The lights are glaring at me as I set up my equipment. PC streaming today means adjusting the brightness of my triple monitor set-up, doing some color-correcting, and making sure my streamer window doesn’t cover up anything that could be important to the gameplay. What am I playing today? Something light, something that doesn’t take too much attention from my chat and monitoring my equipment, but most importantly, something solo. I’m a female streamer and I’m already braced to deal with harassment from randos in the chat- I don’t want to also deal with it in-game. I don’t want to deal with toxic gamers attacking me on two fronts, trying to break me and, if I show any negative emotion to their attacks, declaring, “it’s just a joke- you aren’t a real gamer if you can’t deal with this. It’s just a joke.”
It’s just a joke.
Christopher Paul tells us it isn’t just a joke, but a complicated interaction of highly discriminatory and toxic practices spurred on by an underlying belief in meritocracy. Since another student is covering chapter one of Paul’s book The Toxic Meritocracy of Video Games: Why Gaming Culture is the Worst, I won’t spend long defining meritocracy since that is largely covered in the first chapter. Instead, I am focused on chapter two, “A Toxic Culture: Studying Gaming’s Jerks,” in which Paul makes a strong argument for the use of rhetorical methodology for analyzing discourse around and through games. According to Paul, “A key to rhetorical criticism is understanding the relationship between the reality we perceive and the symbol systems we use to describe it” (2018, p. 63). This means that both our symbols (the words, gestures, behaviors, and signs we use to communicate) are determined by reality, but that also our perceived reality is determined by these symbols. This is an important point when studying games as it underlines how games are also simultaneously impacted by and impact the cultures in which they are created and played.
Given this, rhetorical criticism becomes a rather useful tool for analyzing structures of power and meaning in games and gaming groups. Note, I do not refer to gaming culture here as I agree with Adrienne Shaw’s assertion (mentioned by Paul) that looking at people who play games as culture, rather than in culture, creates an artificial separation that belies the larger societal impacts of gaming, as well as the prevalence of gaming in various societies. Rather than an outlier activity, approximately 75% of all US citizens play video games, according to a 2020 NPD survey. While some of this may be attributable to the conditions of Covid-19 (lockdowns and remote work led to several consoles and games selling out or reaching record sales numbers; see Liao 2020 and Minor 2020), pre-pandemic reports also showed an increasing number of US adults playing video games. In 2018, for instance, approximately ⅔ of US adults said they played video games (Variety 2018). It would be a disservice to only analyze games as culture instead of considering how they impact and are impacted by the cultures in which they are mired.
Full disclosure, my main field of research is rhetoric (though I also have a background in anthropology). Paul ends the chapter stating “Meaning swirls within games, the way they are played, and the discussion around them” (2018, p. 90). For many rhetoricians, this may be a better connection to our field than his description on page 63. Yes, rhetoric is concerned with the interplay of reality and symbols, but more than that, we tend to be interested in how meaning is constructed and communicated, circulated and shared, taken up and adapted and discarded. If meaning swirls within and around games, games are definitionally rhetorical artifacts.
Image taken from: IMGFlip
And Paul does a good job exemplifying the important rhetorical themes in and through games. This chapter focuses on the toxic rhetorical elements: he mentions how women in games or writing about games are harassed, bringing up GamerGate as a prime example that caused many women to flee their homes, led to testimony before Congress, and ultimately resulted in calls for pursuing harassment as cybercrime and, in the case of Zoe Quinn an (eventually) successful harassment suit against her ex-boyfriend for instigating harassment against her person by GamerGate. Importantly, Paul does not stop, or start, at GamerGate. Paul includes examples from Cross Assault, in which the female player, Miranda Pakozdi, received so much sexual harassment from her team leader, Aris Bakhtanians, that she refused to play and threw the final games of the match. Paul also mentions a design feature that, though intended to upset the inherent problematic logic of meritocracy, was offhandedly called “girlfriend mode,” thus revealing who these designers picture as needing the most help playing (not to mention that this mode was available for the cutest character, Mechromancer, further illustrating how women are stereotyped as players of games). He further mentions Games Against Bigotry, which had an online pledge not to use slurs when playing and acknowledge that they have the ability to impact others through play, which became so inundated with harassment and slurs on their pledge they had to take it down entirely. Ultimately, Paul argues, “one of the best explanations for what was happening was a desperate effort to hold on to meritocratic norms in video games” (2018, p. 87). Norms that envisioned men as inherently good and women as inherently disrupting the status quo.
While I did promise not to get into the weeds on the definition of meritocracy, it cannot be ignored as it is the crux of Paul’s argument in this chapter and, indeed, the entire book. According to Paul, “meritocracy amplifies the real-world effects and harms of social biases. To enact the ideology in practice requires equal opportunity. Structural inequality undercuts its functioning by confounding attempts to assess merit, while the prevalence of the ideology reassures the most successful that they earned their position because they are the most skilled and hardest working” (2018, p. 88). Though Paul does a good job in the first two chapters of this book establishing what meritocracy is, some origins for it being taken up, and why it’s problematic, there is an important aspect to meritocracy that he leaves out here: that meritocracy is a cornerstone of neoliberal ideology.
I do not have the space to cover the entire history of neoliberalism, but know that the first neoliberal thinkers were largely reacting to the horrors of WWII and attempting to outline the ways that conservative values and practice in other countries were different than Nazism. This was largely put forth in arguments that conservative values needed to move towards a new ideology (neoliberalism) for the future of the world and their place in it (see the works of F.A. Hayek and the Miltons as neoliberal thinkers, or the work of Wendy Brown for critiques of neoliberalism). Importantly, Hayek and the Miltons both outlined the importance of meritocracy to their new ideology which was premised on the concept of hyper-individualism. In their ideology, government would work as a referee or umpire to keep the economic game fair but would have no real place as a player of the game. Notice this game metaphor. Neoliberal thinkers often turned to game metaphors to describe their ideology and how life/society/the market was a competitive game, but ultimately fair to all. This theme in the early pieces is important as it doesn’t just show how meritocracy, as part of neoliberalism, impacts games and leads to toxic behavior, but how meritocracy was always thought of in terms of games.
Why do I bring this up? Because Paul misses a nuance in meritocracy and how it is fundamentally flawed by not considering how meritocracy functions as a key component of neoliberalism. Because meritocracy was considered using specific game metaphors, we can apply a rhetorical methodology to reveal that the neoliberal thinkers conceived of games as fair but competitive. Furthermore, as they extended their metaphors, they never considered the inequality that was present before the start of the game. For instance, the Miltons, as US citizens and Chicago residents, used the metaphor of baseball and emphasized the fairness of competition. However, they were writing in 1962, just 3 years after full integration of men’s baseball, and eight years after the end of the All American Girl Baseball League. These would have been recent memories for the Friedmans and, as Chicago residents, a city with two baseball teams, they would have been aware of these events in America’s favorite pastime. By not including these nuances, but still claiming their ideology is for a fair economic game, the neoliberal thinkers reveal who they believe should be included in the game at all, which undermines the system as unequal and discriminatory by nature. Paul’s narrative of meritocracy focuses on how people believe it to be fair and how, because it isn’t, that belief leads to toxicity. Looking at neoliberal ideology makes it clear meritocracy was only ever meant to have the appearance of equality, but, as many critiques of neoliberalism argue, was always intended to stack the deck of life and retain power for a certain group of people.
And that is the hypocrisy of meritocracy. On the surface, it seems well-intentioned and a good ideology: the best person for the job gets the job, the most skilled gamer wins the game. However, meritocracy is predicated on a neoliberal system that intentionally cuts off those systemically disenfranchised from any programs that could level the playing field. This focus on hyper-individualism always leads to blaming the victim. It’s your fault you can’t afford a good computer, need to work three jobs so don’t have time to practice, or it doesn’t matter that you didn’t have a gaming system growing up, you should work harder now. And importantly, it is never the system that is broken- it’s you. Meritocracy cloaks itself in neoliberal armor, but rhetorical critics are attempting to puncture through. Still, meritocracy and neoliberalism are crafty- they have weaponized the players against any critique of the system. Players believe in the surface intentions of the system and so any issues they have must be their own fault and any issues anyone else has are also their issues alone. This leads to rampant harassment of women, poor people, PoC, disabled people, and anyone the system doesn’t privilege. To expose the hypocrisy and break the system down, we must “dive into meritocratic game design and meritocratic game narratives, with a particular focus on how prominent both are and why that matters” (2018, p. 90). Afterall, just like it’s not just a joke, it isn’t just a game.
It isn’t just a game.
Bibliography
Brown, Wendy. (2019). In the Ruins of Neoliberalism: The Rise of Antidemocratic Politics in the West. New York: Columbia University Press.
Crecente, Brian. (2018, September 11). “Nearly 70% of Americans Play Video Games, Mostly on Smartphones (Study).” Variety. https://variety.com/2018/gaming/news/how-many-people-play-games-in-the-u-s-1202936332/
Friedman, Milton, and Rose Friedman. (1962). Capitalism and Freedom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.
Harvey, David. (2005). A Brief History of Neoliberalism. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press.
Hayek, Friedrich A. (1944). The Road to Serfdom. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1994.
Hayek, F. A. (2012). Law, legislation and liberty, volume 2: The mirage of social justice (Vol. 2). University of Chicago Press.
Liao, Shannon. (2020, April 30). “Nintendo Switch and ‘Animal Crossing’ are Quarantine Bestsellers. Here’s Why.” CNN. https://www.cnn.com/2020/04/30/tech/nintendo-switch-animal-crossing-quarantine/index.html
Minor, Jordan. (2020, April 4). “With Ring Fit and Animal Crossing, Nintendo Switch Soothes My Quarantined Body and Soul.” PC Mag. https://www.pcmag.com/opinions/with-ring-fit-and-animal-crossing-nintendo-switch-soothes-my-quarantined
NPD. (2020, July 20). “More People Are Gaming In The U.S., ANd They’re Doing So Across More Platforms.” NPD Group. https://www.npd.com/news/press-releases/2020/more-people-are-gaming-in-the-us/
Paul, C. A. (2018). The toxic meritocracy of video games: Why gaming culture is the worst. U of Minnesota Press.
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