Of Phil Fish and Indie Entitlement

Hello, Escapist readers! As part of our partnership with curation website Critical Distance, we'll be bringing you a weekly digest of the coolest games criticism, analysis and commentary from around the web. Let's hit it!

Not too long ago, Anita Sarkeesian's Tropes vs Women in Games series tackled the narrative device of "fridging," whereby important figures in a character's life (usually women) are killed off to catalyze the character's development. At Ontological Geek, Bill Coberly grabs hold of the concept and takes a particular look at fridging in the context of Baldur's Gate 2, where it treats the death of two characters, one man and one woman, very differently.

From Baldur's Gate to a more contemporary series, Stephen Beirne takes to the Dark Souls series again, this time borrowing from German philosopher Nietzsche to describe the game's "optimistic" nihilism:

[D]eath is ubiquitous but it is also deflated as a barrier and as an existential burden. It is no longer the final hurdle of one's life, now it is merely a condition of one's continuing living that you may accept. I have to admit, putting it like that doesn't make it sound so different to death in real life, except for the point that 'one's continued living' in reality remains a point of mystery for those bewildered with existential dread. So I stress: in Dark Souls, death is simply another thing you can do. While all else in Lordran is ruined by decay, you have transcended death as a barrier to worldly life.

Let's move on to discussions of internet fame, shall we? In this widely circulated video (at right), Ian Danskin advances the argument that the highly visible negativity directed at Fez developer Phil Fish stems largely from a system of internet celebrity, in which Fish's public statements are only part of the equation.

Problem Attic developer Liz Ryerson directly responds to Danskin's video as being too charitable toward the primary actors involved, instead asserting that there is a pervasive background noise of masculine entitlement which undergirds the behavior of love-to-hate-them indies like Fish or Jonathan Blow -- and it is part and parcel with the increased commercialization of the indie scene:

[Danskin's video], in its inert, smug navel-gazing, merely reflects back the entitlement of the indie world. in the end it offers no particularly controversial or new insights about celebrity culture, but creates a sense of being a relevant and no-holds-barred commentary to those who are intimately aware of the subject matter. it attempts to exonerate Phil Fish to a lot of the young white dudes who are involved in the indie game community and probably want to identify with Fish. [...] but this sudden well of empathy seems to dry up once it's applied to an outsider like [Anita] Sarkeesian.

Want more? Be sure to swing over to Critical Distance to have your fill!

Permalink