Talking to the Wall (2): Shame

When I left you, Nintendo were making me - a man who is no stranger to shame - feel ashamed, by talking to me as if I was a real person.

Shame’s a peculiar emotion for videogames to provoke, although it’s no stranger to the gaming landscape. Normally, however, it’s more of a by-product of being discovered happily playing one of the more lunkheadedly dumb or sexist videogames by a, ahem, female member of the opposite sex. Equally, anyone who’s ever tried to explain the plot - or the relentless and unimaginative swearing  - of a blockbuster FPS to a non-gamer with an IQ higher than room temperature is likely to be fully conversant with shame.

This is a shame.

It is, however, engendered by an approach in many games that falls somewhere between Groucho Marx and the kitchen sink. In order to make sure we see how fun or different they are, there’s an awful lot of eyebrow-waggling, fourth-wall breaking, and pointing out that we’re in a game, as if we didn’t already know. They want to talk to us. They want us to know.

Is this the crap sci fi that launched a million marines? Or are they more hackneyed than even we think? Image from Skiffy.

It appears sophisticated and postmodern - at first glance - for a game to wink at you and say, remember this from that other game? We’re sharing a joke. Ha very ha! Or to say, look, we know you have a real life, and that while you’re running around shooting Sephasteroth in the paunch with your Mace of Justice, you’re really Geoff, and you actually work in a dull customer services job. But you’re a person, and we who made the game know you’re a person, so let’s make a clever comment about what time of day it is in the real world or something, so you know that this fantasy is alright. Aren’t we both clever?

We’re all in this together, right? It’s ok being Geoff, too. Hugs.

And sometimes it’s even well done. Deathspank, for example, has some great and very knowing dialogue throughout that nails pretty much every element and convention of a fantasy RPG. It’s genuinely funny and, most of all, inclusive as it sends itself and its audience up. But Deathspank also has no end of ‘collect seventeen amusing things that are dropped by an amusing thing in order to get the next amusing thing’ quests. And no amount of polishing can make this chore any more fun or any less generic. Even if Ron Gilbert called me up on the phone while I was playing and told me the hilarious one about the amusing quest meta-narrative, it doesn’t stop it being, at best, an excuse dressed up with humour. Using humour to get away with a tired mechanic is arguably less imaginative or fun than just coming up with a new one.

When games try to talk to us as gamers, then, it’s like watching a thirteen year old trying to proposition a porn star with a ‘hilarious’ chat up line. We know this shtick, and it’s embarrassing and demeaning for the game to stoop as low as we suspect ourselves to be; we don’t want to be reminded of this part of ourselves because we might have to admit how hollow our ambitions or our actions actually are. And more importantly, I don’t feel more part of a game afterwards: I feel more part of a joke. A joke that’s only being told because we’re both a bit shy about the fact we’re playing a game.

However, there’s no less immaturity when games are doing Grown-Up. Because what grown-up means to games is ‘Adult Themes’. And Adult Themes can be defined in two ways: 1) A simplistic child’s caricature of what adult means, largely amounting to violence and sex, cos they’re, like really cool and adult, right? or 2) Blood and boobies.

Press button to abandon hope. Alternatively, don't press button to abandon hope. Image from Skiffy

Regardless of how adult these themes actually are, there’s no more of a common register established between the game and me because I’m in a photo-realistic world full of things that, if you squint a bit, might actually be real boobies. And while I might like social commentary in a game, it’s not like I bought a game so that it would try and socialise with me by trying to talk to me in my real life. Even if we do both like blood and boobies.

Fairly obviously, I bought the game to play as a game. So when it tries to talk to me like I’m a real person, it’s as much an imposition as me treating a drug dealer as if he’s my actual friend, rather than a stranger who I only know in order to buy drugs, and who would kill me if I tried to kiss him. Not that I know any drug dealers, or try to kiss my friends.

Lastly, the arty, deep-and-meaningful approach of many games is to rather cackhandedly drop us into what the game imagines is a profound emotional or moral dilemma in order to converse with us about universal truths. However, I have to say that there’s never been a single emotional dilemma in my life that could be resolved by pressing x, or could be played through again for an exciting different ending.

This approach pretends it’s more worthwhile because it’s trying to talk with us about bigger issues. But there really is little difference between choosing whether to kill or save your videogame best friend and jumping on a Goomba’s head; not if it’s written and delivered as adolescently as games are. Certainly not if it keeps drawing attention to itself while it’s doing it, with experience points and rewards and graphical feedback on how ‘good’ or ‘evil’ you are. That’s morality via Dubya Bush. It ends up being as preposterous and laughable a response to profundity as writing poetry because girls give you erections. More crucially, games about jumping on a Goomba’s head are usually less immature and more enjoyable experiences.

In the end, then, we come back to a hardwired immaturity in range, register and scope. Every conversation between the game and us is crippled with the knowing and clumsy humour of a doomed masturbator at a porn shoot, or the pretentions and assumptions of an artiste who thinks his grittily realistic stiffy is meaningful to anyone other than himself.

The obvious question is why? Why are games so terribly poor at talking to us? But I actually think that’s the wrong question. The questions should be: Why are games trying to talk to us in these ways in the first place? Why do they keep on talking to us about themselves? What motivates this awkwardness, or the self-conscious clever-clever humour, or the pretentious desire to put on big pants and talk about morality? (Morality being a subject, I might add, that’s foxed some of the cleverest philosophical minds of the last 4000 years, let alone people who can code or press x.)

I think it’s because games aren’t all that comfortable with being games, and here’s why. I’ve talked about immaturity a lot, partly because I’m so utterly fed up of the excuse that ‘gaming is a young medium’ that I’ve been hearing for over twenty years now. It isn’t young any more, it’s just trying to be young, as excruciatingly as watching a forty year-old businessman trying to put it in a teenager.

The Chaos Engine. It was all downhill after this for the Bitmap Brothers. But their games weren't ashamed to be brilliant games. Why aren't games now less arrogant and more proud?

That said, the medium itself is still acting on immature assumptions. That’s why it’s hiding behind a clever-seeming sense of humour that’s actually shallow, an avoidance of its contract with a gamer rather than an exploration of it. That’s why gaming keeps trying to give you humorous or moral or real world contexts, even when they get in the way of the experience rather than enhancing it. Because it’s talking to you about being a game, rather than actually just being one. Because now there’s more complexity and scope than ever for games, there’s less confidence in simply being a game than ever before. Because playfulness is as much of a tell that someone shy is in need of validation as it is a liberating new avenue for a growing medium.

And it’s a shame. There’s no reason why we shouldn’t be able to have a meaningful dialogue with a game through, oh I don’t know, our interactions with the gameworld, for example. But while games have never been more technologically proficient than they are now, it’s just that they seemed to be far better at being games when there was less technology to get lost behind.

Which is where we’re going in part three of this indulgent, Bioware-sized bloat of a rant.

Comments

[the actor]

Do I get any extra xp and a bigger sword if I read the third part of this rant, or am I better off reading the first part twice instead?

[Button Monkey]

You think there are only three parts? Heh, in that case, certainly. Have a Sword of Midwinter Frost and 32 XP. Bioware irritate me so much they have all of part four of this rant, and a separate individual rant all of their own which they deserve but isn't thematically relevant. Part one is better, though. It has spunking.