Be Pretentious! Games, Art history, and Dialectics.

16 Sep, 2025

This post is blog version of a talk I gave at Games Talks Live in April in both Edinburgh and Glasgow. It's largely an industry event, so my usual tone is different. This is a heavily edited piece, whatever the word count is when I publish this it's far more than the 10 minutes allocated to a Games Talks Live talk. If a paragraph looks long, it's probably only the first couple of sentences that made it into the talk proper. That is, this is a pretentious rewrite.

I'm Fallible Things, I've been co-hosting [local gamedev meetup] for the last year, but that's been going on for 15 years beforehand. I make games too, but that's not what this talk-gone-post is about.

This talk-gone-post is about Pretentiousness, Music Scenes, and Hegelian Dialectics.

Pretentiousness

Pretentiousness means to pretend, to put on a boot a size too big, to make yourself out as something beyond what you are. The UK specifically hates pretentiousness to an excessive degree. And what's there not to hate about pretenders after all? They think they're better than you. They're pulling the wool over your eyes. They're getting what they're not owed. While you, the much more virtuous and capable one, are getting none of what you've worked so hard to get.

But we don't just mean pretending when we say "pretentious". The UK hates pretentiousness, in part, because it loves class. It hates movement between classes, it views this movement pathetic in every circumstance.

There is no buy-in to a myth of class mobility here, the working class "should" either be humble and grateful of their station, defend it even, or should be quashed for insolence and lambasted. The aristocracy, the ruling class, are "better" people than you and understand the world far more than you could. Anyone in breach of these lines is pretentious. A kid getting a lucky out from poverty and distance-from-power is a sign, largely to a desperate "middle" class, that she is taking a spot rightfully owed to someone "above" her. The wealthy can't be allowed to fall into poverty, it is beneath them and people will bend over backwards to prevent this from happening. When they succeed at losing everything they are merely "slumming it" until a connection pulls through again.

What we call Pretentiousness is also about Confidence – Artistic confidence is a kind of promethean substance to the UK's psyche. We sniff out someone who thinks they're all that and we pounce. "We" hate the intellectual who thinks she's educating us. "We" hate the expert who thinks she's got it all figured out with all that Data and Knowledge. "We" hate the artist who tapes bananas to walls and sells them for 50 years worth of our salaries. The last 10-15 years of british politics has been steeped in this.

Pretentiousness is an accusation thrown at artistic integrity, at genuine knowledge and experience, at reproducible research, at people trying to build a better world. It's thrown at people just having fun and at people trying to say something with meaning much more than it ever gets thrown at grifters.

It's hard to come up with something that has meaning. I don't think I need to convince a group of game developers that human connection and articulation about the depths of what it feels like to be alive is hard.

But we still try. The question is then: do you want to be ARTSY and PRETENTIOUS?

HOW TO BE ARTSY AND PRETENTIOUS 101

To be artsy and pretentious you need to make statements that you hope – BRUTALLY hope, with vulnerability and your full heart – will change the world around you. Or at the very least tear into people's minds and stay there for a while. It doesn't matter if they don't – you'll get some idea about what to do next – but you need to start out with something.

So what you need is a "theory of change" for Ideas and Concepts. A way of reasoning about what was, what is, and what may be. A hypothesis on how to get from the present moment to what's next. An analysis of why things stop being the way they are and become something new.

One I think of frequently is "Hegelian Dialectics."

Hegelian Dialectics

Dialectics is a scary word, a pretentious word, a proud graduate student's word, but it just means something that comes from conversation. So what I'm on about today is a conversational theory of change. Hegelian, here, just means that "As hegel used it"¹.

The way this one goes is:

1. There is a state of affairs, a set of understood conversations, a set of values, "the way things are", a general tendency.

2. Contradictions are observed within that tendency. Doubts and frustrations build up. The resources available to people change. The ways of life change.

3. The previous state of affairs and its contradictions are "resolved" somehow.

And then that resolved situation settles down and produces a new step (1) on some scale.

This kind of tool can be used to think about actions, desires, tendency, trends on large and small scales. You don't necessarily need to sort everything into a these three positions, but consider the fact that contradictions will always arise. It's a way of viewing historical changes that does not reduce what is happening to "averaging out" of individual tendencies.

You can use dialectics across all sorts of things. People have used dialectics as a tool of analysis across art, science, politics, economics, and many other things.

You can more practically learn how to use this by getting really weird about a specific area of art history. Or finding a small scene, like a small forum or website online, and just watching what happens there. Watching what people make there. Watching that change over time. And then you develop this way of seeing like a muscle.

Here's an example of how people already think about this outside of games:

Music scenes

We can see how the dialectical process works out in music scenes! Not just "well there was A Big Band that was SO GOOD then there was Another Big Band SO GOOD" but actual local music scenes and the events that happen within them. The local bands made up of people who have swallowed their pride, hooked up an amp, and stood on a stage. All these people are not special, they are just people. This is a fact about everyone you look up to in the world.

At the start of a local music scene, things might form around a love of a genre, or a community history, shared struggles, shared desires, shared politics, or maybe just liking a specific band. All sorts of things. And then, if you're lucky, people start making music.

1. This is the initial state: there's no music scene.
2. Then there's the contradiction: But we want there to be a music scene. and we have the means for there to be one.
3. And its resolution is: We started a music scene, come play this saturday?

And then it just keeps going.

1. (state of affairs) Everyone is playing music for genre X with similar assumptions about what genre X is.
2. (contradiction) This scene's music is too same-y. We don't see ourselves in it. There's a new class of instrument out. Our lives ended up looking far more different than we expected.
3. (resolution) We've broken the silent rules people were adhering to in the scene. We might not "get successful" off it but the assumptions are changed.

And then it keeps on going

But on the "big" scale it might look like this

1. (state of affairs) Rock music! yeah! So cool :)
2. (contradiction) The general political climate of the the cold war and advancing capitalist production & alienation within that context².
3. (resolution) Punk music bursts out.

And on a smaller scale it might look like this

1. (state of affairs) Folk punk, early-mid 2010s, lots of music about overdosing, being poor, hopeless political future, losing friends to all the previous and even more³.
2. (contradiction) People leave the scene either due to getting sober or because of this being the identity of the scene sucks.
3. (resolution) Scene moves more towards recovery, post-addiction, conviction and stubbornness in political hope.⁴

This is a social change in what people are valuing within the scene. You can see this clearly in histories of hip hop, emo, industrial music, hyperpop, etc. This happens a lot in music! And also in art. And also in literature. But when you pay attention only to popular music, published books, highly acclaimed art, you miss out on internalising this process of local dialectical, conversational changes.

Games

Games are not immune. Games may take immense amounts of time to work on and in many cases have the work distributed across large teams, but this does not make them just consumable products.

Games obviously have some kind of art history to them. The way people have talked about the history of games in the last 40 odd years is steeped in specific ways of thinking and talking about the origin of games. As time goes on it will become more clear that games are following a much more complex history than "what is capable on current hardware"

For example, lets look at the late 00s:

1. (state of affairs) Games as an industry is maturing, game companies are taking fewer risks. Lots of market saturation in safe genres.
2. (contradiction) Alternative game marketplaces are maturing, internet connections & data plans are getting good enough to reliably download games, indie developers from the online flash scenes have matured as developers.
3. (resolution) The indie development scene explodes (positive).

But again you can also see this happen on smaller scales. The dialectical process of change is visible in the span of years and months when you respect the smaller scenes. You can see indie and hobbyist game developers play off each other constantly on places like Itch.

A breakout game can come from nowhere not just because it's "good" but because it appeals to people's desires. It comes from a social scene where people were testing what worked and what didn't in a dialectical manner. Not just play testing single games until they were "good" but completing projects and reflecting on how they went.

End

And so you want to get in on this? You want to tune yourself to the artistic moment in games, you want to be someone who can feel the electricity of the current milieu? You don't want to be carried along by the currant but contribute to its velocity?

To do this, you need to wholeheartedly embrace a dialectical artistic game-developer method. Or at least some theory of change.

You need to identify what's going on around you, watch as things change, take in information about the world. Not just with the intent to observe or dictate but to play into the motions as they happen, exaggerate them.

Not chase trends, which are surface level to dialectics, but look out for underlying arguments. The underlying arguments. The ways the world and the ways people live in it work are changing. When we as a collective group of people make art, what is that collection of art saying? What do you want to say in response?

Each game is an argument that the people who made it are making about the world. You can't avoid this! Even a "just for fun escapist game" is making statements about the world around us. Some of you may be tired of this kind of announcement, but that too is a reaction to the present moment in the context of recent history. To be tired of "everything is making statements" is itself some kind of statement, and you can ask what are the contexts, positions, and desires of someone making such a statement. Their frustration about this is often there to be ignored.

You need to be able to take yourself seriously. We use humour to disarm ourselves, but we also use it to push away vulnerability, hope. To push away what could be, to play it safe.

You need to collaborate on small scales. You need to not just treat each other and our projects, organisations like competing items on a shelf. Livelihoods depend on it! But it's isolating, alienating.

And you need to love art. Not for the sake of it, not out of worship of The Soul of The Work, but for the ways these things build and strengthen connections between real people working towards better things.

Last year I hosted Pretentious Jam after writing a normal itch page for it, which I was happy to see people participating in. I'm proud of everyone who tried. I stand by it and miss the spaces that appreciated it. This talk is not about pretentious jam, but I would have not given the talk without it.

The sources that informed this were things like various online marxist libraries, conversations with friends, reflection on when and why confidence in analysis has sprouted in specific contexts in my life and others, the above game jam, Mike Duncan's "Revolutions" podcast, Dan Fox's "Pretentiousness: Why It Matters" among other things I've already forgotten. Recommended, accessible "reading" is the Overthink podcast, just cos it's fairly approachable, conversational, and reliable as a philosophy discussion and explanation source. You will not catch me directly recommending Phenomenology of Spirit even as a joke.

The histories presented here are extremely loose. It was a 10 minute talk, after all.

#art #art history #art scenes #dialectics #edinburgh #folk punk #gamedev #games talks live #glasgow #hegel #philosophy