News Kneejerk: MoMA Sez "Games = Art."

Yesterday the MoMA announced that it is adding the following titles to its collection:

• Pac-Man
• Tetris
• Another World
• Myst
• SimCity 2000
• vib-ribbon
• The Sims
• Katamari Damacy
• EVE Online
• Dwarf Fortress
• Portal
• flOw
• Passage
• Canabalt

And this is only the beginning. If you clicked the link, you'll have surely noticed games like Pong, Asteroids, Chrono Trigger, and Minecraft on the MoMA's wish list.

Oh, good; here we go again. Video games: art?

Meh.

I enjoy playing video games as much as the next hip twentysomething jerkoff, but this news from Manhattan somehow doesn't sit well with me. I've been trying all day to sort out why.

I've noticed, for one thing, that the more cultural legitimacy games acquire, the less interesting they become to me. This might be a personal problem as much as anything; the griping of an O.G. annoyed that the band that used to belong exclusively to him and his friends suddenly belongs to everyone.

Maybe there's more to it than that.

Nintendo Power -- a magazine whose reporting focused on reviews and strategy guides -- recently went under after 24 years. Nostalgic older players can be heard muttering to themselves about "the end of an age" as they click on the next Kotaku link.

Meanwhile: earlier this year, the Onion A.V. Club unveiled a spin-off site called The Gameological Society, which focuses its reporting on what video games mean. It's some relatively highbrow stuff, reading like some Artforum contributor's examination of Secret of Mana or Metroid. More than once I've stopped reading an article halfway through, thinking GOOD GOD, IT'S A FREAKING VIDEO GAME. GET OVER IT.

Yeah, yeah -- this from somebody who's written a veritable book on Final Fantasy. Call me inconsistent.

(However: two years after playing through the whole freaking Final Fantasy series, one through thirteen, and writing about it, I feel a lot differently about Final Fantasy.)

Truth is -- and I've said before -- video games have become a guilty pleasure for me. An hour spent plunking virtual credits into Revenge of Death-Adder on MAME is an hour I'm not writing, going outside, reading 19th century novels or Greek philosophers, learning calculus, looking at the stars, having sex, doing a crossword puzzle with a friend, et cetera., et cetera.

It's too passive. Which is fine -- were it not for the pet pleasures society affords us, those of us on the lower rungs would have burned down the banks and government offices years ago. Lord knows an hour or two with a fighting game or shmup after work has more than once been the difference between Functional Patrick and Sociopathic Patrick.

But art -- especially the sort proclaiming itself modern -- is not supposed to be passive.

Yeah, yeah -- video games are interactive, you say. That's not what I mean. Mario moves and jumps when you hit the buttons, but it's still so damned easy. That's the point; toys aren't meant to be hard. Games are meant to be played and won, ideally yielding their player as much entertainment and as little frustration as possible. For the most part they are psychic comfort food.

I've always been under the assumption that modern art's ideals are to provoke and challenge its viewers. To upend their assumptions and beliefs about the world in which they live; to force a reevaluation of their values and perspectives. Modern art is not easy. It's best when it drives you crazy because you can't easily resolve it, can't figure out how it makes you feel, can't "win" at it.

Tōru Iwatani made a very neat game once (Pac-Man) and is evidently a career lecturer these days, but I wonder if he has as many interesting things to say about his medium and the world as Kandinsky, Miró, or fuck, even Warhol?

Perhaps I am being unfair?

Maybe. But these might be questions we want to ask, distinctions we want to make when selecting which cultural artifacts have more weight and lasting value than others; which notes in the general cacophony allow the listener to transcend and arrange the rest in a more melodious order.

.......

While typing the last paragraph, it occurred to me that the MoMA's very decision to incorporate games in its collection might be construed as a challenge. The choice itself was made to provoke thought, discussion, and argument.

Video games are not longer just hobby pieces for kids and geeks. "Subculture" is no longer a term that applies to self-described "gamers." The scene has gone mainstream in a big way. And the values expressed by these games, by the people who design them, and in the lifestyle choices of the people who consume them, are exerting an increasingly heavy influence on society.

I wonder if the MoMA isn't implicitly asking us to consider what the values implied by these developments might be? What is the difference between a pre-gaming culture and a gaming culture?

The other Walden, the Videogame

Savvy reader Adam points out that Walden, A Game is not the first attempt at a Thoreau video game and directs us toward Transcend, a no-budget app game by Chris DeLeon (who calls it a "notgame," which is evidently now the video game counterpart to the ten-minute student art film). Not that you're necessarily going to like this any more, but this did affect me in interesting ways, writes Adam, and just like that I became obliged to investigate Transcend.

The "game" is simple: using the touchscreen, you guide your character (represented by the letter "A") along a procession of screens representing such diverse, immersive environments as "field rendered in ASCII characters," "underground path rendered in ASCII characters," and "cave rendered in ASCII characters." Along the way you encounter three companions (each represented by a different letter of the alphabet) who blurt out a greeting, follow you around a while, and then peace out when you reach the beginning of the next "level."

Transcend is an inane, clunky, sub-bush league game that's no fun to play and can be completed in less than fifteen minutes if you're able to blunder your way through the more arduous screens. But the whole thing basically exists to feed you Walden quotes (which appear onscreen as a deliberate voice reads them out loud) whenever you cross from one screen to the next:

Our life is frittered away by detail.

“Is not this railroad which we have built a good thing?” Yes, I answer, comparatively good, that is, you might have done worse; but I wish, as you are brothers of mine, that you could have spent your time better.

Our inventions are wont to be pretty toys which distract our attention from serious things. They are but improved means to an unimproved end, an end which it was already but too easy to arrive at.

Most of the luxuries and many of the so-called comforts of life are not only not indispensable, but positive hindrances to the elevation of mankind.

I know of no more encouraging fact than the ability of man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor.

In the long run, men hit only what they aim at. Therefore, they had better aim at something high.

I am eager to believe that DeLeon is the most brilliant troll to haunt the "art game" scene, but his website and all the text in Transcend that wasn't extracted right from Walden suggest he might have acted with the same oblivious, totally unironic earnestness as the academics working on Walden, A Game. But either way, he's managed to design and put up for distribution on the App Store a game that actually berates you (though indirectly) for wasting your time on it while you're playing it. Adam writes:

It made me angry. I played it on an iPad I'd just gotten as a gift, and it made me hate myself for using the thing, angry about my job, etc.

I never used it again after that, quit my job the next week, and gave away the iPad a few weeks later. And some time thereafter actually picked up Walden at the library.

This is a Walden game I can support (even though I'd never play it again or actually recommend it be played by anyone else). By trying to render the "world" of Walden as an expansive pseudo-environment where the player is made to spend minutes or hours virtually tending his virtual bean patch, foraging for virtual berries, observing virtual chickadees, and other narcotic Harvest Crossing XI-type activities, Walden, A Game overreaches and becomes something totally contrary to the principles argued for in the very book on which it is based. Transcend, on the other hand, is a piece of shit game designed for an inessential electronic toy/status symbol that repeatedly tells you that you'd be better off doing more worthwhile things with your time. If Thoreau were sufficiently alive to appreciate the irony (whether intentional or no), I think he'd be positively tickled.

Well played, Mr. DeLeon! (Or notplayed, as it were?!)


(Before anyone asks, my own relationship with video games remains complicated. That might be a talk for another time, though.)

Stuck in My Craw File #429520: Walden, the Videogame

The Onion, America's finest satirical journal, has been really spot on for the last couple of years. Remember that piece about the grotesque new MacBook? How could you forget it? The one about the new Six Flags rollercoaster based on a miserable codependent relationship with a woman named "Deborah?" Priceless. And what about the story about a bunch of University of Southern California academics receiving $40,000 from the National Endowment for the Arts to design a video game based on Henry David Thoreau's Walden? Har!

Oh, wait. That last one wasn't The Onion. It was TIME.

Well. Let's talk about Walden, a Game. It's the only way I will be able to get over it.

Composing a more substantive response to this news than ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING was a greater challenge than I thought it would be, likely because the incongruity between what's written in Walden and some fan's idea to make a video game about it should be so searingly obvious to anyone who has so much as read the book's back cover, and in so little need of explanation as to actually defy explanation. But as I am of the belief that one is better off not holding any convictions unless he can articulate and account for them, I suppose I'm obligated to scrutinize the anatomy of my knee and its peculiar jerkings.

Question one: what's this Walden book about, anyhow?

In brief: this guy Henry David Thoreau, a sort of libertarian hippie type, believes that there's too much bullshit in the modern world ("modern" meaning 1840-1850) and its outstanding effect is a population that's widely unhappy and dull. Thoreau posits that a happier and richer life would be one lived with a minimum of unnecessary bullshit, and to test this idea he goes out to live by himself in a little shack in the woods by Walden pond, where all he has to worry about are securing and maintaining food and shelter. He finds that when one lives deliberately and severs as much "civilized" nonsense from his life as possible, a kind of lucidity follows, tuning him in to the essential sublime brilliance in all things, et cetera et cetera.

So from the beginning: this is a piece of literature whose main argument is that people would be happier shedding the trappings of technology and engaging more directly and personally in their transactions with the world. And now there are some people, people who have presumably read this book more than once, who want to turn it into a video game. The NEA is giving them $40,000 in taxpayer money to do it.

ARE YOU FUCKING KIDDING? SERIOUSLY ARE YOU ACTUA

So I guess my question is what's the bloody point? I'm imagining something like Animal Crossing (the most depressing game in the world) without the cutesy visuals, and with snippets from Thoreau's writing wedged between the completion and assigning of fetch quests. My personal hope is that players who manage to achieve a 100% (or 200% as the case sometimes may be) completion rate in Walden, a Game are treated to a special message à la Guitar Hero à la South Park: "GO OUTSIDE."

On that note, may I suggest a substitute to playing Walden, a Game? 

GOING OUTSIDE.

Of course everyone should spend time in nature; but not all of us are able to set aside our lives for the time it would take to conduct an experiment like Thoreau’s, says the game's lead designer.

Fair enough. But do you suppose Thoreau would prefer that those interested in his ideas and legacy spent five, ten, twenty hours hunched before a computer screen indoors, following his pretend footsteps in a pretend forest; or that they tore themselves away from all the screens in their lives for just a few minutes and went outside? Found their own special places? Thought their own thoughts? Experienced their own moments of revelation?

Would anybody truly be willing to argue that someone who goes outside for half and hour and practices a deliberate mindfulness of his surroundings experiences less of nature than he would by playing a video game about experiencing nature in his sterile, climate-controlled, artificially-lit bedroom or cubicle for the same amount of time?

Walden, a game [sic] posits a new genre of play, in which reflection and insight play an important role in the player experience. While traveling the virtual world of Walden, the player applies themselves to both daily task of maintaining the basic aspects of life at Walden Pond, as well as having the opportunity to focus on the deeper meaning behind events that transpire in the world. By attending to these events, the player is able to gain insight into the natural world, and into connections that permeate the experience of life at Walden.

I don't think you can gain real experiential knowledge about nature and the world through pseudo-experience. That's not how it works.

You want to talk about the great outdoors? It reeks.

Nature is full of awful stenches. Nature is uncomfortable. Nature is mud and hairy coyote shit and vomit balls with fractured rodent bones poking out. Nature is rotting logs, grubs, maggots, and mold spores. Nature is a cloud of flies jumping from a half-decomposed animal carcass to a dung pile to your cheek. Nature is walking into spiderwebs face first, sap and evergreen needles stuck between your fingers, tripping on tree roots, and falling into poison ivy. Nature is blackberry seeds stuck between your teeth, trees with four-inch thorns protruding from their trunks, gnats flying into your eyes, poisonous snakes, ticks buried in your skin, and bears taking your food. Nature is sweating, shivering, bee stings, briars, and wet feet in the winter. Nature is pissing against a tree, shitting in the bushes, and wiping your ass with leaves.

The first step toward achieving that transcendental wonder for the wild world is to appreciate the fact that the living part of planet Earth did not make itself with any regard for you, your comfort, or your capacity to comprehend what it is and what it does. This is not something you can really know until you've been out in the thick of things (I never really grasped it myself until going on a camping trip that very nearly killed me), and the thick of things cannot be conveyed by a virtual "environment" that only communicates to your visual and auditory senses.

The potential for those sublime moments of peace and truth is always there, but you can't really receive them without first exposing yourself to the grime, stench, and discomfort. Supposing your can get the full taste of one without sampling the other can only be called shallow and shortsighted. It's the difference between diving into the pond and wading at the edge with your trouser legs pulled up to your shins. It's the difference between the living, growing, respiring thing and the mass-produced polystyrene image of it. It's the difference between doing something and playing a video game about it.

If you want to learn about nature, go outside and pay attention. You don't even need to be out in the middle of nowhere to do it. Nature is everywhere. The planet you're standing on is nature. Find a public park, a vacant lot, or really any place where the weeds are pushing up  through the concrete, and just pay attention to what's going on around you.

It might take a few minutes. It might take a few visits. But it's happening.

If you want a kid to understand nature, take him outside. Don't make him play Going Outside: the Game.

If you want a kid to read Thoreau, make him read Thoreau. If he is incapable of absorbing ideas that aren't being delivered through a video game, then Walden probably isn't for him anyway.

What we have here is a video game that's probably not going to be much fun, replicates something most people can do without a computer (going outside), and is designed to convey a set of ideas that you can simply go ahead and read without any intermediary Animal Crossing nonsense. It's basically pointless. And given that it's based on a book admonishing humanity for all the inessential nonsense it lugs around with it, Walden, a Game seems doubly pointless, and doubly demeaning to the spirit in which Thoreau wrote it.

The NEA grant is just insult added to insult -- Walden, a Game ain't a $40,000 idea, and with so many austerity hawks in Congress looking for programs to cut, the NEA picked a very bad time to endorse such a ridicule- and publicity-prone waste of treasure.

Cubehead Classix

For those of you arriving here from the 8easybits.net URL, welcome! If you're just tuning in, the reason you're here is because I accidentally nuked the .sql engine of the 8EB site during a host/domain transfer and don't know how to fix it.

But I have some good news: a new comics site is underway. From the beginning (before the ill-starred host transfer), the plan was to build a brand new site to host my brand new comics, which would be kept separate from the 8 Easy Bits archives. Although a full 50% of the scheme ended in total disaster, the second half of the project remains in progress. I'm going ahead and transferring most of the comics I've drawn since 2008 (or so) to the new site as originally intended, but this means that a whole lot of "Cube" archives get excluded, and they've got nowhere to go without the old 8 Easy Bits page.

And that's why I'm posting them here!

Well, that's one of the reasons. The other is that I've been so busy elsewhere I haven't had an opportunity (or the remaining psychic reserves) to compose a fully-baked update for this week. (Incidentally, these comics were first conceived to fulfill just such a demand.)

But man...this stuff is ancient. The very first ones date back to when I was twenty, which was eight years ago. Going through these now, I can see why some webcomic artists have deliberately erased or hidden the archives of their earliest work. While it might offer the longtime reader a moment of nostalgic comfort, revisiting really old material can be, for its author/artist, an embarrassing march down Memory Lane (which intersects with I Used To Really Suck At This Avenue and God What A Loser I Was Boulevard). Be warned: if you haven't read these before (or at least not recently), a lot of them are pret-t-t-y bad.

But it does go to show: we've come a long, long way together, haven't we? You have to praise me like you should.

And while we're at it, here are a few more oldies but goodies:

Oh man -- I'd nearly forgotten this one, which dates back to the first semester of my junior year at college (late 2004). For the sake of disclosure, the strip's inclusion is the reason I've tagged this post with a "marijuana" label. Kids, pay attention -- the preceding comic has been a dark portrait of cannabis consumption's effects upon the inexperienced and developing brain. (For your own safety, please just stick to safe, legal binge drinking.)

Polly the Chemist Vs. Polly the Polly

I particularly enjoy how Final Fantasy Tactics allows you to draft hired goons into your army and give them whatever names you please. You can assemble an entire crew named after you and your friends, and then play the whole game pretending you're all going on fantastic adventures together and that everyone not only listens to you, but indeed follows your every command.

It is also useful for acting out passive-aggressive dominance fantasies against snarky webmistresses.

(5:56:05 PM) Pitchyfork: this isn't easy for me to say, polly. (5:56:09 PM) Pitchyfork: but i'm removing you from the team. (5:56:19 PM) ThePolly: What? (5:57:03 PM) Pitchyfork: you don't have the right kind of stuff we need. (5:57:34 PM) ThePolly: Yeah? Well your dumb team doesn't have the right stuff I need. (5:58:06 PM) Pitchyfork: D: (5:58:49 PM) ThePolly: shut up

Chrono Question

I have spent a god damn lot of time playing, thinking, and writing about video games. This is not news. Since I practically grew up on them, the habit never struck me as anything other than natural, reasonable, and harmless. But lately I am beginning to wonder.

My experience with games went something like this:

I was born in Washington, D.C. My parents lived in Columbia, Maryland. In the basement of their townhouse was an Atari 2600. Every now and then I would get my hands on a joystick and play a game of Ms. Pac-Man or Megamania, but I do not recall either of them developing into an all-devouring preoccupation. (My being two years old might have been a factor.)

I learned to read at an early age. When I was three years old, my parents got me a picture book about volcanoes. I could not tell right from left, but likely knew more about the Mount St. Helens eruption than at least half of today's U.S. population.

Some months later, my parents got me a children's astronomy book. I could not tie my shoes, but could tell you about the choking density of Venus's atmosphere, identify the Galilean satellites and describe the most prominent characteristics of each, and knew about Uranus’s titled rotational axis.

Some months after that, my parents bought me a picture book about dinosaurs. At age four I was aware of the distinction between the Triassic, Jurassic, and Cretaceous periods and could give examples of the dinosaurs that lived during each of them, though I am sure I mispronounced their names.

When I was five years old, my parents bought me a Nintendo Entertainment System. On Christmas day I chose to foul my undergarments rather than take a five-minute break from Duck Hunt to use the toilet.

So much for an interest in reality.

One particularly interesting aspect of the video game phenomenon is their continuing presence in the lives and minds of the generation that was first exposed to them. I remember seeing all kinds of toys in my friends' rooms and basements. Ninja Turtles action figures. Nerf weapons. Archie comic books. Skip-its. Hungry Hungry Hippos. Mighty Max playsets. Hot Wheels race tracks.

As the Mario generation (which, for the sake of convenience, we will describe as gamers born between 1980 and 1990) aged, it is unlikely that most of them continued building massive Lego fortresses and staging epic cross-universal showdowns between their G.I. Joe and X-Men action figures into their teens and twenties. But the video game consoles remained constant. I would be interested in learning the statistics of console owners who stopped playing video games altogether once they began, but in my personal experience, I have known very few Nintendo or Super Nintendo owners who have eliminated video games from their lives after playing them consistently for a time. In almost all cases, the video game console was the one childhood toy that never got put away. When the Nintendo got old, the Super Nintendo replaced it. When the Super Nintendo got old, it was replaced by the Sony Playstation. When the Sony Playstation got old, it was replaced by the Dreamcast, the Xbox, and the Playstation 2.

What we have now is a not insignificant slice of the populace whose most consuming interest during its developmental years was video games. A large multinational subculture today describes themselves as "gamers" and talks of the wider "gaming community." Growing up as a gamer myself, it did not seem unusual to me that I and my peers might decide that the characteristic that most defined us as human beings was the time we spent by ourselves in front of a television screen with a controller in our hands. (Do you suppose there were groups of adolescent television enthusiasts who referred to themselves as "watchers" during the 1950s and 60s?)

But lately I am starting consider what this actually means. The proliferation of video games is a phenomenon that has not been examined thoroughly or honestly enough as of yet, though progress is being made.

I am not suggesting that life should not be pleasurable. I am not saying that children should spend every hour of their lives being dragged by the wrist between school, piano lessons, SAT prep courses, and soccer practice. Nor am I saying there is anything wrong with a professional or student returning home after an exhausting day and unwinding with a game of Halo or Persona. (I myself have been very partial to Hydorah as of late.)

When I was "studying" at a summer university program in Japan several years ago, one lecturer discussed the need for societal "pressure valves." Living and working in any nation exerts a certain degree of stress on the populace; and Japan in particular, owing to its work ethic, corporate structure, and deru kugi-wa utareru culture. What I got out of this lecture is that if Japan were to suddenly enact a zero-tolerance ban on video games, pornography, and alcohol, their famously-low violent crimes rate would immediately spike upwards. (Please do not ask for specifics. I was very hungover and my notes are terrible.)

The point is, video games serve a practical function in society. They are a mollifier. When the overworked, underpaid, and resentful Borders employee comes home and shoots people in Call of Duty, he is releasing tension that might otherwise manifest itself in his professional and social life. He is less likely to take out his existential frustrations on customers or coworkers, march into a crowded McDonalds with an uzi, or drive a dynamite-packed SUV into a government building. (Though video games have occasionally been suspected of encouraging violence in younger and more impressionable players, the reverse is almost certainly true for adults.)

This is certainly relevant to the broader "New Media and Society" issue, but we will not be looking at the Big Picture today.

One aspect of the Mario generation that strikes me in particular is the amount of intellectual and academic energy it expends towards coming to a deeper -- in some cases transcendent -- understanding of video games: what they are, what they mean, and how better ones can be made. It has created a large body of music and art rooted in video game tropes and aesthetics. It has begun reading games through the lenses of critical theory. Some very interesting and meritorious work has been produced, but one must bear in mind that it indicates a generation (or two) whose creative and intellectual focus has been riveted on their toys. If as many people spent as much time waxing Aristotelian about Parker Brothers board games, it might seem somewhat absurd.

The "are video games art?" question has become a very hot topic over the last decade or so. Gamers become absolutely livid at the suggestion that their distraction of choice is not worthy of being counted as valuable as the more established and "higher" distractions, such as books or film. I think a lot of the people wrapped up in this debate are missing the point. I subscribe to the classic (and increasingly unpopular) view that the substantiality of the content being delivered is more important than the means by which it is delivered. There are a lot of very intelligent and artfully-designed video games, and there are a lot of really fucking stupid books and movies. If I had to weigh the artistic merits of Secret of Mana and The Da Vinci Code, I would say the overall advantage goes to the one about the kid who travels from place to place by getting shot out of a cannon.

But I do not believe video games have yet produced anything that clears the bar set by the greatest works of film and literature. (They probably should not be expected to, but for now let us assume they should.)

My personal "high art or low art?" litmus test is a question of lasting influence. If we look at my bookshelf, I can pull out a couple dozen books, open them up, and point to specific chapters and passages that have actually changed my life. After reading and considering them, my perspective was altered to such an extent that I had to subsequently alter my behavior. As far as I am concerned, that is the distinction. "Low" art keeps a person occupied. "High" art effects a transformation.

(Of course, this is all subjective. In the first Superman film, Lex Luthor says: "some people can read War and Peace and come away thinking it's a simple adventure story. Others can read the ingredients on a chewing gum wrapper and unlock the secrets of the universe." But I suspect War and Peace has facilitated exponentially more revelatory experiences than a Dubble Bubble wrapper, or Space Invaders for that matter.)

I can think of very few video games that, in my personal experience, fall under this definition of "high art." I have great times playing games, but rarely walk away with much else to show for the experience and time spent. Not that I am complaining; I do not play video games to enrich myself. I play them to entertain myself.

What worries me is the suspicion that fewer and fewer people are able to tell the difference.

I sometimes worry that video games are being given a kind of eminence they do not entirely deserve, or are earning it for the wrong reasons. They are very nice, fun, designed by incredibly clever and creative people, and admirably fulfill their function as another mollifier for the masses. But do they have any value beyond that?

Rather than drag this out any longer, I will just wrap this up with a question that occurred to me recently:

One of my favorite parts in the SNES game Chrono Trigger is the Fiona's Villa sidequest. In 1000 A.D., you pass through a stretch of barren desert on the Zenan continent. Traveling back to 600 A.D., you visit the same area and come across a dying forest, which a young woman named Fiona is struggling to save. With a little elbow grease and some help from the dutiful Robo, you defeat the subterranean monsters decimating the landscape and assist Fiona in replanting it. Returning to 1000 A.D., you find that a thriving forest has replaced the desert, and a shrine built in honor of Fiona and Robo rests on the site of her old villa.

Chrono Trigger fans hold a special place in their hearts for this quest. It is a lovely lesson in how acts of righteousness and kindness can trigger far-reaching and lasting changes in the world.

But I wonder: of all the people who played and praised this sequence -- and judging by sales data, we can assume at least 2.36 million human beings on planet Earth have played Chrono Trigger at some point in their lives -- which do you suppose the greater number of them are more likely to have done later on:

1.) Gone outside and planted a tree themselves?

2.) Sat indoors and played another RPG?

I wonder.