The Patreon Letters - 28th October 2017

Patreon Letter 28th October

Hello friends,

It’s Jackson here with another Patreon letter! First things first, yesterday was M’s Birthday, so everyone needs to be extra nice to them, tell them that the podcast is good, give them the validation that they crave. I’ve known them for five years, been doing this podcast for four, I talk to them every day and we still haven’t run out of shit to laugh and/or yell about yet. Here’s to continuing to read Star Trek books and watch Gundam until we collapse.

Anyway, for some reason, the press sneak fucks online didn’t seem to take notice of M’s birthday and instead focused on Friday as a bountiful day for consuming content, with the release of Mario, Wolfenstein and Assassin’s Creed! I got Mario and have played it for a few hours so far; it seems very good but for some reason I wasn’t prepared for how much of a launch game it is. There’s a lot of really obnoxious motion controls that could easily be button presses, because the game also wants to support a two player, two joycon mode. If this was a DS game you’d be blowing into the microphone.

But! I’m not here to talk about which games you should or should not buy, knock yourself out and do as you please. What I want to talk about on this weekend of extreme consumption is talk a little bit about spoilers. With Mario coming out, a lot of people have been asking folks to tag their screenshots and be careful about what they say so as not to spoil the game for those of us who haven’t had the chance to play through it yet. This has been met with an equal amount of people asking “what the hell is there to spoil in a Mario game?” and the conversation basically stays static in this exact spot, repeating forever until the end of time.

I’m often frustrated with conversations around “spoiler culture,” which thankfully is a term slipping slightly out of vogue now, because they miss the actual heart of the issue. There’s a lot of talk about what does and what does not constitute a spoiler, or maybe a study about how spoilers actually make you enjoy things more. It sucks because it frames the whole argument around what the correct approach is, often to make some point about how shitty and unreasonable kids these days are. And it’s a shame because it completely ignores why this is an issue, why people care, and what that says about media and our relationship to it.

To me, the general aversion to spoilers says less about an individual’s or a group’s dislike for them, and more about the lack of control we have over the information that we see. Whether we use twitter, or facebook, or whatever it is, the majority of people online in 2017 are presented with a single, unbroken stream of information. Unlike, say, with Forum Threads, it is impossible to opt-out of a conversation on twitter; you can choose who you follow and you can set up mutes, but if all your friends are talking about Hillary Clinton then you’re either going to have to listen to most of it or log off. If everyone’s playing Mario, posting pictures, talking about the surprises, then there’s no easy way to avoid that other than a) completely disengaging from your online social spaces or b) spending an illegal amount of money on video games.

Services like twitter are designed to create zeitgeists, to make the conversation around the latest [Insert Media Property Here] feel inescapable, so that you buy a copy, or a ticket, or subscribe to Netflix. Getting mad about spoilers can feel like party pooping, but it’s also an attempt to push back against the pressure to spend way too much money out of an obligation to hashtag join the conversation. Games are incredibly expensive, and we should strive to be aware of the kinds of people that are being excluded from participating in our spaces in social media by the norms that those spaces enforce. “If you don’t want to be spoiled, you have to join in now” is a shitty stance to have about a $60 game on a $300 dollar console.

One point always brought up in this discussion is the fact that you can’t talk critically about any work without spoiling it - which is completely true. And it’s why this topic eats away at me sometimes whenever these arguments surface, because “it should be easier to avoid discussions you don’t want to see” and “criticism needs to be specific” are not contradictory positions. The only reason that they appear to be is because we’re all stuck on websites which, through their design, shape the ways we are able to interact with each other, and media at large.

Because I’m not really mad at spoilers, and the people on the other side aren’t really mad at people complaining about spoilers. It’s a symptom of the social spaces we exist in online, which themselves are a result of capitalism, which blah blah blah. Nothing exists in a vacuum. The Spoiler Argument is just one of many arguments which seems endless but unchanging, and hyper-focused on the issue as it directly affects the people mad right now, very rarely is it put into any kind of context.

Obviously I don’t have a solution other than just try to be considerate. I’m not saying that talking too quickly about Stranger Things is bad praxis and the call out post is in the mail, it’s in the scheme of things a very low stakes situation! I’ve just been very, very exhausted with twitter lately, and I wanted to use this to talk a little bit about just one of the ways that the place I spend my time makes my life worse to make someone else money. 

You never know. Maybe this internet thing will be over soon and I can go live in a cabin somewhere and read books til I expire.

Until then, I’ll see you next week.
Jackson <3