A three hour long indie game, about teenagers enjoying their final summer together, has inspired an internet hate campaign of disturbing proportions, but why is everyone so upset?
The term non-game dates back to the Nintendo DS, in the mid-2000s, and was not intended as an insult. In fact, it was coined by former Nintendo president Satoru Iwata and used by him to describe titles such as Brain Training and Nintendogs which, as he put it, don’t ‘have a winner, or even a real conclusion.’ Non-games are not necessarily devoid of traditional gameplay, or an ending, but they are made with different intentions, and often for a different audience than normal, and for some people that means they must be hated above all things.
As a concept, the non-game has many antecedents, all the way back to the 1980s, including Jeff Minter’s light synthesiser Psychedelia and interactive rock opera Deus Ex Machina. SimCity is also often considered one, although creator Will Wright preferred the term ‘software toy.’
Terms fall in and out fashion, and nowadays SimCity and any similarly open-ended simulator would be called a cosy game. Walking sims are a more modern invention, and in that case the name was definitely intended as an insult, since in gameplay terms that’s often all you do. That in turn implies that, to the benighted minority, the award-winning narratives of games like Dear Esther and What Remains Of Edith Finch are somehow irrelevant. Which brings us neatly to the embarrassing furore surrounding Mixtape.
Mixtape is not literally a walking sim, but it shares a lot in common with that genre. There are a number of simple minigames, that you cannot fail at, but much of the story plays out on its own, without any input from the player. It’s a flawed experience, that relies a bit too much on its soundtrack and general 90s nostalgia – especially given the sometimes cheesy dialogue – but it’s breezy and competently made and utterly inoffensive.
If you’re not familiar with the game, or the anger surrounding it, you’ll quickly get an inkling for what’s going on when you hear that two of the three main characters are young women and that the game’s publisher is being accused of bribing video game journalists.
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A good argument can be made for Gamergate being the vanguard for the worldwide rise of far right rhetoric, which is as terrifying as it is pathetic, when you realise it revolved around nothing more than nonsensical conspiracies about review scores and women in video games.
The madness surrounding Mixtape makes it depressingly obvious that little has changed since 2014, to the point where Xbox felt the need to step in and say something this week, presumably because Mixtape is on Game Pass at the moment.
At this point, many agitators are savvy enough not to focus on the female characters, although there’s been lots of purposefully vague talk about the game not being relatable, as if it was the law that every game should appeal to everyone. There’s also a lot of weird conspiracy talk about the game’s positive reception being funded by giant corporations, despite the developer being a 12-person team from Australia (and it having a Very Positive user rating on Steam).
Mixtape is published by Annapurna Interactive, which was co-founded by Megan Ellison, who presumably is or will be a billionaire – and yet her film company, from which the video game side spawned, has never funded anything more expensive than a Dick Cheney biopic.
It’s hard to believe that the sort of person who would complain about Mixtape would care that it was somehow siphoning money away from other indie developers (which has been one of the other suggestions). In any case, that ignores the fact that Annapurna Interactive is one of the best indie publishers in the business and since 2017 has been consistently putting out a wide range of interesting and unique games from many different developers – and yet for some reason this is the one they decided to bribe IGN for a good score?
The complaints about the lack of interactivity also seem insincere. Either that or these people’s minds are going to be blown when they find out about visual novels or the final disc of Metal Gear Solid 4. Interactivity is at the heart of video games but the exact nature of it is highly malleable. From the earliest days, games could be all action or slow-paced strategy but in the last few decades the broadening of gaming’s audience has meant there’s plenty of space for narrative-focused games with low levels of interactivity or cosy games with low levels of anything except comforting vibes.
That hasn’t meant less of the other type of games – it’s not like Mixtape’s developers were being tempted away from making the next Gears Of War – it’s just meant that people that wouldn’t previously have considered being game developers have been able to make games for people that hadn’t previously considered being gamers.
Whether you like the games that result or not that seems like it should be something that’s celebrated by everyone but, as we see with Mixtape, that’s not the case. In trying to understand what so many people are upset about you have to work through several layers, the first being the general sense of mass hysteria which social media has always encouraged.
Sexism definitely plays a part but more even than that, there’s a sense of petty outrage that anyone would dare make a game not aimed specifically at a traditional male audience, not just in terms of the protagonists but a game with almost no gameplay. The obvious response to this outrage is to wonder why anyone would care, considering there are already many games like Mixtape and an almost infinite number of action-orientated alternatives, but clearly that’s not enough.
Imagine if action movie fans suddenly started a hate campaign against Hamnet, angered that it had the temerity to exist, and attract critical acclaim, rather than its meagre resources being directed towards making a film they liked. That’s what’s going on this week in the world of video games and it’s sad to say it almost certainly won’t be the last time.
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