Playing Dumb
Button MonkeyThere has never been a better time to be stupid. Unless you’re the wrong kind of idiot, that is. And I’m the wrong kind of idiot.
And this stupidity upsets me for a number of reasons. Not the least of those reasons is probably the most obvious. It’s so obvious, in fact, that it shouldn’t need saying at all. But for the sake of stupidity I’ll say it here: Anti-intellectualism isn’t clever.
To illustrate this, it’s time to drop the A Bomb. Yes: I’m talking about games and Art. Because nothing seems to get some gamers’ goat like suggesting games might sometimes be Capital A Art. The horror, and so forth.
Oh Yes It Is, et cetera. [image courtesy of http://arthistoryofgames.com/]
The vehemence - as well as the number - of respondents to a couple of recent pieces on this theme almost struck me dumb. Maybe it’s a reviewer having the presumption to talk intelligently about Bioshock 2 in a review on The Guardian, and make broader cultural and artistic references. Maybe it’s simply floating the question of whether videogames can in any way constitute art on Edge. Either way, many of the comments and replies are mystifying exercises in overreaction. The fact that both Edge and The Guardian, both quite liberal and well-educated publications, could attract such thunderingly vitriolic repudiations from their readership is equally astounding. If this is the thin, clever end of a stupid wedge, then there must be a terribly thick thick end to it.
But being clever in a time of stupidity is not popular. If you use your brain as anything other than a handy space-occupying device between your neck and your hair, your views are not only likely to be savaged – they’re also treated with a desperate all-consuming scorn previously reserved for heretics and politicians. Make no mistake: stupid people hate you.
As for me, if you think that games and Art are mutually exclusive, then I think you’re stupid. Yes, you. You’re stupid. And I’m not sorry. I don’t care if you huff and puff and write disbelieving comments accusing me of pretention, or of missing the point of gaming, or if you get offended at my snobbery. Your stupidity is beneath both of our contempt no matter how strongly, publicly, or frequently you express it. Because you’re not just wrong, you’re also wrong because you’re being stupid.
There. My hat, as Bill Hicks used to say, is firmly in the political ring. Let’s get on with it.
For starters, all games should aspire to good design: not just in terms of mechanics, but also in terms of graphics - or art design as it’s helpfully known, in case you need a clue. Gaming is, after all, a visual medium, and a badly designed game - whether it’s broken or just ugly - is one that people don’t really want to play. Does anyone seriously think we’d ever have had any new generation of consoles if the way things looked weren’t a valid concern to gamers?*
As processing power allowed for better graphics, games responded by aspiring to produce realistic-looking games, as well as implement new types and effects in non-realistic stylisation. It’s a sign of gaming’s maturity that it has such aspirations; it’s a sign of the immaturity that goes hand in hand with the gaming community that the industry doesn’t have the perspective to contextualise these aspirations with historical sense.
It turned out that this E3 Killzone 2 Demo was not live
To me, a lot of the conversations in gaming about ‘realism’ versus ‘hyper-realism’ resemble contemporary Victorian responses to Realism in painting. There was an endless stream of guff about paintings that needed both to look like real life, while at the same time capturing the essence of something deeper than simple appearance in their (necessarily accurate) representations. That debate is at least a hundred and fifty years old and has never been satisfactorily concluded; it was simply abandoned when fashions in the art world inevitably moved on. The same thing happened with so-called Realism in literature, and the conclusion there was to brush aside the debate with a scornful broom called Modernism, or Structuralism, or Postmodernism, or any number of other schools of thought that mistook ‘new’ for ‘satisfactory resolution’. By the way, see also: films.
In fact, it’s almost a trend, isn’t it, how all popular entertainment forms have inevitably struggled to find a definition for themselves (and the effects they try to achieve) at some point in their development? And how not only have all of them ended up using art as a referent, but the way they’ve all crossed over (to greater or lesser degrees) into accepted art forms. So while arguing that pop music could ever constitute Art in the days of Elvis would have had you made you look as ridiculous as Katie Price’s legs on a night out, even pop music has finally been accepted. So it’s nice to see Gaming has learnt from those mistakes, right? Oh. Right.
Of course, talking about this means that I’m pretentious, doesn’t it? Here I am pretentiously trying to interpose a current, popular entertainment form into a lineage of other unrelated forms that were eventually considered to be Art. And these forms are not the same as games because, well, erm, something-to-do-with-interactivity, right? But is it pretentious, or is it simply recognising that some games can offer something other than pressing x to kill Geoffrey Villain? That’s not ‘more’ or ‘better’, just different. And it’s a valid choice as long as the game is still compelling.
And while none of this should be contentious in a rational, intelligent atmosphere, I’m talking about gaming here. But I’m not denying the holocaust – I’m simply talking about removing self-imposed limitations on what games can try to achieve. You don’t see less insecure entertainment forms falling over with an eagerness to cripple themselves with that kind of blind, unformulated panic at the suggestion they might be able to straddle the seemingly contradictory poles of popularity and Art.
In 2009, Braid inspired 47% of the recorded uses of the word pretentious [image courtesy of IGN]
For example, I may detest Dan Adjective Noun Brown with a passion that borders on a religion, and wish that his pitiful crayola scrawlings had never helped to kindergartenise popular sentence structure, but I’m not going to claim he shouldn’t be allowed to exist; I’m saddened that he’s popular, not scandalised at the fact he has ‘written’. And you’d look appropriately stupid if you argued that something genuinely, astoundingly creative like Margaret Atwood’s The Blind Assassin, which arguably pushes the novel as far as it can go without becoming an unreadable stylistic mind-game, isn’t both Art and popular. It has every reason to exist without any need for justification. Books do this with ease, can be both popular and art, sometimes at the same time.
Films, too, from blockheaded blockbusters through arthouse explorations of ideas and themes, comfortably co-exist without any real question of their right to do so. And if you don’t like one sort, on you go, try a different one. No desperate howls of self-righteous disgust from popular film fans who can’t stand the thought that Wim Wenders is allowed to practise – they just go to a different screen in the multiplex. There’s not a lot of intellectual harm done.
And it’s not simply the audience defining the stupidity in the medium, or creating an unconditionally stupid response. Films and music pander to a similar audience to games – often caricatured as a rabid set of largely adolescent, male fans who pour forth streams of gob-toss on their favourite subjects, or obsess over release schedules. Yes, there’s a lot of snobbery – even inverse snobbery, too – but nothing quite as hysterical as the response to suggesting games can sometimes aspire to being Art.
In any case, the point remains. Good design is good for games, at whatever level. And that means different design is required for different types of games. And so while there’s obviously no reason that any game should aspire to art, that also means there’s no reason why some games shouldn’t. Games have aspired just as unsuccessfully to movies for years, and no one (who isn’t considered pretentious) seems to bat an eyelid at that. If they did, EA would never have bought Bioware, who are as shameless in their promotion of films as a valid model for gaming as they are at ending up releasing games riddled with torpid talking scenes that could bore the ears off an iron-clad bat.
You’ll notice that I haven’t given any examples of games being Art. And you might think some examples would help. And you might even think I’ll namecheck The Usual Suspects, like Flower, for example, or Braid. But actually, I don’t even think that matters. I’m not saying that games have achieved Art (though even Chuck Klosterman suggests the Sims might qualify as such for the genuine affect it can have on perceptions and understanding of a wider world). And I’m not saying they haven’t. I’m just saying there’s no reason they shouldn’t try. And there’s similarly no reason why criticism and discussion of games shouldn’t include art as a valid reference point.
Flower makes people talk about Art, rather than horticulture. Why?
It’s not like you’re reading a game review and it transpires that someone’s written a thesis entitled Ulala: Inventing an Actualised Individuality through Reified Performances in Space Channel 5; Popularity and The Subversive Discourse of the Dictatorial Other. It’s simply allowing a frame of reference that is an accepted and perfectly justified response to every other entertainment form humanity has ever created or celebrated.
At the end of all this, it doesn’t really matter if games ‘do’ art, if they try and fail, or if they abandon it altogether and propel gamers into a toxic vat of moron-drivel that we can all overexcitedly spack about in like hyperactive water-winged retards in a swimming pool full of Fanta and excrement. If you don’t like the direction a game decides to take, move on. If you don’t like a reviewer’s frame of reference, read a different one. But don’t rail against intelligence (or an aspiration to intelligence) as if this makes you a better person. Enforced blinkering can’t make for a better perspective, by definition. And trying to argue that people should aspire to be stupid isn’t just self-defeating – it’s world-defeating.
And if you really think people should only play dumb when talking about games, then perhaps you’re not clever enough to make a worthwhile comment. Learn to think before you learn to talk, and then maybe you’ll have something worth saying.
* Note: that’s a valid concern, not the only valid concern, just to forestall starting on another of gaming’s intellectually weak spots. I’m not suggesting ‘eye porn equals good game’ helps gaming progress. However, there’s no denying that if you could play an identical game in either an ugly or a pretty version, you’d choose the pretty one. So let’s not pretend that graphics are irrelevant – let’s just accept they are one concern that has its place in the overall sum of worries.
Reader Comments (3)
This is what I like about the Button Monkey approach to ignorance. It's reviled for being abhorrent and smelling of stomach lint yet there are helpful links to pages that explain Realism for those with no short term memory or aspirations to one day understand what anything in the Daily Express means. Nice.
</http://vaguesuggestions.com>
art as game as art as music= chime
and its all for a good cause as well, apparently, feeding starving musicians or hippos or nuking the whales or something equally mundane/impressive.
Button Monkey understands sarcastic linking does not always need to involve Rick Astley; sometimes it simply means linking to the tediously literal. Disappointment has many forms....