This is a repost from my Tumblr, from January 2, 2025!
I read a pretty bad essay, i was a teenage exocolonist (and so can you), and now I’m making it your problem.
Let’s start with my issue with “wholesome games” as a concept. Personally, I think the entire concept as a marketing term is like nails on a chalkboard. The “wholesome games” directs, that game during The Game Awards being marketed as a “wholesome game”, it’s just a filler phrase that means nothing to me. While it can feel pretty useful coming from a friend whose tastes I understand who can actually explain what they mean by “wholesome” in context, as I said on bluesky, “it feels very overwhelmingly corporate when said out loud during several hours of gaming ads.”
So a couple days after hearing about “wholesome games” during a long advertisement with occasional awards thrown in, I see a medium article from Doc Burford passed around on bluesky. Now, I already dislike this dude’s writing style in general. At the end of 2023 he got main charactered on Twitter for arguing that JRPGs aren’t RPGs. While I won’t get into “if I think JRPG is even meaningful as a genre”, and while I think he and I come to genres and their categories in two different ways, I said on Twitter that he’s got “forum poster brain, where you’re just an unshakable, in your mind always correct, asshole and it means any message you write is muddied by that tone.” I stand by that still, he writes like an asshole who thinks he’s better than anyone who disagrees. He acts as if he is not talking down to you, while the tone he takes online is actively talking down to people who disagree with him.
With all that being said, I still read the article. And it fucking blows.
When I initially read it and reacted to it, it felt like he was arguing that “wholesome games” uniquely attract shitheads to be shitheads. This felt silly because he only gives one instance of “wholesome media fandoms being little shits” with a Steven Universe example, and the rest are examples of people being awful to Doc Burford in other, non-wholesome-games contexts. In fact, at one point in the essay he says:
I’ve watched people go “no! you can’t criticize this! it’s wholesome!” come out in droves to defend a game that sucks just because they tied their consumption of the product to it.
Which clearly tells me there isn’t a unique issue with “wholesome games”, but the actual issue is deeply tying your consumption of something into your personality. And honestly it’s more broad than that, where when you tie external things into your personality it seems like an attack on those external things become an attack on you. Synder Cut fanboys, Harris voters who filmed TikToks ordering Starbucks and McDonalds over her loss… there’s an obvious through-line of tying outside perseption, outside forces, and the like into your own personal identity that is not healthy.
I made a thread about my initial thoughts on the essay, to which one Doc Burford himself chimed in. This made me think about the essay again, about wholesome games and how it ties into I Was A Teenage Exocolonist, the game he’s supposedly supposed to be writing about, and then it hit me.
He doesn’t even talk about “wholesome games”.
The back part of the essay is about I Was A Teenage Exocolonist, and how it’s not like other wholesome games. It’s all giving off a very pick-me energy, trying to make sure this game stands out from all the pitfalls and negativity and fascism that can come into wholesome games fandoms… but he never actually talks about another wholesome game to compare this game to. The closest we get is the Steven Universe situation he uses as an example but, and I hate to tell you this, Steven Universe is a television show and not a “wholesome game”. Despite opening his essay with “it’s easier to find ten games that are an example of something”, he provides no examples of “wholesome games”.
Well, that’s not entirely true. The few times he talks about video games other than I Was A Teenage Exocolonist is when he’s talking up his own games. When he finally gets to I Was A Teenage Exocolonist he explains what makes this game a “wholesome game” in his mind, which is that it looks “twee”, and how he would change it in his own games. The first game he talks about, in the third paragraph of his essay, is a game he’s working on under the codename “Waifu Death Squad”. The only other game I can remember him talking about is Mass Effect, and that is not in the discussion of “wholesome games” but “choices matter games”. He outlines a vague sketch of what a “wholesome game” is to him, which is a game about comfort without conflict with some sort of “twee” aesthetics, but never once says a game that fits this mold. The closest we get is him saying I Was A Teenage Exocolonist isn’t like other “wholesome games” because there is death and conflict.
So he talks about a handful of games but never gives an example of a “wholesome game”. He never gives an example of a “wholesome game” with a bad fandom. And yet Doc Burford spends several hundred words explaing how fascists prey upon a want for “nostalgic comfort” with a section that includes nine (9) different Nazi films as examples of how fascists do this. Nine (9) nazi films, and yet we talk about two (2) video games that are not made by Doc Burford, and one (1) is Mass Effect and the one (1) is the subject of the essay. What the fuck are we even doing here?
This is truly the biggest issue about the essay, in my estimation. We’re supposed to be here for I Was A Teenage Exocolonist, and we’re supposed to be talking about “wholesome games”, and we’re supposed to be talking about how I Was A Teenage Exocolonist isn’t like other “wholesome games”, but you’re not actually talking about “wholesome games” in your essay about “wholesome games”! And I know you can make arguments with examples, because you showed me nine (9) nazi movies to drill in the idea that fascists appeal to comfort in their art. Could you give me any examples of a “wholesome game” maybe?
At this point, I can barely understand what a “wholesome game” is. If it’s a game with no conflict and prioritizes comfort, the only game I can think of in the larger gaming consciousness is Animal Crossing: New Horizons, a game that people seemed to really wish had some more of the conflict and edginess from earlier installments. If we’re talking about “wholesome games” from a viewpoint of audience perception, as opposed to a description of the game and how it plays and what it does, then that doesn’t seem like a useful genre. Should I start talking about Mob Psycho 100 in terms of it being a “wholesome anime” because it has themes about growing up and being a kid and finding yourself and so on? Should I call Call of Duty a “wholesome game” because there exists a part of the fandom that wants no conflict in the game and simply wants their multiplayer matches to look like every clip-farming CoD content creators’ videos? You see how useless this all feels as a description?
All of this swirls around to make for a bad essay. Because he doesn’t talk about “wholesome games”, and instead talks about how attachment to consuming media is the real culprit behind having shitheads raid your fandoms and audiences, he’s undermined any argument around how I Was A Teenage Exocolonist is not like other “wholesome games”. Because he shows you he can come up with endless examples of nazi films that prey on nostalgic comfort, but doesn’t list one (1) “wholesome game” in comparison to I Was A Teenage Exocolonist or his own games, it feels like he doesn’t actually have a good framework for what a “wholesome game” even is. If you then think about how he talks more about his own accolades and games he’s working on or has worked on than actual “wholesome games”, and the little digs at I Was A Teenage Exocolonist, this doesn’t really feel like an essay about I Was A Teenage Exocolonist. The essay reads like he’s jerking off about his own success and telling you how good he could make a game in this mold (again, a mold he refuses to define). It all comes off as self-congratulatory nonsense attempting to be about trying to congratulate some other game he has no real interest in talking about.
And the worst part? He’s shitty about how bad this essay is. Someone made some flippant post about the essay, to which Doc Burford says the essay is actually about “wait, this is a piece where the writer says he wants to write wholesome games but is wondering why nazis are attracted to wholesome games so much because he doesn’t want them as fans”. When the person defends their read on the essay, Doc Burford implies they’re trying to run defense for fascists and defends this by saying the person is trying to “lie” about his work. I mean, he was in my mentions for no good reason! My posts do not Do Numbers, and it’s not like he came back to be like “actually, I did talk about more wholesome games”, so he just came by to be a bit of a shithead and move on because he didn’t like that I was negative.
This is a tantrum. Even by his own standards of what his essay is about, he clearly misses the mark. But to do this in the quote posts of someone being flippant about his essay is goofy. To be in people’s mentions about it is goofy. To act like anyone who disagreed with the essay is stupid, or lacks media literacy, or is someone to talk down to is goofy. And I think that person being flippant about his essay is being too kind, because if Doc Burford had managed to bring up Stardew Valley he’d at least have talked about a singular “wholesome game” in comparison to I Was A Teenage Exocolonist!
I go back to what I said about his writing before, which is that he’s got forum poster brain. This is being argumentative to keep up appearances online. There is almost no actual defense of the words he wrote but instead being mad people don’t vibe with his words. He wants so badly to receive no pushback for his words because he believes no one could argue against him. I mean, look at how high his pedestal is for himself:
But several people suggested that by not liking the popular art they had consumed, I “just didn’t get it,” which was funny, cause I have multiple critically acclaimed games under my belt, have been brought into help people in AAA make their games critically acclaimed, and I have multiple degrees in storytelling and art. I am quite literally an expert in this field. These people were mostly just young adults who’d bought a $70 game that had been advertised very heavily and polished into a generic AAA paste. Like, you wanna argue with me on the points, go for it, but “you would like this product if you were smart” coming from someone with no qualifications to an expert in the field is just silly.
The people who disagree with Doc Burford just “don’t get it”. He’s a self-proclaimed expert in the field! And when you do argue on the points he handwaves it away as being a defense for fascists, or that you’re stupid, or that you don’t have media literacy, or you’re reading it in bad faith, or or or or or. It’s frustrating and it creates for a bad reading experience because you know if you disagree too loud in public he comes in and stomps his feet and demands to be taken seriously. He’s an expert after all and, no matter who you actually are or what you actually say in in relation to the essay, in his eyes you’re just some dumb kid who bought a video game and think you’re entitled to sit with the big kids.
This post was made as a synthesis of lots of different posts I made around the internet, like my bluesky. Thank you to my friends who I talked about this with to help me clarify my thoughts. I hope you enjoyed all my words!