What Even Is Videogame Satire?

Spec Ops: The Line menu screen, courtesy of Stabel on MobyGames.com

“Does it really make sense to make a shooter that criticizes shooters?”

I finally got my girlfriend to play Spec Ops: The Line. I know, I know - we’re always at least five years behind pop culture in this house, but the advantage of that is getting to have the novelty of the first time again and again when she plays through stuff I saw when it came out. That’s why unboxing videos are so popular - that vicarious thrill is so powerful, we can almost smell the new plastic again. Of course, it does mean having to have some conversations that the internet long ago put to bed.

I laughed when I heard her question. “There are about a thousand writers on the internet who agree with you.”

“No, I mean, I’m asking. ‘Cause I just played this and now I feel like a bad person, but I also feel like there was some entrapment going on.”

Pondering the degree of my girlfriend’s guilt in Dante’s Dubai, I found myself starting the conversation up again a day later, like the insufferable asshole I am.

“Hold on, though - because I think that might be a stupid question.”

“Thanks, darlin’."

That’s me, always nailing it domestically. It is, though! Not that my girlfriend is stupid, or any of the people who said that on the internet when Spec Ops came out are stupid. It’s just that this is one of those arguments that seems to make sense on its face, but when you analyze what’s actually being said, turns out to make zero sense.

It’s called satire

They have this conversation about Bastion too. “Can you really make a game about breaking shit that scolds you for breaking shit?” But I ask you - have you ever heard this said about any other medium? Have you ever heard someone say, “Does it make sense to write a book that critiques books?” Or, “Does it make sense to write music that criticizes other music?” I mean, does hiphop exist?

A slasher movie that critiqued slasher movies. (Shutterstock)

That’s the thing. It’s called satire. That’s what satire is. Literally all satire takes place in the same medium it’s satirizing… because if it didn’t, it wouldn’t be a very good satire. It wouldn’t properly invoke the experience in order to lampoon it. We can’t talk about what a form of art is doing wrong without, y’know, showing you the wrong thing it’s doing.

And that’s where the argument becomes even more stupid, because we’re talking about interactive media. In a book, okay, say you’re writing a book about what’s wrong with mystery novels these days, say you’re that kind of dork. (For real tho, hit me up, you sound cool.) How exactly do you plan to write that book without including either excerpts of actual mystery novels that you think suck, or making up your own examples, essentially writing the shitty mystery novel you’re critiquing? In a book, it’s possible to include a bit of another book without departing from the original book.

If you’re making a satirical painting, you might ape the style of the paintings you’re satirizing - you can include those elements that you think are worthy of criticism in your painting, without giving over the whole canvas to crappiness. When Weird Al makes a parody of a song, what does he do? He uses the same tune and rhythm, but satirizes the content with his lyrics. Even more he’s writing about whatever the subject matter is, he’s writing a song about another song. Weird Al can include elements of other songs in his music and still make something that belongs to him.

But tell me… how do you include a portion of a game in another game without leaving the game you’re playing?

How do you look through a window at gamefeel?

Sure, you can show a video, but that’s not enough to satirize an interactive medium, because you can only satirize the visual aspects of it, the mechanics aren’t palpable, the feel isn’t there. So much of the game experience has been stripped out that no meaningful criticism is possible, like writing a movie review off the trailer.

How can a video game point at what video games are doing wrong without first doing it wrong to show you what it’s pointing at?

The nature of interactive media is such that it’s categorically impossible for video game devs to satirize their own medium without making a sterling example of the exact trash they’re mad at. Does it make sense to make a shooter that criticizes shooters? How else COULD you make a game that criticizes shooters? If the best way to criticize a medium is to make its direct opposite, I guess we have to conclude that, what… Journey is a critique of shooter gameplay? Flower? Maybe House Flipper is a critique of Modern Warfare? I don’t know, you guys, I think that satire is too dense for me, I don’t get it.

I think the reason this argument is so enticing to people is that it actually alleviates some of the discomfort of playing a satirical game. Because there’s something different about how we feel when reading satire and how we feel when playing it. When you’re listening to a diss track, you don’t feel personally attacked, even if you like the person being dissed. When you read a satire of a story, you don’t feel hurt or misrepresented unless it’s your story they’re satirizing, because you didn’t do it.

But when you’re playing a game, you did. That’s what makes Spec Ops so hard to play - you did it. That’s how the game gooses you at the end, by asking you how responsible you really are for the choices you made in the game. Are you responsible because you had a choice, or are you not responsible because both potential outcomes were already written for you? If you enjoyed the shooter gameplay, are you complicit in the simulated violence?

Skin in the game

It’s uncomfortable to examine these questions because the medium is interactive, because suddenly we have skin in the game, we could be the target of this criticism. We don’t often love examining the moral implications of our leisure activities, that’s why gamer boys hate hearing from feminists - they don’t want to be made to think hard or question themselves while they’re having fun, and they don’t want to think about the fact that their fun has real-world consequences that they might, in some small way, be responsible for addressing.

But satire is supposed to be uncomfortable. That’s what it’s for. To say, “well, can you really make a shooter criticizing shooters” - that’s responding to personal discomfort by claiming that the satire doesn’t exist, that it’s baseless and bankrupt from the get-go. That’s a coward’s way out, the way gamers have been taking for decades, insisting that our medium be criticized only on the developer’s terms, only in ways that don’t confront us with hard questions. And that, my friends, is what makes people think games are still just kid stuff.

If we want to play with the adults, we gotta be ready for adult examination of what we’re doing. If we want games to be taken seriously as art, we need to take them seriously as players and consumers. We need to stop claiming that games have nothing to say just because we’re afraid to hear it.