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Two disclaimers off the bat:

1)[b]I'm not pretending to know what Gamergate is about. This is simply an inter
esting idea to me.[/b]
2)I am not a literature, gender studies, or really any relevant major. My area o
f study is Computer Science. Forgive my sophomoric understanding of the concepts
.
So this line of thought started when I started researching the use of tropes in
cultural analysis and deconstructionism in general. I realised something pretty
simple: tropes are an abstraction of ideas. I am moderately familiar with Carles
Jung, my high school teacher was a contemporary of his (my high school was inte
resting. Half of my classes were taught by PHDs) so I immediately saw a parallel
with archetypes which started me thinking about my own reservations with decons
tructionist critisism.
My first observation is pretty simple: the goal of deconstructionism is to produ
ce a meta-language with which to describe the subject in question. This is very
useful for describing a subject and its interaction with other subjects when the
re is an assumed base of communication. However, this also gives us a tendency t
o focus on these meta-syntactic elements rather than the work as a whole. This h
as been modernly a very powerful way of analysing the relationships between vari
ous stories and mediums (and consequently favored by feminist and queer theory).
It seems like now that games have come under this lens of criticism we see more
and more of a backlash. I believe this is because of the abstrationalization th
at Deconstruction necessitates.
One common complaint i've heard is that reviewers/critics are 'finding problems
that don't exist'. To me, this seems like an artifact of the weirdness of decons
truction to someone unfamiliar with it. So... to me, I now look at this in somew
hat of a new light: Perhaps these complaints about the criticism of games is bec
ause the critisism seems too far detached from the work as a self-contained arti
fact. This is a natural focus shift for deconstructional analysis.
Maybe in some part, this is the bergening of a reactionary school of critical th
ought to New Criticism.
Just a supposition.
Thoughts?

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