Asocial Gaming, ‘Anti-effeminacy,’ Delicious Loneliness

Videogaming, for me, has more or less always been a solitary pursuit. Just as I’m delighted to live in an era when you can dance without needing a partner or having to know the steps, I really like playing games alone – or, at least, from the other side of a sizeable spatiotemporal gap; after all, you’re still playing with/against the designer(s) in some sense. Having spent the last couple of weeks jet-lagged and pretty much alone in a strange land, I’ve had plenty of opportunities to stay up into the wee hours plugging away at Ranger X or Front Mission. It’s been kind of nice.

The phrase that’s stuck when it comes to describing (or maybe justifying) this preference for singleplayer games and the state of cosily contented absorption they’re so good at inducing is delicious loneliness. I first heard it in a talk on Canadian cartoonist Seth, and I’ve since found that it occurs in Emily H. Hickey, Angela Carter and Arthur Symons.  There’s a pleasantly salacious charge to it, suggestive of the frisson Thomas Laqueur attempts to account for in Solitary Sex. Lacquer’s book asks why, in the wake of the ‘Enlightenment,’ masturbation (hitherto considered entirely innocuous) became the subject of impassioned moral crusades and extensive medical treatises. His answer is that the advent of humanism gave rise to anxieties regarding solipsism and subjectivity, fiction and fantasy for which onanism provided a handy scapegoat. In other words it was not masturbation per se that was scary for Enlightenment culture so much as the questions it raised about about sociality, identity and the capacity of art and imagination to produce virtual realities more seductive than the real thing.

This is the context from whence came the idea that novel reading is a dubious pastime, literature a pernicious machinery of distraction – or worse, corruption. And if it’s tough, nowadays, to imagine that wanking could ever have been considered a serious threat to public health and sanity (to the extent that, as Eve Sedgwick notes, by the 1990s popular medical discourse was reassuring people that it was okay not to masturbate) we’re still very much au fait with the idea that popular media can be addicting, desensitizing and misleading, that by offering us an escape into ersatz fantasy worlds they can compromise our grasp on reality and corrode our morals. In recent decades such fears have been focused on videogames, and it’s no coincidence that scaremongering news reports tend to cast gaming in a seedily onanistic light – as a matter of nerdy, basement-bound males acting out violent power fantasies when they should be outside talking to girls.  Here we see the same preoccupation with solitude, fantasy and perversely wasteful sexuality that characterizes the C18th tracts Lacquer quotes, and while the tendency to see gaming in these terms may be less widespread than it was, say, twenty years ago (when the advertorial collaboration between Viz and Sega reproduced below dates from) it remains pretty common.

In the attempt to shake this image the industry has, in recent years, pushed various forms of ‘social gaming,’ from online multiplayer games to games integrated into social media platforms to the Wii’s library of family friendly living room romps. This move has had some welcome and worthy consequences, proving that videogames can cater to different and more diverse audiences, that they don’t have to be hyperviolent, prohibitively complex, grimly serious or graphically sophisticated, that they can be about creation, co-operation and communication rather than competition. It’s also had some downsides, and many social games  - or at least the sorts of games that are made and sold as ‘social games’  - serve agendas and reinforce behaviours I’m not particularly comfortable with. All commercial games are, of course, made with profit in mind, but the makers of social games have pioneered some particularly cynical modes capitalizing on customers’ creativity and social ties, of cutting development costs, of cracking down on the second hand market, of winkling more money and/or data out of players. Then there’s the forms of antisocial gaming  - trolling, griefing, cheating, harassment – that such games open the door to.

These factors don’t really inform my preference for singleplayer games, but they do make it easier to argue for the legitimacy of asocial gaming, and even to convince oneself that there’s something rather queer, rather subversive, rather decadently Des Esseintesien about its elevation of solitude over society and the virtual over the actual, its ability to a support or produce a feeling of delicious loneliness.

Reading Robyn Warhol’s wonderful Having a Good Cry has made me think slightly harder about this preference, and about the ways in which I prefer to account for it. In particular her discussion of serial novels and e-mail as kindred forms of ‘anti-effeminate technology’ has gotten me wondering whether my game playing couldn’t be thought of in similar terms. Warhol’s point of departure here is Ellen Ullman’s suggestion that e-mail caters to a “male sort of loneliness”’ which is woven into the culture of computer programming, and which Ullman, herself a computer engineer, understands as the legacy of teenagehoods spent their ‘tinkering’ with gadgets rather than ‘socializing.’ Stemming from feelings of ‘ambivalent loneliness,’ e-mail expresses a desire to connect, but also to ‘mediate’ that connection in such a way as to set ‘limits on the quality, the intensity, and the content of the relationships it brings into being.’ Warhol agrees with this analysis of e-mail - and, indeed, demonstrates its applicability to other cultural forms – including, however unexpectedly, the novels of Anthony Trollope. She prefers the term “‘anti-effeminate’” to Ullman’s “male,” however, reasoning that - as Ullman herself proves - women can feel these notionally ‘male’ feelings too, and arguing that such feelings should be understood not in terms of innate biological dispositions but in relation to the cultural gendering of emotion, the ‘textual technologies’ we use to evoke, classify and evaluate different patterns of embodied response.

The book has prompted me to think about how gender factors into my preference for asocial gaming, a preference probably not unconnected to my perhaps questionable fear of being tagged ‘a gamer’. This fear is slightly contradictory: on the one hand, it has to do with the idea playing videogames undermines one’s claims to being a real man (bound up as games still are with ideas of arrested development, sexual inadequacy, compensatory fantasy and solitary escapism); on the other, it has to do with the idea that a passion for videogames compromises one’s claims to be a real feminist/antihomphobe/advocate of non-violence (bound up as games still are with macho conflict, cheap titliation, homophobia and misogyny). Games are too manly, or not manly enough, or both. Either way, there’s a part of me for which gaming remains a slightly shameful hobby, and I’m still not sure whether having opted into the postdoctoral study of games mitigates or intensifies this shame (Warhol raises a similar point w/r/t academic studies of soap opera and Hollywood cinema).

I’ve also found that the consolations of asocial play can be considerable when I’ve been stood up, turned down, bereaved – when, that is, I’m feeling emasculated, or subject to putatively emasculating/effeminate feelings (grief, embarrassment, regret, doubt, self-pity). To select one of the examples it’s less blush-inducing to recount, I can remember, in the wake of my nan’s death (and while dead nans are forever the stuff of high school poetry contests, this was like two years ago), really wanting to play the Alaska bit of Metal Gear Solid 4.

Some context: MGS4 is a weirdly soppy, anxious, nostalgic game, and this section in particular is heavy with an overblown and complex sort of melancholy which I’ll try and unpack as economically as possible here. For one thing, we’re at a point in the (ludicrously incoherent) plot where a succession of rilly terrible things has just happened. The first three acts crescendo, then there’s this interlude of comparative quiet as the hero, Snake, is dropped into a snowy wilderness. For another, this environment - a military base called, with typical MGS portentousness, Shadow Moses - is familiar from the decade-old first Metal Gear Solid game, which debuted on the original PlayStation in 1998. There’s a nostalgic frisson to seeing it again, remodeled to take advantage of the PlayStation 3’s added graphical grunt. There’s also, however, a certain sense of loss or waste involved. In 1998, Shadow Moses possessed an incredible sense of place - of, as the game’s title boasted, solidity. Snake left footprints in the snow, his breath condensed in the freezing air, rats scuttled through the air ducts, icicles depended from the gantries and the place was patrolled by guards who were, by the standards of the era, unusually intelligent and discursive. The base felt alive. MGS4’s Shadow Moses, by contrast, is deserted but for a staff of robots. Dilapidated and assailed by blizzards that periodically obscure your vision, it feels like a ruin. A constant succession of flashbacks, in-jokes and allusions recall the first game – there’s even a mask you can make Snake wear the makes him look like his fuzzy, blocky PS1 incarnation - but rather than underlining how far we’ve come since 1998 these scenes, if anything, suggest the industry has been resting on its laurels. Ten years on, technological advances may have allowed developers to elaborate, refine and expand existing templates, but we’re still waiting for another quantum leap like the shift to 3D.

If this rueful attitude is particularly pronounced in the game’s fourth act, a sense of worry and wistfulness pervades the whole production. For an exclusive title meant to showcase the power of a shiny new console (literally shiny: the first PS3 had a buffed metallic chassis) MGS4 was strangely, even ominously preoccupied with obsolescence, finitude and death. Presented with all that extra processing power, director Hideo Kojima put it to use making his hero look lined, haggard and decrepit – a stark contrast not just with his more youthful PS1 and PS2 incarnations but also with the PS3’s polished façade. This Snake’s tendency toward retrospection and self-doubt, his suspicion of a new technological order which is sweeping old certainties away, seem to echo Kojima’s attitude at the time of the game’s development: pre-release interviews address his fear that ‘If the evolutionary roads like the PS3 are closed off, the industry will no longer grow,’ articulating doubts as to the long term viability of the console business which, five years down the line, have been at least partially borne out: the Xbox, an American upstart, has broken Sony’s monopoly on TV-based gaming, consoles in general are thought by many to be going the way of the dodo in an era of smartphones and tablets and the Japanese videogames industry has become increasingly insular, focusing on simple, traditional titles for a domestic audience where, in the 1990s, it seemed to turn out an unprecedentedly ambitious, globally influential epic every few months. I’m exaggerating of course, but this is the kind of exaggeration to which MGS4’s sentimentality and grandiloquence render one prone. In any case, I hope I’ve given some context for the game’s mournfully OTT atmosphere, an atmosphere into which the passage of time, the vicissitudes of technology and commerce and all manner of other non-gamic influences factor, and which is neatly encapsulated in the somewhat Friedrich-esque tableau of a figure with his back to us advancing into the heart of a raging blizzard.

As is probably apparent by now, I’m a sucker for the particular sort of ultra-Japanese macho melodrama MGS trades in. But it’s not quite right to say that the game’s doom-laden atmosphere is what prompted me to reach for MGS4 when feeling extra bummed-out and bereft. Rather it was the way that the game’s melodramatic flourishes throw into relief the way that, on a mechanical level, videogames are totally neutral, unfeeling, objective. The game’s artists might have made Snake look worn and jaded and vulnerable, its writers may have given the voice actor lines that attest to the heavy psychological burden of his traumatic past, but if I mess up and Snake ‘dies’ I know he’ll be instantly resurrected, and won’t manifest any awareness that he was just ‘killed.’ The avatar’s animation might suggest weariness and decrepitude, but he’ll still follow my joypad prompts punctually. And this is because while the game’s designers might intend for a title to evoke a certain emotion, the game itself simply doesn’t care. It won’t go easy on me if I’m feeling blue, nor will it push me out of spite. The computer just follows its orders. It gives me a list of things to do and it acknowledges my doing or failing to do them, completely ignoring the spirit in which and the reasons for which I’ve opted to try and do them right now. As Robert K. Jacob points out, ‘computer input and output are quite asymmetric,’ so while the PS3 throws all manner of data at me as I play (sounds and pictures, text and haptic feedback, music etc.) it receives comparatively little information in return, registering only the electrical pulses I’m sending it via the joypad and disregarding things like my posture, my facial expressions, my sighs of contentment and groans of frustration (though of course biometric feedback systems are beginning to change this…). I play secure in the knowledge that our interaction won’t have any real-world consequences, that the system can’t be disappointed or delighted or bored as a ‘real’ co-player can, that I don’t have to feel beholden or implicated or compromised or any of the other things I might, however reasonably, have felt were I playing with someone else. In short it was the tension between the systematic and the schmaltzy that rendered the game so appealing – and the something similar goes for my other go-to at this point,  Demon’s Souls, wherein the aesthetic layer is all amped-up eldritch fantasy while the mechanical layer is about discipline, repetition, patience.

This sort of play definitely fits Warhol’s description, with the games console operating as a ‘anti-effeminate technology of feeling’ insofar as it helps us avoid giving way to – or at least being seen to give way to - patterns of response our culture codes as effeminate. I’d argue that it would be wrong, however, to dismiss this type of play as nothing more than a poor substitute for or means of avoiding ‘real’ consolation and company (which is not to deny that it can also be that). It would also, I think, be wrong to see the feelings it can elicit simply as a matter of the production of an intended effect (catharsis, poignancy, wistfulness) being undercut or sabotaged by our catching a glimpse of the algorithms underpinning it. Yes, there are tensions, asymmetries and contradictions here - between the sentimentality of the game’s diegesis and the objectivity of its underlying systems, between the powerful affects to which games can give rise and their inability to register any but the most concrete and unambiguous forms of response -but rather than one element cancelling the other out, you often see forms of juxtaposition and interplay that are moving on their own account, capable as they are of reflecting and eliciting feelings of ambivalence and self-consciousness. As Gone Home – a brilliant asocial game that aims to foster distinctly ‘effeminate’ affects – demonstrates, games can be a great medium for exploring loneliness, aloneness and the separability of the two, for thinking about technology in terms of the mediation or deferral of contact, for dissecting the impetus toward asociality.

(Friedrich sunset from here, Viz image from the late, lamented UK Resistance)