In the world of video game criticism, people have been writing what are essentially manifestos about what to do for the incoming second-term Trump administration. While I’m not usually someone who reads articles like this (I would rather read your Mike Davises that tackles systemic problems), I’m open to the idea that game media writers should change their approach.
Two notable articles in this vein came out: Gamers with Glasses’s “Five Theses on Antifascist Game Criticism” and No Escape’s “Ruminating on an Antifascist Games Criticism”. The first article proposes five big points:
The second article sympathizes with these points, but it is wary of the way it may water the militant potency of antifascism with everyday acts. It is more interested in tackling the roots (capitalism) and it also recognizes, say, that indie games can also be made in exploitative conditions. The article therefore agrees with the five theses, but it needs to be reformed with a more political view.
I think both articles are worth reading because they do show an imperative need to do something more than essay criticism. But they remain vague in proposing solutions outside of what essayists and readers are already doing: people had already been writing leftist reads on popular and niche media for years now, but the culture war is still ongoing. To put it another way, Gamergate never ended. And I also don’t want to beat the dead horse, but many websites remain SEO-driven and will only post clickbait about popular media. It seems unlikely that writing better criticism, something I’m sure all of us will agree about, is going to change people’s minds.
We have to admit that the people who are willing to read these kinds of articles aren’t going to be the general public. It’s going to be for people who have already planted their feet in the position on XYZ Media being leftist or problematic or people interested in the cultural discourse of the newest and hottest things. In other words, I think many of the political articles on, say, Critical Distance are for people who are already writing and reading this stuff. There is no suggestion that a more antifascist criticism (if it is possible) will break out of this circle.
Someone could go “Kastel, but we are creating a more solid foundation for our theories. Criticism is important. Aren’t you a critic who reads politics?” I do agree that this theorycrafting work is important, but if we want to be serious about antifascism and political criticism in games media, then we should also be trying to win other people’s voices. We don’t even do this with the people who would be more sympathetic to our side: there are many trans developers who are left on the sideline as many people keep writing about the newest biggest games.
I think we need to stop writing for our conceited selves and try to get more people outside the online media writing circle excited and interested in doing antifascism. But this would require a rethinking of what we mean by media criticism. Indeed, what I’m suggesting may mean us abandoning the term media criticism altogether.
I arrive at this point as I am writing from an outsider’s point of view. I’m not American, so I don’t have any stakes on the US election except for how Trump might affect the global economy. But I am a Chinese Indonesian living in a country that seems to have given up on its democratic dreams. We just elected a president who was banned from the USA for a long time for his alleged genocidal actions against Chinese Indonesians and East Timor, and the vice-president is the son of the outgoing president, suggesting that we are going to see the rise of nepotism like what’s happening in Singapore (a country I lived in for ages too).
And I doubt that writing about RPG Maker games or whatever in an antifascist way is going to change politics, especially since I’m not writing in Indonesian but the colonial English language. Even when I write articles about how progressive a work actually is, I know that at the very least I am just preserving a memory and not doing something brave.
I’ve talked to a few video essayists about this subject and we basically agree that the way we consume media criticism, especially video essays, don’t actually make people march out and organize. Arguably, it makes people more complacent: “We’re consuming the real media and its criticism, so all we need to do is just post a video about how Starship Troopers is satire and this will convince people to do the right reading.” There’s nothing wrong with a thought-provoking (video) essay, but I doubt what we are doing is anywhere similar to creating mutual aid organizations.
Indeed, I wager that media criticism as it currently stands doesn’t seem like it can do anything more than critique media and maybe say something deep about ideology. This is still an important tool, mind you, but let’s not fool ourselves: what I’m doing is at best providing comfort and fun trivia to people to distract themselves from reality for a bit. I know people have thanked me many times for the articles I’ve written because of this, and I am grateful.
But writing an article, even about niche media likely to be censored, isn’t exactly the bravest thing I can do. I recognize the anxiety in many critics now and in the near future that they should do something. I know I feel this to a degree: we want robust communities that can support people as the world seems to enter into more fascist times. While I do think media criticism can foster a strong community, there are other better ways to do something like this.
The most exciting and interesting acts of antifascism in media are in the world of trans literary fiction. Recently, the Trans Feminine Review has published some incredible articles about the need to preserve trans media from censorship. There is also a practical guide to building a trans micro library. These acts are useful because they help trans people.
What the world needs is more direct support and aid. Preservation, I think, is key. There have always been problems on how to access media, especially when trans media gets lost in the weeds of the web. To use an easy example from the world of interactive fiction, the Twine Revolution was a groundbreaking phase in our internet history because it introduced many people to trans and nonbinary creators. However, many of these works outside the very popular ones are lost or partially recovered. Lilium is a Twine game about internet relationships and trans identities, and it’s in a mostly playable condition – except the hyperlinks to old YouTube videos are gone. I can definitely say that preserving Twine games and anything online-only is a pain in the ass, and it is a shame that so much of our history is lost as websites and archives go down.
Indeed, the most interesting works of media criticism I find are the ones that are trying to preserve the atmosphere and context of these games. I am an ardent admirer of Misty’s work in CD-ROM Journal for example: each article is an in-depth investigation of the game mechanics and the production. While these articles are not going to be the “real deal” so to speak, they work well as a way to introduce people to these works and get people interested in connecting to computer games history.
And I have to also give strong kudos to the interactive fiction community for its strong emphasis on preservation. While not every work is playable today, there’s a lot that is on IF Archive and the forums. You can go through an old IFComp and reconstruct what it’s like to be in that era.
I didn’t really want to write this article because I’m not the type of person to comment on articles like this. But knowing that video essays, op-eds, and more articles will rise to answer the question of “what should we be doing as media critics in 2025” mean I need to spend some time explaining my position.
If there is a sixth thesis that I want to add to the five theses people seem to agree on, it would be something along the lines of seeing archival as the basis of online antifascist media criticism (if we want to keep using that term). I am thinking of games like Autumn Chen’s The Archivist and the Revolution where the protagonist is an archivist who needs to live by rent but realizes they can do something with their job. We “critics” should consider this: curating what we write about and preserving important aspects are important in these turbulent times when information can simply disappear.
Whether we like it or not, we are all in a living history. What we write can be preserved and erased. I don’t know if this is antifascist enough for my liking, but this is a start. For my part, I’ll be writing more about trans and disability fiction not just because I find them interesting and worth shouting out but I want to preserve these books in my own way.
This article is at the moment on Google Docs as I am not that interested in sharing them in my website, but if the blog post is popular enough, I might consider it and re-editing some sections.