want to read depressing writing ... then what's stopping them from closing the tab?

The personal pieces that tend to make people most "uncomfortable" and/or "feeling manipulated" tend to be ... in my experience ... progressive pieces written by the marginalized, about their experiences. Maybe the piece is about how a game has either helped or hurt the writer politically/emotionally/socially, or about how gaming culture or a convention experience has affected them, or similar -- I see people get far angrier and far more explosive about these pieces, asking questions like, "Why is this relevant?!" I don't see this happen so much with a personal piece about, say, how I identify strongly with Samus Aran or whatever. That's less controversial.

This is why Patricia Hernandez's pieces have allegedly "ruined" Kotaku -- people aren't talking about the short news pieces she does, they're talking about the long thought-pieces about people using "rape" as a casual way to describe beating each other in-game, and the like. They're talking about the personal writing she does, because personal writing has a certain kind of power that can make people very uncomfortable, in a different way than, say, reading a list of statistics about rape (which still feels chilling, albeit in a different way).

I also want to mention that some of the attacks on personal writing do take the form of "concern trolling" as well -- for example, "How could this Maddy Myers share all of these personal details about her life? Doesn't she know people are going to attack her?" This is just another way of silencing people, and it's a form of victim-blaming as well, as it suggests that by sharing information about myself, I "deserve" to be mocked or threatened or derided as "not a serious writer," etc. The criticism takes many forms, but I'd say that people "worrying" about me (or worrying about anyone else who writes in this fashion) feels the most condescending of all.

I think concern about personal writers' stories "drying up" falls into this category as well. There's a commenter on the "Ethics of Selling Children" post who says a professor of hers in college warned against writing personally because, if you do that, you're somehow giving away pieces of yourself that you can never get back, and once you write down an experience, it's somehow "used up" and you will write less and less well the more you do this. That's a huge pile of bullshit, and it makes me so, so angry to hear about a teacher telling young writers that they shouldn't tell anyone about their own life experiences.

[Zoya]

I think there are limitations, but I don't think that means there's something uniquely wrong with personal writing. There are limitations to every kind of writing, which is why we need people doing all of them!

[Ethan Gach]

Part of the problem is that people take writing to seriously to begin with, and so then start getting up in arms about whether someone's writing the "right" way, or whether the contribution is "valuble."

 

Rather than just say, I don't like X, so I won't read X (preferablly to themselves and not waste time saying it outloud), people try to police content in a way that pressume far too much.

 

This is, I think, different from criticisms of criticism, news, journalistic pieces more generally. If you're telling me about something, and you're doing it in half-assed, propogandistic, or otherwise polluted ways, then that stuff should be called out.

 

But when it comes to personal/confessional writing, the only thing at stake is the writer and reader, and their feelings/time. The best writing like that can hope to do entertain, shock, emote, empathize, inspire empathy, make something a little more meaningful, make someone feel a little less lonely (like, oh hey, you think/feel/experienced that too...humanity!)

 

That stuff can be done better or worse, more appropirately or less appropirately, but on the whole, it makes no sense the way people get upset about it, cause unlike other types of writing where there is a subect at stake outside of the author, like a particular game, trend, etc., these kinds of things are about people, and people are who they are, and you gotta take'em or leave'em on their own terms.

 

[Amanda Lange]

Thanks for starting a new thread. I think you've written a really great breakdown of the debate so far, and I think it would be nice to be able to discuss this in a safe space. 

On Thursday, February 28, 2013 10:38:27 AM UTC-5, Maddy Myers wrote:

I think concern about personal writers' stories "drying up" falls into this category as well. There's a commenter on the "Ethics of Selling Children" post who says a professor of hers in college warned against writing personally because, if you do that, you're somehow giving away pieces of yourself that you can never get back, and once you write down an experience, it's somehow "used up" and you will write less and less well the more you do this. That's a huge pile of bullshit, and it makes me so, so angry to hear about a teacher telling young writers that they shouldn't tell anyone about their own life experiences.

I don't see the comment you're talking about on that post. I looked, because, I thought, "I'm a woman who commented on that post a lot, and I don't think I said anything like that." Maybe there's a comment I missed or it's something on a different article?

 I worry that just from the comments I made on that post I somehow now am some sort of game writer satan who is trying to silence women and minorities by comparing their personal struggles to my teenage LiveJournal. And believe me, that wasn't my intent at all. Mostly I'm relating that my experience with this type of writing has always felt a little bumpy. I've discussed personal details in my work but it can often feel "forced."  Or, as I said on Joel's post:  "Sometimes I think “I wish I had the courage to write that way-” but it always feels followed up with “-because then I could be popular like other girls” and that feels terribly hollow."

Because, to follow up, yes, this is kind of a gendered, political thing, and it feels like as a woman and feminist I should be on "the side" of spilling my guts. I'm lucky in that I'm not pressured by my editor to do such things. But I also work in a space that allows that (occasionally a Tap Repeatedly article is pure autobiography http://tap-repeatedly.com/2013/01/discontinuity/).

You also quoted a point of Mattie's that I really wanted to discuss with her, but I think I probably insulted her re: LiveJournal.

" They feel they can’t critique the piece without insulting the person who had a Very Sad Thing Happen. "

She's spot on. That's exactly how I feel.

If you write a piece that you entangle yourself in DEEPLY, to the point where it's hard to extract yourself and your identity and your past from the argumentative points that are made in the piece, it becomes difficult to critique the piece without critiquing the person. Maybe a counter-argument to this is "why should we want to critique pieces." But I think being able to engage one another on our arguments without causing offense is really important. (and here I mean argument in the academic sense, not in the "Monty Python's Argument Clinic" sense where everyone is yelling at one another)

[Maddy Myers]

Maybe that comment was on another post ... or maybe it was just a horrible nightmare that I had and that comment never happened??? I kind of hope so. I really hate the idea of a professor teaching that to students.

Re: "because then I could be popular like other girls" ...

This line of thinking is giving me the shivers, because usually that "popularity" translates into "widespread harassment, especially sexual harassment, by strangers". But, um, anyway, I don't think that personal writers are inherently "popular" just because they've written personally. I think this kind of writing becomes popular if and when it is good, and even then, not always. It's not like Mattie Brice or Patricia or You Name A Personal Writer Here have all that many Twitter followers compared to their "objective" male counterparts in games journalism (your Justin McElroys, your Greg Millers). If Mattie seems popular or cool to you, that's ... nifty but not actually that reflective of what really goes on, I don't think. I think those personal pieces get a lot of hits when they go up at big sites like Kotaku or whatever, but that doesn't make the writers "popular" in the way you'd expect. It makes them "popular" with haters, not "popular" in that they're followed/adored. Pageviews are pageviews, but, come on now. That ain't the same. And just because you look up to those writers for taking a risk you're not willing to take (and that's FINE!), that doesn't mean everybody does.

I think it's tough to critique a piece of writing in which a person has written a sad anecdote about their lives. Heck, it's tough to critique writing anyway! Hearing criticism is hard! Every time I send a piece to an editor, I dread hearing them respond with, "Well ... this needs a lot of work." But I suck it up and deal, because I want to improve, and accepting criticism and help has made me a better writer in the long run, I think. This does mean that I get super judgmental when writers won't listen to criticism, however.

I guess I just think that critiquing a piece from a grammatical, structural, thematic, or rhetorical standpoint is very different than critiquing a person. For example, "Maddy Myers did a bad job constructing this sentence," or "Maddy Myers is a bad journalist," or "Maddy Myers is an attention-seeking whore" ... there's a continuum of acceptability. Obviously, I don't want to hear any of that, but in some contexts, it might be helpful to hear. But that depends a lot on context. Who's doing the critiquing? What does the rest of the post say? Does it seem like the person doing this Totally Objective Critique also happens to hate me personally? Unfortunately, a lot of this runs together online, and also unfortunately, I think a lot of people who try to, uh, "respectfully critique" personal writers end up doing so with a hefty helping of condescension and misogyny. I'm not saying you do this -- I'm more trying to make a point about how people's inherent biases make it hard for them to evaluate anything in a vacuum. I don't think being objective is even possible. 

I'm not saying no one should ever critique personal writing, ever ever. But ... I do think that some critiques are pretty misguided. For example, the Border House and Nightmare Mode don't have editors, I don't think. So, the pieces have typos. They have structural issues; an editor might have moved a few paragraphs around here and there. I evaluate that writing on a different scale than I do the writing at, say, the New Yorker. I don't really get the sense that everyone realizes the distinctions of context, in these discussions. (Plus, you know, the whole context where we live in a patriarchal society that privileges certain kinds of speech, actions, appearances, and writing.) I don't actually think these "personal writers" are all that privileged in terms of their ACTUAL popularity and influence. Do you see pieces like this at IGN? At Polygon? No. You see them at smaller outlets, because these are considered to be niche pieces for a niche audience.  And when a piece like that appears at Kotaku, people get mad. And Kotaku isn't even as "big" as a place like IGN.

I'm lucky because the Phoenix publishes a lot of personal writing about different topics, and we have several editors and copyeditors. So, I know what it's like to go through that process and learn. I really, really wish that other personal writers could have this opportunity more, that we had more places in games journalism where personal writers could get more help with their writing. I'd feel less bad about people critiquing these pieces if the pieces in question had been through as much editorial process as many of my pieces get. I'd love to see places like Polygon really going to town on personal pieces and giving them both the editorial help AND public recognition the work deserves. (Also, hey, go to TOWN on dissecting my work if you want. I had editors. I'm experienced. I can take it.)

I also think comparisons to Livejournal shouldn't be considered insulting, but that's mostly because my Livejournal was a heartbreaking work of staggering genius. :) But seriously, though, having a Livejournal for so many years (from age 13 through my mid-20s, so, long after anyone was still reading it) helped me practice writing in different styles on the regular, so ... don't knock it! Not that I think you were, that's just a general "don't knock it" for anyone who might try.

[Johannes Köller]

It's probably worth mentioning Brice's own response to all this, since it mostly concerns how frustrating it is to see a discussion with her turn into an argument about her, which we are currently driving on and on - http://realtalkvideogames.tumblr.com/post/43070516489/take-me-personally-babe

I have something of a tangentially related article coming up, but in hindsight it mostly boils down to "What Brendan said". I see no issue with this kind of personal writing. Some are worried about how you can possibly respond to it, but that rarely seems necessary or even helpful. I rarely see these kind of pieces arguing universal truths (and in those cases it's obvious something is going wrong on their part). If their point is "This is how I feel" why must we be able to go "Your feelings are wrong!" and claim it was a reasonable thing to say?

[Maddy Myers]

Ugh, yeah, I know. I tried to use myself as an example more often than anybody else, but it seems kind of self-centered to do that. But I'll do it more in the future anyway, so long as you all realize I know I'm not the only writer in the universe. :/ Just, willing to make myself my own example to make a point, instead of using someone else.

[Amanda Lange]

In the sense of critique I'm not really talking about critiquing grammar or sentence structure; I'm talking about disagreeing with a premise or a point made.

As an example, I do like Mattie's work, but I disagree with her comments regarding the value of satire in her recent hotly-debated piece. I think satire can be a useful tool for people in any part of the social structure. But because the piece is so personal, it seemed like any critique of its points openly would be considered dirty pool.

(And no, LiveJournal was not actually supposed to be insulting at all; I feel bad anyone took it that way. I think lots of great writers use/used LiveJournal)

As for "popular like the other girls" it was a partially-sarcastic, partially-sincere comment regarding the need for a creative person to feel validated for work done. I am sure we have all been there? I know it's not actually something entirely positive to get attention on the internet. 

[Amanda Lange]

...I should say, "I recognize that it's not entirely positive," rather than "I know"; I'm not trying to be condescending about your comment which was a good one.

[Nick Capozzoli]

On that note: I also take exception to some of the "black and white" terminology that Mattie sometimes uses, and often find that such elements are difficult to extricate from the personal nature of the articles. I wonder if it's a consequence of how interwoven her sense of self is with her writing? I feel like it takes surgical targeting to get to the issues while avoiding hitting Mattie, if that makes sense.

I don't really know if that's problematic, or positive, or what. I'm still sorting out my thoughts on it, I guess.

On Thursday, February 28, 2013 1:30:53 PM UTC-5, Amanda Lange wrote:

[Maddy Myers]

Why couldn't you write a piece about the value of satire in games? I think that's fine. But, hey, just because you find a particular piece of satire to be relevant or valuable to your life, does not mean that it will resonate with everyone ... nor do I think that someone for whom Spec Ops does not resonate is "wrong". I mean ... I think you know that? I'm not really sure what you're getting at, there, but if you wrote a piece, maybe I'd get it.

Not everybody likes Spec Ops (or its ilk). I've loved reading lots of different kinds of responses to it. These different reactions don't nullify each other, nor do I think anybody's trying to say Spec Ops shouldn't have been made ... but, saying, "Spec Ops isn't for everyone" seems accurate to me.

It is possible to make that argument without seeming like a huge jerk. But, if you aren't sure how to do that, I'd recommend ... not doing it, or writing a piece about the concept you're talking about, as opposed to pointing to the writer who brought up the concern for you (if you're worried about insulting them, that is)?

If I'm worried about bullying or insulting someone, I just ... write the piece I want to write without mentioning them at all. Alternately, usually more than one person has written about the topic before anyway, so I can talk about multiple arguments without singling anybody out.

I'm not thrilled with the tradition of writers going through each others' work paragraph by paragraph and dissecting what's "wrong" with it. I rarely see pieces like this that turn out well. I'd much rather see pieces that make a new point, based on the writer's own observations.

[Maddy Myers]

Nick, if you want to talk sentence structure, be my guest, but I'm not that interested in hearing someone pick apart a specific writer's political ideology, personality, or perspective on life.

[Maddy Myers]

And ... as I already said ... I'd really rather see people be obsessive about sentence structure when it comes to writers who've had editors and copyeditors, as opposed to writers who contribute to community blogs like the Border House or Nightmare Mode with basically no oversight (and no payment)? Seriously. Context.

[Nick Capozzoli]

I understand (and support) wanting to keep things constructive and away from personal attacks, but I really don't think that I've "picked apart" anything in the quoted post (nor am I attempting to use it as a springboard to talk about anything save the topic at hand).

It's tough to talk about personal writing without talking about specifics, but allow me to rephrase, to speak to a more general idea: When someone expresses something, right or wrong, that seems to be intricately tied to specifics of their personality, I often have trouble responding to it without including personal overtures. I like the idea of writing a general response, but I think personally I have trouble doing so, particularly when the thing I'm responding to defies generalization. I like to think that I'm loathe to paint in broad strokes, so it's a tough thing for me to navigate.

TL,DR: Impersonal personal writing is hard!

[Maddy Myers]

I see a lot of people attack Mattie for being "too black and white," and I'm not interested in seeing this thread devolve into that.

It reminds me a situation that I saw once on Twitter, in which Andrew Vanden Bossche tweeted about how much he loved Twine games, and ... somehow a ton of people misinterpreted his original tweet as saying Twine games were the THE ONLY GAMES THAT SHOULD EVER EXIST. Cue an hour or more of people tweeting back at him to "correct" him for this "black and white" thinking; eventually, these "corrections" started looking a whole lot more and more like bullying, since several people wouldn't let the point die and kept tweeting at him over and over and over. I didn't ever happen to think Andrew's original tweet even IMPLIED that Twine games should replace all other games, and he defended himself by saying he didn't say that, but ... it was too late. People had already decided what he'd said and they were going to argue with his wrongness. Never mind that he didn't actually feel the way they'd decided that he did.

I hate shit like that. It really happens too often.

I feels like watching people try to take each others' opinions away. I know that's not what anyone's trying to do here. It's just ... I guess we all feel kind of "black and white" about our own opinions, don't we? And maybe we overstate the case, by accident, or maybe people think we've overstated the case even if we don't think so.

But does feeling "black and white" about how great Twine is or how alienating Spec Ops feels mean that we're dictating how everyone else should think? I don't think so. I never interpret Mattie's pieces that way, or anyone else's, for that matter. I read pieces that describe experiences I don't understand all the time. But I never walk away thinking, "this person is telling me how to feel, how to think!" Perhaps I just happen to wear a thick pair of That's Your Opinion sunglasses? If a piece is in the first person, as opposed to some sort "objective voice," then if anything I'm more likely to take it with a grain of salt. Because the first person implies the writer isn't trying to tell me how I should feel. They're telling me how they feel.

I read Mattie Brice's "Would You Kindly" and it made me think hard about my taste in games. So, in response to that, I wrote a huge story of my own about my very different experiences (http://thephoenix.com/boston/recroom/150906-why-i-play-violent-video-games/). Instead of reading her piece as some sort of ... attack on the fact that my experiences are different, I wrote about my experiences, in an effort to sort out how I felt.

I don't recommend that approach to everyone (obviously). That's just what I did.

But also it kind of seems sometimes like I'm reading a different piece/tweet/whatever than everybody else did. :/ Or maybe I just feel like I know these people well enough that I know they're not trying to censor me or tell me how to feel or when to feel guilty or ... whatever else? I feel like these writers are human beings with lives and thoughts and feelings and I just ... I assume the best in people, I guess.

On Thursday, February 28, 2013 2:31:06 PM UTC-5, Nick Capozzoli wrote:

I understand (and support) wanting to keep things constructive and away from personal attacks, but I really don't think that I've "picked apart" anything in the quoted post (nor am I attempting to use it as a springboard to talk about anything save the topic at hand).

It's tough to talk about personal writing without talking about specifics, but allow me to rephrase, to speak to a more general idea: When someone expresses an idea, right or wrong, that seems to be intricately tied to specifics of their personality, I often have trouble responding to it without including personal overtures. I like the idea of writing a general response, but I think personally I have trouble doing, particularly when the thing I'm responding to defies generalization. I like to think that I'm loathe to paint in broad strokes, so it's a tough thing for me to navigate.

TL,DR: Impersonal personal writing is hard!

[psepho]

Nick's point is an interesting one. It hadn't occurred to me before but I guess there is a sense in which an author by getting very personal can kind of use themselves as a human shield in front of their argument -- so that challenges to the argument tends becomes ad hominem attacks and are thereby weakened. I can't think of particular examples (it certainly doesn't apply to any of the writers discussed in this thread) but its an interesting strategy in theory -- certainly when considering advocacy and functional writing. Something to bear in mind.

[Nick Capozzoli]

I feel like you're projecting quite a bit onto a vague and one-off comment of mine! I certainly don't think that Mattie's trying to dictate or censor anything, nor do I think my quibble with her writing is due to a silly misinterpretation. But I haven't even expressed that quibble, just made a very general allusion to it. I feel like you've conflated an assumed stance of mine with the actions and mindsets of a great many other people. As I mentioned, I understand not wanting the discussion here to devolve, but can assure you that you're not about to see that happen due to me. I like Mattie's writing quite a bit.

I assume the best in people, I guess.

Are you so sure? 

[Maddy Myers]

Okay.

[Ethan Gach]

This is why I think personal/confessional writing succeeds when it doesn't try to make an argument or be part of a debate, but rather tries, more simply but also more difficultly, to reach across time and space and make a connection with another person; here I am and there you are and isn't this interesting--and if you don't think so than keep moving and don't sweat it.

[Zoya]

A few weeks ago I tried to make a list of ways that I think one probably can respond to a piece that is written in a very personal way without attacking the person. I made it for my own use as part of trying to improve personally as a writer, rather than to tell other people what they should be doing, but I thought it might be useful to share. Obviously it's limited to the sort of stuff I personally enjoy writing. I hope the list will grow, but here's what I have:

• Follow up with an analysis of documentary evidence related to the claims made in the personal piece.
• Map out a variety of personal perspectives in a literature review, to start to get a picture of trends and differences.
• Write a personal piece of your own where you locate and own up to the source of your discomfort with the other person's reading of the game.
• Consider the design problems posed by the piece and discuss what the possible takeaway for a designer would be.
• DO NOT offer a new interpretation of someone else's subjective position. I ended up doing that once to someone on Twitter and now really regret it.
• DO NOT accuse the writer of being manipulative, politicising, selfish etc. Assume good faith.

I think my general rule is that you should not aim to disprove an argument made in a personal piece, but offer another perspective.

Also note that we are not necessarily entitled to respond to another person's writing at all. The assumption that absolutely everything ought to be open for critique and discussion seems unhealthy to me, bordering on bullying and controlling.

[Nick Capozzoli]

That's a helpful list, Zoya, thanks!

I wholeheartedly disagree with this, though:

Also note that we are not necessarily entitled to respond to another person's writing at all. The assumption that absolutely everything ought to be open for critique and discussion seems unhealthy to me, bordering on bullying and controlling.

We're all very much entitled to respond to another's writing (assuming that said writing has been offered up for public consumption). I think the idea that certain works are privileged with immunity from further discussion would be very harmful. Writers should always err on the side of freedom of speech, after all. It's a hazard to put forth your own work up for others to see, for sure, but others are as entitled to respond to it as you are to respond in kind, or disregard their take should you so choose.

We avoid bullying or controlling by, well, not being bullying or controlling in our responses. I can see nothing wrong with a polite, altruistic response to another's work, no matter what that work is.

[Ethan Gach]

"I think my general rule is that you should not aim to disprove an argument made in a personal piece, but offer another perspective.

Also note that we are not necessarily entitled to respond to another person's writing at all. The assumption that absolutely everything ought to be open for critique and discussion seems unhealthy to me, bordering on bullying and controlling."

 

I mean, if someone makes an argument, they're always opening themselves up to counterarguments. If that's not the kind of discourse someone wants, they shouldn't enter into it. Again, no reason why arguments have to be a part of a piece that's operating exclusively in the subjective space of that person.

 

There's no reason why critique or rebuttal needs to be bullying or controlling, and while we certainly want to discourage offensive or trolling remarks and criticism, I think it's equally disrespectful to the writer to treat their argument, if they have chosen to make one, with less seriousness for fear that the disagreement might get out of hand.

 

Posting something publically is inherently an act of sharing. It makes you vulnerable, but that vulberability was freely accepted, and though the audience owes the writer their respect and generosity, they should be co-partners in the result discourse rather than passive listeners to whom the terms of engagement can be dictated.

On Wednesday, February 27, 2013 10:30:33 AM UTC-5, Maddy Myers wrote:

[Amanda Lange]

On Thursday, February 28, 2013 1:53:35 PM UTC-5, Maddy Myers wrote:

Why couldn't you write a piece about the value of satire in games? I think that's fine. But, hey, just because you find a particular piece of satire to be relevant or valuable to your life, does not mean that it will resonate with everyone ... nor do I think that someone for whom Spec Ops does not resonate is "wrong". I mean ... I think you know that? I'm not really sure what you're getting at, there, but if you wrote a piece, maybe I'd get it.

A really good point, perhaps I should write that.

Actually it's kind of a relief to see that I wasn't misinterpreting Mattie's article apparently. I read it as "Spec Ops just isn't FOR me."  But I think it is kind of a challenging piece. And right in the middle she has this statement about satire that I find confusing (especially since she has also employed satire in other situations).

This is going off on a bit of a tangent. But I'm not sure if it's ethical for me to say "this piece made me consider the value of satire" or just pretend that I wasn't sparked by that piece to avoid writing something that could be misinterpreted as a response disagreeing with an aspect of the piece which would in turn cause people to be upset with me for responding to that piece.

I agree with Nick et al that we should be allowed to discuss and debate pieces. I think as long as we are respectful and really reading one another it's a good thing if a piece starts up a discussion.

On Thursday, February 28, 2013 4:39:29 PM UTC-5, Nick Capozzoli wrote:

That's a helpful list, Zoya, thanks!

I wholeheartedly disagree with this, though:

Also note that we are not necessarily entitled to respond to another person's writing at all. The assumption that absolutely everything ought to be open for critique and discussion seems unhealthy to me, bordering on bullying and controlling.

[Mollusk Gone Bad]

If a central point can't be divorced from experience, especially experience you don't or couldn't share, especially if you're in a privileged position, it's not necessarily something being put up for "counterargument" even if you feel you could formulate one.

I've recently been rereading "Notes and Tones," a series of musician-to-musician interviews conducted by Art Taylor in the 60s and 70s and primarily focused on black musicians. I don't necessarily agree with all the conclusions drawn. I absolutely feel that I am not entitled to rebut or provide counterarguments to what is in those pieces, either in whole or divorced from the context of the very specific interviews. I feel that it would be deeply misguided for that vast majority of even the most qualified sociologists or ethnomusicologists to try.

[Cameron Kunzelman]

I'm swamped with work this week, so I don't have time to really weigh in here--and I think my thoughts on the topic are well-known enough--but I'm happy that people are able to have this conversation without reducing other people to polemics.

I'm also posting to say I think there's some weird tension going on in a few of these responses and I would prefer if we could refrain from armchair psychoanalyzing other participants in this group or other writers, period.

[Cara Ellison]

Can't we all agree that it's great to hear from everyone's little corner of the world, and that it expands our experience and understanding of how the world works, regardless of how useful you think 'confessionals' are to conversations on game design?

I read a regular diet of every kind of writing, from journalism to fiction to game scripts for kids' games at work when I'm developing games - I sometimes even get to help proofread Simon Parkin's excellent investigative pieces - but in every regard, it broadens how I think about games and it legitimises talking about them in every space in every way. Confessionals are fine as part of a balanced diet - and we don't have to go around seriously critiquing them in order to get anything from them. Hey - I have put up my fair share of confessionals on Unwinnable - and they appeal to a certain reader, but other readers of my work at RPS wouldn't touch that stuff with a barge pole. We're all capable of reading and writing a huge amount of styles and in a huge amount of voices. Confessionals aren't the entire landscape, but they provide texture and flavour to an otherwise dry and obstinate way of talking about games as if they are somehow just an item that sits on a desk. Games are close to us and we should stop expecting them to be far away. Most of us agree that we can't be objective about games most of the time, so what the fuck point is it trying to 'measure' our subjectivity?

It comes down to this: can you learn anything from what has been written? 90% of the time it is yes, particularly if the writer is any good. If you got that, then that's all you need. 

[Ethan Gach]

I thought that was the consensus myself. The only thing that seemed to still be inviting disagreement was the degree to which particular personal essays can be critiqued on content, and whether the argument a personal essay makes, if it makes one, can be distinguished from the person making it, and their personal experience, when discussed.

[Bryant Francis]

The only thing I can contribute to this point of the conversation is this question---why is confessional/personal writing exceptionally villified in gaming compared to other media conversations in the first place? Obviously there's Maddy's original point of entrenched sexism that seem to dictate it as a "feminine" trait, (I.E, weak, bad, a mindset being its own brand of scary) but if I may be pessimistic, many forms of media discussion share similar entrenched sexism, and yet the backlash seems nowhere near as foul.

Obviously within literary circles, the form of writing will be somewhat more accepted given that it was born there, (Woolf, Baldwin, etc.), but when it shows up on gaming sites readers treat it like a vampire that you need to throw holy water at. 

Is our community's sexism just that blatantly obvious? Or does it have roots in the fact that the first mass-media exposure to "game journalism/writing" tended to be more like talking about cars, guns and technology than it did a work of art? (Or are they tied together?!)

(Also, Zoya, if you see this, thank you for elaborating and contributing that list, I was curious as to your outlook, not seeking to condemn or anything of the like)

[Sparky]

So, I'll bite the bullet and identify a "confessional" piece that I think isn't very successful, which is Dennis Scimeca's piece about getting high and playing games that ran on Kotaku earlier this week. I saw a tweet from him where he seemed surprised that so many people reacted to his piece by saying how much they liked getting blazed while playing, when his whole point was that toking and gaming was bad for him. That doesn't really surprise me, because of the way the piece read. Scimeca's piece is structured around his personal history rather than whatever idea he is trying to convey. This means it's frontloaded with stories of him having a great time playing games while stoned out of his mind. The part where this almost destroys his life is hidden deeper down, where - remember your journalism classes - much of the audience has stopped reading.

Aside from the structural issues, I felt like the piece neutered itself by only really focusing on Scimeca's personal story. He lists a whole bunch of games in this piece, some of which he preferred stoned and others that he preferred sober. Yet, he doesn't really try to dig into why this could be different for formally similar games. That is, why was Marathon better stoned, but Call of Duty better sober? Ultimately, I take home THAT certain games were better with weed, but not really why. Contrast this with Patricia Hernandez' piece about playing DYAD stoned, which actually got at something about the game and the experience of the high and how those two things interacted.

It doesn't help that Scimeca doesn't really seem to know what the point of his own piece is, other than relating his life story. When it hits the end the whole thing seems to trickle out, with a bunch of hemming and hawing and disclaimers that he's not really trying to tell anyone what to do, and a vaguely-expressed fear that authorities will get concerned about game addiction, which they already are, or that they will connect gaming and pot, which is kind of ridiculous.

This sort of prevents me from having a hook to get into this story. Scimeca doesn't provide one, and even specifically disavows the idea that he means to make any kind of universal point. This really is the worst thing to do in a "personal" piece, because it makes the whole thing about the author rather than speaking to the reader. Reading the piece, I don't understand *why* he's putting it out into the public rather than, say, reading it at NarcAnon. Contrast this to "Would You Kindly", which takes an experience the vast majority of the audience is never going to have and maybe can't relate to and folds it into a more universal point about what games are saying and how.

The worst part is that this story does have the necessary hooks in it. The way that the gaming and drug addictions reinforced each other is important and universal because it taps into associative behaviors almost anyone can relate to. Okay, maybe you don't get stoned while you play. But do you drink? Do you gorge on snack food? Do you indulge emotions, behaviors, and language you hold yourself back from everywhere else? What does this have to do with the illusion of control intrinsic to many games and also to many addictions? There's a whole world of relevant reporting that Scimeca's personal narrative could have tied into that he just doesn't seem interested in exploring, to the detriment of the piece.

This was one case where I felt that the personal nature of an article obscured whatever rhetorical function it was trying to serve. I couldn't relate to it, and Scimeca didn't really open any doors that would have let me in. As a consequence it came across to me more like some dude oversharing at a party than an insight into anything.

[Ethan Gach]

I felt similarly when I originally read it Sparky.

 

Of course, writing about video games and addiction is not easy since someone has already done it so well. And the piece doesn't read in a way for me that's either A) primarily about just telling a story--i.e. entertaining, or B) trying to use personal experience as a point of entry into a larger issue about addicition and games, and so it feels kind of supurfluous in the context of similar pieces that have already been written on similar subjects and/or in similar ways.

[Zach]

I personally don't get the fear of responding to a personal piece. i've never really felt the urge to do it myself so it's honestly just missing for me, but i'd love to hear more about it in specific terms. 

maybe this comes from the fact that a few people ventured into this territory and didn't do it particularly well? like richard goodness here, who I will pick on for being the first incident around personal essays I can recall and was cited by Electron Dance.  http://www.secondquest.vg/2012/12/11/in-praise-of-patricia-hernandezs-gaming-made-me-fallout-2/ oozes with condescension for 16 paragraphs in response to an essay about patriotism, family and personal experience. it's not a good essay in my opinion. 

The essay is all bombast and sarcasm wrapped in a layer of thick irony and very little actual criticism. It relies on strawmen ("I worry that we have been too prodigal with our praise of this article" - who is I? We ) and doesn't contextualize ( prodigal as compared to what? an IGN article? a tumblr gif of cute kittens?). The irony here - the contrast between public and private - is laid on so thick I can only read it as outright mockery ("I can only hope that Hernandez’s example might inspire me to, one day, become mature enough to realize that such issues should not remain in the privacy of a therapist’s office or kept in the context of a serious discussion between intimate friends. To know that I, too, am special"). When he finally gets around to engaging with the literal content of Patricia's essay he makes a pretty unsupported link between spears and phalluses and then relies on " anyone with a basic understanding of Lacan" for another neat bit of alienating prose. I don't know who Lacan is or how he relates. Propping your argument on a stranger with no context completely locks me out from understanding Richard's point about killing video game man with spear inevitably leading to murdering all men irl (SERIOUSLY, that's the bullshit "conclusion" he comes to: "the natural conclusion that Hernandez is suggesting that the only way for women to gain any agency–and, simultaneously, the ends to which that agency is a mandate–is for them to claim the Phallus, to destroy men, and to replace them entirely"). 

One point Richard makes is "I have had no meaningful struggles against high parental expectations". This is the part I really don't understand. I'm a dude who has had it pretty easy, and I don't have a tough time writing about games. I have a whole blog about it. I don't have an impossible time getting engaged "in the community" (by whatever metric you use for that) - I'm engaged in it right now with this very act. There's no secret prerequisite to talking about games and how they affect us. Patricia (and Mattie, since god knows she can't escape this shit either) are in my eyes genuinely good writers who skillfully interleave their experiences with the text of a game with the experiences of their lives. They use metaphor and parallel structures and go deep into critical territory about why game content exists and how it interacts with them. I think their writing is technically varied and topically interesting. People are free to disagree that they are good writers! The problem is when you feel you have license to be smarmy and condescending and disingenuous about how you do it. Be *honest* about the content and the text and the relationships embodied there. That's where Jonas fell - he wasn't honest about Mattie's text, accusing her of cheering on the deaths of white babies. That's where Richard fell - in his quest to disarm Patricia's honesty, he spent his essay attacking her and not exploring the game or Patricia's relationship with the topics in the essay.

So this essay by Richard got a huge, (imo) well-deserved backlash. And it was more-or-less the first shot in ... whatever this is. I hope that combination didn't scare people off or make them think that Personal Essays are Off-Limits, although I can see how it might. I think there's still plenty of space to criticize personal essays if you feel that need. 

[Nick Capozzoli]

Hmm...I'd never try to make a case for arguing from a place of ignorance, but I just can't get on board with the idea of writing that's above counter-argument.

Sometimes a personal experience imparts one with a greater understanding, or some special knowledge, but it also can impart bias just as easily. I don't think that anybody's position on anything should be considered unassailable by virtue of its specificity alone. We're all human, and we're all fallible. 

Not to say that anyone here has suggested it, but I don't really want to live in a world where others (say, "privileged" people) "can never get it". It strikes me as decidedly unacademic, and I'm really surprised when I see people who's opinion's I value attempt to shut down discourse in such a manner (an example: when, during debates on sexism, someone says "You're a man, so you don't deserve to speak on this subject"). It's a really disheartening hypocrisy, and it promotes close-mindedness and division.

Perhaps I'm being idealistic, but I really think that such gaps between peoples' experiences can be bridged with communication, as long as everything's done in good faith. Heck, even if it doesn't always go smoothly, I still think we often benefit from the attempt.

[Cameron Kunzelman]

Nick: Don't put privilege in quotation marks like it isn't something that is real and materially tangible in the real world. That's bullshit. Additionally, there are spaces where you don't get to talk. The people who are "shutting down discourse" have the right to do that or to at the very least be excused from the conversation/not used as an example. If you are not a woman, your opinion about what women can or cannot say or what they can or cannot subjected to on the internet means basically fuck all. I know that's a hard thing to swallow, but there is a rhetoric to certain forms of criticism on the internet that border on harassment. And sure, this is close minded and divisive, but the rhetoric of openness and togetherness in the context of the internet generally means very safe for white middle class dudebros. 

Good faith argument is a beautiful thing, but we also need to respect the opacity of other people. Not everyone wants to be accessed. Not everyone wants to play, and no one has to. It only benefits the people who are not experiencing it as harassment. 

So what I am saying, Nick, is that you can feel this way but it does not reflect the way that people experience their day to day lives and you need to drop it.

[Cameron Kunzelman]

Zach: I think you are saying totally reasonable things. I am really surprised that article got the play that it did; I mean, shit, I have never even been able to make it all the way through the thing.

I have a lot of thoughts about games writing and "confessional" writing [NOTE: can we come up with a better word? Essaying? Something?], but most of those have to do with my distaste with New Games Journalism. Weirdly, I think my stuff on NGJ and my unhappiness with treating games as places that we "vacation" or whatever often gets applied to "confessional" writing, which isn't really what I'm going for. Confessional essays and NGJ, I think, are pretty fundamentally different, but we've sort of collapsed them together. 

I mean, both involved personal narratives, but NGJ as I understand stand it formally is more about "here I am in the game oh look at all the shinies" whereas confessional essays are more x event and y game and they come together in a beautiful way. 

[M.H. Williams]

I think Nick's basic idea, roughly delivered, is:

Does posting an essay or other piece of writing invite others to comment on that piece?

He seems to be trying to get at the answer of "yes, but in a civil manner". Is the issue that disagreement, even in a civil manner, can come across as harassment?

I tend to err on the side that you aren't exempt from response, but you should not be required to enter a resulting discussion. Your original piece is often your final word on the subject.

[Ethan Gach]

The echo is getting kind of loud in here.

[Cameron Kunzelman]

IMPORTANT NOTE:

Nick approached me on twitter and said that he felt I was bullying him the my post above. My stance as a moderate here is to encourage discussion, but I have a definite limit on what I understand as acceptable speech. Both Maddy and I want this to be a safe space, and by that I don't mean "totally neutral libertarian speech paradise" and I am going to step in whenever I think that things are getting out of hand to say something. I had a particularly affective reaction to Nick above, but I stand by it. 

In any case, Nick has chosen to leave the group due to the dust up. 

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Wb9By-lODgk

[Zach]

i think there's a difference between "emailing a person to follow up with thoughts and confirm your reading of their piece" and "putting up a blogpost", even if that blogpost is really civil (for what it's worth, I haven't seen very many civil response pieces, but conversations like these work better with specifics and examples, so link 'em if you got 'em). emailing someone isn't putting pressure on them in a public sphere, it's more of a private conversation. A blogpost doesn't really invite the author to respond directly as much as it exists in its own space (different from the original author's space) and tries to get the original author to enter the new space.

Someone wrote a really good metaphor about a blogpost existing as a dramatic monologue and a response piece as another monologue on a separate stage that was really interesting. can't find the link tho.

also I don't know what it's like to get detailed emails explaining how wrong the sender thinks you are, I can easily see that being just as presumptuous and unwelcome. 

i guess the takeaway here is "not every disagreement you have needs to be broadcast". it's a matter of context and care.

[Richard Goodness]

Let's call it like it is: I'm a condescending asshole. Whatever. I know my position in the gaming community is EXTREMELY liminal. Critical Distance hasn't been taking my phone calls for months now--and, since Kris Ligman decided that a personal email I sent her that detailed my mental illness and drug issues was hilarious enough to spread around to her friends, I've been all the better for it. (If you're interested in my mental illness and drug issues, as an experiment I've written about some of them. It's my least popular article--the experiment was a success from my view of things.) I've been writing about videogames since I was 19. I went through my shitty confessional writing phase--by the way, learn a little something about the history of literary genres before you start talking about the reasons I use the term, and also knock the fuck off the anti-religious snark because I'm culturally Catholic and that insults my background. (Of course, I'm white, cis, and Catholic, so insulting my background isn't apparently a problem?) Point is, I've been a bad writer, I've been a good writer, I've been a weird-as-shit writer that no one gets, and I've seen so many writers come and go that it's extremely difficult to impress me.
 
I get that I'm not widely read or discussed, that I'm usually hated if I'm thought of at all. Whatever. I write what I write, and if you don't get it, I'll be more than happy to read your little essay about why I suck--long as you understand that I'm gonna write a little essay back. So here we go.
 
Zach, you've failed to understand a single word of my article. Oh, you've picked up on the oozing condescension--I love that phrase, it makes my piece seem like a suppurated, festering clump of blood (sorry, I'm reading The Emperor of Maladies and it's goddamn amazing but I keep thinking of everything in terms of cancer these days)--and you've picked up on the irony, but, uh, I don't think you've thought about what that irony means.
 
Here's a behind the scenes note: I don't think a single piece has gone up on my site that has seen less than three drafts. "In Praise Of" had eight. All told, about 12,000 words were written to get to the 2500 you see there. If 10,000 of those words weren't unreadably awful we'd have a Lord of the Rings-esque special edition on our hands. Maybe I should charge for the LoTR special edition of my piece. It's a thought. What all of this is leading to--besides me stroking my ego--is that every single word in that article is chosen extremely goddamn carefully.
 
(By the way, thank you for counting the number of paragraphs I've made. I've never thought to count paragraphs before; now I have yet another way of making myself seem long-winded. I appreciate it.)
 
I don't like writing on the literal level. I think it's boring and itself condescending. Nearly every piece Hernandez has written has been on the literal level. I may have made mistakes with that article, but the biggest was expecting that people would understand what I was trying to say. Whether I'm a flawed writer for that or whether you're simply "not my audience" will be left as an exercise for the reader.
 
So, what the fuck does "In Praise of Patricia Hernandez's 'Gaming Made Me: Fallout 2'" mean? Why did I pick that particular article to rip apart?
 
While at the time I published my article, Hernandez was not yet an editor at Kotaku (bravely "battling the commenters", as if the quality of peoples' antipathy is at all related to the quality of your writing), she'd had some Kotaku pieces under her belt, Nightmare Mode was getting a reputation due to the Adam Ruch thing, and Rock Paper Shotgun had published her piece. (She was hired something in the neighborhood of two-three weeks after I published--I seem to remember it being right around the New Year but I don't consider the exact date relevant enough to look up.) I had some things I wanted to say about the use of the personal in writing, and I needed to be EXTREMELY careful with who I picked to write about. Were I to pick someone who was well-established, it would look like some asshole with a blog picking on a giant--I've made that mistake before. Were I to pick someone whose career was not so assured, it would come across as bullying an unknown. I picked Hernandez solely because she was an extremely well-defended target. She's a professional writer. I'm not. Not yet at least. I just turned 30. I'm one of those who considers anything before about 35 or so to be an apprenticeship.
 
I'm an extremely private person. I'm an only child, I'm single, I keep mostly to myself. I don't have a Facebook. I gave it up when I realized that there were only about eight-ten people on there I had a genuine relationship with, and if I can't keep that up through calls and physical presence and texts, then it's time to reevaluate that friendship. I'm shitty and crazy on Twitter and I'm trying to not tweet very much because I get myself into trouble. I think social networking should have stopped with Myspace. I consider social media to be masturbatory, and I consider--let's use the term New Games Journalism because I'm enough of a dinosaur that my worldview coalesced when New Games Journalism was indeed new--to be, if I may quote myself, "incoherent, rambling, bombastic, self-aggrandizing little squirts of Freshman Composition-level material only tangentially related to videogames" (c.f. this abomination I'm in the middle of writing now.) I used to, when Tim Rogers was relevant, dismiss NGJ as "writing about noodles"; now I tend to dismiss it as "I was sad because my mommy was mean and then I played a videogame and it was all better," which not only misses the relevance of the videogame but also trivializes the personal issues which do happen. I'm not going to write about the fact that I was molested repeatedly my freshman year of high school and how I played videogames because, you know, I was fucking molested and I don't want to pretend that that wasn't goddamned awful. I'm also not going to write about it because you know something? It's none of your fucking business.
 
The burden is on me to prove that I'm not relying on strawmen. Brendan Keogh--you're in the room. Have you not recently said that "GMM: F2" was a "phenomenal" article, after saying that Hernandez is a "phenomenal" writer--as if repeating a word makes it true? But you're right--that piece wasn't published at the time I wrote the piece. Zach, you might have missed it because it was all the way at the bottom of the piece, but Liz Ryerson's piece for the New Statesman praised Hernandez's piece highly. (In many ways, the subtext of my article is that Hernandez is extremely incidental; the piece is a criticism of Ryerson.) (And, for the record, I kind of fucked up my next-to-last paragraph. That was a total fumble--the bit on Anna Anthropy is especially shitty. I have massive, massive problems with her work, her persona, her writing, and yet I articulated them extremely poorly here.) I'd seen dozens of comments talking about how wonderful Hernandez's article was--dozens of tweets--and it was linked nearly goddamn everywhere. Hands up--is there anyone in the room here who wasn't aware of the article, who didn't see at least someone talk up Hernandez as the second coming of Joan Didion? This is a fairly bullshit point you're making here and you know it. I'm too lazy to drag out links at the moment. If you really want me to drag out links, I'll drag out links and quotes. Don't ask a guy with a master's under his belt to do Research Day if you're not equipped to deal with something exhaustive, though. I'm just saying.
 
I have not, to date, seen any real reasons why I should like GMM. Everyone says it's "powerful" and "personal"--and yet, I don't really think that's the case. When I first read the piece, it seemed like a crappy personal article. When I reread it, it seemed even crappier. Every single time I saw it linked somewhere, or talked about by a writer I respect, I read it again. After about the seventh time I've read it, I was convinced that the entire point of the article was simply Hernandez wanting to tell the world how horrible her mother was to her. I started writing my article at that point. All told, I read the article at least fifteen times--fourteen times more than anyone, seemingly including Hernandez herself, has. Maybe I've seen something there that doesn't exist. But then again--Death of the Author? My point that we don't have any real language to talk about how "good" something is, that's a point I still feel. If you're willing to show me a coherent and plausible and substantiative argument defending her piece, I'm willing to read it. But most of the things I've read have just given up after a few moments and have just ended up waggling their arms in the air while gushing about how their girl Patty's done good.
 
Let's talk about choplogic. You're familiar with a syllogism, right? One of the cliche examples is:
 
Socrates was a man.
All men are mortal.
Therefore, Socrates was mortal.
 
This is logic in its most basic form. Philosophy 101 stuff. A set of premises that are taken to a conclusion. Choplogic is a parody of syllogisms--you'll see people call them "sillygisms" which is a horrible name so let's not talk about that any more. It uses the techniques and the form of logic and twists it. It uses puns, or bizarre properties, or esoteric meanings of words and comes to completely ridiculous conclusions. The humor lies in the incongruity of using logic--which is seen as an extremely formal, extremely rigid, almost scientific form--to come to conclusions which are completely illogical. A favorite one I remember from childhood:
 
After death there is a mourning.
After morning comes night.
In chess, the Knight is next to the Bishop.
A Bishop can eventually become Pope.
The Pope has serious convictions.
After a serious conviction, you get life.
Therefore, there is life after death.
 
You've got to understand choplogic to understand "In Praise Of". Mocking? Hell yeah I'm taking a mocking tone. There's a lot in "Gaming Made Me: Fallout 2" to mock. But more importantly, I believe it's impossible to find any value in this article--that it's an example of adolescent rage.
 
You have completely misread me saying "I have had no meaningful struggles with parental expectations." You seem to believe that that's me feeling like I can't join the Club because I don't have any trauma in my life. You seem to have completely ignored the two sentences which surround that: "I am merely the gay only child of an Italian Catholic family" and "I do not know what it is like to live contrary to my family's values." I don't know if you've thought about this, but being gay in an Italian Catholic family isn't exactly the easiest thing to be. Doubly so when you're the only child--being gay means that the family line dies with me. My point was that I've had a lot of meaningful struggles with parental expectations in my life. Earlier in my piece I say that I have a "complex relationship with my parents". That's an understatement and an extremely lame statement: EVERYBODY IN THE WORLD has a complex relationship with their parents. Whether it's good or bad or indifferent, the way we are or are not raised is fundamental to our personalities. I don't find Hernandez's personal struggle to be meaningful. That's not a slight against her. I don't expect her to find my personal struggle to be meaningful. Mine is meaningful to me. Hers is meaningful to her. Yours is meaningful to yours. What I see in "Gaming Made Me: Fallout 2" is the same mother-vs-daughter traumas that happen to everyone. And in them, I see a massive self-centeredness and a massive inability to realize that other people have the same shit happen to them. Every other line of this essay is Hernandez inviting us to feel bad for the difficult life she's led. As a feminist, I find such self-victimization to be disgusting. If she has had it worse than everybody, then she hasn't made that clear.
 
Take for example, one of the vaguely memorable images in the piece: Hernandez crying over having to try on a bra while her mother pounds on the door. Now. Every single woman that I know has had a--let's say complicated relationship with their first bra. I don't think anyone would disagree. It's an event which is extremely loaded: It's a symbol of womanhood, of sexuality, of growing up--all of which are very difficult things to deal with even when you're not dealing with a bunch of hormones pumping through your body. (I mean seriously, being 13 was crazy as shit and I NEVER want to go through that kind of thing again.) Some of the women I knew embraced it--they were ready and excited for what it brought. Some were extraordinarily embarrassed--they weren't comfortable with the attention they knew it would bring. And some were simply freaked out at childhood ending. Hernandez directly connects her issues with her first bra to issues with her sexuality--and I do not at all fault her for that. I don't fault her for not being able, at that age, to articulate what exactly it is that she was bothered about. And yet I fault her, as an adult, for not recognizing that there might have been something a little more complex than simply her mother being Mean and Bad. In fact, when Hernandez opens the door, her mother is "laughing"--and while she's certainly implying that her mother is making fun of her, as an adult I can see this having some of the gentle humor that a mother has for her daughter. Her mother, you must realize, had her own traumas when she was that age. Perhaps she was remembering a similar fight she had with her own mother--how important it felt at the time and how silly it seemed with distance. What I see is Hernandez having an inability to judge distance. She is as affected by some kids playing doctor with her as she is with her mother having her wear a bra as she is with a high school teacher as she is with--well, read any of her articles, she's certainly not made a secret of what's bothering her during any given week. I can't speculate too much. I can only go by the text. And the text shows me a woman who is frustrated with her young teenage daughter being difficult, a woman who laughs with relief when the ordeal is finally over, who herself must have some complex feelings about her daughter growing up (Mrs. Hernandez is, after all, a person herself, much as Hernandez does not care to recognize that) and who--and this damns her for all eternity!--buys her daughter a present to cheer her up, perhaps even to celebrate that she's at a new phase in life. Hernandez makes a point to tell us that she didn't even really play games at the time, makes a point to mention that there were a couple of games that weren't as good, and it's only coincidence that Fallout 2 happened to be in there. If there was nothing in the box she liked, perhaps it would have been tossed aside as another crappy present. I find this scene extremely poignant. Throughout is the implication that money was tight in the Hernandez household; the box of games is explicitly a box of cheap used games purchased at a garage sale. Sharper than a serpent's tooth is Patricia Hernandez.

Over and over we see Hernandez bitching about her mother--and yet even as she says that power in her family was concentrated in the men, even as she criticizes the patriarchy, we do not see her father. I cannot stress this point enough. If she wants to show us that gender roles, that high expectations, that stress was put on her by her father, why does she not show him? Why does she spend her time talking about her mother? I can only go by the text. And the text shows me that Hernandez cannot back up her statements.

And so the "academic" portion of my essay was written using pure choplogic. I won't insult you by giving you a lecture on Lacan--when Adam Ruch implied his readers didn't know something he got lynched--but this entire section is intended to be read as a parody of psychoanalytic criticism. What I am saying here is that to read this article as a legitimate critique of patriarchy, to read it as a feminist statement, to read it as politically mature--this requires some bizarre leaps of logic, some doublethink, some unwillingness to look at the article Hernandez actually wrote.

(I also have some serious issues with textual readings of games, and part of the parody comes from that impulse. My long-time readers will know that I come from this place, and they would have been aware that I was making fun of overtheorizing and using inappropriately academic discourse to discuss something. Academia has a definite, important, necessary place in many things, but it's not appropriate everywhere. This was simply some straight-faced riffing that I did for the people who enjoy this sort of thing. I'm happy to talk more on this subject, but it's kind of irrelevant to the issue at hand and I don't want to get bogged down in it. I'm wasting enough of your time as it is.)

Look. Believe me or don't, I don't give a fuck, but I'm totally cool and down with making writing more personal. I mean, fuck. Have you read this response? (Probably you haven't--I wouldn't blame you. TL;DR and all of that!) What I argue against is the irresponsible use of the personal. I don't want to read the autobiography of someone I don't know. I don't care. It's not my business. It's a narcissistic exhibition that I don't get and that makes me uncomfortable. I think the Mattie Brices of the world misunderstand me when I say "uncomfortable". I'm not uncomfortable about Patricia Hernandez being a woman, or being a lesbian, or having a family from El Salvador, or using cough medicine recreationally, or being a former alcoholic, or using the word "rape" and regretting it, or whatever per se--last time I checked I was a slutty, druggy musician living in Brooklyn and I've made my peace with seeing random shit.

It's just--I dunno, let's go to my bedroom for a minute. I'm naked, covered in come, a haze of pot smoke is swirling around and there's some dude (I can't remember a single thing about him, genuinely) in bed with me, same state, the only light is a shitty string of cheap Christmas lights that I've tacked up, and the room smells like amyl and like two men have just fucked each other senseless--sorry, did this image make you uncomfortable?--and we're having stoned conversation about childhood shit, and I'm telling him how my dad used to sing all these stupid little songs he used to make up. And there was a little one that was the first song I learned to sing. I'm a musician. This song is extremely, deeply important to me. And I opened my mouth to sing it to this guy--and suddenly I decided, shit, who the fuck is this guy? He doesn't get this one.

Look, it's stupid. You can make all of these awful parallels about virginity and shit like that, I've thought about it and I'm going to plunge ahead even given the metaphorical pitfalls. I'm not saying, I'm going to save this stupid little song my dad made up for me for The Man I Marry, and I'm certainly no virgin. But...that's something which goes very deeply to the core of who I am. Many of the things that have happened to me go deeply. They may be meaningless and they may not be important and they may not be interesting, but they're mine and I went through them and I am past the point of needing everyone's approval, I'm past the point of needing to squirt my past every time I meet a new person. I was right not to sing the song to that guy because I've never seen him again. I'll never see him again. I've sung the song for a couple of people though. And those same people have shared their songs with me, and you know what? That means so goddamn much.

I'm lucky as shit. I'm privileged. I've had the good shit and the fake stuff doesn't do it for me any more. The secrets that you tell everybody are hardly secrets. None of Hernandez's stories can ever mean anything to me because they're rehearsed and honed. She is making a career out of repurposing her past over and over again. I'm not friends with her--that her favorite song seems to be me, me, me is a large reason why I'm not even remotely interested.

A last couple of lingering points. That "someone" that Zach references was Kim Moss, and I will avoid saying her name three times after the Adam Ruch dogpile, but I've written about her too, because I'm just that much of a bully. I will say that all of my praise for her writing style is genuine. While I found the content of her post to be reprehensible, the girl can write. This ties into the whole "debate/conversation/I just want to say this and have no one question it"--but short form is, saying that any subject is off-limits creates dogmas. One would think that people against oppression would be against dogma as well--but to quote Orson Bean, "A liberal is someone who will fight to the death for your right to agree with him." Or her.

I thank you for your time and I apologize for the bigth of this post. This has been the equivalent of the end of a My Bloody Valentine concert, when Kevin Shields and everyone put the guitars next to the amplifiers and just let them feed back for hours and hours until everyone's left the room, and I appreciate your indulgence. One of my professors used to say, "If I had more time, I would have written less," and while I didn't understand it at the time, as I progress through my apprenticeship I begin to appreciate the sentiment more and more. I would also like to thank Zach for identifying me as the Gavrilo Princip of this scene; I am extremely flattered. I hope all of you have a good evening!

[Amanda Lange]

Richard:

I think what may help you come to terms with GMM:F2, as it were, is to recognize that you're not the audience per se.

A lot of people *do* know that a woman has a complicated relationship with her mother/first bra/etc. But a lot of people never thought about that perspective before, and seeing it for the first time was valuable to them. So maybe for a lot of folks it was the case of "right article - right time," and the point of the article is in fact that Hernandez is talking about the "right game at the right time." There's synergy there for many people even if it didn't resonate for all of us.

I agree with you that Hernandez is uncharitable toward her mother here but we sort of talked about that a long time ago. But I also think that some people see statements like "you'll regret saying mean stuff about your mom/boyfriend/cousin/etc" as concern trolling or silencing, when it's really honest, genuine concern most of the time. In your case it comes from a snarky place, but I see that it really is genuine concern. I think this is really more of a symptom of differing (generational? Christine Love's 'Don't Take It Personally' often jumps into my mind here) attitudes about privacy.

[Richard Goodness]

And that's an EXTREMELY valid point and a legitimate criticism of my work. I apologize for my use of irony and sarcasm about as sincerely as Dorothy Parker, Pauline Kael, Roger Ebert, Virginia Woolf, Oscar Wilde, Camille Paglia have, or Rory Gilmore in the Gilmore Girls episode "Die, Jerk" have. That's the tradition I come from. Nobody has ever made a secret of the fact that being a professional writer is extremely difficult, extremely competitive, extremely exhausting. Writing is inherently an act of ego--it's saying, I have these thoughts that are interesting enough to share. What I think is worth sharing with you.

But yes. I can agree with you that GMM:F2 was not "for" me. I'm not its audience. At the same time, as somebody who likes videogames and likes writing about videogames and sometimes likes reading about videogames, I *am* its audience. A skilled enough writer can make anything interesting, and the point of writing *is* to share. As someone who is demographically very different than Hernandez, her writing could have value to me. But I simply don't think her writing has enough perspective for it to do that.

So. Is that a flaw in her writing, or is my inability to see what everyone else sees a flaw in me? Does this apply to, say, 50 Shades of Grey or Tuesdays with Morrie?

I've been warned off of ascribing it to generational issues--I've been legitimately convinced that age is an incidental factor. I'm actually making an effort to describe things in age terms (childish/adult) and am starting to describe things in more stage-of-life terms (I've used the term "adolescent" a few times, and I think I've been going to a more "mature/immature" dichotomy).

Oh God I'm starting another essay so let me finish up before I spend ANOTHER day writing a post here! I will say that my view isn't so much "you'll regret this" and more "I don't have a goddamn clue why you want to do this". I don't want to imply that I don't think Hernandez (and others--but since Hernandez is the professional writer here and since she's our current subject let's stick with it) has thought this through or isn't aware of what she's saying. I've disliked her article, but I've also taken her article seriously. Rather than simply putting it on the fridge and praising it to the heavens, I examined it like I do everything I read and as seriously and as thoroughly as I would be comfortable with something I've written to be savaged. Categorical Imperative and all of that.

But your point is well-taken. Issues of Audience are extremely, extremely rarely talked about on here. We talk a lot about how to write--but we don't ever really talk about how to read, or who reads our stuff, do we? Fact is, all of the hostility towards comments sections and all of the reticence towards "dialogue" is kind of an implication that we don't really like people to read the words we post, do we?

[Cameron Kunzelman]

With that I think I'm going to close this thread. We all knew that discussion of confessional writing and the personal work would bring up some tough and often-contested points and figures in the field of games writing. I think everything that can be said without being explicitly aggressive to both the people in this group and to the people that have been written about has been said for at least the next little while.

Richard: I think it is great that you've come here to talk through your points, but you've been pretty mean to Zach and you've doubled down on your opinions about Patricia, which we all now know. I would appreciate if you could read for tone a little and try to not be so aggressive. If you continue to write in the same way as your long post, I will ask you to leave, whether that is your style or not (I understand that it is, but I also think you should understand what kind of language and discussion we want to have here. But I'm also willing to give you the benefit of the doubt in the short term. If you think I am out of line here, please take it to personal email.

That said, I think this thread has run its course. I would like to call for a short moratorium on discussion of confessional writing and Patricia Hernandez' writing. She's been an example in a few threads now and I think there are many, many writers doing the same genres of writing that she does and I think we should probably give her a break from being critiqued.

So I am closing this thread now. How about posting something in the "good writing" thread?