Scrawled in Wax

As any gamer can tell you, the past couple of years have been filled with endless yammering about ‘next-gen gaming’. I, ever the optimist, bought into the hype hook, line and sinker: I was ready to have my mind blown - not simply by high-def graphics and surround sound - but by games becoming ‘relevant’ beyond their economic success. Yet upon completing my console collection and finally playing the big titles of the new generation - Gears of War, Bioshock, Motorstorm and Wii Sports, to name a few - I was disappointed. Sure, things were pretty. Yeah, you can do things in games you could never do before. Yet I couldn’t help but feel “so what?”. While I was definitely having fun, little about this latest evolution of gaming feels particularly new in an aesthetic or philosophical sense. Yes, the games are certainly ‘more real’ and ‘more engrossing’ - but ultimately they still serve as entertaining distractions, rather than what I was so desperately hoping for: aesthetic experiences that are relevant beyond their own entertainment value.

And then into my malaise came Everyday Shooter, a fascinating, abstract mix between game and album. Created by Toronto game designer, Jonathan Mak, the game immediately seems ‘new’. On the surface, this seems an odd statement to make about a game that copies the Robotron/Geometry Wars ‘two-stick shooter’ model that is over 25 years old. But Everyday Shooter combines play and the audio-visual experience in a way that few games have thus far. In Everyday Shooter, your ’ship’ is a just a dot on a screen that emits a stream of ‘weaponfire’. As a sparse, guitar-based soundtrack plays in the background, destroying the objects on screen results in single guitar notes, while chaining such actions creates more cacophonic results. Each level is a ’song’ that contains a different visual and aural design so that both the backgrounds, soundtrack and ‘event notes’ are unique to each stage.

As it happened, when I downloaded the game I had just finished teaching Immanuel Kant’s conception of beauty and I couldn’t help but think of Shooter in those terms (yeah, yeah, I know - it’s weird). In The Critique of the Power of Judgement, Kant argues that the beautiful is that which “does not relate to a concept”. So, to Kant, a natural object or a painting is not beautiful when we say it has attained the ideal of perfection or when it teaches something (both being ‘concepts’), but instead when its aesthetic qualities create satisfaction simply by ‘exciting the imagination or understanding’. One way to think of this might be the difference between listening to a song because one can relate to and listening to one because it satisfies in vague but ultimately inarticuable ways. So while the beautiful object doesn’t relate to a specific idea, it still feels like it has a point - or what Kant calls “purposiveness without purpose”.

Gaming, of course, has a purpose - you either ‘win’ or you get a high score - and in this respect, Everyday Shooter is no different: you accumulate points as in any other game and when you finish the 8 levels, you are done. But accumulating seems only half the point to ES - I often find myself turning on my PS3 simply to hear the music, to immerse myself in the aesthetic of the game rather than its ‘ludological‘ world (i.e. the world of play). Instead of caring about how high I score, I play the game for its aesthetic rewards, its sights and sounds and more than anything, the manner in which these elements all overlap. To return to Kant, the satisfaction of Everyday Shooter is not in beating your old high score, nor is it getting to the end of the level - it is not about experiencing something to relate it to a goal or a concept; nor is it simply a question of likes and dislikes, which Kant argues are ‘mere’ personal tastes. Rather, it is precisely the excited state of imagination and understanding that Kant labels the beautiful that becomes the ‘purpose’ of playing.

What feels so refreshing about Everyday Shooter is that insists upon itself both as a game and an aesthetic experience comprising the visual, aural and, umm, game-al. Indeed, it works hard to make those elements indivisible so that the game is an aesthetic experience. In doing so, it reinforces the enormous potential of gaming as more than just a visceral or entertaining distraction, instead suggesting that it can be a new medium that draws on film, music and visual art while creating something new. While I have no desire to get further mired in the ‘Are Games Art?’ debate, the manner in which the game becomes an experience unto itself suggest that games like Everyday Shooter may very well be ‘beautiful’…

Appendix?: I feel I should note that Kant is much less useful as a theorist than he used to be. One of his aims in trying to make beauty devoid of concepts was to allow for universal aesthetic judgements, something 20th century thinkers rightly found problematic, instead arguing that aesthetics are often constructed by social, ideological and market forces. But I would argue that the way in which Kant delineates how we as individuals experience the aesthetic still contains some validity, especially when we think of how we actually react to Art on a personal, psychological level.