Scrawled in Wax

While grad school certainly has its drawbacks, one of its many perks is the sheer pleasure of ‘just chatting’. Often, perhaps as a group of us watch the sun fade over pitchers of beer, it is a distinct pleasure to discuss books, film and TV with people who are smart and engaged.

Yet, for all the open-minded exchange of ideas, one thing I have found you cannot discuss – at least not without drawing uncomfortable looks – is video games. Naturally, this isn’t universally the case; I do have a couple of friends sympathetic to the potential gaming holds. But, all too often, when you find yourself among arty or literary intellectuals, uttering the term “video games” is akin to saying you sexually fantasise about your eighteen year-old students: “Ew!”, goes the response.

This stigma attached to video games was on my mind recently when, while studying for a field exam, I was taking breaks by playing Nintendo’s Super Mario Galaxy. While I initially found the game hard to get into, I soon found myself surprised, and then amazed, by the sophistication and complexity of what Shigeru Miyamato and his team had achieved. But while I wanted to talk to my friends about this gem, I felt as if I couldn’t.

Part of this has to do with how hard it is to translate gaming for someone who isn’t familiar with the form. Show a clip of Mario Galaxy to your average lit major, and an argument for any intellectual depth will quickly be brushed aside – a reaction that I actually think is quite understandable. After all, the game is filled with walking mushrooms, carnivorous plants and a lead character whose excited utterances are perhaps a shade too cute. On the surface, the game seems like ‘it’s for kids’.

In many ways, this frequent use of objects and themes that have a childish association has cemented gaming as an infantile pursuit. Even when the aesthetics of a game change to something more ‘mature’, video gaming is still haunted by an adolescent affection for violence, simplistic plots and weak characterisation. Though this in no way represents all gaming, it has certainly informed the perception of games among the literati – namely that art is for clever grown-ups and games are for those yet to reach that vaunted status.

But, as I’ve argued so frequently, games live and die by interaction and play, the experience of actually controlling a character or object in a game, moving through the game’s process of challenge and reward.

As such, as I progressed through Super Mario Galaxy, one of the things that struck me was the evolutionary nature of play in the game, the fact that it was so cleverly different from what came before. When I was asked to move Mario in new ways – not simply in three dimensions, but against patterns I already knew, not merely sideways, but with the entire screen shifted ninety degrees – the units of play, the familiar bits and pieces that a gamer picks up over time, were repurposed and recontextualised. Put somewhat differently, playing Super Mario Galaxy was a bit like listening to jazz.

I say this because, as I played, the experience it felt most familiar to was listening to Coltrane’s Giant Steps. To me, the beauty of that album isn’t that Coltrane’s ‘wall of sound’ is inherently intellectual or complex. Rather, it’s the way that he and other jazz musicians play with the accepted conventions of melody, harmony and note progression, upsetting what your brain thinks is coming next. And while one can’t push the analogy too far – part of Giant Steps’ brilliance is precisely that the wall of sound feels out of control and sublime, a sentiment at odds with a well-designed video game – it certainly helps.

After all, Mario Galaxy also plays with accepted conventions and forces you to reorient your relationship to structures you’ve already internalised. When Mario ran vertically or had to jump from one plane and direction to another, I could feel my brain being pushed to conceive of this representation of space in a new way. Relationships had to be re-imagined and, unlike music, not just in a conceptual manner: my fingers had to learn to do new things too.

What became significant was the difference between what I as a player was asked to do and what I thought I was about to be asked to do. And if language means through difference – loosely, that words are only defined by other words – then the sophistication of a language of play is about the tension between norm and novelty, expectation and surprise. Like Lisa Simpson once said about an avante-garde jazz musician, “you have to listen to the notes she’s not playing”. ‘Clever’ video games don’t simply engage sophisticated themes; they reform expected definitions of play by first invoking what you already know and then challenging and reshaping it.

The thing is, to understand the brilliance of jazz, you have to at least be familiar with what jazz adapts and rejects. Listen to the way Ella sings a classic, and then listen to how it falls apart when she starts to scat: you need the former to appreciate the latter. To dismiss video games on the basis of their childishness is to dismiss the evolutionary nature of play involved, to throw away The French Lieutenant’s Woman because you never read Tess of the D’urbervilles. If you don’t get what Mario was playing at 20 years ago, you won’t get what he’s doing now.

One might object that this is mere aestheticism or indulgence. But then, couldn’t the same argument be made for instrumental music? What, if not difference and innovation, defines the complexity of what musicians do? If you’re looking to understand what people mean when they say ‘games are smart’, start with play. Learn the language, then see how people start to adapt it, to mess around with it, how they, so to speak, start to pun. And beyond stretching your brain, of having that strange ‘intellectual’ feeling that comes when listening to compex jazz, who knows? While you’re at it, you might even have a little fun.