GX4: “Failure is (Not) An Option: Tearing Out The Roots Of Git Gud Culture”

I attended GX4, the fourth year of GaymerX, and hosted a panel, “Failure is (Not) An Option: Tearing Out The Roots of Git Gud Culture”, along with co-panelists Amr Al-Aeser and Ayla Arthur. Amr and I earlier in 2016 had launched Deorbital, a website for marginalized voices in games criticism, and Ayla was an old friend of ours as well as an early author at Deorbital.

Together, we spoke on how the phenomenon of “git gud”, a common phrase used among gaming communities, had evolved from a simple term of admonishment to a more insidious and deeper reflection of skill fetishization, cultural gatekeeping, and resistance to criticism from outside sources. The panel ran for an hour, and an unofficial writeup by attendee Jay Castello is available here (archived version here).

From that writeup:

“Game design itself is political, with presupposition of who is playing and what their abilities are. Many games companies just haven’t thought much about accessibility, such as Uncharted 4 adding lots of features that weren’t in previous games when they were raised by a disabled player.”