I’m not an extraordinary minesweeper player. My best time to date is 168 seconds on Expert, and I lose 80% of my games. Admittedly, however, I lose most often because Minesweeper suffers from a fundamental design flaw: in almost every game there are frequently occurring positions that are logically undecideable. These are situations where there is a 50/50 chance that any one of two tiles will contain a mine, and no amount of logic or head bashing will help you. The only option for these situations is to guess. Statistically, you would thus expect my lost games to average out to 50%, but don’t forget the copious human error involved (and my general lack of skill: I frequently guess for decidable positions, simply because I haven’t mastered every logical subtlety yet; moreover, I miss-click, sometimes just plain miscalculate, or fail to notice an adjoining square, and so on. In truth, I probably only get to the endgame where most 50/50 guessing positions arise about 20% of the time, which means that a 10% win ratio sounds about right). But even in games I lose, I still manage on occasion to get into an effortless mind-space that I find deeply satisfying, and one I’ll try here to explain.

Without getting overly technical, I’ll just present a few positions from a single minesweeper game to illustrate my thinking. Minesweeper is a wonderful example of a game with a steep, but clearly noticeable and measurable learning curve. When I first sat down to play I had absolutely no idea what to do, and the game seemed impossible to me. Once I understood the fundamentals, namely that the numbers on each tile represented the quantity of mines touching that tile (either adjacently or diagonally), things began to move a lot more quickly. Now this very simple rule wasn’t in the least obvious at first, and I can even recall the first few times I played experiencing a vague sense of unease, as if the numbers represented a mysterious secret or hermetic truth that I could never actually grasp, or maybe a perverse anti-logic, as if the mines moved around or required profound analytical abilities, prayer, or alchemy to locate).

The truth is that most mines are extremely easy to find. In our game, since minesweeper is designed to give you an open area on your first click, I got this nice position:

The mine in the middle is dangling down like a cherry waiting to be plucked. There’s absolutely nothing else around and it couldn’t be more obvious. Another lesson is that corners are your friends. A great deal of the automatic play that develops later is simply perceiving corners as inherently mine-heavy. Once you start thinking that way, you start carving paths around and through them in a way that seems more instinctive than logical. The real magic starts to happen when you encounter advanced positions, and solve them quickly and spontaneously as if they were also ‘geographic’. I’ll get to that in a second, but first let me update this position with the mines I know I can detect (based on my limited logical analysis) from what’s available here already.

It only took me a couple seconds, without even clicking away any empty tiles, to locate all these mines. Once again, I’m not profoundly talented at this, but by practicing even the little I have, I now see 1s as very clear designators of emptiness when they are near corners. Now my intuition tells me that the question marked tiles contain mines, but I can’t prove it yet. But let’s clear away some of the dust and see what we’re left with.

So it seems like my intuition proved to be fairly accurate. Even the two touching question-marked tiles are now, without a doubt, mines. The other question mark is still undecided, but there’s nothing we can do about it for now. Let me fill in these mines and get to the next position.

Now we have more data and another question mark. Here both question marks point to specific patterns that I see all the time. Those ones, nestled between two twos, are often mines, but not always. I’ve lost enough games by mistakenly flagging them that I know that this pattern represents a good probability for detection, but not a logical certainty. From a psychological point of view, my desire to rush ahead and take possession of a particular pattern, committing it to memory and reflex, comes up against the painful experience of having been proven wrong again and again. I can safely say the dopamine starts flowing whenever I find a mine without effort. It is immensely gratifying to perform a skill, with ever-increasing speed and facility, that has proven to be reliable and trustworthy. Part of the satisfaction of playing minesweeper quickly (the emphasis here is essential) is that in the transition from the slow, frustrating grind of logic and probability to the instantaneous process of solving positions quickly, your mind is actually leaping from a mechanical level to another level of essentially pure abstraction. My experience of this ostensibly higher level is the unifying of different types of awareness: mechanical, rational, spatial, patterned, and others as well, into a sort of gestalt of conscious activity.

Think of this way: let’s say you’re learning guitar. Someone teaches you the open C chord with 3-fingers. It’s a basic chord and easy enough to play, but for beginners it is quite difficult to find each appropriate fret corresponding to the right string, and if you happen to be learning theory at the same time add to that knowing the notes of each string and fret position, the chord structure, its key, etc. A novice will have more than enough to think about without even getting into the right amount of pressure for each finger, the best hand position, where to place fingers inside the fret for the best sound, rhythm, how to hold a pick, how to strum, and so on. But once you’ve internalized all these mechanics, you no longer think about them. More than becoming second nature, they actually lose their mechanical quality. They become fluid, spontaneous, and effortless. The quality of the action itself changes.

The same is certainly true for logic puzzles like minesweeper. See the top leftmost flag in the last picture? I am 100% certain it is a mine, and I was able to find it quite quickly. It simply has to be a mine (the “1” can only permit a single mine in those top two squares, while the “2” needs a second mine somewhere else to fulfill its value, necessitating the red flag here). It might take a beginner a while to see this (as it did me when I first started learning). For a while this sort of scenario wasn’t even apparent to me at all, but I can see it now almost instantly. Once you get faster at the mechanical work of playing the game, or in this case crunching the logic, at a certain point something exciting and complementary happens. It coincides with gaining momentum, or warming up, and carries with it the sense of finding your rhythm. It’s a glorious feeling, and I think it actually deserves to be called an altered state of consciousness.

Now as I’m playing through this particular game, I’m deliberately exposing all the mines I can positively identify through logic before removing empty squares. I’m doing it this way for demonstrative purposes, but it is by no means the fastest way of playing. In fact, minesweeper offers a few wonderful heuristics (shortcuts) for speeding up your game. For example, if you double-click on a numbered square next to a flagged square, it’ll remove a 3×3 square of boxes for you. This isn’t cheating though: if you’ve mislabelled a flag, you’ll expose a mine somewhere, and lose. But if used properly it does greatly accelerate the game play. Another trick is to actually place all those question marks in your head, instead of wasting precious seconds double right-clicking. Most importantly, and again this comes back to the question of speed, the best tactic is to flag the easiest mines first, because doing so will reveal more information about otherwise potentially complex regions of the board. This is important because skill, and the intangible quality of finding one’s groove that I spoke about earlier, is strongly correlated with your momentum.

This might sound wishy-washy, but I can swear by it. The faster you play, and the more rapidly you accumulate successes, however minor, (e.g., little victories in the form of individual correctly marked flags and exposed empty tiles) builds up a sort of repository of good-feeling. Your brain starts coasting on the high that success gives you. Your thinking speeds up, and your accuracy improves. I’ve seen this happen to me again and again. The inverse happens as well: when I start making errors, and getting frustrated, and if I get bogged down on a particularly tricky section of the board, my play begins to disintegrate, the number of errors I make increases, and so on. One good example of a tiny victory is in the case of that “1” on the middle left of the board, sandwiched between a flag and a plain blue tile. I found that “1” tile based on logic, and then was able to uncover an entire swath of board by extending the implications of its presence even further. Sudden accomplishments like this give me a burst of energy and speed; it’s like getting a second wind after scoring in a game like soccer. It also gives you quick access to a lot of easy grist to quickly chew through, which only adds to your speed and confidence. Let me fast forward a little bit now.

At this point in the game I’ve reached an impasse where I can no longer advance by using straightforward logic. There are really two kinds of logic that can be applied to a game like minesweeper (before running into guesswork and probabilities). The first is pattern recognition and consists of “folding” sequences of logical deduction into single flashes of judgment. Logic, by and large, proceeds through conditional statements: if this is true, then the following is also true (if x then y), a rule sometimes called modus ponens (also common is the negative inversion of this, called modus tollens: if x then y; because not x, then not y). You can find logical inferences all over the place in minesweeper (e.g., whenever I see 2 1 2 in a row without any other surrounding tiles, the “1” is always a mine); one inference then usually leads to another, and then another. Group these commonly occurring sequences of logical inference into larger, but really quite subtle, patterns, and the speed of your analysis increases exponentially. In the above scenario, however, this heuristic “shorthand” form of logic will not work. All the positions are too complicated (at least, for my current level of understanding of the system).

The second kind of logic you can use is a counter-factual brute force approach. This also uses methods of deductive inference, but rather than folding commonly recurring sequences into easily identifiable patterns, it takes an uncommon section of the game and works through every possible variation until one “good” one is found. It is time consuming, laborious, and inimical to the speed of success. It is also very difficult to get quick at this mode of reasoning, without converting a painfully worked out logical sequence into a rule. That’s right: all the examples of the first series of pattern recognition logic are tricks and shortcuts I discovered by working through a whole heap of brain-freezing “if-then” counterfactual scenarios, using brute-force and trial and error. Through practice, I gradually converted these from the slow, second type of logic to the first, expedient type. By internalizing the “proof” for each of these tricks, I could eventually call them rules of the system, with 100% certainty. But that certainty had to be earned.

There is a third approach, however, and that’s just flat-out guessing. It’s unfortunate that minesweeper so often requires this, but such is life.

Rather than work through every possible if-then situation from the previous picture, I just guessed. Once. The rest of the board opened up like a boiled clam. Only now, as you can see, I’ll have to guess again at least once more to win the game. There’s no escaping it. But leading up to these two guessing-impasses, I was able to get a taste of that special state of rapid pattern recognition that makes puzzle-solving such a joy. It’s no exaggeration that you can begin to experience minesweeper as a conceptual landscape, with its own architecture and geography. I am convinced that once a certain threshold is passed in the skill of a player (reflecting both the quantity of patterns learned, and the degree to which they have been assimilated), he or she actually stops thinking. The mind shuts off; the calculating part of the brain goes from working furiously to not working at all. It is an incredible feeling, a zen state of no-mind, that nevertheless preserves (and in fact produces) a very high level of technical skill.

And sometimes, it even helps you win!

Andrew, chief editor supreme of Little Bo Beep, seated on his gilded bodily evacuation receptacle and perfumed douche machine, opened yet another gaming magazine special issue devoted entirely to his blog. Yawning, he forced the magazine through an overflowing slot in the wall labelled “Celebratory Printed Materials Recycling” and deactivated the automated pedicure device and flowery scented wafting valve. He washed his hands and opened the door to the raised somatic purification facility, but not before winking slyly at the poster of John Tesh pasted on the inside of the door, and stepped down from the facility’s dais to the main floor of the Little Bo Beep headquarters.

“I’m so bored,” he said to Jack, who was idly toying with his eight-monitor display of web traffic analytics and market data.

“God, I know.” ‘God’ was Andrew’s nickname around the office. “It’s impossible to do any sort of interesting data mining. All the graphs demonstrate constant linear growth. Totally predictable.” It was true. All the monitors displayed graphs, stock figures, and charts representing Little Bo Beep’s outrageous success in the blogosphere. It was like an insane geologist had pasted a bunch of topographical maps of mountains all over the screens, but had sliced off the right halves.

“Incoming!” shouted Paul, as he swooped down from the 200-foot square skylight ceiling with retractable observatory dome on a military-grade poly-carbonate hand glider, high-fived both Andrew and Jack, and zipped past into one of the headquarters’ many underground tunnels.

An explosion of organ music erupted suddenly from an adjoining room. “Is Eric hooked up to his synaptic music engine again?”

Jack nodded, stifling a yawn, “Yeah, he’s brain-generating another improvisational 8-part fugue.”

“That’s, what, the ninth one this week?”

“Tenth, actually. But he’s simultaneously dictating his latest article to a voice transcriber. I think it’s entitled, ‘Plangent Penis Plants in Obscure Japanese Sega Genesis Titles, Redux’.”

“What is with his fascination with penises?”

“You know, I can HEAR you,” came Eric’s voice from a tentacular robot mouth appendage that protruded up from a sliding floor panel.

Andrew shrugged, “Doesn’t change the basic underlying truth of that statement.”

“Ohh the sweet, delicate textures of sound, they suffuse me!” said the Eric-mouth, which vibrated for a minute, then receded quietly into the ground, purring. Just then Jack’s diamond-studded phone began playing NSync’s “I Want You Back”.

“Man, it’s Goldman-Sachs again. They’re so desperate. Sorry, dude, I gotta take this.”

“Yeah no problem. I’m going to go check on Julian, see he’s not hurting himself or anything.”

Andrew walked over to a large red X marked on the floor nearby, sighed, and shouted, “Ladder of Impervious Knowledge and Absolute Verification, Descend!”

A deep voice echoed from high above, “Your request for access to knowledge is being evaluated for logical consistency. Please stand by.” A minute later a single sonorous BOOP reverberated through the room, “Your request has been granted. Ladder descending.” A dual-helical ladder in the shape of DNA slowly spun downwards from the ceiling to the red X. Andrew climbed up it, trying not to read the bronze plaques embedded in each rung, but he always found himself scanning at least one or two:

TRUTH IS THE COEFFICIENT OF YOUR FINITE DAYS MULTIPLIED BY THE SQUARE OF YOUR ABILITY TO UNDERSTAND.

and

THE ALMIGHTY LOGOS IS THE BASIS OF ALL ALEATORY PROPOSITIONS, AS SIGNIFIED BY THE STOCHASM OF PARTICLE SUPER-POSITION IN THE ENTROPIC SUBSTRATUM OF CONSCIOUSNESS.

Pushing up the trap door into Julian’s loft, Andrew immediately ducked as a large alembic carrying a boiling green liquid whipped past his head and exploded on a bust of Sir Francis Bacon, dissolving it instantly. “Julian? What’s… oh dear.” Julian was currently riding in the glass cockpit of a steam-powered brass exoskeleton, whose tubular arms were currently grappling with an enormous baroque cube covered with numerical equations, levers, gears, and pistons, and whose parts were rapidly reassembling in the manner of a lunatic rubic’s cube. Prehensile pincers were darting out from sections of the cube, snagging objects from around the room, and hurling them in random directions. Julian’s massive chemistry workshop lay in ruins on the floor, and his four story library had large gaping holes where entire shelves had been ripped off.

“Be with you in smidge, old chap,” said Julian just as he brought down an extremely heavy-looking marble pedestal onto the box, smashing it into a thousand flopping pieces. With a gush of pressurized air, the cockpit opened and Julian, covered in black grease and wearing a leather aviator cap replete with goggles, leaped out. “Beg pardon for the mess, guv’nor. Introduced a few too many conditional statements in the moral sub-cortex.”

“Oh, was this your life-sized interactive representation of the Logico-Philosophico Tractatus?” said Andrew, picking up a throbbing metallic heart.

“The very same. Pity. I’d only reached level 6.2. What can I do for you?”

“Julian, I’m deadly bored. We’ve reached the absolute pinnacle of success; our influence over every aspect of the gaming industry is undeniable; we have more followers on Twitter than Jesus; but despite all that, the games these days just aren’t getting any better. What can we do?”

“Well. I’ve been keeping something secret from all of you, because I suspected your combined intelligences were inadequate to deal responsibly or productively with it.” Andrew nodded. “I received this parcel in the mail a few days ago, but I do now believe it is something we should take a look at.” He opened a boudoir shaped into a large chess queen, and handed Andrew a manila envelope. A big red stamp on the envelope said:

FOR LITTLE BO BEEP’S EDITORS ONLY. UNAUTHORIZED READING WILL RESULT IN SEVERE TERMINATION. YOUR FRIENDS: THE DEVELOPERS.

“Who the hell are these guys?” said Andrew, as Julian pressed a button and lowered them both down to the main room on a circular platform.

“My sources tell me they are an obscure cabbalistic design studio possibly operating in trans-dimensional space/time.”

“Figures.” Andrew opened the envelope and pulled out a non-descript DVD case. The title was simple: THE SECRET GAME. “Wow, it even has an ESRB rating. But it’s one I’ve never seen before. What does KA stand for?”

“It probably stands for Keter-Atziluth, or the upper crown. It’s the highest possible sephiroth. You’re dealing with pure metaphysical gaming here. Only suitable for the absolute pinnacle of consciousness.”

“Hey Paul,” Andrew called out to his friend, who was currently hanging upside down from a sick tufa on their indoor 5.15b climbing route. As usual, he was free-soloing.

“Yeah? What’s UP?!” he called back.

“Ready for an adventure?”

To be continued…

The ORIGINAL Avatar... well, that is, uhm, besides Krishna. And, I guess, arguably, Jesus.

Surely Bob Dylan never imagined his classic refrain, “How many roads must a man walk down…” being adapted to the language of video gaming, but here goes: “How many games must a man walk down, before they call him a man?” The answer is probably non-denumerably infinite, but for the sake of brevity I’ll just offer the more reasonable, and decidedly finite, 361! (factorial), which happens to be the number of possible moves extant at the beginning of a game of Go. Now rumour has it that’s a number larger than the total quantity of particles in the entire universe (a figure also exceeded by the possibilities of synaptic combinations in the brain, interestingly enough). What does this tell us?

Probably nothing. But we’ve got to start somewhere, and where better than with a modest analogue of consciousness transcribed into the language of mathematics? Sure, sure, been done. But really, there’s something going on here. Consider for example the question: What happens to us when we die in a game? I mean, we’re not really dying, but our avatar is. Again, and again, and again, at a rate inversely proportional to our decaying motor reflexes. That’s got to affect us somehow, right? Let me make the connection between numerical vastness and consciousness a little bit stronger.

Krishna, the God of Ambiguous Gender... and flutes.

When we die in a game we experience that death vicariously. Vicarious is precisely the word, too: it comes from the Latin vicarius, meaning a substitute. A vicar is likewise a person who is authorized to perform the functions of another. Our video game alter-ego is perhaps more like a vicar than an avatar (which by contrast means a deity descended into an embodied form in the world; but I won’t deny the capacity of some gamers to believe themselves gods in their limited domains – why deny them such pleasures?).

It goes without saying we are connected to our vicars. They stand in for us, assuming our duties and responsibilities within the game, and like true servants of a deity receive their instructions as if from on high. We input data into a gaming system by means of haptic (or touch-based, physical) interfaces. The game interprets the data according to various more or less complex algorithms, and in turn our characters, the vicars, react and respond with the appearance of immediacy. One of the great accomplishments of gaming is condensing an extremely complex causal sequence, beginning at the user’s end and concluding with the behaviour of the game itself, into the form of a single and direct transaction. But these transactions are anything but direct causal events.

One of the characteristics of complex systems is that they can only be fully understood by other complex systems. The mind is inordinately complex, and is therefore extremely good at understanding other examples of complexity. Doubtlessly, however, it does not require a game of extreme complexity to create an impact (whether emotional or simply informational) on the consciousness of a user. Many people have very fond memories of playing Tetris, for example, which is so simple that it is one of the very few games that can be coded entirely in the browser-endemic programming language JavaScript. But the complexity of these relatively simple earlier games is tied together inextricably with the innate and self-reflexive structures and meanings of human consciousness.

A more or less accurate representation of the imbrication of consciousness with art.

When we play a game, no matter how ornate or simple, we are automatically imbricating it with layers of personal meaning and inherited signification. The game occurs therefore in a non-linear sequence of events that extends back to the beginning of our lives, and even beyond that to the earliest inception of consciousness. As soon as the lineage of human thought began to haul itself above a basic state of necessity and ask certain fundamental questions about itself, and the world, we set in motion a system of complex, essentially self-referential, thought. Heidegger talks at length about the notion of the dasein, which translates simply to that-being, and in a very crude sense can be understood as a being for whom its existence is an issue, a point of concern or interrogation. A question.

How then do video games interface with the questioning existence of dasein? We are all that-beings, who propagate complexity by breathing and thinking, and who are ideally positioned to do so by being the inheritors of a long history of thought. The combinations of synaptic processes in a single brain can be compared in a way to a miracle of physics. That thought occurs is alone a breathtaking source of wonder. But these synapses are not merely burned into history and then discarded. They carry on, like the continuation through time of a vastly intricate and polyfurcated electric chain.

To return, and rephrase, my original question: How do games affect who we are? How does a death in a game impinge on our sense of self? When we die is our consciousness affected? What proximate values do we impart to our gaming vicars? What parts of ourselves do we transmit to them in their corrals of programming and data? Our consciousness persists when the vicar is extinguished, sure, but because we are complex and games are ever-increasingly also complex, the relationship between these two must necessarily (I argue) be complex. It seems unlikely to me (though admittedly, probably not impossible) that two complex systems in interaction would produce a simple outcome.

If we accept, at least provisionally, that the interaction between user and game is definitionally complex, does it follow that the individual events that occur within each of those systems are likewise complex? Not necessarily. It is true in a sense that the individual units of data that comprise a game system are at their most fundamental level totally simple (binary ones and zeroes). Nevertheless, the meaning produced by the interactions of those basic units will register on a higher, much more elaborate level. There are orders of complexity, ranging from the top-most level of system-wide organization, right down to the most basic and unitary substrate of raw, particulate information.

Life, consciousness and art are all gardens of forking paths. So, too, is David Bowie.

So when I paraphrase Dylan and ask how many games must I play to be a man, I am not attempting to bastardize a good song or invoke traditional gender norms, but rather trying to assert that the boundaries of consciousness are permeable and responsive to interactions with complexity beyond the protean boundaries of mind. The very presence of possibility represented by the number 361! changes how I think. To stare at a Go board is to come face to face with the incomprehensible vastness of mathematics. When we play a game we are likewise also engaging with a monumental tapestry of potential variation. The events that occur in a game may be rigidly defined and finite, but the combinations that occur between a game and the ever-changing infrastructure of my mind are essentially infinite.

The best answer I can come up with to that question is thus: An infinite number. We are who we are in the becoming of ourselves. By engaging with the world and its manifold variations we are simultaneously defining who we are. Games contribute to this definition in more ways than I can describe. Death in games is likewise only one event among many, but it has the unique and paradoxical quality of being understood by the living as the absolute cessation of consciousness. How then are we defined by an experience of death that is perpetually repeatable, almost transient and inconsequential?

I’ll continue to examine this question in a subsequent article.

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.

Me hope momma be proud. Me grow big for to smash good guys. Me miss ol’ cave times wit da fam. Lots o luv from momma den an dere. Wuz good times. Lots of food and critters and smashy smashy halfling adventurahs. But me wanna go off and be big and circus-fuel. Momma gonna be sooo proud of Thumpy. Thumpy got big good job. Now me write jernal fer momma on skin of dead queric I found in dis room. Thumpy wait in room in bottom of dundigeon, dudgeon, dundidgen, scary old place with lots of webs and spiders and shambly corpse thingies. Me wait behind big metal door with club, gonna go smash smash when stupid adventurahs come charging in.

Me got job from old wizzy man. He real smart. He make big stone thingies out of stone and other stuff with the magic words and stuff. They walk and smash too. Me kinda of scaredered of them. Is scaredered a werd? Me no. Me ask big wizzy guy tomorrah when he come to check on me. He very nice. He pat me head and cackle in ear, promise me big thingies like trezer and fame and lots of females. I likes him. He make big pwartal thing to other deemunsion for to make other thingies come out of air and take over werld, cuz he hates werld and wants to kill it and make something he call GREAT NECK ROMANCE STICK EMPAYOR, and he always stands on box and waves arms and shouts real loud when he sez it, even if it is dinner time and the rest of us are eating, cuz he likes to talk about the GREAT NECK ROMANCE STICK EMPAYOR cuz he is funny dat way. But I likes him.

I think momma would like him too. I think momma would like the other guys he gots werking fer him, like those big tall snake thingies with the hissy hissy voices and pokey sticks and the sloshy water every place dey go. They messy. And the sludgy thingies that smell like old unkle Gouger when he farted lots after eating, except the sludgy thingies are diffurunt an I no dis becuz a gobling fell into one and turnered into bones real quick. It wuz funny. It wuz funny cuz I pushed the gobling inter it. Huh huh huh. We all laughed bunches and da wizzy came down at patted me again and said I wuld be great fodder for da GREAT NECK ROMANCE STICK EMPAYOR, but I dun no wat fodder is so I just nodded and wuz happy cuz he likez me. He likez me so much cuz he put me in dis room at da bottom of da place, real bottom too, cuz I don’t remembar how to get out actual now dat I think about it, cuz there wuz lots of turns and stairs and doors, but dats ok becuz I am do impotant job for him: guard big chest in dis room full of thingies like swords and gems and stuff. I askud him why he keeps dis stuff here and not in his office upstairs cuz thats where he werks and he said it was BAYT but I dun no wat BAYT wuz so I just smiled.

I been here few days but I dun no wat to do other than smashy smashy when they come. Oh I tink I here dem now. Big noisy all down to end of hall. Explosuns and stuff I think. Momma gonna be so proud. Here I go!

Luv,
Thumpy

Little known fact: Benjamin stole auras from angels and gave them away as Channukah presents.

Walter Benjamin, in his seminal essay Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction, famously argued that objects of art, with the advent of film, lost the aura of being the direct, unique, and original products of an artist. By following templates, music and film pushed art into a mode of mechanized reproduction; the original became just a model for the production of copies, sometimes called simulacra.

Benjamin’s point is that in becoming reproducible objects, capable of being appropriated into the Fordist engines of capitalism (envision factories churning out millions of copies of music albums or films to satisfy the burgeoning gusto of consumers), objets d’art lose a certain immaterial quality that exists only in material works that are unrepeatable and irreproducible. These simulacra cease to be invested with the spirit of their creators.

I suppose you could say there’s a certain religiosity to this idea, the invocation of spirits imbuing art with an ethereal glow and what not. Despite this, I will likewise attest to the simple evidence that a carving made by a human displays the marks, lines and expressions of that person’s vitality embedded into the material substrate of the medium. The result of this is a quality altogether distinct from a carbon copy sculpture shaped according to computer algorithms, made flawlessly and without a hint of variation, by a machine.

Oh noes! It's Warholio, come to steal our simulacra!

This whole debate is very old, by now. A great many of 20th century artists acted in response to Benjamin’s implicit conservatism. Why should art be original? Why shouldn’t there be reproductive levels of separation between the creator and the product? Why shouldn’t art be made entirely compatible with the logic of consumer demand? And of course anyone can point to the very real category of ‘original’ art produced for the very rich, and claim that the reproducible nature of today’s art has vastly increased its accessibility to the common people. And they’d be entirely right.

These popularist objections notwithstanding, something is tangibly absent from art that lends itself to continuous reproduction. The mark of individuality, if you will. But as we come to types of art that exhibit increasing complexity, as in massive Hollywood film productions, and the latest blockbuster video games (some of which have staff in the hundreds and are the products of multiple design studios collaborating with extremely high levels of organization), the question of individual authenticity becomes somewhat, well, moot. Almost laughable.

YAWN! Come on guys, how about something ORIGINAL for a change? Seriously, WTF.

How could a video game like God of War III, whose credit roll takes a minor epoch to run through (easily rivalling film in this respect), ever have been the work of one artist, or the brain child of a single megalomaniacal subjectivity – an auteur. Auteurs are simply impossible in big budget video games. These projects are simply too vastly complex to bear the visible stamp of just one person’s vision. Just look at what happened to 3D Realms, when an auteur attempting to control the entire process of game development is given virtually limitless cash and dollops of praise: simply put, disaster results. If Benjamin’s aura can be rediscovered somewhere, it is not along this path.

In seeing Kick-Ass recently in theatres, I realized that something incredible had happened. Almost as interesting as the film itself (from a critical point of view) were the trailers preceding it. Not surprisingly, they exhibited a predictable assortment of conventional film tropes. Each one was totally generic. You had the “I Married a Spy” movie, the “Classic Horror Remake,” the “Genetically Engineered Alien” movie, and the requisite star-studded action feature with various over-the-hill celebrities reprising historical roles. I have for a while now suspected that in each major studio there exists a sacred binder that contains pages of script templates, a certain number of which are deployed each year, and then cycled through. The thematic and structural unoriginality of Hollywood has become so transparent that virtually all mainstream films these days exhibit some degree of embarrassed self-referentiality: an apologetic nod to the has-been, “already-done” nature of a depleted industry.

When iconoclasm becomes iconic.

Then along came Kick-Ass, which broke a great number of tropes, expectations, and structures, while at the same time employing a vast number of tried-and-true archetypes and plot forms in a dizzying display of inventive re-configuration. In a sense, Kick-Ass is manifestly unoriginal: it is comprised of a plethora of tiny unoriginalities, innumerable unanticipated configurations and combinations of old forms that conspire to produce something fundamentally novel. One example to make the point: the protagonist girl fulfills the prototypical anti-hero established by Tarantino and Scorcese, the former specifically contributing an updated violent heroine model, where Scorcese added the self-destructive, nothing-to-lose, pathologically insane construct, both of which are condensed into the character of Hit-Girl, herself referencing the vengeful pre-pubescent girl, a la Hard Candy. It is breathless, complex, overwhelmingly post-modern art.

The reconfigurations are endless. Kick-Ass exemplifies the transformations contemporary artistic media are undergoing. If post-modernism is the breaking down of old structures, then perhaps we are witnessing a new movement of art, dare I say (I cringe even as I write this) a post-post-modernity operating at a deep level of abstraction and structure. The so-called aura Benjamin mournfully declared gone and deceased has, in a sense, returned in the tapestries of multivalent form, the jury-rigged and complex new structures that result from imaginative combinatorial practices of reconfigured elements.

Fun fact: Metaphors for the evils of artificial intelligence and computation can also be used to symbolize the intangible spirit alive in formal, ostensibly deterministic systems!

Contemporary, electronic art has attained a level of tremendous, unprecedented complexity. Games these days can perhaps be described as multi-media projects of installation art (the computer is their site) involving perhaps hundreds of artists and contributors with a broad range of technical and aesthetic abilities. They are built on the backs of countless past achievements in design, conceptual architecture, group organization, and programming, and are only growing more and more complex with time. How can these entities exhibit anything even remotely original? How can games, in their quintessential reproducibility, insofar as they are becoming expressions of pure non-physical information, express an aura of authenticity, originality, or whatever ineffable qualities coincide with Benjamin’s artistic predecessors (sculptures, unique paintings, live musical performances, and so on)?

I will submit as a hypothesis, and one positively ripe for contention, that a new type of aura can be located in structural novelty. When abstraction is the prevailing form, and variation occurs on a level of conceptualization below the surface, and experiential only on the level of design and intellection, then aura becomes an intangible, theoretical quality. The aura of art in the age of electronic hyper-production is the commentary of a work on the history of its progeniture – the story of its creation; Aura becomes expressed through a beautiful modification in the lineage of structure and a deviation from the demands of form. It is defiance of cliché and a refusal to be entirely complicit with the determining forces of history. It is the irrepressible human spirit discovering possibilities for innovation in the most formalized, structuralized, and engineered systems. The aura is alive as the iconoclastic ghost in the machine.

Flower. Art? Or the pernicious excess of our wasteful dilletante culture? You decide.

Video games occupy a rare and incredible position in culture. They are a relatively new medium that is just beginning to attain a level of almost universal saturation. They are also being made by people with highly developed artistic sensibilities, raising powerful and important questions about their relationship to art. In the recent TEDx talk at USC, Kellee Santiago defends the thesis that video games are art. She does this, perhaps somewhat weakly, by employing an easy Wikipedia definition that states:

Art is the process or product of deliberately arranging elements in a way to affect the senses or emotions.

It’s pretty clear why Santiago bases her discussion on this definition. It’s general enough to encompass most things. To its discredit, it is also so general as to encompass just about everything resulting from human intention and design. A few unfortunate examples spring readily to mind: advertising, police crowd control, war, propaganda, hate literature, and religious proselytizing. I, for one, desire none of these, and would be loathe to call any of them ‘art’. Yet they all arrange elements (words, images, people) to affect senses and or emotions (with pain, fear, violence, bigotry, sex; to inspire hate, anger, lust, consumption, etc…).

My objections, of course, would probably stem from an inclination to be a purist aesthete, and delimit art specifically to that domain of things that doesn’t offend or adversely affect my senses and emotions. I can’t in all fairness expect art to pander specifically to my tastes and ideology. That’s fine, I don’t want it to. I am prepared to accept that art can be offensive and brutal, grating and intolerable. Sometimes it can even be used for profit (I say this sarcastically, because in truth most artists deserve to make a living, and therefore art should, in an idealistic world, be capable of supporting its creators).

Flow. How will future generations judge the merits of games like this?

At the heart of this issue is the question of legitimacy. We are a culture deeply imbued with dichotomies of incredible excess and self-critical guilt. We engage in frivolous activities the like and extent of which no civilization in history has been able to parallel. To paint a certain picture of excess, consider a friend of mine who lives below what statisticians of wealth would call “the poverty level”, and what the most affluent might describe as “abject destitution.” He, by living frugally in subsidized housing, nevertheless can own a computer (second hand), has access to the internet, running water, clothing, food, privacy, all the books he could ever want to read, and one of the best health care systems in the world. His living situation, while not as luxurious as a Czar or the Pope, profoundly surpasses the comforts and resources available to most of the world’s inhabitants (both past and present).

Now my intention here is not to moralize, but to point out a problematic tendency in the ways our culture engages with art and its other, so-called frivolities. I mention my friend’s situation to define a frame of reference for the statistical majority of people living in the affluent West. Even the poorest among us can find shelter, clothing, food and drink, and health care services. How many people in the world can claim the same? We are a minority.

Now, far from denying the vast disparity that separates the rich from the poor in the developed world, I want to examine precisely the privileges that this difference entails. I am undeniably extremely fortunate to have had access to a liberal arts education in philosophy and literature. I can think of virtually no other formal education that is more detached from the work of necessity and the hard toil of life. Now I work part time and can afford to play video games and write articles about such; my situation is undeniably privileged, even among people in my own country. In ancient Israel, I would probably have been a Pharisee, with all the detachment and snobbery that implies.

Braid

So when I, and others in a similar position, opine about video games as art, we are engaging in a distinctly Western practice of legitimating a part of our experience, of assuaging our inherited guilt. Art has already undergone the battle of self-justification in our culture. The culture wars of the 60s and 70s, the punk movement, Andy Warhol: all these were events in the progression of art from a peripheral or elitist activity to a central, defining facet of our civilization. The popularization of something must, almost by definition, bring with it the aura of legitimacy.

Video games already glow with the de facto approval of big business. They are lucrative, and thus trump modesty and objections of opulence by dint of the almighty dollar. But is this enough? People like Santiago (and the writers of Little Bo Beep), by describing video games as art, are attempting to bring them into the same purview of legitimate activity that is enjoyed by film, literature, and all other more conventional (read: established) forms of artistic creation. And as they well should be! It is my explicit position, and I will fight strongly to defend it, that video games are art; that said, it is also my opinion that we, as gamers but also as the beneficiaries of tremendous over-arching privilege, must be clear about what games signify, why we play them, and in what capacity their being art affects our relationship to them and to the activity of ‘frivolous’ play.

Baldur's Gate III: Shadows of BioWare

We can cite their names like the holy litany of computer role-playing games: Baldur’s Gate I and II, Planescape: Torment, and (to a lesser extent) Icewind Dale I & II. They are all unified by the now dated, but once sacrosanct Infinity Engine, which I love like my own future hypothetical child. They, alongside Fallout 1 and 2, are the greatest gifts Black Isle Studios gave to posterity. Any single one of these titles would have rightfully inscribed Black Isle into the pantheon of legendary game design, excepting maybe the wonderful but oft-underappreciated Icewind Dale series (which I think is a damn shame considering that it did so successfully what other lesser but vastly more popular games have struggled to do, which is to translate D&D faithfully to an action RPG environment — Neverwinter Nights, anyone?). To their undying credit, Black Isle delivered not one, but seven beautiful titles, each of which occupies a space of high privilege in my memory.

'Only slightly more imaginative than Dragon Age'

So it’s not surprising that my proverbial neck follicles went on high alert when Ray Muzyka, BioWare’s CEO cum Electronic Arts vice-president (after selling BioWare to them) came along with a press release in 2008, saying, “We’re thrilled to be returning to BioWare’s fantasy roots, with Dragon Age: Origins representing the culmination of over a decade of experience. Dragon Age: Origins is a dark heroic fantasy that doesn’t pull any punches. Our fans are in for the most emotionally intense gaming experience we’ve ever created, and we hope to surprise them with just how dark and gritty it gets!” I don’t know who first described Dragon Age as the “spiritual successor” of Baldur’s Gate, but that phrase caught on like wildfire across the blogosphere and review community, taking on the veritable quality of fact. We were all calling it that, and we all very much wanted it to be precisely that. And we had good reason, too.

In 2008, BioWare was the strongest candidate for creating a plausible successor to Baldur’s Gate. It was BioWare that developed the Infinity Engine, which introduced the revolutionary fusion of real-time and turn-based strategy into role playing games, and was an integral component of Baldur’s Gate’s success. To their credit, they have produced a number of high-quality role playing games since then, including Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic I and II and Mass Effect I and II, which both employ a three-dimensional combat system that, like the Infinity Engine before it, enables the action to be paused so the user can issue strategic commands. They’d also proven themselves to be competent storytellers. It really seemed that if anyone could make a successor to Baldur’s Gate, it had to be BioWare. And it would certainly seem, if you were to go by the strident voices of mainstream critics, that they succeeded. Let’s look at the facts.

A flawless, visually stunning masterpiece. One of the best games ever made.

Over at metacritic, Dragon Age: Origins has received a glowing 91% “metascore”, aggregating 65 critic reviews, a whopping 8 of which deigned to convey grades of 100% (a ninth mincing some particular qualms to impart only 99%, and I wonder why he even bothered). That’s 8 declarations of perfection. 8, I would assume professional, reviewers out there who consider Dragon Age to be a flawless masterpiece, or one whose flaws were so trifling, so inconsequential, as to make denying BioWare a perfect score an affront to the ethics of criticism. Let’s not forget the 44 other reviewers who gave 90% and up — for all we know theirs may have been the highest possible score permitted by their editors, and which may for all intents and purposes describe a broad reviewer tendency towards perfection. If I were to be cynical, I might suggest you could almost see the bandwagon careening down the path of gaming history, a coterie of followers clinging desperately to it, hollering such indications of their hard-earned fealty like, “Remember me? I was your champion! I gave you 100%!”

To give some context, of the top 500 PC games of all time on metacritic, Dragon Age is (at the time of this writing) ranked #64. It’s score, 91%, is only 4 percentile behind Baldur’s Gate II, ranked #6 of all time. It is rated more highly than such incredible games as Portal, Deus Ex, Civilization 3, Duke Nukem 3D, Starcraft and even Fallout. Now to reveal my personal viewpoint (not altogether mysterious based on this article’s title, I expect): Though I don’t actually hate Dragon Age, I do consider it to be a work of remarkable mediocrity and unoriginality, in no way worthy of the hyperbolic accolades it has received from all quarters. I’m most inclined to disparage it, frankly, because it has positioned itself to be one of the best games of all time, a true successor to one of my absolutely favourite games, and it is anything but.

The critics have spoken. 'Just not as good as Dragon Age.'

Let’s take a more discerning look. What criteria should a game be evaluated on? Storyline, graphics, gameplay? On these points, Dragon Age is at best entirely average, and at worst a resounding flop. I know saying this is in staunch opposition to the public consensus, but really how can anyone who has earnestly and soberly tried the game claim it is a pioneer on any of these fronts? The story, for instance, is notable only for being one of the most hackneyed and derivative ones I have encountered in recent memory. It employs virtually every conceivable trope of the Fantasy genre: a daemonic blight is encroaching, plaguing the land. A hero must rise to unite the divided kingdoms and stop the great nemesis. Elves are sequestered in their remote, ancient forest, tending to their trees and xenophobia; mages are governed by a militant authority that fears an outbreak of untrammelled magic: they are consigned to a great tower to conduct their studies. Dwarves live underground in stone halls and are excellent blacksmiths. The blight itself consists of trolls, orcs, goblins, ogres, and an archdemon. What here is even slightly original? The whole narrative smacks of an inexcusable laziness, considering that it is a story-driven game that demands the player navigate through countless cut scenes of plodding, uninspired dialogue about unimaginative and two-dimensional characters, on a quest utterly predictable in its every twist and turn.

Breathtaking.

The graphics, while in a limited sense contemporary and decent enough, are in terms of imagination, wonder, and pure raw creativity just as banal and uninspired as the story. The environments are generic dungeons, castles, and small towns, utterly bland in comparison to the intoxicating, dark, and wonderful city of Sigil in Planescape: Torment, or the richly detailed and original hand-painted locations in Baldur’s Gate II (like the creepy organic Beholder lair, or the variously delightful and horrifying planar spheres). The voice acting is good, but the character animations are invariably wooden; it is disconcerting to be given a riveting speech about action by a character who has all the subtle mannerisms of a marionette. The magical effects are for the most part colourful light blooms and explosions. There is no great inventiveness, visual play, or breathtaking artistry here.

Displayed here: the best generic golden rings, generic belts, generic longbows, and generic armor in the game.

The gameplay is not much better. The battles often feel tacked-on, as if the enemies were not there owing to some plausible aspect of the plot, but rather because it is a fantasy game and as such requires copious slaughter. Nor are they especially fun. The fact that your characters heal instantly after each encounter makes things feel like an arcade game, the enemies the limitless hordes of some fantasy version of Smash TV. The action feels hollow where it is clearly attempting to be ’streamlined.’ The skill system, invented from scratch, is not just contrived and bizarre, but sometimes outright confusing. For a long time I had no idea what any given skill was good for, and what’s worse, I could never really bring myself to care. To my dismay, since every single point invested in a particular tree unlocked an entirely new ability, it required an instant and complete familiarization with the entire system’s subtleties and nuances, lest I accidentally acquire at the outset skills for which I had no real use. Case in point, Alistair uses dual weapons, but I selected the two-handed weapon skill not realizing that these two skill trees were basically incompatible. A skill point was thus wasted, irrecoverably.

'Mostly derivative, unlike Dragon Age.'

New characters likewise become sources of frustration and tedium. Do I choose between this spellcaster with a preference for healing spells, even though I know her interactions with Morrigan will result in conflict and an overall reduction in their approval levels? Somehow the game’s designers succeeded in making secondary character interactions annoying exercises in trial and error, as I tested one and then another “gift” on different people to derive the most positive reaction, and felt compelled to replay certain dialogue sequences that resulted in a dramatically poor character reaction because I happened to choose the wrong dialogue option. To completely reveal their personal story trees you must skillfully and attentively nurture their approval ratings (not only difficult, but annoying to do), yet the unfolding stories proved to be so underwhelming as to be unworthy of the effort required in unlocking them. Contrast this to the marvellous secret lives of your party members in Planescape: Torment. For example, I still think about the joys and immediate rewards of unlocking each of Dak’kon’s incredible philosophical discs.

These are just some of many objections I could raise. The game is riddled with issues concerning pacing, design, and, simply put, fun. What’s more, these objections are fairly easy to see. Within moments of playing the game I was struck by its overall lackluster and generic qualities. Where is the critical review mindset that addresses the merits and flaws of a game regardless of the hype around it? I feel that, out of the fervency of our desire for this hallowed successor, we have dulled our collective better judgment as to Dragon Age’s real worth. I say resolutely that Dragon Age is not the spiritual successor to Baldur’s Gate. Earlier, I deliberately held off mentioning one striking coincidence: Dragon Age and the original Baldur’s Gate both scored 91% on MetaCritic. Is this a manifestation of our collective will to power? Did we all so strongly wish for Baldur’s Gate III that we willed a mediocre and unoriginal fantasy RPG up to the status of legend? Or perhaps it’s a testament to the brilliant marketing of one of the most successful video game publishers in the industry? I leave these questions to you to answer; for the time being, in my own eyes, I will continue to consider the true successor as yet unnamed.

'Guys, I've done some preliminary calculations and, uhm, judging by the building angle and the estimated distance to heaven... we're fucked.' 'Watchousayin' now, Poindexter? Yer always chattering on, an' it sure do sound like English, but damned if I ain't makin' no sense of it.'

“Dude, you totally just Starcrafted my ammo; I am so gonna Mario your mom,” says one gamer to another, by way of insult, and thus with a proverbial mesotron rifle places the last, gleaming bolt of missile energy into the exposed forehead of “linguistic integrity”. You don’t have to be an Oxbridge Grammarian with a pipe permanently glued to your upper lip and whose definition of a “good night with a lady” is an intimate fireside read of Austen to have your forelocks raised in pre-emptive worry about the State of Things, but let’s be candid for a second here folks: language is about communication, and when communication consists of staccato ’splosions of the weird, frantically changing online pidgin that tends to sound like a mix between the attempts to describe the parabolas of the sun by a fourth grader who’s just discovered his big bro’s cache of MDMA and an intoxicated computer’s binary interpretation of The Mikado, something begins to seem a bit awry.

See? You've upset him.

“WAT teh F0ck d3de, u r n0t g0nna g3t to d4t base b4 1 do!” is the modern form of the old childhood expletive “Tag! You’re it!” that invariably cursed the slowest kid around to scramble desperately, wheezingly, after his or her persecutors; it’s here again, only filtered through what amounts to an ad hoc “font” of alphanumeric substitutions called 1337 speak. But 1337 speak isn’t a problem. It’s easily comprehensible once you learn to read it, and doesn’t really change the underlying grammar. And you’d have to be pretty stuck up to take offense to something kids have really just grafted on to language. History is full of examples of simple mono-Alphabetic substitution ciphers, like the pigpen cipher, that are extremely easy to decode using simple frequency analysis, and even the most basic of these are nevertheless vastly more obscure than 1337 speak. Nay, I say, NAY, the problem of decaying communication lies not here, but elsewhere.

Now just think back to that classic episode of Star Trek TNG “Darmok,” when Picard reveals his hidden (or not so hidden?) linguistic genius by cracking the heavily myth-based and metaphoric Tamarian language. Well the writers weren’t stretching particularly far to come up with a language that communicates by referencing cultural, historical, and mythological events condensed into crystallized meaning. All languages do this to one degree or another, and English is no exception. Of course, the creation of these little gemstones of species-memory is often a boon. How else would we succinctly describe something like, for instance, an isometric 3rd-person game involving repeated forays into randomly generated dungeons with randomly generated monsters and randomly generated loot drops colour-coded based on power, value, and rarity, interspersed with truly spectacular boss fights and the nagging, vehemently suppressed feeling of life being irretrievably squandered into an abyss of recapitulated video game tropes? One word: Diablo!

Remember, if they actually bother to decode the napkin pigpen cipher you slipped them under that gin and tonic, they will probably sleep with you.

Yes! Owing to the miracle of idioms we can now reference an entire edifice of cultural experience with a single word. Diablo is a stand-in for the genre of hack and slash RPGs that have flooded the video game market in the last decade and whose basic structures have become practically synonymous with role-playing games period. Typically the word is invoked with an explanatory suffix, like -esque, or -clone, but sometimes even that is eschewed in favour of just calling a Gleaming Nightmarish Spade of Deathly Incarnadine Bloodgasm a Gleaming Nightmarish Spade of Deathly Incarnadine Bloodgasm. “Yeah it’s got some Diablo elements,” or, “This is Diablo set in [genre]/[place] [time-period]” are fairly common usages. Having played a few Diablo-esque clones with hack-and-slash, action-RPG elements set in the post-apocalyptic future, or the enigmatic Renaissance, or the Samurai-flooded Tokugawa-era of Japan, I can attest to the general validity of these descriptive techniques.

But I think that Ferdinand de Saussure — who so famously divorced the signatory content of a statement (read: the word’s meaning) from its phoneme (read: sound) and idea (read: thought) — the very self-same Saussure we all know and love, would at this very instant be celebrating in his grave at the spontaneous forms of usage that explode across the Internet at every conceivable point of human linguistic interaction. In other words, these days we just say whatever the fuck we want. Without pause, we engage in conversation while using a highly personalized lexicon of terms, expressions, words and idioms that, like Picard’s incomprehensible Tamarian friend, reference our own past experiences, or at best the experiences we have shared with a very small subset of the broader (potentially inter-galactic) civilization.

Unlike Picard, however, we humble Internet-faring citizens lack either his dapper, chrome-forehead ensconced genius, or even a mere universal translator to help facilitate these simple, daily interactions. Whatever shall we do? The answer is obviously to Zork the Splinter Cell with a God of War, and 3D Realms the Monkey Island just like Bioware did the Grim Fandango. Too confusing? Well, failing that, we could always put all our faith in the third pillar of the linguistic triangle, pragmatics (the other two being syntax and semantics, in case you’re trying to impress a date). In brief, we could understand through contextualization. But wait, you say, we’re not computers? That’s right, and John Searle is in a Chinese Room somewhere trying to eat a bowl of rice with one of Euphemia Allen’s musical scores. Go figure.

'Hey guys! Where's the party? Guys? Hello? Dammit, why do I always find the AWKWARD mixers.'

So Borderlands is alright, if you like wandering through a post-apocalyptic wasteland literally teeming with alien monsters who haemorrhage weapons and ammunition, legions of bandits hurling their bodies onto the barrels of your guns, and a non-existent story whose entire purpose is to propel you ineluctably on to a final confrontation with a giant Lovecraftian beast reminiscent of Cthulhu. Hope I didn’t spoil anything for you (as if the first five minutes of gameplay didn’t make that outcome anything but entirely unavoidable). It’s not so great if you like thoughtful, intelligent conversation in an online roleplay-supportive environment with good folk who welcome you with open arms and cheerfully initiate you into the sometimes mysterious, sometimes frightening customs of the multiplayer realm.

I won’t keep it a secret: I prefer my games offline. I once remarked to a friend, “Why should I have to share my enjoyment with others?” Notwithstanding the fatuousness of that statement, there’s a lot about playing online that abrades the sensibilities of us more temperate, shrinking-violet types. People online are often loud, immature, and inconsiderate. They steal your kills and your loot. And, especially in Borderlands, they introduce an element of chaos into a gaming experience that should, by all accounts, be sedative and well-mannered. I want my carnage neatly arrayed against a well-proportioned backdrop of measured insanity. I don’t want my carefully organized progression from quest A to quest B to be suddenly short-circuited by a player thirty levels my senior who decides to “pop-in” for a little meet and greet, kills in one shot the boss I’ve been working on for the last five cycles, and who mitigates the affront by generously dropping a weapon I won’t be able to use for another ten hours of gameplay, altogether completely baffling my fragile sense of proportion.

'Jesus Christ! Why did you just shoot my dog?' 'Because he reminded me of my mother. Hey... that's weird. So do you!'

Without a doubt I would never assert, categorically, that offline or single-player gaming is “more fun” than the multiplayer alternative. MMORPGs wouldn’t be anywhere near as lucrative as they are if people didn’t froth like addicts over the pleasures they offer. But in most cases, the single-player experience tends to be more finely crafted and narrative-based than games designed specifically for the online crowd. Borderlands is a case in point where the single player campaign seems begrudgingly tacked-on to appease that inevitable (and damnable!) subset of gamers who refuse the allure of an internet connection. Well, I was such a player, until around level 30, when I was struck by the astonishing loneliness of the Borderlands world Pandora. Sure, hordes of enemies pour out of hovels, tents, and the literal ground to shoot, maul and eviscerate you at every opportunity, but call me crazy if I don’t exactly derive much interpersonal warmth from those types of interactions.

Pandora is desolate, unwelcoming, and bleak. It is a society based unapologetically on bare-knuckle greed; and everyone is out for their share. The only friends you encounter are lunatic robots with some fab dance moves and a tendency to get shot up, and the ghostly effigy of a woman whose sweet encouragements begin to take on a sociopathic timbre when it becomes clear they invariably lead you to slaughter. “Why are you trying to get me killed?!” you feel almost like shouting, but for whatever reason you trudge on into yet another dark cavern full of corrugated shanty houses, huge mounds of garbage, and subterranean colonies of giant insects to slay one or another lunatic boss in the name of adventure. But damn does it ever get lonely down there sometimes, and not even the cold comfort of your bullets does much to stave off the chilly isolation.

'Dude...' 'I know.' 'Dude, its... face.' 'Look, I KNOW.' 'But DUDE... it looks like...' 'When this is over I am going to kill you.'

So then it isn’t much of a surprise that I tried my hand, finally, at playing with other humans. It turns out there are certain unspoken rules about interacting with that dour and intolerant breed, the online gamer. There are various customs that must be observed. Naturally, I knew nothing of this, and like a neophyte I stumbled in, all toothy grins and bristling good cheer. There were three in one room, hanging out, talking with audio, and discussing the intricacies of their characters’ development. They were fighting duels amongst themselves, and so I, like any hapless visitor, held myself to the axiom “when in Rome,” and challenged one of them in turn. I won handily (no exaggeration, since my character was a Bruiser whose special ability is to pound his enemies with fists). In seconds one of them chimed in, “Well, actually, it’s really hard to beat a Bruiser since their health tends to be like three times that of other characters. Also, you’re a FAGGOT,” and with that pleasant farewell, I was booted.

Could any other response have sealed my fate as an online gamer faster or more completely? I can’t really say. Maybe I’m just not cut from that particularly irascible stock, but suffice it to say I’m not chomping at the bit to get back into the fray. I don’t care to speculate about the strange and cliquish motivations of the online gamer, but having experienced its venom first hand I am inclined to turn back to the established classics of the single-player domain (Planescape: Torment, Fallout 1&2, Baldur’s Gate, or even to more recent and excellent entries like Crysis and Bioshock, that despite being first person shooters, which lend themselves so readily to multiplayer, produce immersive and non-isolationist offline experiences). To game developers, I say this: a game that cannot in all fairness be played alone, but that which reinforces our solitude in being played by others, is perhaps the most interesting sociological accomplishment of this century. Well done!