Slate’s Gaming Club (Part 2): Obsessions and Perversions
It has been a distinct and refreshing pleasure over the last couple of days to be able to sit and read four smart individuals talk about gaming. Yes, the round-table – that staple of Slate‘s end-of-year roundups – has come to gaming and N’Gai Croal, Stephen Totilo, Seth and Chris Sullentrope discuss their picks for the year’s best games and their reasons for their choices. What has been remarkable about the discussion is the way in which the writers have sidestepped the usual discussions of the best graphics or weapons and have instead engaged the question of how to evaluate the aesthetic, interactive and narrative elements of gaming. There’s too much to cover in one go, so I’ll break things up into parts. This is the second post, in which I examine N’Gai Croal’s assertion that obsession is a valid way to critically judge a game.
When asked to defend his choice for Game of the Year, Stephen Totilo is clear: he chose Desktop Tower Defence as his number one pick because of “the pure pleasure of its gameplay and the impossibility of quitting”. He acknowledges that while gaming may have yet to produce its Citizen Kane, we need to “find room to praise games” like DTD that are about “pure gameplay” and not story or big-budget production values. The argument being made is that the more obsessed you are about a game, the better the game is, an approach that everyone who plays and enjoys video games is vaguely aware of.
As Totilo writes, he sounds committed but unsure, as if he knows that his choice is fair but puts him against the flow of popular opinion. N’Gai Croal, however, comes to Totilo’s rescue and argues that obsession is a valid selection criterion. Comparing gaming to other art forms, Croal states that “whether I’m thinking about my favorite song, album, movie, TV show, novel, or play, I generally pick the one that I’ve responded to the strongest, the one that I can’t stop thinking about”. What’s being suggested is that the best types of games get under your skin and suck you in, hovering in your mind even when you’re not playing them – that it is the degree to which you become obsessed that determines how successful a game is.
Reading this, I couldn’t help but think of recently watching Dreamland, a film that stars Agnes Bruckner, Kelli Garner and Justin Long. A coming of age story set in a trailer park, the film has an ethereal, sun-soaked quality that stayed with me for days after I had seen it. Flashes of the film and its general tone lingered in my mind, its presence an odd contrast to the cold, grey Toronto winter. As a whole, however, I considered the film a failure – its woozy, romantic promise wasted by a formulaic and too-packaged ending.
So why had the film had stuck with me? Well, the acting was great and so was the overall atmosphere. But when pushed, I had to admit – the film’s creators went to great length to display the bodies of both Bruckner and Garner. They spend much of the film in bikinis, while other times the camera hovers on close up of their faces. My point is not that I’m sorta’ pervy (I’m not!… I think); rather, the film stuck with me for reasons other than its artistic merit. Instead, its depictions of teenage sexuality and young, attractive women in an almost other-wordly context appealed to something that hovered below my conscious mind: my id.
What Croal wonders is how we might “explain why we respond as we do to a particular game” when we have yet to develop the vocabulary for doing so. To my mind, the question is whether or not we can use a response such as obsession as a criterion for judgement if obsession is a primarily unconscious process. And while I’m not about to claim that good art appeals to our ‘pure conscious mind’, I am wary of using an essentially id-driven emotion as a method of judging art. Ultimately, I am again asserting the need for games to be culturally relevant beyond their capacity to entertain, distract or be a part of an economy. It is quite possible that games like Desktop Tower Defense are simply the soap operas of gaming: addictive and ultimately vapid. Their addictiveness stems from how they appeal to fundamental structures of consciousness, whether desire or reward. And to me, art’s function is to lay bare those fundamental structures and our relation to them rather than merely access them. It is in this that Desktop Tower Defense fails – there may be artistry in its design but not its experience. For this reason, I am (yet again) going to disagree with Croal and argue that obsession is probably not the best criterion by which we should judge games.
