The Between

Margaret Robertson in the Proceedings of the 2009 DiGRA conference:

Now, this same instinct [The One Right Answer Fallacy] is starting to be felt when thinking about writing about games, as well as in making them. Should games writing be subjective and experiential? Yes. Should it be…objective, analytical and based on a sound understanding of a century of critical theory? Yes. Should it be voyeuristic like good sports writing? Yes. Can you ever write meaningfully about a game you haven't played or finished? Yes. The biggest thing wrong with game writing at the moment is how polarised the ecology is. Academic writers find game journalists hyperbolic and hysterical, game journalists find (if they ever encounter it, which they rarely do) academic writing pompous and impenetrably self-referential. And, sadly, between there's not a whole lot else.

My most recent news of late is that, as of February 2010, I’ll be starting a PhD to study The Between kind of writing and what it’s doing (or could be doing) for game discourse. I'm invested in the project because I not only want to know how The Between blogs like fit into the picture Robertson is painting; not because I'm content with finding and promoting The Between kind of writing and its authors; I want to BE in that space also. I hope it’s somewhere not far from where Permanent Death resides and I'm hoping to do some more similar projects in the not-too-distant future.

One last reminder that the ‘Fly Ben to GDC 2010’ effort looks set to finish up on December 16^th, so if you’ve been holding off on donating but still planning to do so at some stage, now’s the time.

Going Gonzo

So I’m trying to write a bit Gonzo – more Hunter S. Thomspon than Muppet – after being inspired by reading Fear & Loathing on the Campaign Trail ’72 which, I might add, is a cracking read. Absurdist humour has always tickled my funny bone in the best way (Q: How long’s a piece of string? A: A bowl of soup this colour) and Thompson at the height of his powers does absurd the best. But it’s actually harder than it looks and even he doesn’t get it right all the time. When he does though, as in describing his wanting to put together an Outrage like releasing 50,000 bats into the Democratic convention centre on the night of Hubert Humphrey’s presidential nomination, which he declines on the grounds that getting the nomination would be punishment enough, Thompson lights up the page like the fourth of July

So it strikes me that Gonzo works best when you’ve actually got something worth writing about – like picking up some hitchhikers who also happen to be part of the Freak Kingdom on the road to Washington just before dawn. In this my own personal Post-University purgatory I don’t have nearly as much to write about that’s actually interesting. So instead, it occurs to me that Thompson has another fall-back in his writing; talking about stuff that really freaks him the fuck out. And there’s a lot of that going round in my world right now.

For starters, to make any kind of objective evaluation of my own chances of procuring employment within my chosen industry (videogames), a highly competitive career path to be sure, I’m much too close to myself to make any kind of objective and rational evaluation of my prospects. People I talk to on twitter say, ‘Quit worrying, idiot, you’re smart enough to get any job’, which is a lovely sentiment and I appreciate the vote of confidence, but they’re not the one trying to overcome a lifetime of stay-at-home complacency and inaction when it comes to employment… and I don’t exactly have an abundance of funds when it comes to cash.

Which reminds me of another thing Thompson loves – short paragraphs. And elipses… I thought that particular habit like nail-biting, dropping them in like pennies in a Christmas pudding, was a more modern practice but apparently not. He also likes to let his sentences run on for a really long time, much longer than normal. In case you missed it, I did it in the first paragraph and it seems to have spectacularly backfired, but that’s what you get for trying to write in the style of a Pro like Thompson. It’s also a tendency that I’ve worked quite hard to circumvent in my own writing (academic at least) since it was pointed out to me earlier in the year that while my sentences made sense to me and managed to articulate complicated points, they were usually impossible to read for anyone else. It kind of annoys me that Thompson does it so well and without making them convoluted and confusing. Overall though, I think my problem was I used commas too much and needed to just stop my sentences more often. It might actually be a good thing that I trained myself out of the habit because now I can do it deliberately and, dare I tempt fate and say, somewhat more properly.

So where was I? (That’s another thing Thompson does endlessly – go off topic and then reign it in again as if he was talking to you on the telephone) Something about breaking into the games industry. Thinking about it, how does anyone ‘break into’ any industry? The obvious answer is that some kind of training is supposed to provide with the foot-in-the-door that you need, but thinking about my soon to be graduated from Music degree… I don’t exactly have a massive stable of bankable skills and I’ve been thinking long and hard recently about how the hell I can convert those skills into finances. I thought about doing some freelance writing; it is supposedly my strength, after all, unless I’m deluding myself; but I have this sneaky suspicion that when I am not being exceedingly lazy and posting at 1 in the morning, I’m capable of producing some solid copy. But hey, words are cheap, right, so what’s my other skill? I can edit and proofread and there’s always (well not at this time of the year, but in a few months time) a market for students that have papers due that could seriously benefit from a quick once-over. I could charge $50 for 20 pages and that would at least pay for my board for the week and stop my parents making me homeless before the new year – I’ve currently paid up till the Saturday before New Years day and I have about $33 left in my bank account[1]. I have another $35 in my wallet, but I suspect that unless I somehow arrange to not leave the house before NYE that I’ll need some of that just to get around.

My God, living is so expensive. Whoever came up with the capitalist idea of actually contributing to society ought to go and jump in front of the nearest locomotive. I write a bloomin' videogame blog that aims to elevate the medium above the general level of “Hey, fuck you, my mum is a classy lady” Xbox live discourse which, I occasionally suspect, may be a noble yet Sisyphean effort. I mean, who even reads me? And who would want to after this ridiculously long-winded and self indulgent… tangent? I can’t blame you for turning off half-way through this piece, it’s really nothing but a blatant rip-off of L.B. Jeffries attempts at emulating the style of Lester Bangs in aid of game criticism. At least he had a point in his writing about games, what have I got? Certainly nothing about game criticism just a pointless whinge about how life is so hard for a middle class white kid who’s house-bound with nothing but the internet and a boxed set of Futurama DVD’s for entertainment.

You know, people I know have said “I would give anything to be able to do nothing, like you”, but what I think they fail to understand is the absolutely soul crippling effect that doing nothing all day has on you. When you do nothing, you become nothing (or you feel like you become nothing) and it’s bloody depressing. Exercise is actually a good cure and I’ve started jogging in the evenings just for something to get my heart racing a bit. Anyway, what friends of mine should understand, before wishing nothing upon yourself, is that it’s really not that great. Sure, it was fantastic to take time off after finishing that thesis I spent the whole year working on but that got old really fast, like in a day or two. I should have actually seen it coming – it always happens and I guess it’s probably inevitable that we put on the rose tinted glasses in the middle of high stress periods. But I could certainly have done a bit more to prepare.

Erm… so let’s bring this to a close. I don’t think I’ll edit this, just whack it up and put it out there – do the authentic Gonzo thing even though I don’t really have a deadline to meet. Feels more raw that way, and hopefully I’ll learn something from it. Might go self medicate or something. Okay, so I lied, I edited it but it really didn’t need much. Maybe I’m a better writer than I think. I should approach some vain Official Australian Xbox magazine or something and get them to feed me games to review and play if only to take my mind off my impending bankruptcy.

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[1]

Okay, so I have a trust fund that my parents set up for me as a kid with a couple grand in it but using that to pay my parents to continue to live under their roof seems either hilariously ironic and appropriate or just pointless, not really sure which.

Things I don't want to do

N'Gai Croal can have my man-babies. Hi N'Gai!

This post could also be called “Things I’m not particularly good at, and hence largely shy away from”, but that was a bit long I thought. It might also help to keep that in mind while reading.

As a member of the burgeoning blogeratti, us pretentious, occasionally intelligent videogame writers (admittedly a somewhat unknown in comparison to the likes of Michael Abbott, Iroquois Pliskin, Leigh Alexander, N’Gai Croal, etc.) there’s a particular thing that I see others doing and that I struggle to be interested in.

Reading around, I get the sense that there’s a lot of thought being put into things like defining the proper terminology for talking about games; whether that terminology should be specialist or general enough to be inclusive; and what kinds of things need brand new words or explanations. And I really struggle to want be a part of it. And when I stopped to think about it, I wondered if maybe I was onto something.

This is going to run the risk of seeming like I’m calling him out, but Corvus Elrod (whom I greatly respect) has devoted a generous amount of words and blog posts to things like his definition of ‘play’ or the definition of ‘mechanics’. I think the first time I saw it happening I actually did a double take. Does an established word like ‘play’ really need redefinition just solely for the context of videogames? Isn’t just the context of a videogame blog enough for people to generally understand what you mean? If you do think there is a case for it, wouldn’t it perhaps be better to come up with some new and descriptive word rather than repurpose an existing one? Can’t we also by this point assume that many (most?) people who are reading our blogs pretty much know most of the terms and understand what we mean when we say things about a game? Surely they don’t really need us to explain that “videogames involve a player’s input, whereas a movie doesn’t”. If a particular reader doesn’t know that sort of thing already, what are they doing on my blog?! Go out and play some games first! Seriously, shoo! Go play Halo or The Sims – you’ll pick up on that whole player input aspect pretty darn quick, let me tell you. And if my mum can do it, so can you.

James Paul Gee wrote in What videogames have to teach us about learning and literacy that the best videogames, the ones that are successful, actually teach the player about how games work. So why do we in the blogosphere seem to think we have to explain the wheel to our readers? They’ve all played Call of Duty, they’ve know all the tricks. And if they don’t, can we even expect them to understand this interactive medium without experiencing it? Gonzalo Frasca, the granddaddy of academic videogame theory, says that in media that is simulational (videogames), unlike traditional narrative’s with which most people have already had significant exposure to in the form of film, books, etc, you can’t actually come to grips with it from the outside or without experiencing it for yourself.

In another example of the terminology discussion, Iroquois Pliskin (who, again, I greatly admire for his near-overnight rise to prominence and contribution to discussion) in a recent post criticized Clint Hocking’s bastard phrase, ‘ludonarrative dissonance’. He described it as,

“needlessly florid, and…the sort of thing that gives aid and comfort to the people who think that games writin' has gotten too fancy.”

I commented on the post, but I’ll reiterate here – I think ludonarrative dissonance is a fantastic term, and honestly it’s not just because I’m enamoured with the work of Clint Hocking himself (heh). It’s because it’s a term that describes quite exactly a specific occurrence in videogames – one that only occurs in videogames. But hey, just a second ago, wasn’t I advocating against discussing terminology and such? True, but in this instance ludonarrative dissonance is actually a term specific to videogames – unless it involves rules or mechanics that “say” one thing, and a story that says another you can’t get ludonarrative dissonance. There is no potential for ludonarrative dissonance in media like film, so I think it’s quite a valuable term for describing something rather unique to videogames and as such hasn’t really had a name before. And it avoids repurposing old words which, frankly I think is actually doing more to create a specialist vocabulary about games than phrases like the above. In what other context does ‘play’ mean “the self-guided exploration of possibility within a bounded space.”1

Okay, so the counter argument to that all this is, well, look in the dictionary – there’s already a bunch of given meanings for ‘play’ that are all different, some subtly, others wildly. But I don’t think I’m alone in feeling like this is an issue. The recent hoopla over the snappy gamer’s article, which tried to call out fantastic games writers as being “overly intellectual” and ruining it for everyone else, so pooh pooh, made Leigh Alexander comment that, while the author was being a dick, he did kind of have a point.

All of which makes me think that, shock horror, Kieron Gillen and New Games Journalism maybe actually had the right idea. You really, truly can’t dissect a game without reducing it to less than its whole. I just don’t think it works as it fails to capture the essence of what’s really great about games and why we play them. What I believe Gillen was onto with NGJ was identifying and writing about ourselves. Ultimately, people and their reactions, their feelings, their thoughts their stories (which I am also a big fan of, gaming anecdotes [RPS’ Planetside, the 1% and the ‘I was there, man’ syndrome is an amazing example]) are always going to be more interesting to read than a technical breakdown of game mechanics and why the pistol in Halo 1 was overpowered.

So, let’s bring this train wreck to a conclusion – what am I trying to say? Is it misguided to attempt to nail down some important and novel terms and ways of thinking about games? Well, no not really, there’ll always be a place for that. But, if writing about games is going to really truly transcend accusations of ‘over thinking it all’ then I believe the blogosphere has got to stop trying to clinically explain ‘how it is’. Let it go a little more often - go a bit wild. I think the really successful writers are already doing it, and I tip my hat in the direction of Duncan Fyfe and his writing at Hit Self Destruct. Also, Rock, Paper, Shotgun are often exceptionally good at this too.

Lastly, to both the guys who I criticized earlier, please don’t take it personally. Feel free to disagree with me, take my argument apart and show me the gaping flaws in my logic – please tell me if you think I’m aiming way off base. I am eternally thankful that, largely, we’re all an incredibly mature, friendly and thoughtful bunch and that that in itself goes miles towards overcoming any disagreements.