The Fruits of Video Game Labour

This is part three in my ongoing series examining the relationship of Video Games and Art. Here are parts one and two.

Why do we play games? The obvious answer, and doubtlessly true, is that we play games in order to be entertained, but that seems altogether too simplistic and easy an answer. The sources of entertainment in our culture are legion; our choices are abundant and ever changing. Why are games rapidly becoming the most lucrative and pervasive form of entertainment in the world? They may not yet have completely usurped the dominance of film and television, but they are quickly gaining ground. Why? What is their appeal to our culture? Does their relevance reside purely on the generic level of Western affluence (which can afford the ostentation of electronic amusement?) Or does it extend beyond civilization, to something innate in what it means to be human, and alive?

'Uhm. Sorry Descartes... that's not quite what I had in mind.' 'PINEAL GLAND!!!' 'Rene, dude, seriously. I like you and all, but you are standing WAY too close.' 'PINEAL!!! GLAND!!!'

Truth be told, I often can’t decide whether to lavish games with love or loathing. They came into my life, or more accurately I chose to embrace them, when I was much younger. I was suffering from a noxious kind of self-loathing that had me at odds with not only my physical animus – the uncomfortable and generalized awareness of my body that stuck with me at all hours of the day, except when my consciousness was powerfully siphoned by the exigencies of the electronic arts – but also suffering from a terrible and sustained conflict with my cognitive self. My mind was at war with its own thoughts. I had no tranquility or peace of mind, even for a moment, except when I turned on my computer or gaming console. Then a sort of mild sedation descended over me, and for a time the clamour of my thoughts retreated to a dull, barely audible murmur. Video games were an out, in a way, by being an in. They took the raw stuff of my undiluted ego-mind and shunted it unceremoniously into the pathways of preordained symbolic narratives and structured stimulus-response systems. They jacked me in. I was hooked from the raw age of fourteen. With all the juvenile energy I could muster I set to mastering my solitary, self-imposed confinement.

Mill: The quintessential physiognomic archetype of 'chillaxing'. He was all mellow yellow, as evinced by the concave cheeks, protrusive cheekbones, angled brows, and leathery epidermis.

The lesson of my youth, in contradistinction perhaps to people like John Stuart Mill, whose stringent and exhaustive pedagogical upbringing drove him to a nervous breakdown at the age of 20, was that the world’s harsh realities were best avoided, and that my lot in life was not to learn and grow but to forebear. Forbearance: the nineties of my adolescence was a perfect testing ground to experiment with this notion. I would sulk and shill the hours of my waking unhappiness to the glowing box, and pay daily fealty to this weird god by neglecting the very energies that might otherwise have dislodged me from my depressive furore. I don’t know what those energies were, or where they might have been found, but I knew enough to say they were not comprised of pixels and 8-bit sound, nor were their luminaries the iconic sages of video gaming repertory, the cave-inhabitant wizards who give you swords and an encouraging wink with which to tackle evil. Where were the genuine secrets of manna that might fall from heaven to sustain me through my desert?

The Humphrey Bogart-esque facet of my mind takes this moment to pull me aside and say with sly benevolence, “You were looking in the wrong place, kid,” and I was. Games are what they are, you know, and what they’re most definitely not is the Holy Writ. Not to say I need an existential epiphany from my Grim Fandangoes, or a theophantic revelation from my Deus Ex Machinas, but so help me I sure did then, before a puritanical atheism took me by storm and colonized my outlying islands of doubt under the stalwart banner of ‘We Fend for Ourselves’. Far be it from me to announce some arbitrary requirement to which gaming ought to adhere; after all, gaming has fared quite well for itself without being moralized or made awkwardly pedantic. Not being a game designer, and being too poor in clout to affect their opinions, I generally must content myself by engaging with my personal, and active, relationship to the games themselves.

'So, where can a mental apparition get a drink around here?' 'Sorry, sir, this is a DRY brain.'

Gaming, more than any other art form, is ergodic. This word, meaning ‘involving work’, is one of those pretentious sounding designators that once in a while gets slapped onto fiction. It designates a type of literature that ‘transcends’ the normal passive level of interaction betwixt book and audience by demanding an extra bit of involvement from the latter. There is no such transcendent process in gaming: the activity of work is not only presumed in the form, but is integral to its success. The Aristotelian notion of arete, or virtue, refers specifically to that quality of a thing that permits it to realize its nature, to achieve its excellence. What the virtue of games is I cannot here say; such a notion would involve a rather lengthy discourse with heady words and a lingering flavour of intellectual snobbery. (I shall endeavour to do so later.) What I can say with some certainty is that whatever the virtue of gaming might be, rest assured it is tied inextricably to the logic of work.

This is all to say that games are active. I might even be daring and suggest they are the most active art form ever created. Nothing else seems to come close, with the exception perhaps of a spontaneous musical jam session, where the audience is indistinguishable from the artist. These two examples are nevertheless qualitatively different: the jam session is governed by the ebb and flow of musical voices; its logic will only and always remain specifically confined to the instrumental capacities of each musician (further restricted by the natural limitations of his or her instrument). The game, on the other hand, is a confrontation between the aggregative hive-mind of intention and invention that is the game developer, and the anticipated unpredictability of the user. The game is at once more free form and more structured than a musical composition, by being more susceptible to the anarchic unpredictability of a user, and likewise far more under the control of the artist’s specific determinisms.

They told Frooti van der Frootison not to go into agriculture, but did he listen? Frooti's Fruits was a total disaster.

When I say that my youth was one of forbearance, I am speaking to the incongruence of having relished and subsisted on the insubstantial nourishment of gaming: the games I played involved tremendous work, but the countless hours of labour produced nothing but a state of absolute passivity. How could this be possible? How could my sweat, rage, and complete mental and, yes, physical devotion be so overwhelmingly inconsequential? Fallow? Bereft? I slavered for years at the altar of self-abolition, and produced in myself only the quintessential lesson of Stoicism: you are powerless over the world, therefore defy its power over you by abnegating its effects. Stoic power is a refusal to be affected by power. The saintly cheek of Christ turned to defy the hateful blow. I, in my intensive, highly focused ‘distractions’ (which word ever-increasingly strikes my retrospection as an insulting misnomer) became progressively less substantial: in my ergon, work, I ceased by degrees to exist.

But it was a lie, of sorts (insofar as a thing never intended to be cathartic could be faulted for failing to be so). My suffering did not disperse or become transformed. It burrowed deeper and took root. The action promised by games amounted to misdirection. The work never rebounded upon me. The fruits of my labour evaporated into binary dust. Was this the fault of games, or my own inability to approach the medium in a healthy and productive way? I’ll continue to explore these questions next week.