The subtitle of the somewhat legendary tactics RPG Tactics Ogre is “Let us cling together.” This is one part ostentatious subtitling — a practice not only confined to Japanese game development as your lit professor desperately trying to get tenure will tell you — but unlike, say, the various additions onto the Under Night in Birth fighting game series, this subtitle carries some weight. For one, the game is about a small group of subjugated citizens — the Balmamusans — attempting to hold together and fight back against a large empire that is much more powerful than they are. And the major choices in the game (see above for a fairly non-spoiler view at this first big one) are all about whether you will cling together despite moral qualms, or cling together with a smaller and smaller coterie and stay loyal to basic tenets of not doing war crimes.
More critically, though, there’s a kind of desperation to the phrase that I think has a salience outside of the mechanics and narrative of the game itself. In any wartime situation as we are unfortunately seeing unfold in Gaza right now, the only thing anyone can do is cling together; stories of brave Gazans simply attempting to help their fellow man, woman, child, etc make it through or survive have been heartbreaking and inspiring in large part because the people in these stories have chosen to cling together. Social cohesion matters, yes, but even as society and the norms therein collapse around your ears, there is a cohesive urge that, I think, can often be directed to the good, unlike so many collective urges. I’ve set myself up for a hard pivot here, because videogames and videogame journalism are less important than the suffering of the Gazan people by a magnitude too big to really pin down. But the cohesive urge is something I think that matters in world historic and trivial instances.
At the moment, there’s a bit of a controversy over the nature of games writing and the encroachment of academia. In some ways, we’re going to want to emphasize the obvious and point out that this is as it ever was. I’m only writing this substack because, as a down and out PhD student, I decided to carpetbag my way into games writing. It happens! But the recent Critical Hits anthology put out by Carmen Maria Machado and J Robert Lennon has re-focused the lines of tension around the fight. I won’t rehash the ins and outs: for one, I don’t really know them. I wasn’t aware this was a controversial text until after reviewing it for the podcast, and I pretty much stand by everything I said there if you’re curious about my takes on this collection. But looking over some of the (often salient!) critiques of the collection and its aims, I realize another reason I didn’t really pay it much mind as a potential land mine was because it just made sense as part of an erstwhile-but-maybe-always-active member of the academy.
Part of what makes me think of the critical scene above in Tactics Ogre when I think of this controversy is how there are two different lines of dialogue here that are completely unheard by the other party. When games journalists hear an academic saying “I never knew games could be taken seriously” as Machado said (I’m paraphrasing) in her recent interview about the text, they hear someone saying “The rest of the work on games, aside from this book, is pretty shitty, huh.” When academics say it, however, what they mean is “no one in my department will ever greenlight this sort of thing and I’ll never be able to present this paper or get a book deal out of this to help me get tenure.”
And when games journalists say “hey, you know, we’ve been doing thoughtful work since forever” academics hear their students saying they wrote interesting work on literature before they got to their class. What they should be hearing is that other professionals in the field have written serious shit, maybe more serious shit than you have really considered! This is effectively a call to do the reading; in much the same way that a deep research bench can keep you from writing yet another essay about how The Yellow Wallpaper is “about madness and femininity,” it can keep you from writing another essay about The Last of Us.
But ultimately, these two lines of thought aren’t going to meet because journalists are (understandably) defensive and academics are (institutionally) condescending. I recently told the story on my podcast, but I don’t assume everyone listens, so here it is again — when I first pitched games writing, I asked Austin Walker if he wanted a 2000 word, weekly read of how the Metal Gear Solid games are reponsive to and predictive of our understandings of how surveillance works. Great idea, as we both agreed, but a deeply insane thing to pitch as your first freelance piece. What I thought when I sent it over? I have a PhD and that makes me probably the smartest and best guy doing this, so they’ll be thankful for it! When they weren’t, I was baffled.
But since the academy wasn’t hiring, I had to learn how to manage expectations. And when I wrote my own book on gaming and was hoping for acclaim from my previous advisors and interlocutors, I was a little disappointed. My advisors were happy for me, don’t get me wrong, but it’s not like videogame studies suddenly discovered the book and I’m the talk of the walk. It’s another book from someone who is, now, essentially an academic outsider. It doesn’t count for tenure or clout, and therefore is a bit diminished. That’s just how it is.
But maybe it doesn’t have to be. Unlike the example of the Gazan people above, we’re not effectively in a life or death struggle here. We identify the importance of these struggles, as we want to have a livelihood and we have things to say and have said things that are important and should be read; but we also have to admit that in the grand scheme of things, this is not an existential sort of threat, on either side of the journo/academic divide. It is an inflection point though: as the people who write popular work on fiction, or history, or technology, etc have learned, it’s that academics with assumptions and pretentions are going to come around, and there’s a way to integrate them without dimming their own stars. What academics must learn, if they are to survive, is how to best cling together with more people, because however dim the games journalism space seems, my friends, trust it is worse in the academy.
I’m not sure what kind of conclusion this is, other than one that says “try to see the ways in which people are talking past you in these debates” as this knowledge can better position you to understand, respond, and even critique the things you see going wrong in the discursive space. Make choices, as one does in Tactics Ogre to cling broadly, or cling with your people. That the urge to cling together exists in crises big and small is a consolation indeed, but as long as we are in a smaller crisis, we may step back and consider how our clinging might be blinding as well.
Epigraph: Thanks for being patient with me while I recalibrated a bit. I found some new work and am feeling very much more grounded, so I’m getting back to writing! I’m doing a month of posts as a kind of No Cartridge advent calendar, some longer than this, some shorter, and I hope you enjoy and tell some folks about them. We’re trying for daily, just in December, and back to normal in January. Can’t wait to share w you all.