The Lie-In

Good morning, videogames. It has been a week of everyone, everywhere writing about Mixtape (including me), which means our links mostly have a theme this time. The theme is: articles I disagree with. Is Mixtape worth a perfect score? Is it cheap pablum? Is it too nostalgic? Is its depiction of the '90s too fast and loose and therefore not nostalgic enough? Is it an Australian psy-op? Are teens unlikeable? Are games journalists unlikeable? We will not answer any of these questions (except maybe the last one, every day forever), but here are just a handful of the articles I disagreed with this week.

Cameron Kunzelman wrote about how and why Mixtape deploys its music, and whether it can be effective in a world of nostalgic Spotify playlists.

What is maybe more notable about Mixtape, and what might bring people to clear defensiveness or derision when they encounter it, is that the kind of sampling it does with the database of culture is about your emotions. Bugs Bunny shows up in Space Jam because he is intellectual property that will draw Looney Tunes fans closer to the product, and he exists in contextless space and time to be summoned whenever we need Gen X to wear a t-shirt they love. A Smashing Pumpkins song shows up in Mixtape because it is also intellectual property with emotions pre-sorted and emotionally tied to it, so that when the protagonists do teen feelings set to the song you know exactly how you’re supposed to feel.

Kaile Hultner took readers to the hater zone. I was happy to go, although in disagreement with everything I found once there.

There’s no way around this: Mixtape uses nostalgia as a bludgeon to beat players to death with. There is a specific Type Of Guy whose presence is overrepresented in games media for whom this game is basically catnip. It is meant to trigger emotions so powerful in that specific Type Of Guy that when they write or talk about it, they frame the bill of goods that Mixtape is selling as the universal growing up and coming-of-age experience, that it is so authentic and classic and true-to-life that surely everyone who has ever lived has experienced, or wanted to experience it.

However wide the spectrum of opinions from games journalists, it was nothing compared to the opinions found in the mirror universe of social media grifters, trolls and racists. For Aftermath, Nathan Grayson wrote about how Mixtape became a lightning rod for conspiracy theories in the aptly titled, "All This Over... Mixtape?". I guess I don't technically disagree with this article, just the things it cites.

Foremost, the Gamergate 2.0 conspiracy engine is now a well-oiled machine, and it requires a fresh helping of grievance-flavored fuel every week. Mixtape, which prior to release popped up in showcases here and there but largely flew under the radar compared to triple-A behemoths, landed last week to rave reviews, which the usual suspects on Twitter and YouTube immediately seized upon.

Several people had wondered who Mixtape was for, given that it's set in the '90s, inspired by '80s movies, and includes one song from 2011. I'd argue that it's for people who like fun stories and narrative games and beautiful animation and funny games and '80s movies and the '90s and music regardless of what time period it's from. Garrett Martin had a more specific answer, which might be the only sentence in the article I agree with: Mixtape is for 12-year-olds.

Rockford probably seems cool to a 12-year-old, though, and that reveals the audience that will most appreciate Mixtape: restless tweens looking for something that makes them feel special, feel older, feel like they’ve been let in on some secret club. Despite its suffocating nostalgia for ’80s and ’90s teen movies, despite its playlist of early college radio classics and ’70s AOR deep cuts, despite its fetishization of archaic tech like VCRs and cassette tapes, Mixtape is squarely for the children its Gen X characters would be raising today.

Is this about Mixtape? I suspect so, but no longer recall where I sourced it. Kyle Labriola correctly argues that narrative games are real games.

This might be a slightly extreme take on my part, and I’m sure there are reasonable folks who would disagree, but I don’t think that there’s any level of interactivity that a game needs in order to be a "real" game.

Perhaps, after all these, you still long for a traditional review. I think Tom Regan's take for The Guardian was good, in that it gets at both its shortcomings as a structured narrative and its pleasures as an experience, without being entirely poisoned by having first seen the corners of a bunch of online discourse.

Other flashbacks are a bit more out there, reimagining typical teen misadventures as fantastical, dreamlike vignettes. When the police show up at a house party, for example, there is a minigame in which a panicked Rockford and Slater sling a passed out Cassandra into a shopping trolley, drunkenly steering her across roads, Frogger-style, hurtling over ramps and screeching across a highway. It’s all fairly silly stuff – but undeniably enjoyable.

I have plenty of issues with Mixtape and it's both fun and easy to pick holes in it. It's also a cartoon: a pretty silly, lighthearted game explicitly framed as a kind of fantasy. For that reason, a lot of the fussier criticisms seem ridiculous to me in tone, and much of what I've read is deeply unkind both to Mixtape's characters and audience. It feels as if IGN giving it 10/10 prompted everyone else to sharpen their knives but, crucially, not their analysis.

However much I disagree with so many of these articles, it's pleasing that there were so many. I haven't been this annoyed by videogame writing in years, and on some level that means there's a plurality of ideas. I'm taking this as a positive and have ultimately enjoyed chewing my way through the discourse (without ever looking at Twitter, Reddit, YouTube, etc.).

Two more. It's not an article, but I thought The Besties podcast approached Mixtape with a generosity and a lightness of tone appropriate to the subject matter, and their read of the story and its purpose was more in line with mine. Although some of them also liked it more than me.

Lastly, the article I agreed with most this week was Nathan Brown's Hit Points on music, discovery, and curating your own relationship with games. It's not strictly speaking about Mixtape, but Nathan and I are simply a specific Type Of Guy.

We talk a lot about discovery in the game industry, but the discussion is incredibly one-sided, talking only about how difficult it is for developers to break through the impermeable walls of digital storefronts and actually put their games in front of players. And sure, that’s a problem, I get that. But the entire discussion operates on the assumption that consumers no longer go looking for things. Unless you can find a way to put something right in front of their eyeballs, they will never know it exists. That's incredibly depressing. I think perhaps it’s time it changed.

If Mixtape was about me aged 18 it would be about riding the train across Scotland while listening to The Photo Album by Death Cab For Cutie (the album before they broke big, so you know that I'm cool) and mp3s of All-Time Quarterback demos (so you know I'm obsessive). I don't tend to revisit my old musical taste much, however. Music this week is Porcelain Hands by Swedish lo-fi noise pop Weatherday. Consider supporting Weatherday on Bandcamp.

Sleep well, videogames.