An Anarchist Critique of "Super Smash Bros. Melee"

Super Smash Bros. Melee failed my expectations as an anarchist.

In my masterpiece How Non-Violence Protects the State, I wrote

Closing the list of common delusions is the all-too-frequent claim that violence alienates people. This is glaringly false. Violent video games [...] are the most popular. (Southend Press edition, p. 130)

Thus, despite my typical disgust with bourgeois comfort and luxury, I consider it my revolutionary duty to toil away for hours, damaging my hawk-like optic nerves and cramping my already-abused wrists, in order to analyze this important cultural phenomenon.

Sometimes, however, it gets very dreary to have my senses numbed by sordid array of fast-paced, new release video games made available to me in my crushingly comfortable and decadent suburban Northern Virginia environment. When that happens, I find a good cure is to wander through the poor quarters of No.VA., where humble and quietly dignified poor and oppressed people of color work their callused and honest hands in ox-like servitude to the global bourgeoisie. Among these meek and decrepit street bazaars and open-air markets, where the rich smell of exotic spice is thick in the air like forbidden love, I encountered a copy of Super Smash Bros. Melee, badly scratched and without a case, for 25¢.

So I thought I'd give this introductory blog post a retro feel with this nostalgic throwback to 2008, when Le Tigre's Hot Topic was hitting the charts, and I was leading a daring insurrection against counter-revolutionary hippie saboteurs.

Welp, sad to say I was not happy with this game. Sure it was "fun", but it did not live up to my expectations. The compelling story of people of all nations and backgrounds (gorillas, dinosaurs, space pirates, etc.) uniting to fight a common enemy was, sadly, not well-executed. Instead of revealing the common enemy to be the global capitalist system, the plight of the protagonists is blamed on a giant magical glove. This is an all-too-common theme among capitalist and sexist literature, where the hero's destiny is placed in the hands of an invisible, all-powerful creator. Also, the designer's misplaced focus on the game's multiplayer mode, at the expense of the quality of the single-player mode, seems to encourage young people to ignore their shared oppressor in favor of chaotic and hectic class-fratricidal skirmishes. (I've been told that this has been at least partly corrected in the recent sequel, Super Smash Bros. Brawl, but I wouldn't know since I refuse to own a Wii. Sorry, folks, there are some chick repellents that even a 13-inch schlong and a much-deserved reputation as an ingenious anarchist scholar can't cancel out)

Sure a bourgeois critic would point out that the multiplayer mode is for "fun", but building correct insurrectionary consciousness is not supposed to be "fun". Are 13½-hour knife-training sessions with sharpened steel blades "fun"? No. But it is our revolutionary duty none-the-less.

Of course the elephant in the room is the game's offensive and racist portrayal of indigenous people, in the form of the "Ice Climber" characters. Given the Japanese government's colonial exploitation of indigenous groups, I found this to be in very bad taste. I also thought choosing to show the male Ice Climber wearing a dark-purple parka, and the female Ice Climber wearing a light-pink parka, was a cowardly a unimaginative retreat into the shackling conventions of gender binary.

So no, I did not think Super Smash Bros. Melee is a very good game from an anarchist point of view, maybe some Leftists will say otherwise. Admittedly my enjoyment of the game may have been impaired by the copious scratches on the disc and the fact that my Gamecube is currently held together with duct tape and chewed gum.