In Defense of Gone Home

I was recently at a symposium where the speaker briefly talked about a relatively new indie game Gone Home. Among the various points she made, the one that stuck out to me the most was the claim that the amorphous mass of “gamers hate this game”. I have to disagree.

Unlike most video games, Gone Home does not focus on action or skill. At the core, it is a point-and-click puzzle game where the player, after returning from the airport, explores their unexpectedly empty house, finds leftover notes, and pieces together the story of why exactly their younger sister left. This format may be off-putting to some gamers, but for no other reason than they just don’t like that genre of game, just like how they might not like first person shooters, sidescrollers, or mmorpgs. Everyone has their preferred genre. It doesn't make it less of a game. And Gone Home didn’t exactly do anything new with the basic mechanics. There are plenty of other games that have similar gameplay and mysterious plot, like Myst, Year Walk, The Stanley Parable, and the multitude of Nancy Drew games. All of these have generally positive responses. So what sets Gone Home apart?

Gone Home had the misfortune of getting popular right when the gamergate conspiracy started gaining traction in 2014. It immediately drew attention by the movement, because of some shakey claims of nepotism. But it also came under fire because the plot twist at the end (spoiler alert!) revealed that the sister ran away because she is a lesbian and wanted to pursue a relationship with another woman without judgement.

Gamergate exploded because of some gamers’ hatred of the feminist critique that some games were garnering. It’s no secret that the majority of games contain sexist portrayals of women, and some gamers desperately want to keep gaming communities a “boys only” club. They claim that gamergate is really about “ethics in video game journalism”. But the majority of the anger seems to stem from critiques that point the prominent one-dimensional portrayal of women in games, the skimpy outfits, the lack of diversity in characters, and the rampant misogyny, homophobia, and racism in gaming communities that make them such hostile environments. Many of the original critics that unintentionally became the ignition point of the controversy came under very targeted attacks and harassment. There were multiple accounts of rape threats, death threats, doxing, and even a threat for mass shooting when Anita Sarkeesian planned to give a guest lecture at Utah State University.

Gone Home got stuck in the crossfire of all this unrest. Since the game features a prominent multidimensional lesbian character who is not fetishized for the fans, the game became the perfect example for how feminists and SJWs were supposedly ruining games and don’t know how to make a proper video game.

“The problem people have isn't the fact that Gone Home isn't a game but that it is about subject matter that makes people uncomfortable.”

All of the intense hatred from a vocal minority has drowned out the majority of the reviews. Aggregated reviews from well-known game critique sites generally score the game in the mid-80s/100, a definitely positive score. It has gained critical acclaim and won multiple awards, including a BAFTA. Even general users on the popular gaming platform Steam give the game generally positive reviews. It is not has hated as some users would like people to believe.

Gamers don’t hate Gone Home any more than most other video games. Gamergate hates Gone Home.

Are you there OP? It's me, Anon.

Out there, in the wide reaches of internet fandom, exists communities where all communication is anonymous. All of the original posts are anonymous, and all of the subsequent comments are anonymous. I’m talking about anon memes.

The anon memes typically exist as discussion boards on sites like livejournal or dreamwidth. Even though tumblr now exists as the general hub of most fandom activity, the design of the site makes it a poor host for anon memes. Tumblr, after all, does not support forum-like postings and threads. Comments on any original post are drowned out by reblogs and likes, making a thread of discussion extremely difficult to follow, if not impossible. I would know. I’ve tried. And I don’t recommend it.

Livejournal and dreamwidth, however, still support such functions and nest comments, making them much easier to track. More importantly, however, both sites make it incredibly easy for any person to make an anonymous contribution, regardless of whether or not they have an account.

Anon memes vary according to subject and may all have different rules or community guidelines that the mods enforce. Some are very general and discuss almost anything. They may be fandom specific or stretch across all fandoms in general (like Fail-Fandomanon). A few of the memes are known as hate memes and can definitely be as vicious as the name implies. But, they may also act as areas where users can safely vent about issues they might otherwise be uncomfortable linking back to them.

Other anon memes may even focus on the more creative aspect of fandoms and encourage short commentfics. The most notorious incarnation of this style is the kink meme. Like the name suggests, these memes tend to be more sexually explicit in nature, but not all are graphic in content. A poster leaves a prompt for a fic (often with a desired pairing and kink) that any anon can fill. The fills themselves may range anywhere from very short drabbles to long multi-chaptered fics. The anonymous nature of the memes tends to lower inhibitions, making users much more likely to make prompts and fulfill them. It’s sort of like being drunk or participating in an improve skit. You just do it, without thinking much about how “valid” or “artistic” a fill is. You just let the ideas freely flow and post it before you have any chance for regret. And it is precisely in those moments where the most unexpected creativity may sprout up.

Full post here.

Anons may later choose to de-anon themselves by collecting and editing their fics before posting them on a site like AO3.  But some authors may choose to never “out” themselves for a variety of reasons that I have touched on previously.

 Full post here.

The method of archiving generally becomes an important question for kink memes. Some memes, after all, can become very active and spawn hundreds if not thousands of fics. They may easily become lost, however, with each new addition. To track anon fills, many kink memes have a separate post where users can post links to both finished and ongoing fics. Many times, these links are then reposted onto sites like delicious where they can be tagged and organized while still keeping all of the authors anonymous. AO3 provides another alternative, but only users comfortable with de-anoning transfer their fills there. The site, however, also has the added benefit of making the fics much easier to read than on the original meme, where they are split into multiple short parts because of the word count limit for each post.

Anon memes may seem very odd and off putting at first, especially the kink variety. But they serve as an important gathering place for fans where they may post without any of the fears associated with having an identifiable pseudonym. They encourage and augment fandom participation. And they are where many, many fics and fic writers first get their start.

Pseudonym Sunday: How to Disappear Completely and Make Sure Everyone Knows About It

Let’s say you’re part of a fandom, maybe for a few months or even years, but you’re not content with your place in it. Maybe you’re getting bored with the material and the fans. Maybe your plans at becoming a well-known member have fallen through. Maybe no one is responding to your comments and your inbox is eerily silent. Maybe you just want more attention. Or maybe you just want to announce that you’re leaving the community for other fandoms. What do you do?

If you have any conscience at all, you would choose anything other than pseuicide.

But, of course, some people live for the drama.

Pseuicide, also known as pseudocide, is a rather self-explanatory portmanteau of “pseudo” and “suicide”. It refers to someone faking their own death, specifically on the web. It can take a number of different forms, but it’s commonly used as a rather underhanded method for attention-seeking. It’s about seeing people’s reactions to the news that you’re leaving or have already left forever. Sockpuppets are often utilized to either break the news about your abrupt death or to start threads to garner support and sympathy.

One account of pseuicide was even used to try and get gifts out of followers and sympathizers. Svmaria, a member of the Smallville fandom in 2006, used a sockpuppet account to announce that she had been in a bad carwreck, miscarried her baby, and is currently in a coma. The sockpuppet account then asked for fics and gifts to help svmaria during her recovery:

Her boyfriend has asked me to let you know that if you feel inclined to send her any gifts besides what's on her Christmas Wish list, she likes especially the following:

Lip balm, lip gloss, butterflies, dragonflies, kittens, angels, bunnies, snowmen, x-mas trees, lieetl presents like earrings, make up, stuff like that.

When the charade fell apart, mostly due to a suspicious lack of info and the home and hospital IPs matching up, people were understandably very angry for being used in such a manner. Another write-up can be found here.

Those who get caught may try to backtrack, often with absurdly hilarious and offensive remarks. One member of the Harry Potter fandom, limeybean, claimed to have died from tuberculosis, of all diseases. When limeybean was quickly caught and called out, she made a few posts hastily trying to explain herself and recover her reputation. So, she promptly tried to assert the nobility of her actions and push the blame onto someone else:

So we're clear, I had never intended for things to go this way. I had not meant to "die" from the beginning, but I wanted an escape and it gave me one should I ever want to leave. I've always had a problem when it comes to telling the truth on the internet, to be honest. My parents wouldn't let me at a young age and since then I've never been able to do it, even if I wanted to. After realising the effect my bravery in my illness had on people, I then used it as a vehicle to try and get some of the idiot emo kids on LJ to buck up and realise they don't really have it all that bad. How much hope can you see reflected on the comments left on my entries, or in ones about me? So the lie was worth something, wasn't it? How bad is a lie if it helps?

Unsurprisingly, limeybean was left with almost no supporters and found her reputation tarnished beyond recovery after such emotional manipulation.

The phenomenon has since become popular enough to have its own term coined by psychologists: Münchausen by Internet. The frequency of the behavior has also spawned a satirical guide to pseuicide.

Fandom Wikis

Almost everyone with internet access is familiar with Wikipedia, the internet encyclopedia. But fewer people are familiar with the smaller wiki sites available.

Individual wikis work much like the larger website from which they derive. Users add and edit content as they see fit. They may contribute to corrections or purposely add humorous mistakes. (The Colbert Report's wiki and its devotion to the show's parody, even to the point of satirizing their own pages, comes to mind.) And most importantly, for this blog anyways, most wikis do not require users to make an account to make minor edits. They can all be done anonymously.

The open, sandbox style technology has attracted wide use. Wiki sites exist for almost every conceivable fandom. Books, movies, shows, comics, games, music – any medium can have a fandom and a wiki. Unsurprisingly, large ones like The Lord of the Rings, Harry Potter, The Simpsons, World of Warcraft, and Star Trek all have well-known and active wikis. Even smaller or obscure fandoms may have such sites. The 1991 cartoon Rugrats, for example, even has a wiki. At this point, it’s almost expected that every fandom has a wiki, no matter how small or incomplete. (Somewhat surprisingly, however, wikis also exist for phenomenon such as fandom behavior. Fanlore archives and explains fannish behavior, fandoms, and participants. And I definitely often draw from it.)

The wikis have become such attractive appeal because they embrace the principles of “freedom, transparency, fluidity, emergence, collective intelligence, and relative anonymity”. They are open to everyone with a clear instructions and guidelines. The pages are not planned out, but rather created when needed. They are not written linearly, but are added to and edited over time, often by people who are knowledgeable about the subject at hand. All six make the sites welcoming and easy to use. It makes them much more open to participatory culture, which is what makes up fandom.

Fandom wikis ultimately help to augment the culture. They can act as a gathering place for fans to document important information about the object of obsession. The wikis serve as an easily accessible area to assemble and arrange information according to that fandom’s interests. One dedicated to a TV show, for example, may have pages for each episode, character, and actor. Another based on a video game, in contrast, may focus on providing pages that contain detailed walkthroughs for each level, as well as pages devoted to game achievements, items, characters, and enemies.

But a lot of this information can still be found on the original Wikipedia. So why specific fandom wikis?

“While Wikipedia does contain entries on fictional stories, places, and characters, a key tension among Wikipedians involves the concept of fancruft, a derogatory term meaning overly-detailed information that is seen as only relevant to the most passionate fans. Wikipedians frequently debate whether pages chronicling the fictional worlds of anime or videogames require the level of detail that some desire, often making the site inhospitable to hardcore fans of fiction that it rarely is for fans of non-fictional topics… While all of these topics have elaborate sets of pages created within Wikipedia, their stand-alone fan wikis thrive as spaces to document their fictional worlds with elaborate detail.”

Full text here.

 

This is where smaller wikis step in. The “overly-detailed information” is exactly what makes up fandom, or an obsession with a particular cultural object. Fans fixate over the details. True, some may be more devoted to Doctor Who than others and are able to name every single episode, both Classic and New Who.  But all fans, regardless of level, can benefit from specific fan wikis. A more casual fan just might not read them as in-depth as a more hardcore fan might. The creation and use of individual wiki sites still enhances the fandom experience and its participatory culture.

Theoryofficgate Clarification and Follow-Up

It's been over a month since fanfic writers, specifically user waldorph, discovered that a UC Berkeley class had required students to write reviews as part of a course on fanfiction. I initially wrote a bit to explore some of the issues being raised as tensions still ran high. Since then, tempers have simmered down and most of the problems have been resolved.

Now that most of the details have come out, I wanted to clarify some points from my previous post as well as add on to some of the discussion regarding fan aggression.

The class, "The Theory of Fanfiction", is not taught by professors. In case it was unclear, the course is student designed and run. By undergraduates for undergraduates. So, it's basically a glorified reading group with the added benefit of college credit. And as later uncovered profiles revealed, these undergrads had a personal interest in fandom and even participated in it. One of the teachers was found to go by the pseudonym of FiveMinutesTilBedtime on many sites, including ao3 and tumblr.

Unfortunately, fandoms tend to get rather prickly when disturbed. There were reports of targeted harassment and malicious posting on top of the general drama the course caused. It got so bad that the fan-turned-instructor has since deleted or deactivated these accounts, but traces can still be found on the wayback machine or through tumblr correspondences. Sure, they made a mistake, what young adult doesn't, but the responses were excessive and cruel.

Such behavior truly highlights the ugly and destructive sides of both fandom and internet culture in general. BNF copperbadge, for example, allegedly posted a spiteful response (that has since been deleted) to theoryofficgate:

If you’d like to share your thoughts with the “teachers” of the “Let’s go be dicks to fan authors” class, their emails are listed in this cached document.
You know, if you wanted to. Unsolicited criticism seems to be the order of the day, after all. 

And since the original poster has a large presence in online communities, the post gained a lot of views and traction. It revealed personal information about the instructors and called for further harassment. Such behavior cultivates a very negative space in fandom and encourages cruelty. At least one fan was run off as a result and felt pressured enough to destroy their fandom identity completely. After all, it can be easy to forget, but FiveMinutesTilBedtime was first and foremost a fan and content creator.

A few anonymous commenters weighed in on this incident while criticizing the phenomenon of BNFdom:

Original thread here.

The class has since edited the syllabus and stopped the reviews in favor of revising the assignments. Now aware of the close scrutiny, the teachers and students have been much more closed off about the course. But discussions like the above still continue.

The attempt to bridge fandom and academia was overly eager and ill-conceived, but it was still genuine. They are all fans. Both teachers and students are trying to respectfully study, analyze, and document a culture they love. This particular experiment may have failed horribly, but perhaps the lessons from their follies may create space for future success.