Bridging Worlds

Essays In Conversation 1: The Evolving Relationship Between Video Games and Photography

Eron Rauch — Thu, 18 Jan 2018 07:30:52 +0000

Essays In Conversation 1: The Evolving Relationship Between Video Games and Photography

Eron Rauch Do. 18 Jan 2018 - 08:30

Though it waxes and wanes in public consciousness and gets called by different names (screenshots, virtual photography, or more recently, in-game photography) over the past decade there have been a whole host of artists who have explored video games through photography. My first project that combined the two was a series from 2001 which re-printed cryptic landscape images found on Everquest forums, after learning the reason one of my old friends had dropped out of high school was to play the game. Kent Sheely has also been exploring this far-flung cultural space for just about as long as anyone else.

After collaborating to curate a recent art show about video games and photography, titled Screen Knowledges, I had a moment where I realized what a long, winding trek it has been to get to this artwork in 2017. Given his status as one of the most veteran artists in this genre, I wanted to talk to Kent about the arc of his oeuvre and hear his thoughts about how the field has changed over the past years.

Eron: As of 2017 we both have been working with video game imagery and screenshots for over a decade. I was wondering what your first screenshot project was? Working together curating the Screen Knowledges art show made me realize I didn't know anything about it, or even what inspired you to make it.

Kent: That came about in college when I was still figuring out what direction I wanted my work to take, and I had been playing GTA San Andreas on the Xbox. That was the first game that I ever played that had a built in photo mode. It's for a mission in the game. You're supposed to kill someone and take a photo of the body, so it's only used for one instance, but it'll actually save photos to your Xbox hard drive. I figured that out. I didn't have a way to get the photos onto a computer, because I was just taking them through the Xbox, so I bought a video capture card just so I could get my screenshots out of GTA San Andreas. I think I ended up calling it Grand Theft Photo?

Eron: Was this for a class?

Kent: I ended up using it for a class, but it started out realizing that I could take photos inside this built virtual landscape. I gave up beating the game entirely. I just quit at that mission when I first got the camera and never looked back.

Eron: How did you end up showing it? Through video? Or did you make prints?

Kent: I made prints from the video capture, which is 480p or something on Xbox. They ended up really small, so they ended up looking like they're from a toy camera or something. But then later I got the same game for PC, so the captures that I was able to get were a lot higher quality. That led to me making an interactive version where I actually built like a custom (camera-shaped) controller for it, so you could take your own photos in the game, just by moving the controller around.

Eron: So like a motion sensitive thing?

Kent: It was actually a Wii remote inside of a camera body.

Eron: Oh, interesting. What camera did you use?

Kent: It was a fake camera. I just built it from PVC parts.

"The primary reason that I've been moving towards video is just because it's easier for me to share it."

Eron: Fast forward a decade, when we were selecting work for the show, you mentioned your work has tended towards video. A lot of other artists who work with video games are also moving towards using video as their primary medium of exploration. Why do you think you've been favoring video as a medium when you make art about video games?

Kent: I think I've been really motivated by the ease which video can be shared now. Especially through social media and Instagram. When I started out, I was coming at it from a photography background. The primary reason that I've been moving towards video is just because it's easier for me to share it.

Eron: Do you think that that has to do with the way the internet platforms have changed?

Kent: Yeah. It didn't use to be that easy to share things on the internet. Before YouTube especially, you would have to either have someone download the file or have them download a player to run it. It was really hard to share video work. More artists are sharing video rather than photo work and I think that it's probably a similar situation that I'm in, where I'm just always recording video clips when I'm playing the games. For me, publishing those short sketches is really satisfying to me. It helps me reach more focused goals. It's sort of the spaghetti method, but in a way, it pressures me into trying to look deeper at something, because once I share it, I want to push it further.

Eron: So much of the way we exist in images, both in art and online, is performative. It feels as though maybe there's something in video that seemingly more succinctly captures the performative context of video games?

Kent: Another thing I was thinking about was that video games are time-based media. So video, I think, more accurately emulates the way that we encounter video games. So it sort of lulls us into a false sense of security.

Eron: Yeah. One of the biggest issues about being a screenshot artist is we're almost inevitably genre-fied as 'screenshot’, right? People want to talk about the action of making a photo in a video game as the primary source of the content. Accessing any other content than that, is very, very hard in the face of this kind of incredibly aggressively avantgarde gesture of what might be seen as defying the video game. In a screenshot, there's no sound, no motion… No screen!

Whereas with video, you're right, there's this slippage. I can watch you playing a video game and fall into believing at some meta- level that, "Oh, this is you doing something in a video game that has meaning." Rather than, "Oh you took a video of a video game, therefore it has meaning."

Kent: Yeah. I still haven't really landed on any one answer for that. And there probably isn't one.

Eron: You make games as well, yes?

Kent: Yeah.

Eron: What was the first game you made?

Kent: The first complete game I ever made was probably in RPG Maker, which came out in like '95. I was probably like 12 or 13, I think, when I did that. But it was basically just fan art. It was a fan game for Dragonball Z or something, taking existing sprites and making my own story out of them.

Eron: Which isn't that dissimilar from what you're doing now…

Kent: Oh gosh, yeah. I think that may have been the first complete playable game that I made. I fucked around when I was a little kid in Q Basic and older programming. You know what? I made a "Choose Your Own Adventure" game when I was like nine!

Eron: Oh god.

Kent: Yeah, because I figured out how to do the GOTO structure. It was based on old text adventures and "Choose Your Own Adventure" books. I took the structure of "Choose Your Own Adventure," where the page is like a function in BASIC, and based it on that book structure. Did you ever play FlameWar Deluxe?

Eron: No.

Kent: The first Twine game I ever made. All the text came from a forum chat. It was a flame war that sparked as a result of ... oh my god, I can't even remember what game! It was completely unrelated. It started like a chat about Quake? And it turned into this geopolitical flame war that was the most expansive thing I'd ever seen.

You know how there's branching conversation paths that happen in chat? So I took node of that chat and made a Twine game where the objective is to get the most replies out of a thread by taking branching paths. One person says this, and your choices are the two people who replied to that.

Eron: You were basically are making art about something in the Trump era we now know to be a very real thing affecting the world! It puts you in the mindset of gaming a forum, which is incredibly interesting because the Russians do this to affect elections, GamerGate to influence the media, and Facebook to maximize their income.

Kent: Right. “How long can you keep people talking?” It's figuring out not what I (as a viewer/player) can do, but what moves I can make; what steps did this person take to push this further, advance the plot? It's making choices by proxy.

"'Flame War Deluxe' puts you in the mindset of gaming a forum - like the Russians do to affect elections, GamerGate to influence the media, and Facebook to maximize their income."

Eron: It's a psychological investigation, as well, like a good novel. A great novel doesn't just tell you what happened, it entices you into feeling why those choices happened.

Kent: There's some branching path of conversation that made this the biggest flame war ever. There's one branching path that has more comments, more discussion. But what led to that? It's sort of breaking down which comment pushed this forward. It is getting into the mind of gamers and people who instigate bullshit online. The other people you're playing with remain kind of untapped (as a subject). A lot of people, especially people who do screenshot photography, focus on the game world. I feel like they're kind of missing a layer that a lot of people don't tap into, and that's the real people that are behind the screens controlling these avatars.

Eron: There's so many kinds of photography that get subsumed into this dog-pile of "screenshot photography.” I don't like using that term because it's caught up in a specific idea of video games. I really prefer video game-related photography (or art). Work that doesn't take account of time or people often feels like it mindlessly believes the Wired Magazine 1997 version of Francis Fukuyama’s “end of history” in an overly literal way.

There's so much that comes along with re-acknowledging the existence of time and people. It's fairly radical. Just acknowledging aging in fandom, the fact that people get older, change, make decisions they can’t take back, have to live with, is pretty radical.

Kent: We've evolved past the singular label of screenshot photography.

Kommentare

Josh Taylor So. 21 Jan 2018 - 00:29 Permalink

Bravo!

Wonderful essay/conversation guys and what a wonderful quote by Kent, "We've evolved past the singular label of screenshot photography". Looking back over the years virtual/in-game/screenshot photography really has come a very long way from where it was. Video Game-Related Photography is a wonderful and fitting title for this beautiful genre indeed.

I can only imagine what it will be five or ten years from now.

Josh Taylor Creative

Bridging Worlds: Civilization Outside Stasis

Eron Rauch — Tue, 04 Apr 2017 09:29:09 +0000

Bridging Worlds: Civilization Outside Stasis

Eron Rauch Di. 4 Apr 2017 - 11:29

Bridging Worlds is artist Eron Rauch’s ongoing series of in-depth articles on the curious places of connection between video games, contemporary art, and culture.

After a 24 year break from playing Civilization, my friends recently roped me into trying the new Civilization 6. For reference, the last time I had played a Civ game was in 1993. I was 12 and didn’t even have a computer with a color screen at home. After stumbling around the overwhelmingly massive campus of new junior high, my proclivity for reading Dragonlance novels at lunch accidentally made me a new friend who would open the geeky technicolor doors for me.

Let’s call him J.T., and after bonding over our mutual love of 20-sided dice, Robotech, and the number 42, our daily after-school ritual became to head to his conveniently located house. Yeah, it smelled like cat pee, but his mom always brought us nacho cheese dip made with Velveeta and taco seasoning packs so that evened out. But the main attraction was that JT’s family had a full-on computer room in the basement, the lair of a towering beige beast with a massive 15-inch 256 color monitor.

We’d fail our way through Eye of the Beholder’s early stages (too hard); try to pick fights in Star Trek: 25th Anniversary (too boring); and eventually settle into the original Civilization for a long afternoon of mayhem. Nothing could cause more squeals of laughter from us than playing as Gandhi and rushing for nuclear missiles and blowing up the world.

My current friends were supposed to play my first game of **Civ 6* cooperatively with me, but they make video games and hit an unexpected stretch of crunch time. When they are crunching, they may as well be stationed on the moon for hanging-out (and hygiene) purposes, so I just dove in. The game had apparently detected my past life where I started a bunch of anime clubs, so it randomized me the most weeaboo-appropriate choice, Japan, with its special units “Samurai” and “Electronics Factory.”

Long before I could live out my William Gibson fantasy of electrified katanas, things went horribly wrong. By turn 15 my city was on fire with a half dozen barbarian units warming their hands on its embers. Trying to play nice with my neighbors, it wasn’t until like turn 120 that I figured out there was a whole other hidden system governing religion and by then my towns were crawling with Catholics. Then there seemed to be this other, even more obtuse, system for acquiring culturally important objects, masterpieces pilling up in every nations’ vaults except mine.

At around turn 200 my bad karma from when I was 12 years old came back when Gandhi tricked me into declaring joint war on France. And by tricked, I mean put something at the front of a treaty that I thought meant something other than what it did. For reference, France was already in the industrial age while I was just realizing I had missed researching that great futuristic technology: the wheel.

Slowly but inevitably came the realization that I was utterly screwed. My Civilization was way behind in money, art, culture, cities, espionage, famous people, religion, and trade. To top that off every other head of state then denounced me as a warmonger, including Gandhi, who started the whole damn war and surrendered one turn later because he had no military units.

If you’re curious: The entire war was where a single archer unit in my home city managed to shoot holes in a catapult unit France had caulked up and floated alone across the largest ocean in the world. The way that microscopic skirmish ended seemed positively realistic compared to the way the French behemoth then instantly surrendered after losing the Battle of the Lone Unsupported Jury-rigged Ocean-Going Siege Weapon. I look forward to seeing the bronze monument they will erect in future-Paris to commemorate that tragedy.

By now I was a dozen hours deep in a totally unfamiliar game only to find myself in a situation where I’m almost guaranteed to come in last place. But something even more frustrating was occurring as I tried to push forward: the game seemed locked in a damnable equilibrium where the computer players were waiting for me to make a move before doing anything interesting themselves, and every turn that passed with me in last place makes it made likely I won’t have any good opening moves in the future.

Tobias Winnerling recently described this exact problem more concisely than I could in his excellent piece about the lack of impactful diplomacy in video games, “Although they are staged as digital rivals — whom human players might apprehend as their digital equals in terms of pursuing distinct internal needs, intentions, and goals — they really are not… The AI parties are not so much opponents as they are obstacles whose only function is to hinder players in achieving their goals.”

"The AI parties are not so much opponents as they are obstacles whose only function is to hinder players in achieving their goals.”

As my Civ 6 save-state currently sits, I have no reasonable goals left to try for, thus the AI has no reason to interact to hinder me (should we call that “hinderaction”?). So my Japan will forever just get passively screwed by its larger, richer, more connected, more advanced, oft-snarky neighbors. Meanwhile the AI presses ever forward, ever more efficiently until hundreds of turns from now we will cruise to a finish at exactly the same ranks as turn 50.

But I’m stubborn, so I was puzzling through my options one last time before giving up in boredom, when I realized there is something insidiously obvious I could do. The very option my 12-year old self, smeared with drying Velveeta, would have done from the beginning. By listening to the game’s virtual advisor I had accidentally given myself insanely sophisticated tech for making warships. That means I could quickly make a massive navy far larger and far more advanced than anything my neighbors could produce since they had spent their resources on other things that would, you know, win them the game.

To put a fine point on it, I could simply embrace my warmonger reputation and race through the remaining turns using my fleet smash the other Civilizations, burn their cities, kill their populations, destroy their temples, and pillage their works of art. Then, and only then, would I be able to avoid coming in last place.

JT and I would already have been sailing on Gandhi’s capital, knowing he was aiming for a pacifist religious victory and had nothing to defend with. But all those intervening years suddenly snapped into focus: news reels of guided missiles in infrared; faces of neighbors from around the world; the aftermath photos of suicide bombings; drone strikes; years of studying the actual history of Japan; years of travel; my friends and their families; shattered cities. Every time I load the game and think about cueing up a terrifying fleet, some part of me that has its roots in the real world shouts, “But there has to be another choice!”

I want desperately to win, as I am a terrible loser, but I also desperately don’t want to see the world burn. Yet the game is designed so that I have two clear options: First, I could keep doing what I’ve been doing and spend a dozen hours that could otherwise be spent hanging out with my friends, to see the game’s narrative to its logical, peaceful conclusion, where my Japan is a happy-but-third-world country living off the scraps of the big colonial powers.

Or second, I could take my Japanese navy, blindside one of the strong but neutral countries, and start some alternate-history version of World War II. Which even if I lost would at least move me up the winners list quite a few spaces.

Yes, some small part of my reticence to just go along with the game is assuredly a stylistic reaction to its chipper, Disney-fied vision of innocuous, a-historical colonialism that annoys me in every media. But there seems to be something deeper to my discomfort with launching a massive last-ditch war of aggression: I feel like I would only be doing it to make the game happy. Even more distressing than that, it feels like going full Pearl Harbor seems like the only way the game will even acknowledge and respond to my presence as a player.

Going full Pearl Harbor seems like the only way the game will even acknowledge and respond to my presence as a player.

There is a third option, one that anyone who has played a lot of video games is probably screaming at me to pursue, which is to just restart my damn game. But a new game does nothing to allay my concerns about how the game wants me to interact with it. All that would be different is that I would reach that momentous decision to slaughter, bully, and pillage my way through a the ages a few dozen turns earlier. All that would be different is that I would be more prepared to launch an assault on Pearl Harbor.

I first learned to see and express myself through geek/fandom culture with JT and his friends in that basement. We all drifted apart after getting split up during the first few years of high-school, and I feel like I was never as true and pure a fan as those few youthful years. Fandom made up a lot of my youthful identity, but as life went on I started feeling increasingly uneasy with the media aimed at fandom propagating ever-intensifying stories of heroism, machismo, war, and mastery. In short, as games grew more spectacular and more targeted at their core demographic, and the more I lived of life, the more the dropdown menu in those games seem less and less likely to have the option I felt to be meaningful or interesting.

This sense that Civ really is trying to teach me to love seeing the world burn wouldn’t be such a crisis if the Civ franchise wasn’t the standard bearer for everything good, adult, serious, and sophisticated in games. This is the game that many game fans use an their example for how games are more than brutal shooters, martial arts mayhem, twitch reflex tests, and science fiction apocalypses. There’s even a creator’s name slapped across the front of the game’s name, giving it the legitimacy of a Ken Burns documentary, “Sid Meier’s Civilization*.

I know what the game wants me to do. I know what I would have done when I was a young fan. But while both the game and my teenage self are hanging out with chips in 1993 like nothing has changed, I don’t think the me of 2017 wants to do any of those things anymore. Critically, I’m not sure if I get the sense that anyone making big budget video games is really willing to waste time from cashing all those fat checks from Ghandi-nukers to notice or care that there is some scruffy 36 year-old sitting there scratching his chin, keyboard silent, second-world Japan idling away. In that way, my crisis with the decisions presented to the player in Civ are basically a mirror of the sense of disconnect I increasingly feel I’m presented by the the broader spectrum of products that span the core of commercial video game fandom.

In the end, contemplating starting virtual WWII in a time of real turmoil is a deeply personal but far reaching question: Are video games simply shiny toys designed for passive entertainment, or can video games be a deep part of a complex life outside of a narrow marketing demographic?

Are video games simply shiny toys designed for passive entertainment, or can video games be a deep part of a complex life outside of a narrow marketing demographic?

That is, if I’m not a core gamer but I’m not a non-gamer what are the options left to me and my faltering relationships to video games? The first and most drastic solution would be to finally throw up my hands and say “fuck video games.” I’m a busy 36 year-old and I’ve legitimately got enough other shit to do that I could just walk away. I mean, video games don’t seem to give a shit about me either, so that feels like a fair response.

But this seems to be really dismissive of the potential of games. Somewhere deep down I really believe video games can be something cooler and more interesting than murder simulators for white straight guys to escape into. If everyone like me who finds video games lacking exits the scene, then we’ve basically done a video game culture version of Brexit.

The flip-side option is that I can just grit my teeth into a forced smile and like all the same shit that “core” gamers are supposed to: sail to India with canon-fire in my eyes. I get told to, “turn off my brain and enjoy the fun,” all the time. I could just play Civ because my friends do. Fetishize the creators. Fetishize the money games make. Fill my house by buying all the right merch. Revel in the fact “we-the-geeks” won the culture wars.

Fetishize the creators. Fetishize the money games make. Fill my house by buying all the right merch.

But that explicitly flies in the face of the whole reason the geek and video gaming world attracted me, which was because it provided an alternative set of values to the really constrained mainstream Midwestern conservative-Christian suburban life that I found so confining and degrading. Whatever I might think of Civ 6 or Kantai Collection, I still stand by the fact that Final Fantasy 6 or Akira was a hell of a lot more interesting and mind-expanding ways to spend my time than watching Full House. These were places filled with darkness, weirdness, and complexity, and helped me make sense of being bullied and all the other day-to-day crap that comes with smug suburbia.

This feels like turning my back on the whole reason I came to love games.

I could become a games maker and fill in the gaps myself. As much as I’m an idealist, even I think its a naive answer to solely answer my complaint that “even flagship serious games seem to be rooted in brutal behavior enjoyable by 12-year olds,” with “make your own damn Civ game.” Maybe if I was 20 and had this falling out, I’d end up out there trying to revolutionize the industry. But that’s hardly an option for me or for a vast majority of the folks I’m talking about - people who are older and have lived enough life to see video games fail to speak to them in ways other than juvenile industry tropes rooted in violence, mastery, and productivity.

For myself, and many of my friends, we’re not likely to stop playing games totally, nor are we about to sit down and say nice things about Bioshock Infinite, let alone interning for a few years to be a game dev (only to end up making crappy franchised games based on Hollywood movies). So what does that leave us? Well, from my experience the most common ending is that former game lovers become self-identifying casuals as they age.

This option seems to be the default position that the industry and fandom wants to see with former core gamers too: quiet, steady, low-maintenance consumers for flagship products. It’s basically a combination of both of the first two options, where there is no active connection to video game fandom, but regular forays into a particularly choice mainstream game like Witcher 3 or Skyrim are embraced as a kind of indulgence.

But so far, none of these options let me do the thing I want: to play and think about interesting, complex games that bring meaning and richness to my life. Whether music, novels, painting, or movies, no other major medium seems to have provoked a crisis in my love and appreciation for them simply because I’m no longer a teenager and no longer am willing to try to pretend I’m still a teenager.

That said there might be a clue in that my passion for certain genres in music, novels, and art, have faded. Certainly some genres I used to like can be actively hostile to older folks (“never trust anyone older than 30”). Do I still like Chemical Brothers as much as I did when I was 16? Hell no, I am not block-rocking those big beat records in 2017. But I still buy new records every week from the myriad of other genres that I’ve grown to love.

Which leads me to suspect that the problem here in video games is that we’ve mixed up a medium and genre. What we as fans call “video games" is basically a genre that we might call “gamer” rather than the fullness of the medium. Even Civilization, the go-to example gamers use to show that their “medium” is capable of interesting stuff beyond highly-rendered guns, is steeped in gamer and cultural conventions from nerd and video game fandom’s history. It’s not 4x genre conventions or strategy game conventions that irk me, but “video-games-as-genre” conventions.

From the art of the leaders to the way victory is scored to the prioritize military technology, Civilization 6, thinks and acts not as a video game (since you could certainly design a game without any of those things) but instead in a profoundly “video-game-y” way.

Because I am fan of video games, I’ve mistaken fan-targeted products as the entire possibility of the medium.

If we’re willing to say that “video games aiming to sell themselves to a churning amalgamation of historical geeks, hardcores, gamerbros, and self-proclaimed fanboys” is a kind of macro-scale-genre that contains a number of subgenres like first person shooter and platformer, my issues with feeling left out start to make a lot more sense. It’s not that video games are a place absent of the potential for meaningful art; instead it is that is that because I am fan of video games, I’ve mistaken the fan-targeted products that I typically come into contact with, spanning Civilization to Call of Duty to Mario, as the entire possibility of the medium similar to mistaking solar systems for being the largest unit of celestial measurement, instead of galaxies, clusters, or super-clusters.

Like some pre-Conpurnican church, video gaming as a community desperately upholds this myth that the kinds of games we see on Steam, Polygon, and E3 are both center and sole location in the universe. But indeed, just like there turned out to be no crystal sphere, and the stars are all other places so to goes our perspective on video games. During the Renaissance, powers-that-be, especially the church, suppressed the knowledge of the heavens, killed its exponents, and tried their damnedest to keep thinking of Earth as the center of everything. Similarly, institutions of fandom entrench their claims of representing the sole and complete potential for their “medium” despite evidence the heavens of video games are multitudinous.

Whether it is animation, comics, or board games, video game fandom is hardly the only fan-as-target-demographic space that is realizing what they took as a medium might be best understood as only one limited genre place within a much larger system. Especially as these fandoms have grown and moved out into the world, all the while gaining new fans with different backgrounds, races, genders, sexual orientations, able-ness, histories, and political opinions, there is a growing sense that the American mainstream products made by white straight men for white straight boys aren’t the entirety of what the medium can make.

What started as a simple attempt to think about this historical echo of playing Civilization seems to have led me to a whole new chapter in my video game fandom. A chapter that will be about the exploration of the unknown, not mastery of known. Rather than quitting video games, rather than making video games, rather than than trusting the high priests of video games that there is one true way, another option is that it’s time to go exploring. It’s a scary proposition, but also kind of exciting, to think of the Steam bestseller list as a genre, and to plan an expedition far into the expanse beyond that.

I’m hardly the only person who has been feeling uneasy with video games as I age, uneasy with the repeating 12-year old warmonger solutions and homogenous world views that typically fill the top 10 lists of every major publication every year. Similarly, I hardly doubt I’m the only person who has doubted the liturgy of high priests of the gamer, and set out to see the variations of other heretical genres. Indeed, the honest blog writings of Cara Ellision late in her career writing about games and the directness of Tale of Tales documentation of their production process both started the chain of questions that led me to see a more macroscopic vision of video games.

Charting a voyage beyond the known boundaries of mainstream video gaming is a long way from eating Velveeta dip and nuking the virtual world of Civilization 1, but by that scale it is excitingly an almost equally massive distance from drinking a whiskey and contemplating starting a world war in Civilization 6. Setting out to see the far reaches, beyond our little home, is a fairly adult thing to do.

Setting out to see the far reaches, beyond our little home, is a fairly adult thing to do.

Who knows, maybe I’ll stop by once in a while to see what’s happening and share some stories. But while I’m probably not a video game fan by most conventional genre or marketing definitions, I’m still sitting here, I still exist, so that means maybe we need a new term. So why not call me a video game explorer. That name feels right for the future.

Sin, Apocalypse, Cash: The Beginner’s Guide - part 4

Eron Rauch — Wed, 19 Oct 2016 09:13:21 +0000

Sin, Apocalypse, Cash: The Beginner’s Guide - part 4

Eron Rauch Mi. 19 Okt 2016 - 11:13

Bridging Worlds is artist Eron Rauch’s ongoing series of in-depth articles on the curious places of connection between video games, contemporary art, and culture. This is the final part of a four-part essay on The Beginner's Guide - the previous parts can be found here

“It’s hard to create a narrative of success when you’re the dark matter against which the stars shine, but I find that it’s important for artists to be able to articulate what is valuable about art beyond prices and the market.” -William Powhida

Continuing last week’s discussion of the The Beginner’s Guide as an attempt to trigger an apocalypse to wipe clean the slate of video games, it is useful to note that in Japanese creation circles, there is a genre of animation and comics called sekaikei (literally: “world type”). This genre places a single character, almost always male and young, as the center agent in the future apocalypse. This character’s psyche alone gets to remake the world, but only as it burns to ashes. The interior becomes the all-consuming exterior. While perhaps the capstone of this genre, Neon Genesis Evangelion is unique that that it leverages the dark logic of fandom to subvert its perfect apocalypse and decry the passivity and literalism that threatened to stifle the future of anime fandom.

The Beginner’s Guide, if read as apocalyptic in intent, could also be part of this genre. But it portrays a vision of the future world that comes from deep privilege and is unmoored from history. Evangelion was grounded in a disturbing vision of the future glimpsed perhaps most painfully through the terrible AUM fan-cult nerve gas attacks that killed twelve people in the Tokyo subway. This cult was inspired by anime, and Evangelion followed nerd-logic to it’s painful end to try to disjunct fans out of a similarly hapless tragic destiny. Such a future must reconnected to society will then of course be painful and awkward, but Evangelion tried to show that it is also better future than the alternative. The Beginner’s Guide also tries to harness flaws in nerd logic to kindle the pyre of apocalypse with the art and criticism community as kindling, but its aim seems to be to try to placate fans from the pain and disappointment that inevitably comes with art, life, community, and the uncertain future.

Of all the criticism leveled against the sekaikei genre in the decades that followed its heyday, it is that by hyper-focusing on the singular, antisocial, interior perspective of the young male leads, it imagines a world, as scholar Motoko Tanaka observed in her article “Apocalyptic Imagination”, “Without meaningful inter-subjective relationships and confrontations [so] there can be no substantial communities and societies sustained.”

While it might sound boring to say that art should foster “substantial communities and societies,” phrased another way, it is really hard to give any credence to an art object that doesn’t seem to be aware of multiplicity, potential, growth, change, failure, or the other. So even if we take the view that The Beginner’s Guide is a sekaikei, or some other form of apocalypse, to put the redemption of the self, let alone the whole social order of the world, on the shoulders of art is to imagine that each artwork must save the world. Which is once again to succumb to a deeply conservative theology that divides the world into two sides and places them at war.

The Beginner’s Guide is trying to foremost demonstrate its power through negation - by denying community, history, and critical thinking.

Though perhaps dispiriting at first glance, that is precisely why we should listen to Anselm Kiefer, the great German artist whose works have often broached the incredibly traumatic Nazi past his country, who intoned, “You could be seduced to think that art can redeem the world; It cannot.”

Here in The Beginner’s Guide, we have a game which is trying to foremost demonstrate its power through negation. But by denying community, history, and critical thinking, it places itself in a double-bind since it has no way to calibrate or judge the efficacy of that power or even to envision a role for art in the world. The goal is not to save the world, or even make the world, but it is to be part of the world, which is messy and troubling and filled with uncertain outcomes.

In her essay titled “On Ghosts, or why I never want to be anybody’s muse,” Cara Ellison has observed that what art gets made is deeply tied to the social preconceptions of who is supposed to have a voice in art. Specifically, that young white males with money have far and away the most agency and expectations to publicly make art, so their stories tend to dominate at the expense of other voices. Here again, we have a young, wealthy, male lead, standing up to martyr themselves for our education; to show us how to delineate the binary parameters of creation; to defend themselves against the outrageous slings and arrows of the messy social world; and if necessary to call down the apocalypse itself.

Continuing in the apocalyptic vein, Kris Ligman has famously called The Beginner’s Guide a, “neurotoxin for critics,” and whether that toxin was the intentional weapon or a byproduct of the game’s defensive mindset, its inevitable use is quite telling not just about the results of the The Beginner’s Guide, but about why the whole class of meta-ironic art objects are so problematically self-serving. The game seems to be defense mechanisms all the way down, but because critics (and dedicated fans) are some of the first responders to any art-minded video games, this means they are first social group that the game will have to neutralize so it can reach its martyrdom uncorrupted.

The Beginner’s Guide serves to reinforce and entrench the self-segregation of video games from art; from culture; from the rest of the world’s societies.

Through framing the critical community of people who talk and write about games, with their attempt (albeit imperfect) at plurality and context, as the primary location of “the video game problem,” The Beginner’s Guide only serves to reinforce and entrench the self-segregation of video games from art; video games from culture; of video games from the rest of the world’s societies. “The first rule of video games is don’t talk about video games.”

By front loading a pre-refusal of all criticism, like the cat in the video knocking every object placed near it off the table, The Beginner’s Guide is choosing to bat away dialog, community, and anything that is part of the human social sphere. That is, it is pre-refusing anything small enough to fit on the table. You can buy The Beginner’s Guide, and have your interaction outside of it, just like your non-interaction with your Ikea shelf called “Lack.” The perfect hyper-capitalist spectacle.

In the end, these sorts of over-clever, self-congratulating, self-negating works of art seem radical at first. But similar things have been around for years. Admittedly, they were a particularly wonderful way to escape the deeply entrenched classism and nationalism that defined art in the 1800s. But now, in an era of hyper-capitalism, the commitment to defensiveness only serves to shore up market position as the primary source of legitimacy. By denying any sort of model of art that is inclusive to the vast field of conversation and community, the art work is by default embracing the abstraction of the market.

Simply put, the market gives no fucks about whether or not you want to talk with it, and the market is far too big to knock off a table (in fact it probably sold you the table). It only cares how it can use the object-idea to further extract resources. Then the market is happy to show off how valuable these non-objects are as a beacon for the world to stand in awe of, and mutely emulate. They are the yin and yang of global capitalism. So in the end, these sorts of hyper-clever defensive works of art (think Jeff Koons) merely serve to shore up the market as the primary source of legitimacy, comprehension, and valuation.

While young nerds can see it as a rebellious virtue that The Beginner’s Guide can absorb and withstand any criticism thrown at it, these amorphous, ironic objects are in actuality the perfect expression of art as a commercial pursuit. Because nothing critical or social can affect them, they are a one-way-path that can ultimately do nothing but take, absorb. They are completely compatible and complicit with the most egregious excesses of globalized wealth. In fact, as Andrea Fraser has pointed out in “L’1%, c’est Moi”, a huge percentage of the top art collectors in America are actually hyper conservatives who seem to, for instance, have no problem buying a giant Christmas tree butt plug from Paul McCarthy while working to remove gay rights and replace artist studios with million dollar lofts.

Wreden was already a part of that global financial elite before he made The Beginner’s Guide, becoming a millionaire off of The Stanley Parable (as the New Yorker has pointed out). But here, the relationship between creator and fan-consumer may even be more insidious. Unlike the monied elites of the art world, the people who spend $15 on the game are probably way less rich than Wreden. Which makes hyper-defensive works even more problematic since if no reaction to art can be effective the resulting world is far from a jolting revolutionary blast, and instead a vision of the world held forever in an icy status.

While the game certainly deserves some respect for broaching some of these issues of shifting narrative identity, artistic negation, and apocalyptic imagination, it is hardly a model to emulate. Indeed, it seems to begrudge and belittle the audience at every turn, and turn reticent and petulant when it is engaged in any sort of critical dialog.

The world of The Beginner’s Guide assuredly has a few rich veins of artistic thought that could be selectively mined to great effect in future works, especially through foregrounding discussion and criticism as viable topic for making art. But any audience, especially the young male artists it has positioned as a core audience either through intention or accident, would do well to try to understand how many of effects the game’s selfish and defensive propositions lead to stunted and restrictively negative vision of the social and artistic world.

The Beginner’s Guide settles into the natural state of hyper-defensive artworks: as abstract systems which gather more resources for their creator and investors.

After the initial pleasant tingles of danger, bluster, confusion, vainglory, and apocalypse, The Beginner’s Guide settles into the natural state of hyper-defensive artworks: as abstract systems which gather more resources for their creator and investors. These projects then consume a portion of that capital, monetary, social, and artistic, to produce more artworks which are inevitably designed to ever-better defend themselves and to negate everything else in society and community that interfaces with it, no matter the cost.

With these sorts of conservatively dualistic and combative art-systems taken as core values, video games like The Beginner’s Guide construct a toxic vision for the creative world. A world fixed in place like the pre-Copernican heavens, with art-nobility re-entrenched by their inscrutable, monumental, infinitely defensible artworks. A universe of sweet angelic puppets built in the image of their gilded creator-god, fixed all around the celestial sphere, with nothing to do feel sing their sweet nothings forever more. Amen.

The complete long-form essay can be found here. All English features on VGT can be found here

Kommentare

himbeerschlund Mi. 19 Okt 2016 - 20:43 Permalink

Hook, line and sinker. Thank

Hook, line and sinker. Thank for this deep look under the surface of the dead water that is TBG. I am conflicted now.

Sin, Apocalypse, Cash: The Beginner’s Guide - part 3

Eron Rauch — Mon, 17 Oct 2016 06:04:31 +0000

Sin, Apocalypse, Cash: The Beginner’s Guide - part 3

Eron Rauch Mo. 17 Okt 2016 - 08:04

Bridging Worlds is artist Eron Rauch’s ongoing series of in-depth articles on the curious places of connection between video games, contemporary art, and culture. This is the third part of a four-part essay on The Beginner's Guide - part one and two can be found here

“One of the greatest things about being an artist is, as you get older, if you keep working hard in relationship to what you want the world to be and how you want it to become, there is a history of interesting growth that resonates with different moments in your life.“ -Catherine Opie

In last week’s installment of “Sin, Apocalypse, Cash” I discussed ways that replaying The Beginner’s Guide provides expanded choices for audiences to interact with the game, and how those supposed choices are still mired in a simplistic and antisocial framework for art. Yet, let’s approach The Beginner’s Guide again from another angle to see if there is perhaps another, less obvious, social interface that is happening.

First let’s take stock of what the game has going for it: Well, this video game-cum-art project certainly manages to come across on the surface as too clever for the “norms”, and frightens them because they think it is (probably) a trap. What underground fan doesn’t like a little bit of projected danger? By almost all critical accounts the game has a few striking visual images worth scrutinizing. The Beginner’s Guide also seems to have a nice air of rebellion about it, since it seems to be designed to sow doubt on the critical establishment. On top of that, like any good horror film, it possibly has one big conceptual flip if we're willing to say that that first screen about audio is worth considering. It also foregrounds the avantgarde ideas of unreliable narrator and updates them a bit for the digital era.

I, at 35, shrug and go “Whatever, man. I know all this shit already. Get your head out of your ass.” But maybe I’m not its audience. Maybe after play-through number three The Beginner’s Guide should make me feel bored and annoyed. Maybe it is so defensive because it needs the freedom to discover these ideas for itself, for its generation.

And maybe, more than a trap, more than conceptual art, more than a cheap trick, more than a failure, maybe, just maybe, The Beginner’s Guide’s is just a really naive and flawed attempt to build room for generations below mine; a true Guidebook for Beginners, a Beginner’s Bible, in the sense that it is trying to Begin Again with a new generation of gamers. This mindset is on clear display when you start to tally the incredible frequency with which the narrator asserts large parts of the game are not made for you-the-audience.

To frame this new perspective on The Beginner’s Guide more specifically, maybe I’m just too old. After all, the creator is about 10 years younger than me, and I certainly went through a world of problems in my mid 20s. Maybe his angst is real. Mine was (even if it seems misguided now). Maybe his fans, younger again than the creator, give him conciliatory blow jobs in convention hotel rooms hoping to cheer him up. Maybe they think he’s smart and serious and deep-as-fuck. I mean, that’s certainly a narrative that is par for the course with most of the other arts from music to theater to painting to poetry.

Maybe, everything else aside, this game is aimed at people who think Sephiroth is a really relatable #edgelord. Specifically, the narratively reimagined hand-writing of the Wreden-narrator aside, Wreden’s real-life company is no Tale of Tales, who infamously quit the video game world to enter the broader art world. In fact, despite framing itself as a misunderstood outsider, The Beginner’s Guide won great critical acclaim, and made a number of best-of-the-year lists. It is a very successful game by most criteria. This is a game that can be seen as speaking to, or at least at, the video gaming community.

All bullshit hyperbole aside, if I played The Beginner’s Guide when I was 16 I probably would have thought it was the coolest thing ever. I was always wobbling along, being depressed, making art about being depressed, wrapped in deriving meaning from what I saw to be a masochistic emotional landscape existing simply to pile on pain and misunderstanding. I had all those same fatalistic Romantic notions of art and life and suffering and sex and mental illness that young male artists of the avantgarde tend to get told combine to form a properly serious artistic worldview.

The Beginner’s Guide might seem so defensive because it was designed to challenge and then annihilate all comers spectacularly.

If we were to step back a bit and disabuse ourselves of the assumption that The Beginner’s Guide’s audience is a mature art audience, despite its constant engagement with quaintly naive avantgarde tropes. But what audience would be so egotistical as to be able to completely ignore all of the unending protests and tirades about being “not for you” and still internalize that, yes, it is all about them? Which is to say, any precociously artsy nerd teenager.

Even more, maybe we can see something much grander from the simple observation that this video game, made by a 24 year old, seems so defensive because it was designed to challenge and then annihilate all comers spectacularly. What if The Beginner’s Guide is explicitly a giant “fuck you” to your (my) Marios, to your Lego Star Wars, to your Sonics, to your Final Fantasies, to your Dooms, and to the whole of the festering, constipated bowels that has become the game “industry” and “fandom”?

The Beginner’s Guide might just be a move straight out of Phillip K. Dick at his worst: an apocalypse happens and everyone’s body and spirit are destroyed but are reformed in some virtual space and has to go on living with new rules. With a whole new group of gamers who start, begin, a new lineage of games rediscovering these (to me rudimentary and juvenile) meta-art understandings. The whole game is the trigger for an honest but painful mushroom cloud-swirling-formation, the remnants of suns forming into new suns.

I’m not saying that it is a particularly new or even a particularly useful thing to do, but what generation doesn’t have a dream of inserting itself as the new zero A.D. of the cultural calendar? God knows, if I was that age or younger I would be seriously disappointed in what my and the generation older than me has handed them in video games. I would see all the bullshit hyperbole-cum-advertising that passes as game journalism, the viciously entitled core fandom, the cliche pandering of the industry, and want to burn it to the ground too. I certainly felt that way about most mainstream music and comics in the 90s.

But before we bask in the glow of the new-video-game-earth, no matter your age, imagining that any indie-game apocalypse would solve the problems of video games is ahistorical thinking at its most dogged. Perhaps the plan goes off without a hitch, laying the video game landscape as a sheet of blasted glass. Perhaps the feral children will survive and build their Voxel tree forts. But like The Onion headline “Man Thinking About Just Packing Up And Making Exact Same Mistakes Someplace Far Away,” thinking that knocking apart the community around an art would fix all of the [perceived] problems does nothing to prevent those outside of the blast zone from rushing in to implement their ideologies.

The old neo-con dogma of "crisis capitalism" outline by the Rand Corporation - which led to the endless American Middle East wars after 9/11 - specifically states that any apocalyptic moment can be leveraged for profit by the people with the most power.

Wreden's utopia is one without games critics, without fans, without communities of thinkers, without intentioned makers.

If The Beginner’s Guide is a trap-cum-trigger that starts the apocalypse for game history, starting with a specially tailored neurotoxin for critics, then creeping to fans who want to talk about the game, then people who play the game, then people who have only heard of the game, and onward like the oh-so-cliche-but-fan-beloved-zombie-apocalypse, then its vision for the next world is a utopia without games critics, without fans, without communities of thinkers, without intentioned makers. What is left in this new world are but the vast shibboleths of Nintendo, Sony, Apple, and Walmart as the only game in town. They will assuredly survive any small art apocalypse.

The other parts of this essay can be found here

Sin, Apocalypse, Cash: The Beginner’s Guide - part 2

Eron Rauch — Fri, 14 Oct 2016 08:02:32 +0000

Sin, Apocalypse, Cash: The Beginner’s Guide - part 2

Eron Rauch Fr. 14 Okt 2016 - 10:02

Bridging Worlds is artist Eron Rauch’s ongoing series of in-depth articles on the curious places of connection between video games, contemporary art, and culture. This is the second part of a four-part essay on The Beginner's Guide - part one can be found here

“Why, impervious to both affirmation and negation, why in the world this insistent, subsistent, irrepressible, pure repetition be it of nothing, why a picture? Why this picture?” -Jacques Roubaud “Some Thing Black”

In the first portion of this essay I examined why players of The Beginner’s Guide often perceive the game to be a trap, and the ways in which the game’s internal logic leads it to formulate art as martyrdom. But what if I’m approaching the game from the wrong angle? What if I overly focused on the naive macho egotistical vision of art and the purifying flames of antisocial creative angst? There certainly seems to be a radically alternative way to approach the game in a second play-through.

Remember how the narrator implores you to make sure you have audio enabled? I certainly just double checked my headphones and moved on the first time through.

What if we refused to obey the narrator’s most rudimentary commands – like the very first one to enable audio?

After all of the bellowing and moaning and self-flagellating of the last third of the game, it is interesting how I now notice that, restarting the game, the game really takes some seriously awkward time up-front to insist that the player has the audio enabled.

If your annoyance and distrust of the narrator’s emo tomfoolery was anywhere near the amount of mine, by the end of the game you would basically go out of your way to do the opposite of what he says. Even if your reaction wasn’t so visceral (indeed, I’m dramatizing what was simply exasperation and distaste), the narrator, and even the game itself, has been shown to be highly and multitudinously suspect. So why would a player listen to even the most rudimentary commands?

Or to put it more directly: a savvy audience member would leverage that distrust and read that as a cue ignore the [highly unreliable] narrator, which would mean muting the audio. And leave it that way…

…for the whole game.

Just walk around most of the spaces and explore. A player probably can’t easily finish the whole game without the narrator on the first play through, since there are a few button sequences that are verbally cued, but it would be quite easy enough to remember or to write them down for a second play through. All said, simply by muting the audio, it would be easily enough to have a long pleasant meander around some well-realized, oft-romantic, and subtly surreal spaces in the game.

Viewed in this light, perhaps The Beginner’s Guide’s blustering surface is hiding a much more interesting conversation about aesthetics and tactile understanding, and our assumptions about the broadness of choice we’re given in any art work or game.

But if we were to indulge in a reading about authority and choice, we would need some clues, since simply noticing that muting a game makes the game different is true for many video games. But in The Beginner’s Guide, there is a highly distinctive split. The audio is ironic, fragmented, and contemporary. The visual imagery is romantic, symbolic, and rooted in the past. With the audio on, there is a tension between the rambling disordered dialog, and an impulse to see some poetic reflection of existential crisis in these fragmentary digital landscapes, which is also a direct topic that narrator character addresses repeatedly.

Lest you think I’m being facetious, the reason I think playing without audio is a totally valid option, not a gimmick, is that as I mentioned above, the narrator is very specifically set up as an unreliable narrator. But this is only half true. One of the most intriguing innovations in the game is that more than an unreliable narrator, the Wreden-narrator-character is specifically an unreliable programmer.

For example, we know the narrator has ostensibly added lampposts (a rather overly literal symbol) and will happily modify another programmer’s level at will. He has re-developed these games he was supposedly promised to never show, or that were designed to be unplayable. So in the paradigm of unreliable programmer, having a narrator bluntly ask a player to do something rudimentary like turn on the audio would be qualified as really bad design in traditional video game development. It is clear that not only is this creator-character unreliable and whiney (oh so whiney) but they are also set up as a “bad” designer. Indeed, within the most rudimentary chronological narrative logic of the game, the audio, even more than the lampposts, must have been added well after the fact.

Touching again on the player’s impression that the game is a trap, part of what makes the game suspicious is that the imagery seems set up as a more sophisticated and self-aware foil for the verbose hyper-earnest narrator. All of the space the player explores becomes an even more potent counter-argument to itself if players actually treat options that are traditionally non-choices, such as audio, as choices.

To use a crass phrase, at its most fundamental the “core mechanic” of The Beginner’s Guide might actually be all tied to that decision to leave on or mute the audio. It might be the most significantly impactful choice a player can make aside from not playing the game.

What if, upon playing through the game once and being belligerently verbally grandstanded at, then having chosen on the second time through to play with no audio, there is now a third play-through that combines both insights. The Beginner’s Guide, at its core might be best understood as an art work that is designed to specifically train people to free themselves from the sanctity of narrator-cum-artist-cum-critic-cum-curator.

Rather than, say, jumping harder jumps, or shooting faster enemies, The Beginner’s Guide could be seen as teaching players to ignore ever more emotionally charged personal information about "creators.” About learning to ignore the “intention” of the creator, no matter how ferocious or facetious, and to have our own opinions. From this perspective the game could seems to be a full embrace of critical independence and a celebration of the death of the author. Which would be basically the exact opposite of what we perceive to be the trap on the first play through.

The Beginner’s Guide might be about learning to ignore the “intention” of the creator. Or maybe not.

While it is fun to propose playing The Beginner’s Guide without audio, and may well have been an intended way to experience the game on a second or third play-though, it is hard to avoid growing suspicious again puzzling through the results further imagined future playthroughs. Whether it is narrative martyrdom to show the audience the purity of the creator, or the meta-martyrdom of training the audience to forget the creator, the core function of the game is still rooted a vision of the universe with art as an act of martyrdom, and the viewer as sinfully complicit. This is a world founded on binary opposites.

Even when the game is at the most self-referential and meta-critical it has a very conservative, pre-modern way of understanding and interacting with the world by putting things in opposed categories. In a basic way, it is very akin to the Protestant dualistic universe: creator/audience; critic/artist; naive/savvy; internal/external; known/unknown; happiness/angst; healthy/sick; creation/destruction; success/failure; public/private; and most fundamentally, perfection/sinfulness, a fundamental formulation of right and wrong that forces judgment on thoughts, intentions, and preponderances alongside actions.

This oscillation between physiological states might simply be brushed aside as the game dealing with a conflicted subject, which can help to give a world depth. But the game shows an understanding of conflict in a far more literal-ist way. The Beginner’s Guide seems to propose that these dualisms are very real and indeed are in a vast celestial war with each other. Whether we-the-crass-audience are choosing by fiat, or the game is a divine oracle, only one can survive; only one is right.

But what is it trying to win? What is this battlefield? What is this apocalyptic war it seems to envision itself as being the ultimate weapon in? Treating art as akin to war is an explanation for so many of the problematic aspects of what the game does: It lays claim to ownership of a wide swath of radical thinking, but then tries to “win” at art by any means possible; wallowing in defensiveness, irony, reductiveness, shell games, contrarian spats, and a cryptic outmoded vision of art based on sin/perfection dualities. Someone has to win, and that brutality leaves no place for the civilian: no place for society nor for conversation; no place for art nor culture.

The Beginner’s Guide seems most concerned with erecting a monument to honor itself for protecting itself from the messiness of other people.

The initial impression of The Beginner’s Guide as being some meta-criticism of art in the age of smart phones, VR, micro-transaction, and DIY gene sequencing always gets bogged back down in its Puritanical militant world view. The Beginner’s Guide’s vision of art, even if it really is trying to train its audience to engage in new and drastic ways with authorship, is at the end no different than a Call of Duty mission in a museum: a binary mindset that vastly limits the experience of the player to a series of survival choices tied to predefined categories.

But this world of cleanly defined combatants is the inverse of the open-ended mode that characterizes deep artistic experiences which is an acknowledgment of more than simply the unknown, but of polyvalent grandeur and the vast, wondrous, and often painful, unknowability that is other human beings. Swathed in static dualisms and a defensive wartime mentality, The Beginner’s Guide is deeply un-radical because at its core, it seems most concerned with erecting a monument to honor itself for protecting itself, and by egotistical proxy all art, from the messiness of other people.

Kommentare

himbeerschlund Sa. 15 Okt 2016 - 05:12 Permalink

http://www.renemagritte.org

http://www.renemagritte.org/empire-of-light.jsp

Drigs Mo. 7 Nov 2016 - 08:16 Permalink

You can actually turn the

You can actually turn the narration off in the menu after the first playthrough and experience the so-called Coda Mode. You cannot skip any parts of the game this way.

Brett Sa. 24 Dez 2016 - 17:16 Permalink

I disagree with an assumption of this piece

I do not believe this idea of dualism is inherit in the game, no more supported than the belief that Coda is a nihilistic and depressed person. I think the game is a narrative of someone seeing something in a work that isn't there, delivered more effectively by leading the player to experience it with the narrator, only to expose their misconceptions. Its a good lesson, and encourages thinking critically about media, even itself.
Of course that reading invalidates itself, hence the difficulty of talking about this game, but regardless I'm just trying to say I think you're reading too much into it, are you, hell if we'll ever know, but that's the point.
Bloody hell this train of though just goes round in circles.

On another note, Lay off the narrator, he fulfilled his role in the story, very convincingly in my opinion.

Sin, Apocalypse, Cash: The Beginner’s Guide - part 1

Eron Rauch — Wed, 12 Oct 2016 10:45:12 +0000

Sin, Apocalypse, Cash: The Beginner’s Guide - part 1

Eron Rauch Mi. 12 Okt 2016 - 12:45

Bridging Worlds is artist Eron Rauch’s ongoing series of in-depth articles on the curious places of connection between video games, contemporary art, and culture. This is the first part of a four-part essay on The Beginner's Guide.

“What is important is not so much what people see in the gallery or the museum, but what people see after looking at these things, how they confront reality again.” -Gabriel Orozco

When I mention that I’m working on an article about The Beginner’s Guide, first there is a pregnant pause, mouth slightly open, then a lingering awkward silence. Then the seemingly inevitable question follows, “Did you play The Stanley Parable?” eyes narrowing, moving side to side, as though scanning the horizon for the shadows of danger.

Amongst video game fans and critics alike there seems to be great trepidation about voicing an opinion about The Beginner’s Guide. The impulse seems to be to treat the jolly fun of Davy Wreden’s unexpected smash hit first game The Stanley Parable as a safe vista from which to view the thorny and problematic The Beginner’s Guide. Given the very public torrent of ennui that Wreden expressed at the success of his first game, and how the standard narrative is that his internal struggle with fame led to the creation of The Beginner’s Guide, it is probably expected that most fans look beyond the gates of The Stanley Parable and see the path beyond grow narrow and haunted. After all, as it is told, they should be suspicious, since it is their fandom and love that drove the creator to his future darkness.

While perhaps The Stanley Parable was a bit of good smart fun that skewered the tropes of first person shooter video games with devious Monty Python-like aplomb, players and critics seem to suspect that Beginner’s Guide is akin to one of the many chess openings your overly-clever friend in junior high learned from a musty book and then used to beat you over and over until you found some other friends to play Dungeons & Dragons with. An opening planned from the beginning of Stanley Parable, to trap… beginners.

Aside from the reviews by the video game press which pen the game as, “neurotoxin for critics,” or, “the only way to win is not to play,” the building suspicion that the game is a trap is foregrounded right in the overly ironic name. I mean, why would you trust any sort of “Beginner’s Guide” from the person who made The Stanley Parable, a game that took vast glee in undermining as many of the player’s fundamental expectations as possible?

Based on the conversations I’ve had and articles I’ve read, the assumption seems to be that The Beginner’s Guide is a trap laid with the bait of the broad success of The Stanley Parable. I mean, the date demarcated for the final fictional game presented in Beginner’s Guide is the same date The Stanley Parable was released. How nice and neat is that for any critic or any player?

Obvious.

Like a trap.

But while The Beginner’s Guide certainly feels like a trap there are many other social models we have that we should also use to see if they fit the bluster of The Beginner’s Guide: For instance, magicians who do a card trick with too much setup. Or maybe it’s more like a band that talks too much during their set breaks. Or someone that explains their own joke before telling it. These are all mannerisms designed to hide insecurity and manage expectations.

In the Internet Age, there is a deep tendency to overuse these artistic buffers under aegis of kitsch and irony, but with a misunderstanding of the radical potential of those terms seemingly born of Alanis Morrisette’s classic song and an un-ironic love of Family Guy’s comedy-as-oneupmanship. When you are worried that the audience might not be into your magic/music/art/game, why not adopt an ironic, but ultimately highly defensive tactical shift that effectively moves the conversational point away from the work with a wink-and-a-nudge?

So what is actually going on here with The Beginner’s Guide? Do we have any clues as to if the game is a trap or not; if it is an earnest or ironic trap; if it is a naive or sophisticated trap; if it is intentional or not? How would we determine these parameters; and most critically why does it seem like most of us are predisposed to make a very narrow set of assumptions about these parameters once we have experienced our first playthrough of the game?

If the game is a trap, or even some sort of milder prank, there would have to be some sort of reasonable harm threatened, and at least an outside chance of something foul happening. What kind of trap, if any, are we dealing with here?

The most obvious case for a meta and ironic video game like this would be that we would be tricked into expressing an opinion that would embarrass us with our friends. One similar tactic I’ve seen throughout my life as a music fan is in the guise of the overly-ironic friend that makes up band names and asks people if they have heard of them, pontificating “they’re so great!” with a wink. Nothing like a little emotional shell game to negate some anxiously imagined onslaught of criticism that would come with actually engaging with other people.

But given the overly literal linkage between The Stanley Parable’s release date, the deluge of high-school macho-ist Fight Club versions of suffering artist, and all of the banal slurry of metaphors of creation unleashed at us, it seems like that trap never springs. After all, as I noted earlier, the first question everyone seems to ask in a conversation about The Beginner’s Guide is nicely historically rooted, “So did you play The Stanley Parable?”

Maybe the trap is to waste our time with something meaningless? But that two-ish hours I spent with The Beginner’s Guide doesn’t bother me nearly enough to feel deliberate when I’m yet again suckered into playing what must be my 1,000th game of League of Legends. Not even within a couple orders of magnitude of wasted time. Besides, most folks, including myself, seem to have found a few interesting moments in the game. So the stakes are too low for this to really matter, especially given the vast scope to which Wreden and his team were willing to play with the “Art Ending” in The Stanley Parable, which is achieved by pushing a single button for four hours straight.

Maybe this game is not really a trap, but just self-insertion fan fiction

I suppose a variant of this trap is that we would be suckered in to giving him money for something we assumed would be meaningful because of our preconceptions and then it wasn’t worth the money. This seems the most likely trap so far, but making the game took a whole lot of time and money, so it would have to be a really long con which, as noted above, goes against the game’s overall scale and sales model. Besides, making worthless art is pretty much impossible in the age of Youtube and Tumblr, since any random bit of detritus we find drifting around the world can be reworked, remixed, and reused in interesting ways.

Maybe the trap is being exposed to an opinion we normally don’t hear. But the various models of art and games in The Beginner’s Guide are pretty much the dominant pop-cultural stories about struggle, the creative process, and the moral perils of success and fame that we’d read about on The Huffington Post: A young dude, now wealthy, struggles with the way a vastly larger audience than intended responds to his work, has to deal with the emotional fallout, and makes an observation that fans tend to assume they know him. That’s not really a trap, that’s just self-insertion fan fiction.

Maybe the trap is more naively literary, where we’re supposed to really, earnestly, trust the narrator. But while the highly amateur performance of the voice-over might lead us to think this is a possibility at first initially, the game repeatedly shows us how unreliable and unknowable the narrator and his curated world is. It is clear within a few minutes that we’re not meant to trust this person, nor his opinions, nor to envision that anything within the game is as what it claims to be, which gives the audience almost unlimited license for interpretation and criticism. Yes, that means doing and thinking the opposite of what the fictionalized pseudo-Wreden instructs us, but from within the story, that seems like a perfectly reasonable, and in fact probably the most common, response to such a character.

Upon exploring all of these possibilities, it seems clear that whatever is happening, our perception that the game is a trap has nothing to do with its ability to do us harm. We aren’t Futurama robots whose heads will explode after hearing a paradox. We can always quit playing. It’s not a virus that deletes our hard drive if we quit. It is clear, and if anything a bit too naive, about its reference points in art and culture.

Our initial predilection to view The Beginner’s Guide as a trap is because so many of elements of the game seems to be behaving in a selfish, defensive, ahistorical, and antisocial way. Which denies our personal experiences, denies conversation, and as such denies our role as viewers/players.

I know that might seem like a bit of a jump, so let me use an analogy: We don’t perceive arguing with someone about the moon landing being faked as a trap because it might trick us into suddenly believing the conspiracy. We perceive it to be a trap because the conspiracy theorist isn’t willing to engage with any reality outside of themselves. It is not a trap because we waste our time arguing (after all, we often argue about the same old shit with our long-time friends) but because we quickly realize that the mental and conversational model of the moon-landing-denier is built exclusively and selfishly around themselves as a god-king arbiter of reality. It is a trap because if we chose to engage with their phony logic systems, we are necessarily devaluing ourselves and placing ourselves in a subservient relationship to an egoist.

Specifically, the phony logic systems of the The Beginner’s Guide are its models of art and creation. Whether stated or implied, whether ironic or earnest, all of its versions of “the artist” and “criticism” and “creativity” and “the individual” are pretty much tethered to a pre-modernist sensibility couched in dramatized art-cliches stolen from Hollywood movies, urban fantasy novels, video games, and anime. Any mention of other ideas, models, or approaches, academic or personal, artistic or social, are dismissed as being part of the conspiracy.

The Beginners Guide demonstrates only the most rudimentary and rigid vision of the relationship between art and life.

The Beginner’s Guide is so suspicious because while it blusters naively about complexity and unknowability, it at the same time demonstrates only the most rudimentary and rigid vision of the relationship between art and life. The game seems to be built on the premise that the audience will never be able to grasp the deep arcane secret that the David Bowie we see in Labyrinth both is and isn’t himself. He is both his stage persona and acting as the Goblin King at the same time.

In this way, the trap we intuit is not aimed at us-the-audience, but it is the inevitability of the game getting caught in its own logic trap, convinced to the heavens that it is the first to notice and run through the wringer these curious tensions between art, artists, celebrity, society, money, and audience. Without any desire to engage with anything outside of itself the game is left with but one option - to position art production as a form of martyrdom.

This is a game that has become trapped through making a virtue of its artistic isolationism. Not only does the The Beginner’s Guide seem to flaunt its dismissal of the audience’s savviness, it frames this break from isolation as a wearily needed excursion to explain to us our [art] sins and to take up the mantle of [creative] martyrdom for our sake. It is nothing less than a form of art colonialism. In fact, the internal logic of the game seems to naively imply that knowing or exploring ideas developed by other people, whether players or artists, whether audiences or critics, is a honied trap that lures an artist away from a life lived in true purity. Like sex to a saint, this predictably leaves us-the-audience as the ultimate sinful trap for a creator. Art, in The Beginner’s Guide, is framed as inherently pathological.

Part 2, 3 & 4 of this essay can be found here.Also, check out VGT's other English Features

Kommentare

himbeerschlund Do. 13 Okt 2016 - 01:14 Permalink

Outstanding Labyrith/Bowie

Outstanding Labyrith/Bowie reference. I litarlly did not see it comming. Nice one. Wreden deliberately taking on both sides, so we may fall for his work as much as he falls for coda's. Gap/Trap... The beginner's guide left me mostly speechless and again, I'm in awe. I don't know if it's internal logic is binary like perception or intention, the artist and audience relationship being a purly pathological one. But I know how traps work. Once you're in, you're doomed.

Bridging Worlds: Workified Games IV

Eron Rauch — Tue, 19 Apr 2016 08:09:52 +0000

Bridging Worlds: Workified Games IV

Eron Rauch Di. 19 Apr 2016 - 10:09

Part 4: The Garden Of Digital Delights

In past installments of Workified Games I’ve looked at ways that video games, their fans, and their creators have been inundated by workaholic tendencies. In part three, I proposed that leisure could be a new ideal that could help inspire us escape the mire of workification. But lest this sound like an outsider being preachy and this series get pegged as some sort of partisan argument, I want to acknowledge that much of what I’ve been saying has been and remains part of video game fan folk wisdom across genres and communities. After all, what Animal Crossing player hasn’t cursed out Tom Nook at some point for being a loan shark/raccoon? What WoW player hasn’t grumbled about doing endless dailies to earn reputation? What Final Fantasy 8 player didn’t grumble about the bullshit way dungeon speed equates to gold earned? What young Minecraft player hasn’t been frustrated by having to burn a huge amount of time searching ever deeper for a rare material to build their whimsical castle? What Destiny player hasn’t griped about the other people on repetitious runs being like abusive coworkers?

Even more importantly, I would also argue that the reason many of the video games I’ve been using as examples of workaholic tendencies are also beloved by fans is because they also contain vast swathes of leisure-oriented time. World of Warcraft is an excellent example of this dichotomy. Despite WoW’s attempt to reduce the grind, there are still many mindless repetitious tasks to do as play, from trying to earn reputation, to levelling alts, to waiting for item drops, to completing ubiquitous achievements. But a significant portion of what has kept so many of my friends engaged with WoW over the years is the large amount of time left for hanging out with friends, both real and virtual, in weird and wonderful fantasy towns; playing dress up and dancing; racing dragons over the desert; taking curious screenshots of beautiful vistas; and visiting old haunts (figuratively and also literally beating up ghosts). Even in high-end raiding, there are huge swaths of down time spent chatting, sightseeing, and playing pranks, not to mention the after-raid beers and story sessions.

Through past instalments, I’ve made it clear that a large part of this obsession with work and efficiency in video games is a seepage of the ferocious rise of workaholism and efficiency culture of American life and the tech industry. But it also should be observed that part of the fans’ and designers’ obsession with rationalist work systems is very likely a conscious defensive measure to prove the worth of video games to a skeptical public. After all, for how many decades have video games been harangued and belabored by politicians and morally judgmental do-gooders as a vast “waste of time?” What better way than to dodge that massive, culturally loaded, criticism than to highlight the aspects of gaming that are measurable and work-like? Though my argument might, like leisure itself, be dismissed as frivolous, to rephrase it in a way that might interest investors, creators, fans, and advertisers alike: what I’m suggesting is that pre-restricting the market to only people who want to be part of a workaholic system, both as creators and players, is vastly limiting the potential size of both fandom and the industry.

Restricting the market to only people who want to be part of a workaholic system, both as creators and players, is vastly limiting the potential size of both fandom and the industry.

To take a fresh spin on the insightful article “In Praise of Lando” by Julian Murdoch, part of my interest in workification’s limited narratives is rooted in the way that as we grow older our values and priorities invariably shift. Like a large portion of players, such as my gaming group, who still want to play but invariably buy fewer video games than we did when we were younger, a sizable portion of this decline might very well be attributed to our disinterest in games that replicate what we do in the rest of our time. That is, the kinds of games we find valuable and interesting have changed as our careers, relationships, hobbies, and even children have grown to prominence in our lives.

Simply put, many of my friends won’t play, meaning buy, games that have any grind or that feel in any significant way like the very work that keeps them away from their passions and families. Increasingly those whimsical, magical, and breathtaking experiences we found in video games are being reduced to one more cubicle desk, retail floor, or factory line. As such, this essay is a call for fans, marketers, investors, and developers to remember that leisure spaces, leisure systems, and leisure goals are as equally real to the experience of work in video games and are also equally part of the history of the games we loved. While efficiency experts want to “gamify work” to get their companies to be more profitable, we as fans and creators are working against the very thing we love, against the very moments that made us fans of video games, if we continue to “workify games.”

A counter argument for my observations about workified games might be that common leisure pastimes such as gardening or cooking a meal for friends could also be mistakenly viewed as “work-like” under my paradigm. In fact, thinkers like Kucklich have developed ideas such as “playbour” to talk about the kinds of work-like activities we increasingly do for fun. But, as the very need to generate a new term to separate playbour from labour implies, while there certainly is some work involved in planting some tomatoes in a garden or cooking pasta for friends those ideas are radically different in intent than the notions of monetized labor practiced by a field hand picking many tons of tomatoes or by the line cook making hundreds of plates of pasta at Applebee’s.

To reintegrate the term “play,” a word so critical to many theories of video games that I have danced around for more of the essay, philosopher David Steindl-Rast suggests, “Are the two poles of activity really work and leisure? If this were so, how could we speak of leisurely work? It would be a blatant contradiction. We know, however, that working leisurely is no contradiction at all. In fact, work ought to be done with leisure, if it is to be done well. What then is the opposite of work? It is play. These are the two poles of activity: work and play.” Because we’re paying attention and spending the exact amount of time needed to accomplish the work, most of us actually do our best work when we are doing it with a leisurely attitude.

It is not work and leisure that are opposites, it is workaholism and leisure that are opposed.

Indeed, it is not work and leisure that are opposites, it is workaholism and leisure that are opposed. Indeed, as anyone who has ever gardened or cooked can attest to, one can assuredly work in a leisurely way. In fact, even though I’ve named Animal Crossing as a game that can feel workified, there are also many moments, such as fishing in the rain in the early evening, that evoke an idyllic beauty born of the small poetry of daily work. Albeit, crutching on some similar pastoral tropes, Stardew Valley’s pacing also shows how experiencing work can also be leisurely when presented in a way that has freedom from efficiency mandated grind.

The example of cooking can be used to clarify just how different feeling the same task can be when executed as a workaholic enmeshed in a system of exploitive labor or approached as leisure work. In a workaholic video game mode, your cooking experience might be hunting and killing hundreds of deer in World of Warcraft hoping to get the drops to make dozens and dozens of the same pots of deer stew so that one can level-up cooking to get an achievement or be high enough level to be allowed to make the food correct buff for a raid. In this way, WoW is much like working the line in a restaurant, where cooking is about completing task-oriented goals, set by a boss who represents a corporation, in the most efficient way possible so that something specific can be received for the time and labor loaned to the system.

Contrast that to leisurely cooking for your friends. Here the goal and the reward are the same, with the specific way you spend your time being set based on your own parameters (I’m making dinner; come at 8PM and bring wine). Sure, you might not have complete control since a friend might be like me and allergic to avocado, or you might get stuck at work later and need to have your friends help you make the food. Hell, you might burn the roast and have to order take-out. But like the combination of pathos and hilarity at watching a colony in Dwarf Fortress go up in flames because of a mad god running rampage, that very embrace of the fun and folly of human-ness is why leisure is such critical ideal to helping us understand our friends and our community in a more complete, intimate, and present way.

To return to David Steindl-Rast’s assertion that, “These are the two poles of activity: work and play,” this close relationship is also why video games that use play to consciously examine work can be so potent. Precisely by directly engaging in our dysfunctional obsession with work and progress, games like Cart Life, Office Simulator 95, or Papers Please, all of which are certainly not exactly “fun” in a traditional way, are so brutally effective as art because they lay bare the way work can dehumanize us. They also ask us as players to be aware of how easily we can become complicit in our own obsession with work as a marker of success. This should be a reminder, like the often dark hints in children’s playground games and fairy tales, that leisure is not always unbridled optimism, but an opening to a broader vision of the world.

Crucially the “busywork” and “grind” in games like Papers, Please is radically different than leveling a crafting profession in an MMO because it overtly teaches us how we can easily fall prey to the work-systems that exploit us. When you get a commendation from the central government in Papers, Please it is always fraught with meta-critical irony and criticism about what these awards for doing good work might actually mean. These types of games about the fetishization of work are also different in their expectation and respect for players’ time since they also do not demand nor congratulate us for spending vast swaths of our time with them. Most can be fully played and understood in a matter of hours, if not significantly less. They are work laid bare. Papers, Please and so many other DIY, alternative, and art games, encourage us toward a more complicated and interconnected understanding of how we exist in the world. They encourage us to be more present, which is to say, to break apart the linkage between busywork and status, which is precisely to be more leisure-oriented.

Indeed, two of the most effective indictments of the linkage of video gaming and work come from games themselves. In Unmanned, there is this intense moment of existential unease the first time a player comes home from piloting a drone and unwinds by playing a military themed video game. In a similar but broader way, it is crucial to understand that one of the overarching structural conceits of The Stanley Parable is that it is mis-applying First Person Shooter systems, controls, and exceptions, to an office environment. These video games are not without their legions of detractors, so it is critical to understand that, like telling a workaholic that “work isn’t everything,” merely by advocating for art and alt games that are oriented around leisure, presence, and criticizing achievements as progress, these works can be easily misconstrued as an assault on their values.

With workification comes all of the stress, anger, disregard for personal relationships, lack of paying attention, and xenophobia that is entailed by any sort of stress state.

In Austin C Howe’s fantastic article reassessing the much-maligned Breath of Fire: Dragon Quarter, he pinpoints the communities longstanding hatred of the game as coming from the ways it constructs a world of powerlessness, poverty, and replicating the conditions of shift work. “It is consciously built to work against gamers’ expectations of the genre, and most of its design decisions prevent gamers from playing D1/4 (Dragon Quarter) the way they play any other JRPG.” This is not to equivocate, or to say that we should ever tolerate abusive or harassing behavior, but rather that from within the oft-progressively skewed community of artists and critics, it can be easy to forget just how radical and disruptive proposing such a de-linkage of work-progress and value can be. Hell, even within the more progressive elements of art and cultural work workaholism runs rife. Ask any artist or grad student when the last time they got more than 5 or 6 hours of sleep was! So it is always important to remind all audiences what Nabokov said, which should ring equally true for any fan cultural theory or of Final Fantasy VII, that “Texts we care about will both resist and reward us; not necessarily in that order.”

In ending, to borrow a phrase from Maria Popova, curator at of the philosophy blog Brain Pickings, right now it feels as though many mainstream video games are on a “productivity-guised flight from presence.” The combination of a focus on grinding productivity, flow, the value of efficiency, granular task-oriented structures, the constant inhabitation of job roles, and the hyper-focus on external achievements basically positions video game players as workaholics. With this workification comes all of the stress, anger, disregard for personal relationships, lack of paying attention, and xenophobia that is entailed by any sort of stress state. The work-obsessed mentality at the heart of so many video games is constraining our imagination for the kinds of games we make, the communities around them, the characters we imagine to inhabit the worlds, and even our ability to enjoy the games we play, because workaholism insidiously flattens everything to an endless loop of work and progress.

Workaholism insidiously flattens everything to an endless loop of work and progress.

If we, as creators, investors, and fans, continue down the road we are on, video games will be just one more increasingly limited part of an economically focused system that wants to turn us all in to mechanical turks that pay to work our jobs. But if we can find a way to infuse leisure into our video game experiences, to remember to leave space to be present, we will be able pay better attention to the video games we play and to more completely cherish our experiences with them, both good and bad, both work and play. It is only through leisure and play that video games are able fully inhabit their role as a core part of what makes us human, of what inspires us, and of what teaches us about ourselves. Through leisure, video games can let go of the cycle of endless grinding achievement and be a force to help us appreciate each other more, help us understand ourselves more completely, and of what lets us see the world as a richer and more interesting place. After all, as Kierkegaard said so simply, “Of all ridiculous things the most ridiculous seems to me, to be busy.”

Extra special thanks to Zoya Street for the prompt to put my thoughts together on this series. Thanks as always to Rainer for being a home for my weird thoughts on video games and culture. Callie is once again a brilliant copy editor and makes sure you all can make sense of my ideas. Thanks to Alec, Sam, and Jason for informally talking through this with me, even if you don’t at all agree with me. Thanks to Han and Travis for helping out gathering screenshots to illustrate the series.

Links to the previous installments of "Workified Games":
Part 1
Part 2
Part 3

Bridging Worlds: Workified Games III

Eron Rauch — Mon, 18 Apr 2016 08:10:42 +0000

Bridging Worlds: Workified Games III

Eron Rauch Mo. 18 Apr 2016 - 10:10

Bridging Worlds is artist Eron Rauch’s ongoing series of in-depth articles on the curious places of connection between video games, contemporary art, and culture. This is part three of four of a long-form essay on workification.

Part 3: A Celebrating Spirit

The last installment of Workified Games explored how the tendencies to fetishize work in video games overlap deeply with definitions of workaholism. I also talked about how the moral mandate to be constantly productive permeates contemporary Western society, especially the technology sector. But what then precisely is the problem with video games’ focus on work? What is lost because of this obsession with accomplishment? After all, unless you’re of the radical anarchist mindset of Bob Black’s infamous call for “full unemployment,” most people, myself included, find doing a good job at work deeply fulfilling.

The increasingly common task-driven, perma-grind structures in video games are different though because they are not interested in any notion of “end” or “fulfillment”. Embedded in these workaholic strictures is an insidious way of thinking that implies that since doing a good job is fulfilling, then ever-more work is ever-more fulfilling. Instead of work as a part of our life, workification colonizes and distorts every other aspect of life to its limited palate. For a common example, many of us have been on vacation with someone fixated on trying to see everything listed in a travel guide checklist for that destination. In the frantic rush to earn 100% completion on the vacation achievement, that person makes it so that by the time the flight home lands everyone on the trip feels like they need a vacation from the supposed vacation!

Though free time is constituted as wasteful in the American workaholic mindset, and work is conversely lauded, the great philosopher Camus sharply observed, “Life is short, and it is sinful to waste one’s time… But being active is still wasting one’s time, if in doing one loses oneself.” The increasingly workaholic formulation of video games and flow is exactly this sort of “active wasting.” That is, as both creators and players grow more acclimated to this cycle of workification, it has begun to limit the other ways we can imagine interacting with games. Gaming comes to be synonymous with tuning out through doing efficient, mindless, work. Gaming is grinding. Play is confused with achievement.

While my initial observation about being burnt out on working in games was focused on my small group of dedicated video gaming friends, this creeping association with gaming as work matters so much because of just how much of society now plays video games. According to a number of new surveys, about 20% of Americans identify as game fans, but over 50% of Americans now regularly play games (with this number rising quickly with the explosion of smart phones and tablets). As artist Arjuna Newman pointed out, “The culture of today instructs the experience of tomorrow.” Which, in the simplest terms, means that a majority of Americans are being conditioned to inhabit and even desire workaholic video game design and play values.

Having devised a somewhat dark theory of the self-replicating workaholic system in video games, is there any alternative path forward? Is there anything we can strive for against this rising tide of workification? From the midst of this digitally-rendered vortex, if you are anything like me, it can be difficult to even imagine an alternative. Perhaps a good place to start would be looking for a word that we could put forward as a counter-ideal to “workaholic.” A word that, looking at all of the negative attributes of workaholism that I have previously listed, would mean: presence, involvement, tuning-in, beauty, an appreciation of play, openness, compassion, and a simple capacity for paying attention to what is immediately all around. We are looking for a term that suggests a refusal to mistakenly identify one’s self with the products of mindless activity. The term would need to also embrace the myriad of diverse ways that people can exist in, experience, and value the world. In a way, we’re searching for a word that is also the opposite of “efficiency.”

To digress for one moment, it is critical to note that while what I’m saying might seem purely like an attack, I am actually very concerned for what workification is doing to our collective capacity to appreciate the very things our hobby is built around: the video games themselves. Treating all video games as efficient work disrespects and drains ourselves, which I’ve shown at length, but it also leads to an idealization of ways of interacting with games that is very limited. A great example of this disrespect happened when I first started playing Guild Wars 2. I came to the game rather late, but it was with friends who had extensively played the original game and the sequel since beta testing. Muddling through the first zone after the tutorial, I was confused when I saw a large mass of players, including obviously high level characters in typical MMO glowing-spiked-winged-giant-sword-end-game regalia, looping again and again through the same five mini-boss events. My friends told me that repeating this circle was by far the most efficient way to level up and gather resources. Even for the most powerful players, any other way would double or triple the time needed to gain resources.

Treating all video games as efficient work disrespects and drains ourselves, but it also leads to an idealization of very limited ways of interacting with games.

My friends quite practically suggested the best way to do these loops in Guild Wars 2 was watching TV in a second monitor, pausing the TV only to dump the various bits of loot dropped on the auction house. I was appalled since all around us I could see endless magnificent vistas, sprawling towns, and shimmering NPCs loaded with floral language to explore. This was basically the starting zone, after all. But while all around there was a painstakingly created world, it was completely ignored by even its most dedicated fans. This would be like if the hobbits spent the second two Lord of The Rings books back in the Shire just avoiding the black riders and going to Bilbo’s party every night!

In a long interview about the struggle of making art in contemporary American society, Ann Hamilton insightfully commented on workaholic mindsets in an interview on the podcast On Being, “it seems like this whole efficiency thing… doesn’t work very well, because in fact, there’s this thinking that’s always going on inside the thing that you’re engaged with and, you’re not really having the experience if you’re rushing off to the next thing, right? So, even when you’re really, really compressed for time, how do you cultivate just being in the time you have at that moment?” We need to play and appreciate games for what they are, not just what comes next.

To return to my initial question of what word, what value, we might be able to propose as a new ideal to replace work, Josef Pieper, a German sociologist, wrote a book that seems to suggest an elegant word for the opposite of these workaholic game tendencies: leisure. This book is titled Leisure, the Basis of Culture, and came to my attention through the Brain Pickings blog. To quote at length,

“Against the exclusiveness of the paradigm of work as effort, leisure is the condition of considering things in a celebrating spirit. The inner joyfulness of the person who is celebrating belongs to the very core of what we mean by leisure… Leisure is only possible in the assumption that man is not only in harmony with himself … but also he is in agreement with the world and its meaning. Leisure lives on affirmation. It is not the same as the absence of activity; it is not the same thing as quiet, or even as an inner quiet. It is rather like the stillness in the conversation of lovers, which is fed by their oneness.”

What better mindset could a fan of any art form have toward their passion than “considering things in a celebrating spirit”? Yet my gaming group could not have been further from this noble ideal then when we were completely exhausted, but still grinding away to complete tasks we hated late in to the night.

Though, or rather precisely because, work is so lauded in American life, leisure is conversely derided and dismissed as wasteful or for those without ambition. But David Steindl-Rast, a Benedictine monk who has dedicated his writing to exploring interfaith dialog and science, points out that “Leisure … is not the privilege of those who can afford to take time; it is the virtue of those who give to everything they do the time it deserves to take.” Leisure is about reclaiming the individual ability and agency to determine priorities and values. Rather than being rushed to finish one assigned task as fast as possible and then rushing to another task as quickly as possible, leisure differs from workaholism because it revels in the journey. It revels in the value of a simultaneous multitude of options for doing, not doing, watching, participating, resting, or exerting. Workaholism is an attempt to artificially attach our sense of self worth with some external structure of achievements. Leisure is an attempt to remember and discover who we are and how we connect in to the vastness of the world.

Maybe it is the workaholic video game structures that are helping encourage the behaviors of abusiveness that underlie so many video games communities.

If developing a leisure oriented-outlook on video games seems frivolous, perhaps it would be practical to consider how workaholism might well be impacting one of the biggest issues in video game design and fandom: how to deal with the rash of antisocial misbehavior and abuse by (mostly male) community members and players that drive vast amounts of potential new players (and hence purchasers) away from video games. As an example, Riot Games, maker of League of Legends, like every other major company producing multiplayer online games has spent countless millions of dollars and tens of thousands of work-hours trying to solve this issue. But what if it is the workaholic video game structures that the companies themselves are enacting and designing that are helping encourage the behaviors of abusiveness and constant simmering anger that underlies so many video games communities?

This linkage between workified games and antisocial behavior might seem odd at first, but as Klinger points out, to a workaholic, “Eventually, nothing or no one else really matters,” once the workaholism takes over. To reiterate Evenden’s observation about the ways games affect their life-long players, “habituation to play actually changes you.“ So if workaholic behavior usually leads to what Klinger describes as, “growing internal chaos [which] causes them [the workaholic] to try to control every action, and everyone around them,” it is a small jump to start to see these abusive antisocial selfish behaviors as a product of the video games’ values themselves. These domineering and antisocial attitudes are then compounded by the fact that workaholic behaviors are associated as positive traits in traditional definitions of masculinity.

Additionally, as researcher Robert M Sapolsky notes, stress is an inevitable product of mindlessness, overwork, sleep deprivation, and being in the midst of constant aggression. Workaholic behaviors, and their idealization, then contributes to rising stress, which itself has also been clearly linked to a reduction in empathy. “Stress literally and metaphorically narrows our field of vision; it tends to makes us less generous and cooperative in economic games, more xenophobic, more likely to interpret ambiguous expressions as hostile ones, and more likely to displace frustration and aggression onto those around us. As this new study on the biology of stress found, it also makes us less likely to feel someone else’s pain.”

It is quite possible to see this emotional desolation and limited empathy not just amongst community members, harried and tasked to their limit, but in the end-products of the infinite crunch and ruthless focus on metrics enshrouded in the video game production companies themselves. Lana Polansky links ideals and end-product in “Against Flow” since, “Flow works both as the desired affective experience for most games, as well as an aesthetic container.“ Is it anything but unsurprising that the most important aspects of life, friendship, love, connection to community, and authentically realized diversity (both of points of view and representation) are so barren when video game fans and creators have become subsumed by equating work as progress, measurable metrics as success, and an infinite achievement loop as the end goal?

One only has to look at the reputation systems in Mass Effect, Dragon Age, or Final Fantasy, to see how poorly the achievement- and efficiency-focused ways of interacting with the world are able to explore one of the biggest, most important, issues in human life. The stories themselves often glorify friendship, wax poetic about romance, and extol the bond of communities. But then immediately reduce them to rationalist systematic interaction with outcomes that have success guaranteed for work done. Especially in the recent trend to add “dating systems,” workified games can make relationships resemble most closely the actions of pickup artists, itself another group which has insidiously valorized efficiency and achievement as end-goals to be celebrated above all else (and eerily they call their actions “the game.”)

The ways that stress and workaholism reduce anyone’s capacity to view the world through the eyes of others might also at least partially explain the lack of video games which feature people of different genders, ethnicities, socio-economic backgrounds, body types, and other artistic and narrative richness. By being immersed in a constant state of workaholism and stress, then idealizing it, both video game fans and creators are accidentally building “video games” as a social space that is every-more battered from a maelstrom of an all pervasive “status anxiety” (to use Allan Debertuos’ wonderful formulation). Without leisure as a core value in video games, without understanding there is value outside of the grind of dealing with constant stress, and without freedom from demands from constant efficiency, video games workify, and become precariously close to embracing the very xenophobia born of this unhealthy obsession with work as status. Advocating for leisure as a core value becomes a way to combat these tendencies, to open up the possibility to have and appreciate more nuanced and diverse conversations.

This is precisely why games which seem to relish in leisure can seem so radical and controversial to some of the core fans who currently make up the target (workified) demographic for AAA video game marketers. Just think about how many complaints are leveled against games like Proteus, The Gathering Sky, and Gone Home for having no point. Personally, I always thought that I didn’t understand this knee-jerk reaction against leisure in art, against space, against the pastoral, and against the ambient. In fact, I’ve been publicly deeply dismissive of such criticisms. But in writing this article, I realized I do have a very concrete way to comprehend this phenomenon. At a very personal level, while it is embarrassing to admit, I almost always have a panic attack the first night I go on vacation. Living in a near-workaholic mode, in a workaholic city, suddenly being unplugged, unstructured, and so-called unproductive, those first moments I am left with just myself, standing in the midst of a world without any metrics, I freak out.

Alt games, indie games, art games, walking simulators, digital toys, interactive stories, and the whole spectrum of other sorts of video games, often seem combative and disorienting to people trained on workaholic games because they are spaces that, however briefly, arrest the workaholic structures that artificially or not, have given players a clear armature for their sense of self-worth. But while these positions come from a knee-jerk reaction, it is instructive to note that after my first day of panic on vacation, the world does not end. In fact, I not only calm down, but in fact come to feel more like myself, more in control of my thoughts, desires, and body.

Leisure reminds us that self-worth, and our love of video games, shouldn’t be built on getting a gold border for accomplishing some task 15 times.

Similarly, an orientation around leisure in video games, even if challenging or unfriendly at first, is so valuable because it reminds us the very things which makes life interesting, meaningful, beautiful, poignant, and strange are almost never able to be entered in a spreadsheet or compartmentalized into a series of five minute tasks. Leisure reminds us that self-worth, and our love of video games, shouldn’t be built on getting a gold border for accomplishing some task 15 times. To end by returning to Josef Pieper, what better mindset could video game creators and fans try to encourage to combat the hostility and selfishness which has plagued the scene in recent years than a new focus on leisure which is, “…not of someone who seizes but of one who lets go.”

For the final installment of Workified Games, the series will examine some of the complex, and surprisingly friendly, relationships between work and play.

Kommentare

himbeerschlund Di. 19 Apr 2016 - 20:16 Permalink

Der Text fährt zwischen 4.

Der Text fährt zwischen 4. und 5. Absatz eine copy-/paste- Schleife.

"While my initial observation... design and play values."

Christof Zurschmitten Mi. 20 Apr 2016 - 06:50 Permalink

Danke für den Hinweis, ist

Danke für den Hinweis, ist korrigiert.

Bridging Worlds: Workified Games II

Eron Rauch — Thu, 14 Apr 2016 11:32:44 +0000

Bridging Worlds: Workified Games II

Eron Rauch Do. 14 Apr 2016 - 13:32

Part 2: The Grind Has Become The Feature

In the previous installment of this series I charted how video games have become entangled and infatuated with work. It might be easy to explain these predilections simply because work is a major part of many peoples’ lives. Or inversely this work-obsession could be video games striving to provide rational rewards as an antidote for lack of control at our day jobs. Similarly, not all games break when you try to approach them with exceptional or novel ways of playing (the now-infamous solo eggplant run in Spelunky being a fantastic example ). Still it remains the case that a large majority of games are obsessed with replicating work roles, structures, and attitudes.

Games’ obsession with work matters a great deal because as Michael Evenden pointed out so eloquently in his recent essay about what he has learned by coming to video games later in life: “if playing these games feels natural, it’s an acquired nature… because habituation to play actually changes you. In particular, you become desensitized to some elements of the game fictions and highly sensitive to others, including the rewards and energetic stimulations of play. You become crafty at the kinds of problems games put forward; it comes to affect your rhythms, your imagination, your way of processing things.“ (Emphasis mine.)

In returning to Zizek’s Plague of Fantasies, he takes things even further and suggests that, “A fantasy constitutes our desire, provides its coordinates; that is, it literally ‘teaches us how to desire.’” As video game players, many of us spend all day at work (or school, which trains us for work) then come home to spend the evenings exploring sophisticated worlds that are obsessed with replicating work structures and goals. With the collective fantasies of video game fans so populated with work, what are we players being taught to desire?

Before we continue, it is important to note that this habituation and desire for the trappings of work, grind, and efficiency is not an abstract force. Even in the biggest markets, this desire produces very real effects. Overwatch, possibly one of the most anticipated games of 2016, which is produced by one of the most successful video game companies in the world, Activision Blizzard, recently shut down their beta test for extensive revisions. Alongside the typical polishing that happens before publicly launching a game, a large part of the stated reason for the hiatus was because the beta testers overwhelmingly clamored for some sort of “progression” system that gave rewards for playing more. Blizzard had already firmly stated that the game would never have purchasable characters or in-game items like traditional MOBAs, so this added “progression” element will not affect the actual gameplay in any way. That is, the dedicated video game fans that inevitably make up a beta test audience demanded to have a system added that gave them superficial achievements based directly on spending more time in the game and completing more arbitrary metrics! The grind has become the desired feature.

Is there a word for the obsession with the grind? Is there a term that describes manically moving from task to task, with an unending desire for measurable status achievements through work? As I said in the first part of the series, I definitely work too much. In fact, if I’m not careful I don’t just do too much work, but I also talk about work too much, I orient my life around work, and even think about work while I’m not doing work. Lately I’ve doing some reading trying to parse some of my own bad work habits. Reading about how to have a healthier relationship to work and play is one way I try to keep these tendencies under control. One day, I came across a passage which not only seemed to perfectly describe that moment of exhaustion my gaming group felt at being asked to spend increasingly more time grinding for slightly better magic boots, but also many of the other work-like ways fans now interact with video games:

“These driven men and women live a Gerbil-wheel, adrenalin-pumping existence rushing from plan A to B, narrowly-fixated on some ambitious goal or accomplishment. Eventually, nothing or no one else really matters. They are obsessed with their work performance and hooked on an adrenalin-high. Bent on self-aggrandizement, these ego-driven folks reach one goal, and immediately set another more ambitious one. Staying at the same level of accomplishment is considered a failure.”

Workaholism is not an obsession with money, or even the sheer number of hours worked, but it is a fixation on the direct relationship between work and achievement.

This was not some article I stumbled across on some philosophically oriented video game theory site such as Critical Distance or Offworld, but a summation of work written in the popular magazine Psychology Today by Barbara Klinger, PhD, describing her seminal research on workaholics. Her research shows that workaholism is not an obsession with money, or even the sheer number of hours worked, but it is a fixation on the direct relationship between work and achievement. A desire for one to directly leads to more of the other. It was eerie to see the grind, achievements, stickiness, freemium, and the whole complex of work-obsessed games summed up so succinctly in the description of a common psychological problem.

But where might these workaholic tendencies embedded deep in video games and the surrounding fandom have come from? When pressured, most commercial game companies fall back to claiming they merely produce what video game purchasers want and the previous example from Overwatch is certainly one of those cases. But it isn’t fair to blame all of this on the vagrancies of video game fans. In the essay “The Eroticism of Uselessness” Lana Polansky points out that this facet of gaming culture is part of a much broader trend in Western culture. “We’re conditioned to valorize unnecessary labour in real life and that comes back to bite us in games, which are often plagued by what feel like needless, often boring, make-work tasks that artificially lengthen time spent playing.”

In this way, the video game industry is part of the much larger tech industry, which is notorious for putting their workers through permanent “crunch,” which is work weeks of 50, 60, or more hours. The video game and tech industries are notoriously for companies asking their employees to work for free at the behest of the investors. Even “good” companies have mandatory crunch during the last months of a game release, and they are considered “better” because they often have couches and break rooms for employees to sleep in at work that rather than employees sleeping on a jacket under a desk. Video game companies and the tech industry as a whole are so fixated on work that they have brought us the phenomenon of the EA spouse, which is a term for marriages that break up due to company cultures built on workaholism.

Moving up the chain of command, industry leaders, people who own many companies in many different markets, brag about how little they sleep and how much they work. The major investors that fund these leaders demand ten-times returns. They demand absolute accounted efficiency with how their money is being spent, as well as continuous growth from their investment. Even a company making good percentage increases in profits and sales year to year can have their stock prices punished by missing expectations by a few tenths of a percent in a quarter. Company leaders and advertisers demand ever more concrete metrics for every tiny advertising choice. Ultra-targeted ads on social media are increasingly the norm. Focus groups are utilized at every step of making decisions about what product to ship.

An industry which thrives in a permanent state of workaholism tends to make products that resemble their workaholic values and their work-focused lives.

Even in the seemingly creative side of the field of video game production, rational, functional, efficient tools are the norm. That is, much of “Game Design” (now often pushed to the more bureaucratic sounding desk of “Systems Designers”), which includes all the data for how items perform, how much enemies attack for, how much gold is given, etc. is done in spreadsheet systems not dissimilar from the same Microsoft Excel that any company’s accounting department uses. If the old adage “write what you know” has any credibility, is it any surprise then that an industry which thrives in a permanent state of workaholism and quantifiable achievement tends to make products that resemble their workaholic values and their work-focused lives?

Returning to Barbara Klinger’s research on workaholics, this merging of player behaviors that approach workaholism and game structures that are designed to reward workaholic tendencies leads to a very curious, and possibly troubling place. What does it mean that “crunch” is defined as working more than 50 hours a week, and an average video game fan has no trouble working 40 hours a week and then (easily, if they are anything like me) spending 10-30 additional hours playing video games that replicate work? It means that video game fans are being run through permanent crunch; that fans are basically working a part time job on top of their regular work.

Returning to the hallowed halls of video game creation, one of the most wildly popular design philosophies is called “flow.” This philosophy idealizes game creation choices which are structured so a player loses themselves into the regular rhythms of the game. This is accomplished by assigning work that is sufficiently challenging to be engaging but not so challenging as to be frustrating, in discreet small chunks, then rewarding the player for finishing each of those chunks. This pattern of accomplishment and reward triggers a biological response of dopamine. Games with good “flow” are considered ideal within the industry because those quick dopamine hits are, at least in the estimation of game publishers and marketers, what keeps players playing.

Lest you think I’m merely implying the old boogie man of “video game addiction,” it is critical to understand that video game production and gaming culture are but an intense example of work obsession. These observations reflect a broader tendency toward workaholic behaviors and their effects in American society. To reiterate, work invading imagination and free time is hardly unique to video games, but it is particularly intense in video gaming because of certain values within both production companies and the kind of media fans have come to desire.

So in a self-selecting manner the video games the industry tends to prefer are those with the most regularized ways to give targeted dopamine hits; that is, they try to make games with an obsessively direct link between work and achievement. Which, to remember, is the very complex that Klinger identified as underpinning workaholic behavior. This linkage makes sense given that the dark origins “flow” was as a way for factory managers trying to figure out what is the ideal amount and skill level of work that a worker can do during industrialization. So flow, or at least its popular use in video game design, is simply a chemical doubling-down on workaholic structures of imagination where anything but granular, regularly rewarded progress is treated as failure.

Video games can look like companies that we as fans pay to work for in some sort of convoluted pyramid scheme.

From this angle, is it any wonder that many outside of video game fandom see this world as strange and a bit brutal (or at least highly demanding)? To riff on the old World of Warcraft meme, yup, I pay $20 a month to make boots for virtual elves in my free time to get away from taking photos of shoes to sell them in my day job. Indeed, from a casual glance, or in a moment of self-aware punctuation born of exhaustion, video games can look like companies that we as fans pay to work for in some sort of convoluted pyramid scheme.

The seemingly inevitable and unlimited gain from more and more work (and more work), pervades mainstream American life. Companies like Uber, Lyft, Easy, and Amazon’s “Mechanical Turk” program constantly exhort us to “monetize free time.” What these tech companies, companies we are regularly told are the creators of the future by the media, are at their core trying to sell to the squeezed middle and lower classes is that “free time” is otherwise wasteful and should be converted in to a measurable resource or achievement (of which they will take a cut). And what is grinding gold or ore in a video game but another form of this imperative to monetize our free time?

In part three of Workified Games I’ll examine some of the possible interesting alternative ideals to workaholic tendencies in video games and the ways that culture tends to minimize their importance in life.

Bridging Worlds: Workified Games I

Eron Rauch — Wed, 13 Apr 2016 07:55:55 +0000

Bridging Worlds: Workified Games I

Eron Rauch Mi. 13 Apr 2016 - 09:55

Bridging Worlds is artist Eron Rauch’s ongoing series of in-depth articles on the curious places of connection between video games, contemporary art, and culture. Lovingly crafted for passionate audiences, these long-form pieces are perfect for Sunday reading alongside a warm beverage.

Part 1: Gotta Grind For Those Boots

I work too much, but like many Americans I find there are always bills to pay and projects to finish. Like many Americans, I also love to come home after a long day of work and unwind by playing video games, but lately this supposed transition from work to not-work seems like clocking out of one job and into another.

This feeling started to come to my conscious attention one cloudy Sunday evening last year during a video gaming group I help run. Our little group, Meats of Evil, had been meeting for almost a decade as a way for old friends from around the country to virtually hang out and keep up with each other, but we had been experiencing a lot of burn-out and no-shows over the past year, and even though we changed games and moved times around, this problem persisted. My friends and I were equally exhausted and one night while playing Guild Wars 2 I grumbled something like, “Why I am using my lone day off to finish a grinding reputation by collecting the same resource for untold hours to get my character fancy boots when I spent the pay I earned yesterday to replace my actual worn out shoes?” Everyone just kind of stopped and sat in silence for a long moment, then staticky affirmations started to come over the server.

We all took a break, got a refill on our drinks, and went back to our game on that Sunday, but looking through my Steam library afterward I got thinking about the menagerie of other games in my Library. Maybe I decide to spend my off-hours dawdling in Minecraft, digging ever downward in hopes of a rare ore, but as the name literally says, means I’m spending my free time mining, a very difficult occupation which kills tens of thousands of people a year. Maybe I’m leveling up crafting in World of Warcraft (WoW), making three or four dozen of the same leather belt and selling them for a tiny profit margin of a few silver, which is basically factory work. If I play X-Com: Enemy Unknown I’m working on trying to squash specified alien insect-beasts so that my bosses are happy at my progress. I mean, you may as well slap a giant fiberglass Chryssalid in a mouse trap on my drop ship, since I’m basically some sort of apocalyptic exterminator.

Perhaps I try to seem cultured and play some Civilization with building a compass as my goal for the evening. Yet that means I’m mostly means bashing against a spreadsheet like an accountant with a quill trying to figure out how to match purchase orders to the requests of the medieval IT team. I can get spastic and join the legions to play some League of Legends, but even then a huge chunk of the game is “farming” where I repetitively mercilessly kill small creatures like a fur trapper, to collect gold to buy better stuff than everyone else in the game. Maybe I’m going to go retro-old-school and play Pillars of Eternity, but even then I’ll be running around trying to collect some herbs for a lazy apothecary who must have the “Task Rabbit III” app in their wizard’s spell book.

The work-centric attitude in video games is so pervasive that it is almost impossible to see from within the video game community.

This work-centric attitude in video games is so pervasive that it is almost impossible to see from within the video game community. It is not just the kinds of tasks, like making boots, but also the very roles we inhabit in video games that are often replications of work. If you’re a playing a game where you’re a member of the military, you’re doing the same job that someone in the real world gets paid to do (no matter how patriotic, they still get a paycheck and a pension.) Every time you play a police officer, bodyguard, pilot, witch hunter, mayor, hacker, private eye, farmer, assassin, train conductor, boat captain, thief, spy, alchemist, or drug dealer, you’re replicating what many people do to pay their bills.

In fact, every time you hit the dusty road with a trusty sword in hand you’re reenacting the exact entomology of a job that is the shadowy historical origin for the way many video games now get funded. “Adventure,” a word so often used in video games that it can seem meaningless, has medieval roots and specifically was used to describe the act of merchant caravans and their hired muscle traversing the often dangerous roads to make money by selling goods.( *If you want to journey down that historical rabbit hole, Michael Nerlich’s The Ideology of Adventure is a great, if a bit musty, read) Of course, we tend to talk about dudes with swords fighting off brigands and carousing with wenches in far-flung locations because it is supposedly a much more fun story to tell than the margins of profit of selling pots to villagers, but it was the merchant work that was the primary origins of adventure. Now, it has come full circle with the games we play termed “adventure” funded by “[ad]venture capital,” whose only danger is a yearly helicopter trip to Burning Man.

Insidiously, it is not only the kinds of tasks we’re doing and the kinds of job-roles we’re inhabiting as players that have become work-focused. As game design has become increasingly obsessed with data and metrics in all stages of development and advertising, even the manner that we interact with video game content has grown increasingly focused around workplace-like ideals of maximizing productivity and efficiency in a way that would make any tech efficiency expert giddy. Think of how often progress in role playing and action games is broken into a unending stream of small, measurable tasks—pick up ten of these items; kill fifteen of these monster type; haul these three items to a nearby place—all doled out with the moment-to-moment orchestration of an Amazon warehouse puller. Starcraft 2 might be the prime example of gaming as efficiency: unless you’re a top tier professional, the game is won by forcing a linkage between your hands and your subconscious to increase efficiency and speed through repetition, all, to be a bit glib, with the intent of making your mining resources higher and your factories produce more.

The increasing ubiquity of achievements in video games is also a big part of this growth of work-like gaming. Most AAA games, and increasingly even many indie games, have elaborate systems that tally and reward you for almost everything measurable, from stepping foot in new areas of a map, to killing 50 of a type of enemy, to completing a zone in a certain timefame. Completing each one of these tiny chunks results in a recorded “achievement,” which accumulate like a million tiny worker-of-the-month awards. Players in X-Box live can see the aggregate of their achievements on a master scoreboard, where they can compete against other players to finish more tasks. In fact, a common achievement icon in many games is a tiny representation of an old-timey pocket watch which is usually given out for playing long amounts of time. It is not a coincidence that businesses used to give pocket watches as a reward for spending a long time at a company.

Achievements such as “kill 50 zombies in 5 minutes,” might seem different on the surface from the Starbucks corporate guidelines about how many coffees need to be made in 5 minutes by baristas, but even leaving out the obvious joke about those in need of caffeine [i.e. me] and zombies lusting for brains, they are the same in intent. They are ways to structure someone’s time to most efficiently accomplish the most work. Corporate controls of employees like preferential scheduling, rotations, break structures, job title improvements, tips, demotions, mandatory meetings, performance bonuses, and overtime pay are regularly all used in different guises and under different names within video games to structure the player’s experiences. It is no coincidence that our gaming group was starting to feel burnout trying to relax in the midst of the rise of lockouts, tiered loot drops, assists bonuses, titles, epic cosmetics, grinding, dailies, gating, and the ever-ravenous beast that is freemium gaming.

All of these internal work-like structures of many video games (whose origins I will speculate about in the other two forthcoming portions of this piece) are not happening in a vacuum. These work-like structures are bracketed onto an ever-increasingly sophisticated science of how to advertise games and make those games “sticky.” Stickiness is explicitly the science of how to make players spend as much time and money as possible within any given game ecosystem. Most freemium games, from Hearthstone to League of Legends, will let you grind for in-game money, but only in a currency that is unusable outside of the game.

So in my initial grumble, my frustration is not only because I have to accomplish many repetitious tasks to get some imaginary currency to pay for new boots for my plant-elf-mage-fighter-thing. But additionally the company who made the game has spent their vast resources to make me want to continue working toward those boots, but just frustrated enough that I’m always on the edge of wanting to plunk down real cash from my real job to skip the grind and buy them. This constant squeezing of the player from all sides seems a bit too close for comfort to the history of the company store, which were exploitive shops owned by the employers in fields like mining, whaling, or lumber. These stores gouged the isolated workers since the company, which as both employer and supplier, could set both pay (often in some sort of company-only scrip) and determine the prices for necessary supplies for doing the job, letting them profit doubly at the expense of their workers, who would then have to work extra hard.

What is particularly perverse is that while many games have begun to feel more like work than play, the contemporary marketing language of games often make vast claims for the open-ended and multitudinous ways we can engage with their game. But as history has shown us, these choices tend to be basically false starts. Whether it is World of Warcraft, Grand Theft Auto, Fallout, Final Fantasy, or Terraria, most games, both as story and as geography, can only be traversed and explored through grinding, repetitious work. Working to finish specific tasks and progress are equated. Even the language used in most major open-world games, like “percentage of completion,” highlights this task-oriented way of existence is deeply embedded in the subconscious or understructure of the game.

Though there are invariably hints of other ways to approach playing if this rigid way of understanding the game as work-in-progress-out isn’t used, the fullness of the “open” or “dynamic” world is invariably locked away. Which Zizek points out in A Plague of Fantasies: systems which want to control us do so by giving us an illusion of choice. But he also notes that it is possible to see just how limiting those systems are by how disruptive actually following through with their proclaimed bevy of choices would actually be. That is, to be attractive to participants, rigidly controlling systems, are “…compelled to allow for possibilities of choices which must never actually take place, since their occurrence would cause the system to disintegrate.” Similarly in many video games, the virtues of the open-world, non-linear, dynamic, and interactive are extolled, but are regularly non-starters as legitimately different ways to interact with the game worlds in a non-work manner.

While there has been a recent boom of players trying to beat games with (often humorous) self-imposed rules, such as only eating vegetarian power up items, these attempts to play video games in those “open” ways that the marketing promises have only ended up highlighting just how little choice most games really provide. One of the most instructive examples of what happens when a player tries to play in the fantasy realms of World of Warcraft as a “pacifist,” trying to kill no enemies and not facilitate any of the fictional wars in the game world. These attempts are theoretically possible and fascinate the community. Once this criteria is used to approach the game, it first and foremost means refusing to complete almost all quests. But even further, pacifist players basically have to abandon overwhelmingly large chunks of the game’s areas and story to do so, since they would have no items and be instantly murdered almost anywhere in the game, given that the game is mathematically designed to be lethal to players without certain levels of weapons and armor.

Work has colonized, and in many places supplanted, play in contemporary imagination of video games.

These pacifist WoW characters rely even more on base economic and work functions, like harvesting and crafting thousands of items, to get experience. Then once at maximum level, there is no in-game content for these characters, since without grinding items (the supreme measure of progress at end-game) which invariably requires repetitious fighting, they can’t access or participate in any of the higher-level content that is available to regular players. If any significant portion of players decided to play this way, the economies, dungeons groups, guilds, banks, town populations, and ultimately the user base, would be catastrophically harmed as markets would flood with items no one could use, servers would bog down as the few pacifist safe zones were overwhelmed with players, and the already difficult task of finding players to meet the criteria for higher end content would be hopelessly arduous and unpredictable.

Many games overtly rely on players doing tasks that are work-related, in the fictional guise of a job, all with the same control structures born of workplace efficiency. But even sandbox or open world games set up as alternative to "normal" games—as having more freedom—aren't really that different when it comes to being oriented around work. Tasks are hunting, gathering resources, building, finding or making food, getting rid of pests, claiming more land, and then increasing the efficiency of all of these tasks.

Yes, there certainly are some differences, but those differences might best be equated to being an independent contractor (or a small business owner) in the sandbox games or an employee of a large company in a “regular” game. Whether farming gold in League of Legends, or building the next tier of pick in Minecraft, the end result is the same: playing the video game requires some degree of thinking and acting within the terms, structures, and goals we typically associate with work. Work has colonized, and in many places supplanted, play in contemporary imagination of video games.

Next installment, I’ll discuss some of the causes for work-obsession in video games, and a potentially surprising diagnosis for us regular video game players.

Kommentare

Moritz Do. 14 Apr 2016 - 17:42 Permalink

the nature of the beast?

That seems to go back to the old saying that Art imitates life, doesn´t it?
I think it just profundly shows how insanly fixated we are on our role as an efficient workforce that has to be productive no matter what at all time in our sorta distopic society of the 21th Century. Wether you design a game or play it...it´s hard to break out of this ideology. And still, there are those games aswell that just provide unique experiences outside of this box every once in a while -as there are still people that know to do better than just being productive all day long.