Archive for category Gaming Theory
Eyes Averted, You Become the Other
Posted by Nav in Gaming Theory, Video Games on January 24, 2011
Up until recently – and even still – making one’s onscreen self move in a video game has used an arcane set of gestures, involving what you might call a grammar of interaction: move this stick left as you press X while holding R2, and you will make your character climb.
This has, thus far, worked surprisingly well. The things we can make our virtual selves do is remarkable, and perhaps the very lack of congruence helps. Unlike language, which makes the connections between words and the thing they refer to seem natural, video games never make you think pressing X and jumping are anything but coded constructs.
But at the core of this remarkable grammar is a bond formed between our selves and our virtual representations.
Let’s take Assassin’s Creed II as an example. Though the plot of the game is fun and a little silly, what I found most compelling about the game was the recreation of its setting of 15th century Florence and Venice. You guide the main character, Ezio, through these cities, which are not only remarkably accurate virtual versions, but are also simply quite beautiful. The experience of simply moving through Venice at night is serene, calming and fascinating. The often haunting soundtrack certainly doesn’t hurt.
At its heart, that experience – in which one finds oneself saying things like “I could walk through Venice for hours” – is one enabled by the projection of our identity onto a character. After all, it is the fact that it feels like you touring 15th century Italy that makes it so compelling. One could imagine controlling a blank, character-less camera through the city and not at all feeling the same thing.
The virtual always asks you to embody yourself in some fashion, to produce some synedoche of your selfhood in pixels, whether in a Twitter avatar, Facebook profile or virtual avatar. And in video games, that embodiment is often quite one way. You are beckoned to become or mentally inhabit the character onscreen.
But with new motion control device Microsoft Kinect – even more so than with Wii or Playsation Move or whatever else – the relationship of embodiment becomes more and more symbiotic: your avatar moves like you as it asks you to move like it. Instead of your avatar asking you to mentally inhabit its world, you ask your avatar to move as if it were in yours as it asks you to move as if you were in its. It is not so much that you are the controller, as much as it is that you become the virtual you.
In the past, this embodiment of motion control could feel stilted. On things like games that came with webcams waving one’s around produced sporadic, unpredictable results. Even many titles for the Wii feel as if you simply wave the Wiimote in whatever direction one wants.
But a well-crafted Kinect game is quite different, the relationship between player and avatar displaying what I think I’ve decided to call Ludacrisian Reliability (“When I move, you move, jus’ like that“). And in much the same way that the touchscreen allowed familiar things like surfing the web to take on a pleasing tactile quality, motion controlled video games do something similar for interactive entertainment.
So let us think about where this leaves videogames. If the power of games has always been in their capacity to form a bond between the player and avatar, it seems Kinect heightens this, but also does something to that relationship. At the core of the Kinect’s grammar of interacation is a request that you, almost literally, embody the action on screen. You must act out what your avatar must go through.
As someone (impersonating legendary game designer Peter Molyneux) recently expressed the possibilities in a tweet: “I’d like to make a kinect survival horror game where at key moments you must stay absolutely still to avoid being found.” Right? Here we have a scenario in which the use of the body seems like it’d create a very intense, immediate experience.
But let’s push this a touch further – well into the distinctly uncomfortable. Imagine being a African American character in the 18th century. For some reason I am imagining a dock, officers in uniform and the sea, and your character is being boarded on a slave ship. As epithets and insults are yelled and objects are thrown at ‘you’, in order to proceed in the game, you must keep your head bowed the entire time. I realize that’s a pretty intense place to go. But it seems the extreme example highlights an important fact: if part of the promise of art is to expand an individual’s understanding of the processes that make other people who they are, here we have an experience that would do just that and a whole lot more.
Of course, the unintentional side-effect of this is a total mess: to go through this harrowing experience, you would have to not see it. In fact, the only way you could ever see it is if you were to witness somebody else experience it second hand, the cute academic neatness of which, I admit, is almost offensive.
But there are other scenarios that, in their demand that you embody them, seem fascinating and terrifying: of having to swat away apparitions as your characters loses his or her grip on sanity; or of having to defend yourself against blows as a child being bullied.
Motion controlled video games ask you to embody a virtual Other. In doing so, they construct a framework for a kind of relationship between an individual and an artistic space that demands you enact the actions of your virtual self; the avatar becomes the director and scriptwriter, and you the actor – or puppet.
Whether that will be ‘better’ or more immediate than other art forms, I’m not sure. But video games that literally ‘demand your body’ seem to have the capacity to create intense experiences that will have empathy at their core. Given the difficulties in ‘accurate’ and ‘appropriate’ representations of politically controversial moments and identities, this seems full of promise.
A Date With the Taliban
Posted by Nav in Culture of Technology, Gaming Theory on October 8, 2010
To me, the most promising aspect of video games – and, for some, its most terrifying – is the capacity to empathise virtually with another identity or experience.
It was this capacity of games, I think, that lay at the core of the recent controversy over Medal of Honor, a game in which players could assume the role of Taliban fighters. There was no narrative to this particular aspect of the game; only a label ‘Taliban’ that allowed players to occupy a certain ‘side’ in the competitive multiplayer portion of the game – a label that has since been changed to ‘opposing force’ because of the controversy.
Many news articles have made reference to the double standard at work: that films about war are works of art, but interactive experiences are not. Less commented on – at least in the mainstream press that I’ve seen – is the double standard in which identifying with American soldiers killing virtual Afghanis is acceptable, but the inverse is not. This seems wrong to me. I won’t go into the political reasons too much here, though; instead I’d like to focus on what that assumption misses about video games. (Forest for the trees! Part of the problem! Etc etc.)
Anyway. Games work through the creation of structures of play in which certain challenges are presented that the player must overcome. Those structures often map onto cultural or social expectations about what is right and true, so that winning a game means virtually enacting or embodying certain values: individualism, patriotism, even xenophobia. I’d argue that part of the incredible success of war games is that virtual arenas of military combat offer a distillation of those ideas: fighting the enemy, being the one true hero, asserting American values, being masculine etc.
Those things seem to be core to most populist North American discourse. But it’s also important to note that the most broad and ‘universal’ ideas are often the ones that go unquestioned most frequently. This is why I’d argue ‘playing as the Taliban’ is actually a good thing. Games’ capacity to produce a relationship between the player and his/her avatar enables a virtual experience of something else. And the experience, rather than being a end unto itself, reconfigures something inside the human subject doing the play. “War games” in their present state do that reconfiguration as reinforcement of pre-existing values. But to ‘play as a Taliban fighter’ at least allows the possibility for some momentary identification with a dispossessed individual fighting against an impossibly more massive army.*
It certainly feels like this might be useful. Missing from a lot of public discourse around terrorism/insurgency is that one condition for its expression is precisely the disparity in power between two opposing sides. In the attempt to claim the moral high-ground, the material and cultural realities produced by the disparity itself are often overlooked. Wouldn’t video games possibly help? I mean, don’t get me wrong: a Medal of Honor game by EA isn’t going to the game that provides insight into the psycho-cultural makeup of insurgent movements. But nonetheless, this censure feels dispiriting, precisely because it seems to attempt to foreclose not just the possibility of identifying with another perspective, but the validity of doing so through aesthetics/gaming at all.
But what does this have to do with dating? Well, my friend Matthew shared a link to Dinner Date – a forthcoming game that simulates the [sic] subconsciousness of a man being stood up on a date. The game (an experimental, indie title) puts you in the perspective of a guy sitting down at a table, plates and bottle of wine at the ready, waiting for the date that never comes (Godot, anyone?). So here we have an experience that no-one wants to have – but one that, through experiencing it virtually, might ever so slightly expand one’s relationship to human experience.
Right?
The Ideology Valve: Then there will be cake [Guest Post]
Posted by Nav in Cultural Theory, Gaming Theory, Video Games on June 16, 2010
Regular readers are probably familiar with me starting a post with “my friend and I were chatting about this over wine the other day”. Well, after unending cajoling, that anonymous friend – who’ll we’ll call “m” – wrote something pretty great, and he has kindly allowed me to share here. I think those of you familiar with the ‘primary text’ in question will enjoy it.
So, like everyone else, I went back to play through Valve’s Orange Box last week. It was my first chance to see the new graphics upgrades, and I took the time to listen to the developer commentaries.
What did I learn? I learned, most of all, that many of my apparently intuitive and clever decisions had been carefully pre-planned through product testing. I must admit, it was a little deflating. The commentaries describe game-tester mistakes, and then describe the scenes created exclusively to train our reactions and eliminate any future non-enjoyment. This creates an odd benevolent-dictator feeling to the commentaries. Gabe wants to hear from you, but he probably already knows what you have to say.
Please don’t think I’m naive. I know, obviously, that HL2 is linear. I even like it that way. But the extent and quality of the control is surprising. We need the player to see or do or think X, but how do we ensure that this will happen? Often the solution simply involves physical barriers, which are very obvious, but the commentaries also explain many less obvious, non-physical, seemingly “artistic” kinds of control. The player is more likely, for example, to visit the most relevant building first if it’s painted a brighter colour. (I distinctly remember feeling proud about choosing the correct building!) Similarly, the architecture of the rooms produces certain kinds of behaviour in both AI and players. Valve knows this, again, because they’ve tested the structures. When I adopt a particular strategy of protection or observation in a room, who exactly is deciding? How many of my attempts to be a good gamer and to successfully inhabit this world were pre-programmed, even when there were no physical constraints to stop me from doing something else?
And isn’t this really the perfect figure for ideology? To some extent I know that I’m being controlled, but I still feel like there’s some important, irrepressibly human part of me that nevertheless makes valuable contributions. But these games not only control my obvious decisions, they also work by opening up the space for other kinds of decisions that function by feeling “free.” Without these apparently free decisions, the game loses its fun.
There are a number of implications here. First, I’m wondering about Roger Ebert’s (much-despised) argument about video-games and art. He suggests that the very “game” quality of videogames is holding them back. He seems to be suggesting that, in “winning” a game (e.g., a game of chess), we lose the capacity to work through more complicated ideas. Chess games are artful, sure, but they’re fundamentally just a constrained contest, which is different from, say, reading Proust. But what exactly is this odd level of control that we find in HL2? Are these constraints the same as the ones we find in a chess game? It seems to me much easier to compare HL2’s highly organized world with the ones created by movie-makers, painters, or novelists. I mean, artists can make us feel like we are having a spontaneous experience. We forget that we’re watching art, and instead feel “there.” In actuality, of course, those are precisely the moments when the artist has us most completely.
So, second thing. If this a model of ideology, what is it teaching us? By the time I arrived at the White Forest Inn in Episode 2, I was tired of having my spontaneous reactions explained to me by Valve employees. So I broke the script. After the big hunter battle, I was supposed to walk back up the road to find the power-source that fed the force-field that was holding my car. Instead, I piled up some boxes and jumped up a seemingly impossible ledge. Fuck Valve.
Whatever scripts were supposed to be triggered by my long walk along the road weren’t triggered. In the end, I ended up in the right place, but I arrived from the wrong direction. Alyx sprinted up and delivered a few lines, but everything she said was useless because there wasn’t anything to do or anyone to fight. And then she just stared at me.
And it was there, looking into her cold dead eyes, that I realized the real ideological lesson. I had (in some kind of virtuo-Lacanian ethics) traversed the fantasy and moved toward the object. I had shaken the lozenge and exposed the emptiness of the Other. But I was just bored. The result was—nothing. I was freer than I’d ever been, but I also had nowhere to go. So I jogged in little spurts back down the road until the scripts started up again, and I was rewarded immediately when a Combine helicopter swept down and filled me with bullets.
Ideology works through enjoyment. The real fear involved in anti-ideological struggles is that, in success, we will lose ourselves by losing the specific frame of our enjoyment. Alenka Zupančič talks about this in relation to Kant: “[The subject] fears finding herself in an entirely new landscape, a featureless territory in which her existence will no longer be confirmed by what she feels.” We may obliterate the guarantors of our enjoyment (Nation, Racial belonging, Family, and so on). That is to say, we’d rather be attacked by a helicopter than venture into the empty abyss that we have no language to understand.
And I think this becomes even more interesting when we add Portal into the equation. I think Portal is perhaps the most perfect expression of contemporary ideology. Why? Because when you break the frame in Portal, when you escape the game world, it keeps on going. Yes, I know that you can do odd things and break the structure in Portal as well, but in this particular game the resistance is written right into the narrative. You crack out of the game itself only to find more game. And, you know, the cake is always there, offered as a final promise of enjoyment. Others will tell you the cake is a lie, but you know different, right?
And I think that’s exactly where we are, which is also why I’d say that Ebert’s definition of art needs to be questioned if it doesn’t include Portal. Portal seems to understand that the world we live in is a kind of game-world that specifically opens up spaces for our resistance. The recent task for ideological systems has been to provide us with new fantasy frames designed precisely for this world of rebellion “outside” the mainstream. As the final song reassures us, smashing the Other is now actually a “triumph” of the Other. And in the most recent updates to the game, we see our avatar, Chell, slowly retrieved as a valuable object: still alive and still inside. And we are all her, a shell, a new kind of proletariat.
Roger Ebert: Video Games Can Never Be Art
Posted by Nav in Gaming Theory on April 17, 2010
So, this again.
Ebert essentially argues that art should either be engaged in representing something well – whether through a commitment to realism or metaphor – or that it should produce a particular sort of emotional or experiential reaction. So, basically: Aristotle or Kant, take your pick.
I’d rather not try and produce a drawn-out argument as to why I think he’s wrong – particularly in the ‘never‘ part of the argument – but I will repeat that mimesis or imitation operates according to particular principles that have been enmeshed in culture for thousands of years, and we respond to them as such. Games operate partly by representation, but their primary mode is the interactive nature of simulation – or, as I like to call it, ‘re-simulation’: the production of a virtual arena that operates according to particular rules and references ‘texts of reality’ not in order to reproduce them but to use their systems as the basis for a game structure.
Put another way: imitation in the form of drawing or acting is central to human existence. And so is play. In much the same way the the technologies of print and film allowed the mimesis of literature and theatre respectively to become objects of mass culture, computers allow the same thing for play.
All that said: when Ebert says that no game has the same sort of cultural or intellectual impact as film or literature or painting etc., he’s spot on. I can only speak anecdotally here, but no game has even come close to having the kind of impact that a Lahiri short story or Thomas McCarthy film has. It will be some time before games as a form become culturally significant for reasons beyond their enormous impact on economics or leisure time.
And there a number of things that need to change for that to happen, not the least of which is the demographic expansion of those making and writing about games.
To end, though: I don’t know what Flower is exactly. But it’s something. It produces something. And the strange act of identifying with the camera – with the implied gaze – in a game in which you are, in some sense, ‘the wind’… well, it may not be an Amitav Ghosh novel. But it is a sign of how the form may do incredible things in the future.
For the time being though, I’m playing Gears of War 2 – and for reasons quite different than I’ve outlined here – I’m fucking loving it.
Going Greek on The Beatles: Rock Band
Posted by Nav in Culture of Technology, Gaming Theory, Music, Video Games on September 6, 2009
Greek philosophers, that is. If Plato and Aristotle disagreed on the good and bad work that art does, how do we talk about something similar in video games?
When a video game gets an 8000+ word feature in the New York Times Magazine, what’s clear is that this isn’t just any old game. And if you were looking for why The Beatles: Rock Band seems to have the world in a bit of a tizzy, you could do worse than asking Seth Schiesel, who reviewed the game for the NYT. “By reinterpreting an essential symbol of one generation in the medium and technology of another,” he says “The Beatles: Rock Band provides a transformative entertainment experience,”. TB:RB, we’re told, is about to do for video games what The Beatles themselves did for pop music: make them not just popular, but culturally significant*.
Still, as you’d expect, it’s precisely the transition from cultural touchstone to video game that has some feeling uneasy. The Times itself is rife with commentary about the distinction between this blasphemous knock-off and ‘the real thing’. But a far more intelligent, subtle critique was made by web thinker and occasional curmudgeon, Nick Carr:
Rock Band is a means of distancing rather than immersion. It’s yet another sign of the commercialization of the intimate, the replacement of real personal experience with a purchased, preprogrammed replica of experience…
Rock Band is the aural equivalent of paint-by-number… But, like paint-by-number, Rock Band is also a metaphor… What’s creepy about the game isn’t the faux guitar necks with the color-coded digital frets (that’s just rock-by-number). It isn’t even the waxworks avatars (though they are certainly ghoulish). No, what’s creepy about it is its cynical, paint-by-number rendering of sixties counterculture, from, progressively, the Ed Sullivan go-go soundstage to the trippy mindscapes of psychedelia to the flowerchild fields of the hippies.
Carr’s critique is expected, but worth paying attention to. After all, besides Carr’s usual intelligence, it articulates a fundamental fear about video games: if games are about recreating experiences, what happens when they recreate pivotal cultural symbols or events? Do they cheapen them? Do they do away with either their cultural significance or intellectual rigour? What exactly is at stake in virtual representations of culture?
In a loose sense, Carr’s concerns are akin to Plato’s in Republic. Moving away from an original in a way that reduces certain valued qualities – here, originality, rigour – is a kind of corruption. The distinction at work is between, on one hand, creativity and counter-cultural rebellion, and on the other, the mindless repetition of music and consumerism. In order to argue this, Carr has to assume this: video games are attempts to replicate the things they depict. That point is up for debate.
When Plato proposed the poets and their imperfect imitations be banished from the ideal state, Aristotle responded by suggesting that the purpose of artistic imitation wasn’t to simply replicate something, but was to recreate and stage stories so that we might learn both how to live and how not to live, while purging emotions in a safe and healthy way. Imitation was good because experiencing it made you a better person.
An argument about video games works in an analogous fashion. Video games only attempt to replicate their aesthetic or mimetic content; the mechanics of game are somewhat different realm. When a video game presents a battle or a sporting match, the point isn’t so much to recreate an event as it is the rules of the event. As I’ve argued previously: create a world; set its rules; let the player create their experience within that arena of action. It’s a system that video game theorist Gonzalo Frasca has called ‘simulation’, as a distinctly separate field from ‘representation’ (imitation, mimesis) or music. Rather than attempting to recreate or simplify musicianship, games like Rock Band and Guitar Hero attempt to produce their own set of mechanics and rules in order to create their own unique experience. To put it simply, the point of Rock Band isn’t to recreate being musician – it’s to play Rock Band.
But it’s not quite as straightforward as that, is it? After all, a good deal of the cultural force behind video games stems from precisely how they create fantasy spaces to act out culturally significant tropes and symbols. What is the appeal of the World War II shooter if not making you feel like ‘you’re right there’? Though games do not simply depict these important things, whether famous wars or everyday actions, they do constantly refer and point to them. It’s too easy to say that ‘games are their own thing’ and not take this into account.
—–
A few months ago, I was chatting about this to a friend while sharing some beer on his deck. This is something we do often – lazily shifting between topics of academic fascination while slowly getting buzzed. This time round, I was suggesting that we needed a word – one better than ‘simulation’ – to denote how video games didn’t simply recreate the objects and spaces they showed, but set up a world and rules for their own kind of creation.
Because literature people so frequently talk about the prefix ‘re-’ in ‘representation’ – that little gap that reminds us of the fictiveness of literature, film etc. – I suggested the counter-intuitive term ‘resimulation’ to refer to the same gap in video game depictions of real-world things. My friend’s lightning quick response? “How is that different from the simulacrum? Isn’t that kind of repetition of things in the world exactly what we don’t want games to do?”.
It was a good point. If the power of games lies in their creative capacity, then maybe a term that seemed to further connote repetition and corruption was the wrong one. Rather than the kind of creativity and uniqueness of video games, to resimulate something seemed instead to suggest one was simply ‘acting it out again’. It’s like playing a famous football game in the Madden series simply so that one can repeat it; it’s nostalgia, rather than creativity, and importantly, it’s about culture and representation, not gameplay, or what game theorists call the ludological aspects of play – the theoretical term for how games work by rules of play and simulation rather than by the rules we use to approach literature and film.
Not to be proven wrong again – which happens all too often when you have very smart friends – I took what seemed like a half-hearted stab: “Okay, what about presimulation?”. “Huh,” my friend replied. And as we hashed it out a bit, it wasn’t as bad as it initially sounded. After all, if resimulation is the tendency in games to repeat and act out common aspects of culture, then presimulation refers to the potential in game worlds: to presimulate is to set up a world with its rules precisely so you don’t repeat something, but create your own experience. It still refers to things in the world, but does so in a way that isn’t about imitation, but setting up an arena for possible action. You don’t exactly know what’s coming next; you’re ‘before’ the simulation has taken place, and in a sense, you always will be.
And as I’ve thought about this over the past few months, what I’ve realised is that it’s not that good games are ‘presimulative, creative and open, and bad games are ‘resimulative’, linear, closed and mindless; quite to the contrary, it’s that all games contain both presimulative and resimulative aspects, traits that respectively are about the creativity of play and the force and weight of those symbols and events that are culturally significant.
To give an example, the standard ‘war game’ suffices. Take a Call of Duty title and you will find aspects that are resimulative, that repeat both historical events and their cultural underpinnings. The games beckon you to repeat the tropes of our cultural past, from definitions of gender, to ideas about the nation, to an evaluation of war and nobility. Its presimulative aspects, however, are the things the resist the neat repetition of a historical narrative, i.e. the manner in which the player both decides his or her path (to some extent), but more importantly, the way in which the minute, second-to-second experience of the game while sitting in your living room produces a distinct, unique effect, one that is as productive and creative as it is reactive and resimulative. Perhaps the best example of this was the parent who insisted that if his son wanted to play Call of Duty, he had to do so according to the Geneva Conventions. Because the resimulative aspects of a game push you one way, doesn’t mean you can’t push back.
—–
So. After all that, it’s time to return to the question: what is at stake when video games represents not just blocks and shapes, but culture? Well, to me it’s this: video games always-already are capable of reaffirming or challenging their cultural underpinnings. By both asking you the player to repeat certain aspects of culture and produce your own experience of it, video games neither denigrate forms they riff on nor celebrate or elevate them. As a cultural form, video games always have the potential to do both, and one is left looking at them on a title-by-title basis to examine how, through a combination of both mechanics and aesthetics, individual games relate to ‘culture’.
In my mind, this reframes the debate about TB:BR. To say that it is a corruption of musicianship is to miss the experiential and formal uniqueness of video games – their presimulative aspect. But Carr argues that TB:BR also corrupts the counter-cultural message of The Beatles because it renders their images in them frame of a consumerist video game. Before responding to that, I think that at this point, it’s worth noting the The Beatles have sold 2 billion albums (no, that’s not a typo) and that whatever their counter-cultural impact was, it died and was co-opted long before Rock Band was created – or, for that matter, before I was in the late seventies.
But in some ways, I still agree with Carr. Why? Well, to me, the ‘resimulative’ danger of TB:BR isn’t that it co-opts the counter-cultural potential of the The Beatles – it’s that it acts out the same corruption to which The Beatles were themselves a part. Here is our aesthetic of counter-culture – now go lavish in it and enjoy yourself. Whatever The Beatles may have been able to achieve in taking resistance and making it mainstream, rebellion has long been taken over by the mechanisms of late capitalism and consumerism in which the signs of resistance become yet more things up for sale in the marketplace. Even though Rock Band is a great way for people to engage with the music, the best we can hope for is that people new to the music will enjoy it. No-one, as a result, will really consider ‘giving peace a chance’ – or, more importantly, question the vapidity of the message in the first place.
Still, it’s important to note that there is nothing about it being a video game that necessitates this result. Instead, it’s precisely the lack of a video-game-specific approach to the cultural impact of the The Beatles that has rendered TB:BR impotent. More specifically, it’s the lack of a presimulative way to experience The Beatles that reduces the counter-cultural potential of TB:BR.
While I firmly believe music games are an amazing way for people to newly relate to music, little about the kind of ludological satisfaction of repeating a song, even in this new form, will bridge the formal specificities of video games and cultural significance in ‘the real world’. The game will simply celebrate the aesthetics of an overused and tired cultural symbol. The Beatles: Rock Band, if it ever had anything to do with counter-culture, fails at it not because it is a video game, but because it isn’t enough of one.
—–
* Of course, video games already are culturally significant; it’s just that there’s a large part of the mainstream, NYT/Globe and Mail reading public who don’t (or aren’t willing) to believe they are.
Those Lazy, Hazy Pixellated Days of Summer: What Gaming Did To Me
Posted by Nav in Gaming Theory, Video Games on July 22, 2009
Whenever I read wistful, Vinyl-Café-style pieces on youth, it’s hard not to feel that, in North America, being a kid once meant being outside a lot. Had my childhood been like those in the minds of magazine columnists, I imagine the memories of my youth would also involve staring at clouds while chewing on a blade of grass or, to be a bit more Canadian, playing hockey, rosy-cheeked in the streets. But if you ask me what I remember most about my brief childhood in Toronto, it would be sitting in my friend Arjun’s basement on hot summer days, the two of us planted in front of his Nintendo Entertainment System.
I realise that to many, my happy memories just sound like the beginnings of the childhood obesity problem. But to me there has always been something charming about getting misty-eyed over the video games of one’s youth. There is, after all, something about the fond look back at technology that rejects a kind of romanticised, pastoral view of our past. When a writer affectionately thinks about the games and gadgets of his or her youth, I love the strangeness of that ‘nostalgia for the new’, of the unabashed celebration of that which once was, and is often still, dismissed as impure, corrupting, and unnatural. It was there then too.
I suppose it’s true that in those hours spent playing games I could have been outside, riding my bike, eating ice cream and smelling freshly-mown grass. But funnily, it’s exactly the sensuous things I remember about my first forays into gaming: the blips and bleeps of early sound processors; the colours in Super Mario Bros. 3; and the curiously fascinating look of the square pixels that made up these worlds of fancy. So important are these recollections to me that, if you play a particular song from Sonic the Hedgehog, I might actually tear up as I remember how long it’s been and just how much my life has changed. Were I to write a column waxing romantic about the innocence and purity my youth, part of it would probably be about the Sega Genesis.
So often, when we speak of childhood and modern technology, we talk of all the things lost. And I when I think back to those yawning stretches of summer spent indoors, it does make me ache with remorse. If I had just read a bit more, if I had gone out a bit more often, if I had made more of an effort with girls… I guess something was lost. But because something was lost, it doesn’t mean that nothing was gained.
Those times spent tinkering with obscure bits of early operating systems and hardware taught me the little I know about computers today. What’s more, it was gaming that developed my comfort with technology, this ease with newness and change that so many in my time have acquired. I’m not and never have been afraid of technology. And while I’m still wary about its potential for dehumanisation, being a ‘gamer’ means I’ve always tended to look on the bright side of tech.
But while my immersion in the past of today’s technology prepared me for its future, there was something more at work in those pixellated worlds. Though I was an avid reader by the time I was four and a fan of TV only shortly after, it was games that first truly opened my imagination and my affinity for narrative, games that made me comfortable with the speed and kaleidoscope of the new and its language. Perhaps it was those ill-formed, still-shapeless electronic worlds that prepared me for the sparseness of Kafka’s prose. Maybe it was those later, more advanced games that readied me for Rushdie’s rapid-fire bark, for Deleuze’s fractured visions, for Chaudhuri’s languorous, disconnected fragments.
To play, to invent, to project ourselves onto screens and new places and identities - this is what gaming did to me. All these things are now bound up in the swirl of the postmodern, embodied by the web and, at least in my life, it was video games that prepared me for them. And while so frequently games are seen as that dark force that corrupted childhood, that robbed kids of the joy of outdoor play and exercise and reading and imagination, my experience – itself not very unique – means that we might need to rethink that.
I’m sure there must have been a time when writing, that mystical set of markings that can connote meaning – when its author isn’t even there to speak – must have at one point also seemed inorganic and unnatural. Books are a technology like any other and someone, somewhere must have once thought the musty smell of a paperback was off-putting and chemical when compared to the manuscript, the manuscript evil and satanic when compared to speech that came from the mouth. The cycle is always the same: for very good reasons we resist new technology and its cultural forms; then, when we’ve picked out the good from the bad, we embrace it and it becomes a part of us and the way we think and live. A similar thing is happening with video games.
I’m now in my thirties. When my friend Arjun comes home to visit from Washington, our talks usually start the same way: he tells me how things are at his job with the World Bank and I tell him how my PhD is going. Eventually though, maybe a little sheepishly, we slip into conversations about the video games of our youth. Conjuring reminiscences of those colourful screens and staccato beeps, we remember what it was like to sit in that cool basement for hours on end, discovering things, challenging ourselves and having fun. And slowly, as we chat, the happy memories in our heads burst, bit-by-bit, into pixels.
This post was inspired by long-time friend of Scrawled in Wax, The Quixotic Engineer, who recently wrote a post called “Gaming Made Me“, itself inspired by a series at Rock, Paper, Shotgun.
Note: the image in this post comes from the amazing Orioro at deviantArt.
Mario’s Music: The Language of Play and The Video Game Stigma
Posted by Nav in Cultural Theory, Culture of Technology, Gaming Theory, Video Games on May 29, 2009
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. Read the rest of this entry »
