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)
