The release of cultural products is being increasingly disrupted by virulent attacks on certain representations and content that do not conform to the values of some sections of the public. In the same week, two major cultural products were released and came under massive attack for their values: Disney’s Snow White and Ubisoft’s Assassin’s Creed, both set up as paragons of the Wokist agenda in a cultural war that is increasingly attacking the fantasy industries. Driven by a handful of users in the bosom of the anti-diversity equity-inclusion policy, the attacks are multiplying and gaining in strength with changes in the processes of publicisation but also the triumph of the gaming industry over all other cultural forms. The European Video Games Observatory has taken a closer look at these cultural battles.
You have studied the debates around violence, addiction and political condemnation in video games. It would seem that the current attacks are different?
The case of video games is interesting because it is often a foreshadowing of what is happening in other industries – which is quite logical because they massively dominate the others (200M vs. 30M for films). Until mid-2010, moral crusades were limited to the actions of associations or political staff using the debate to position themselves in the political game, and gain access to institutional responsibilities, demonstrating that they were dealing with issues of public and domestic order.
It would seem that with the emergence of social networks, moral crusades in gaming have evolved. What is the reason for this?
I see four key factors. Firstly, video games are a major topic of discussion online, with a significant number of youtubers’ videos featuring games played and commented on online.
Secondly, what used to be a political gain has been monetised into an economic gain. Changes in the way people are rewarded are central to understanding the value of talking about politics and morality online. The commitments generated by these subjects are very significant. In our study, we saw that less than 1% generated up to 17% of engagement on controversial subjects.
Thirdly, the case of a fringe group of gamers is interesting: the haters. It was Steve Banon who realised back in 2017 that ‘gamer rage’ was an extreme force that could be mobilised and was compatible with his political project.
Fourthly, the production of political content has evolved, with gamification playing a central role in the proliferation of fake news: competitive research work in the production of evidence corroborating the narratives and lore around conspiracy theories.
All this goes some way to explaining how outrageousness mobilises people, fake news is the norm (who doesn’t use an AI to illustrate their post), and divisiveness is a profitable business.
But on closer inspection, does this mean that the audience is massive?
In the US, 15% of the population considers itself QAnon. That’s an active and effective minority when it comes to producing content. In reality, the MAGA-oriented detractors are in power, but numerically they are in the minority, as we have been able to quantify.
Is this the dominant discourse?
Allow me to take a diversion with Dominique Pasquier, who recently passed away. A media sociologist and pioneer in the study of fans of AB Production TV series, she highlighted how discussion practices around television programmes formed an important part of the grammar of love. Young people in the 90s discovered love and its sentimental rules. Today’s cultural battles are more about morality than politics.
In this case, what has changed since Hélène et les Garçons?
The inclusion of private discussions in the communications launch of cultural products. The end of privacy decreed by Zuckerberg has changed the way we communicate. The private spheres of discussion have become markets with youtubers and influencers. This privatisation of public space, or rather the supremacy of private space for expressing political or religious beliefs in liberal democracies, is coupled with a massive globalisation of what used to be intimate, personal matters. In fact, all the measurement tools that focused on the rational user are obsolete. The Habermasian public space and the voter with limited rationality no longer exist. Emotion is at the heart of everything – we are conducting a European research project on this subject, MORES – Emotion and Democracy. Launches must therefore increasingly mobilise the soft sciences, the humanities and the social sciences, because the consumer responds to intimate and social logic. What appear to be crises involving crisis communication are also to be understood as community drama management.
Listening to you, it’s a kind of return of the individual, of his psyche, spilling over into these globalised private spaces?
The anti-DEI attacks are directly linked to sex education and the construction of gender. It’s not a question of psychologising politics. What is at stake is the politicisation of the private sphere, in connection with toxic masculinity, incels and other issues that are very important to a very large part of the population, but also the return of religion, which must not be ignored as the administration of the inner self.
The debates surrounding the modelling of female characters in the latest productions reflect this obsession with preserving a vision of the female object: invoking cultural respect for the fact that the heroine of Stellar Blade is a sex cover-up.
The violent attacks on actress Bella Ramsey, who plays Ellie in the series adaptation of the video game The Last of Us, are motivated because not ‘pretty enough’ barely conceal the paedophile fantasy (the heroine being 14) which part of the MAGA community has denounced internally – certain moral standards persist.
The attacks on the trans-identity of the characters in Dragon Age: Veilguard are also a way of talking about sexuality without saying so: critics have focused on the imposition of these themes as the reason for the commercial failure. The call for a return to a masculinist, pre-gamer gate, non-political video game is often invoked by the majority fringe of gamers.
The phenomenon is becoming widespread and is now affecting games as soon as they are revealed. The Californians at Naughty Dog (The Last of Us) woke up the anti-DEI crowd with the announcement of Intergalactic, and the Europeans at CDProjekt with the announcement of The Witcher 4. For Assassin’s Creed Sadows, the attacks lasted a year, which is quite unheard of for a cultural blockbuster.
Yes, it’s very rare for a crusade to last that long and ahead of a launch, but it’s now the global norm – outside the world of video games, European companies are squeezed between national laws and American injunctions.
The attacks on Assassin’s Creed Shadows reflect the MAGA’s quest for purity. We have identified three phases in this quest for purity.
The first focused on Yasuke, a character of African origin who was a hero in medieval Japan and whose historical reality has been called into question by Japanese politicians with strong support from American groups. The second concerned the lack of respect for Japanese culture in that it was possible to destroy objects in temples – due to the player’s freedom of action and the interactive capabilities of the game’s physics engine. The third focused on a second desecration: the emperor’s wife possibly having an affair with the player, or the possibility of a romance with a trans character, again at the player’s choice.
At the end of the day, do these cultural battles have an impact on launches?
Clearly for Disney: the fear of reprisals cancelled the communication campaign that was supposed to accompany the film. Rachel Zegler, was the subject of a smear campaign and online harassment, linking the failure at the box office, to the fact that she didn’t conform enough to the imaginary trad wife of Snow White. Online reviews have been subject to review bombing – the phenomenon of raiding viewers’ average ratings – while also failing to achieve critical success. It would seem that the film’s quality was the primary reason for its commercial failure.
The role of the critics is becoming increasingly complicated in predicting the success of a pop culture object. Minecraft was a huge box office success but was not very well received by the critics. This is an important point, because for a long time all the cultural industries relied on the media to publicise films. Today, however, the media’s ability to prescribe has been eroded as audiences decline in favour of social networks, the primary place for consuming media, videos and culture.
For Ubisoft, the launch of the game was complicated by the attacks. The two postponements enabled us to offer a finished product and to work on the launch and communications. The game has been well received by the press and is performing well, with more than 3 million players to date, and the communication has been successful, with Elon Musk as the key figure. These two treatments of the culture war reflect a classic fact: those who fail to prepare and give in often lose a battle. It remains to be said, however, that fan communities are also an asset that can be mobilised to combat detractors. So it’s important to take stock of the forces at work before giving up.
Interview with Olivier Mauco, Chairman of the European Video Games Observatory
