A few days ago I ran into the professor who is currently giving me guidance at a university I am visiting. We had a spontaneous conversation about how the use of labels and categories negatively affects the quality of writing in history, and academia in general.
This is not a novel thought – much has been written about the overuse of buzzwords in academia, business, development and humanitarian work. Going deeper, much more has been written about how humans use language to signify material things and mental concepts, about how the same word-signifier can mean quite different things to different people.
In history, specifically, the problem with labels is usually conflated with the problem of writing concepts back into the past.
Take “the nation”, as an example. The average person knows exactly what this concept is, if you asked – territory? language? religion? state? ethnicity? – most likely a mix, really.
The degrees to which this mix is differently moulded makes it difficult to define what the term “nation” means to specific people and groups across the world. Which is why, essentially, the term is meaningless – where is the meaning if it cannot be fully and transparently shared between us?
This is why labels are dangerous.
They act as a hyper-signifier, something laden with more meaning than a more commonly agreed-upon descriptor, precisely because it attempts to define a wider concept. The nation is a complex idea, mental and material, that grew out of a specific European context in the 19th century, and then spread globally in the 20th. It is ubiquitous and universal, yet so slippery when one starts to look for a catch-all definition.
This is why writing labels into the past is so dangerous.
When I write about Kyrgyz national consciousness in 1924, not only is the Kyrgyz nation not the same as it is now, but the entire concept of the nation was considered and understood differently at the time then it is now. Just think of the context – now the nation might indeed be ubiquitous and universal, the “pinnacle” of history. Then, however, it was a radical new concept that facilitated self-determination.
Adding fuel to this particular fire is the fact that the history of the Kyrgyz nation was not written or codified at the time, as opposed to now, hence the danger of making the history of the Kyrgyz nation appear pre-determined: “look, it is a nation now, so it must have been the same nation then too, right?”
Not only that, but as a historian I must also contend with the fact that different groups of people (Kyrgyz elites, Uzbek peasants, Russian functionaries) saw it differently then, in different languages, using different mental definitions. How the hell are we supposed to deal with all this complexity? I don’t even have the space here to explain why using “Uzbek peasant” to describe someone in 1924 is completely useless because no one actually identified themselves that way!
This is why labels are so alluring.
It is easy to construct a complex (degrees of complexity may vary) definition of “the nation” at the beginning of your paper/dissertation/book/article/stupid-blog-post-that-no-one-will-ever-read, and get on with it – which is what most academics actually do.
It is hard to consistently engage critically with the concepts that you happen to be writing about, thinking about the appropriateness of their use every time they are deployed, constantly second-guessing their use, second-guessing whether the reader will be able to tell that you are using a term knowingly, ensuring that the writing does not give in to generalised statements. Being precise, knowingly and actively restrained, is the goal.
The writer must be constantly thinking about the reader.
This is why a balance must be struck – the writing should not be ponderous, explaining every decision to deploy specific concepts would not only make reading hell, but writing, by extension, purgatory. It is important to reflect on the choices throughout the writing process, but it is not necessary to always record it within the text. I know, it’s hard.
But what about video games? They can be hard too. What’s harder is talking about them with strangers on the internet, which is a great passtime that I recently got into.
So when this excellent article is posted to a facebook group – how do labels affect the ensuing conversation? [please just at least glance at it, I’m not going to explain anything here in detail about Shadow of War or its Orc domination mechanic that is the subject of the piece]
Despairingly, a good chunk of the responses glosses over the article text completely, instead engages with the “slavery” label:
A good chunk: “Unbelievable, is this person being paid to be triggered professionally?” and “Mass murder of humans is OK but slavery of Orcs is not?”
Rather than going into detail about why they are wrong, why the article is interesting and thought-provoking, it is the power of the label that I want to point this discussion towards. This particular label – slavery – in the context of mainly, but not only, white twenty- and thirty-something men, is explosive.
The label makes the mind make the associations. The associations are pathways formed, in many cases, by prejudice: slavery was a long time ago. Slavery is not about race. This is not slavery. This mechanic does not fit my definition of what the label of slavery is.
The label hijacks the discussion which should be focusing on how an interesting, well made Orc domination mechanic clashes with the sometimes charismatic, sometimes silly, sometimes empathetic nature of these unapologetically video game Orcs. Exhausting that, the discussion could also have moved towards Orcs as “the Other” in Tolkien, and how this makes the mechanic even more problematic (I just used a label, y’all saw that?).
This particular label used in this particular situation violently rewired thinking towards a defensive and dismissive position.
And that’s a big bummer!
Debates were still had, and interesting points were raised, including the sometimes absurd lengths to which I and others take games criticism (fair point, really), but still, labels got in the way.
A question menacingly hangs above me:
Should the writer have agreed to using that label in the headline? Probably not. Should that headline have been less geared towards attracting readership and more geared towards reflecting the nuance of the article? Probably yes.
But that’s not really the problem. Here, the problem is the reaction – not the action. The reader also has responsibility. I expect my reader to, at the very least, read. Read, think, make an informed judgement.
If I wrote an academic piece – look into my sources, critique my analysis, propose improvements.
If I wrote about Orc slavery in a video game… well, listen, at least read it before posting about it, OK?
Historian On Games 
One thought on “On Labels and Shadow of War”