Demakes as Procedural Caricature?

Wondering if there's some interesting purchase to be had on videogame demakes via the idea of 'procedural caricature'.... Bergson talks about caricaturists seizing on features/characteristics that bespeak 'recalcitrance,' immobility, the machinic; demakes take caricature from the realm of synchronic representation to that of diachronic simulation, hyperbolically approximating the most sailent (or ridiculous) routines, procedures, mechanics.... Normally the gag is pretty cheap - made in the service of making us feel fond and nostalgic, or smug and superior. There's fascinating potential in parodic software though - seems like this is sort of what Pippin Barr's latest project is getting at...

Lawnmower Inferno

So this week Lovefilm engineered one of those unexpectedly felicitous double bills, serving up Lawnmower Man alongside Inferno, a documentary about the disastrous and abortive shooting of Henri-Georges Clouzot’s L’Enfer. What turned out to link the two was SFX, with both films using lurid colours and lysergic patterns to communicate a loss of innocence: in Lawnmower Man a holy fool becomes a megalomaniacal cyberbeing, while in L’Enfer a husband is beset by surrealistic visions of his wife’s infidelity. Seeing the two in tandem, I was struck by the fact that, effectswise, they’re essentially coming at things from opposite angles: if Lawnmower Man’s animated sequences see computers clunkily attempting to replicate organic forms, one of the most moving things about Inferno is watching Clouzot’s team inventing ingenious and laborious analogue processes that produce results now reminiscent of nothing so much as the presets available in digital playback and editing software... Ripples, meshes and mirror images, hallucinatory composites and freakish colour schemes are conjured from rotating arrays of lights, sheets of water, layers of plastic and cellophane, sequins and ungents, wires and mirrors. Determined to turn a lake blood red, but unable simply to hit cmd+i, Clouzot dickies with the colour timing, has the make-up department paint the actors a cadaverous grey-green and commissions two sets of costumes - one for each side of the colour wheel.

 In both cases, and even more than in the typical effects-led film, there’s an excessive, flagrantly artificial quality to the SFX sequences. Not content to humbly serve the story, they demand attention on their own terms, as technical achievements. As if acknowledging this, Lawnmower Man’s title screen offers the option to watch just the computer-generated bits, skipping the film that frames them altogether. With L’Enfer, meanwhile, it’s almost as if Marcel’s hallucinations (which are the only scenes that take place in colour) literally refused to be integrated into a finished film, the flimsy narrative architecture designed to support them buckling under the weight of their sensory charge. While the documentary does a decent job of interweaving a sketch of L’Enfer’s plot with the story of its production (a story climaxing with the shock resignation of leading man Paul Reggiani and Clouzot’s subsequent heart attack) these contexts start to seem irrelevant faced with the sheer charisma of the surviving footage. I found myself wishing that they’d just given us a menu of these fragments to watch in whatever order we pleased rather than subordinating them to the (albeit fascinating) history of the project - which desire led to me capping and gif-ifying the bits of it I have.

In this respect, these films also highlight the weird irony of the DVD, a storage medium that allows for random access but which (at least in the case of DVD movies) masquerades as a film strip, surrendering images in a linear sequence. You could argue, in fact, that both movies fail because they attempt to tell A-B stories about things that are inherently non-linear: if it’s no surprise that Lawnmower Man can’t turn the internet and the videogame into material for compelling non-interactive entertainment, it’s perhaps strangely apt that Clouzot couldn’t work a profusion of rushes, alternate takes and freestanding optical experiments into a viable feature film: after all, Marcel’s paranoia can itself be understood as a state of narrative crisis, whereby the proliferation of terrifyingly plausible possible pasts and futures foils any attempt to reach a definitive understanding of what has happened or might happen. Trawling tumblr suggests that both films are fated broken up and strewn, contextless, across a thousand microblogs - but maybe that’s poetic justice?

Lawnmower Man images from:

http://www.virtualworldlets.net/Worlds/Listings/LawnmowerMan/LawnmowerMan1-Falling.jpg

Glitch/Fart/Flash

It begins not with a bang, but with a parp: in their book On Bathos Sara Crangle and Peter Nicholls trace the dawn of modern bathos to a farting corpse in Pope’s Memoirs of Martinus Scriblerus (1741). Initially, bathos simply meant something like nadir. Only in Eighteenth century England does it start to acquire the sense of, as the OED has it, ‘a ludicrous descent from the elevated to the commonplace in writing or speech; anticlimax’. As Crangle and Nicholls suggest, this descent or deflation often has to do with material things, and especially corporeal things, making themselves suddenly and shamingly obvious. In a flash - or with a flatulent toot - we switch from the sublime to the ridiculous.

I was reminded of this celebrated literary fart while playing Pippin Barr’s browser game All's Well that Ends Well. Barr presents players with a simple objective: they have to pilot their aircraft across the screen, avoiding salvos of oncoming missiles. The only problem is that there are far too many missiles, moving far too quickly, for the player to have the slightest chance of success. Eventually it becomes apparent that you can make it across, but only by dying repeatedly; each time the avatar ‘respawns’ it is, in accordance with time-honoured videogame convention, impervious for a second or so, and by exploiting this fact it's possible to inch across the screen. Do this, however, and you’re presented with another, almost identical scenario, pitting a star ship against an asteroid belt. Clear this screen (and, again, this can be done by holding down the ‘d’ key) and other, increasingly surreal versions of the same situation await - flying chair versus flying station wagons, flying station wagon versus flying giant broccoli stalks, missile versus Easter Island heads etc. When (through sheer persistence rather than skill) the player does clear a screen, their ‘success’ is qualified by the pile of wrecked avatars littering the landscape below.

As Barr notes, ‘[t]he idea is of repeated death and of memories of that death, like the corpses left behind in many other video games. But pushed to an extreme for a particular effect.’ That ‘particular effect’ is, of course, a bathos effect; the game’s overblown introductory text (‘You are the brave pilot of a high-tech spy plane... May God protect you’) is immediately undercut by the tinny pop that accompanies the plane’s first collision, which it doesn’t take much imagination to hear as a kind of fuzzy digital fart. His Let’s Play: Ancient Greek Punishment, a suite of unwinnable minigames based on the torments of Tantalus, Sisyphus, Prometheus et al (rapidly alternate between the ‘g’ and ‘h’ keys to dislodge the eagle eating your liver, to roll a boulder uphill etc.) follows a similar trajectory. If Barr’s games mock the way that videogames tend to handle death, then they also suggest how good they are at generating bathos.

In his introduction to Christie in Love (1970), playwright Howard Brenton suggests that the play’s police officers are essentially stock characters, and to be played as such. However, very occasionally ‘they have ‘sudden lights’, unpredictable speeches beyond the confines of pastiche. As if a cardboard black and white cut-out suddenly reaches out a fully fledged hand. It’s a bathos technique... It is very cruel’. Players of videogames will be more than familiar with situations like that which Brenton describes. There are moments when AI functions adequately, and there are even moments when it can seem to have ‘sudden lights’ but there are also all those moments at which the limitations of the code ‘behind’ the AI characters become glaringly apparent.

In Skyrim (which I recently had to review and which, despite my violent aversion to the Tolkeinesque, was pretty fun - nice skies) it’s not uncommon for the illusion of a coherent world to be undercut by the redployment of a speech sample you’ve heard a thousand times before, or a character’s sudden schizoid switch in demeanour (these moments, in fact, are weirdly evocative of Hedayat’s disquieting use of repeated phrases and gestures in Blind Owl).

Then there are the weirder glitches. Just how surreal these can be is suggested by a bullet point in the notes for the game’s first patch, which besides promising to remedy framerate issues and blurred textures also claims to have

Fixed occasional issue where a guest would arrive to the player's wedding dead

In attempting to talk about downright weirdness of some of Skyrim’s glitches I kept defaulting to the idea that it was almost as if the disc was dreaming or delirious, as if we were getting a glimpse into its subconscious – kind of like sharing a bed with someone who talks in their sleep (which I do). The term brainfart (for which the OED, alas, doesn’t have a definition, though wikipedia is pretty fascinating on the subject) springs - as it were - to mind.

As Skyrim proves, glitches can be fascinating - we get a glimpse of how the game, as an assemblage of interacting systems, works, and this is often more compelling than the illusion it’s trying to sustain (Noah Wardripp Fruin calls this ‘the TaleSpin effect’, after a venerable computerised story generator that produced narratives far less interesting than the processes it used to compose them). But glitches can also be strangely shaming, as can the experience of in-game death. Both can trigger the bathetic realisation that we’ve been fooled into responding to a game as if it were something more than a simulation. This is the sort of alienation Graeme Kirkpatrick describes in his account of Resident Evil 4’s QTE sections. For him the graphic button prompts that flash up on screen ‘and the sudden quickening of events seems to conspire to produce a sense of ridiculousness. In the midst of playing the game... we are suddenly offered the spectacle of our own activity as something childish. We see ourselves pressing a brightly colored plastic button on an infantile toy’. He reads this realisation of his own absurdity through Bergson’s theory of laughter, which suggests that we laugh in order to draw attention to and censure ‘the encrustation of the mechanical upon the living’.* For Bergson, laughter is supposed to jolt us awake when we fall into automatic or quasi-mechanical behaviours (like tapping buttons in front of a screen) - an idea that has obvious ties to Pope’s comedy, rooted as it is in his anxious fascination with the possibility that we’re just digestive tracts with delusion of grandeur.
The glitch, like the flash of ‘sudden light’ or the fart that brings us crashing back down to earth, entails a rapid but profound switch in tone/scale/register. In their ‘Notes on Glitch’ Manon and Temkin emphasise ‘the momentary or punctiform nature of the initiating impulse. A glitch is a “surge,” “a sudden short-lived irregularity in behavior” (OED), whose aftereffects are at once shocking and effusive. The garish appearance and obstreperous sound of glitch art betokens its origination in this way: a tiny variance has triggered major damage.’ Perhaps games can harness both the dramatic potential Brenton sees in bathos and the thought-provoking power of glitches and interruptions?

Arguably some already do. If Silent Hill 2’s AI-controlled Maria occasionally seems a little stiff or suspiciously dopey, for example, this only adds to the impression that - like Solaris’ simulacral wife-substitute Hari, who she in so many respects resembles – she’s something between a person and a piece of code, a machine and a memory.** Hari’s repeated deaths and resurrections mirror the logic of videogames, while the sequence where, panicked at having been separated from Kelvin, she tears through a metal door is, to the gamer, more than a little evocative of AI companions’ dodgy pathfinding routines.

While we might be expected to pity Hari, pathos keeps slipping into bathos - her immortality imbues her suicide attempts with something of the existential slapstick of a Wile E. Coyote cartoon, and our emotional response is all the more complex for it.

Moreover, in Solaris as in Silent Hill 2 there is something ridiculous in the willingness of the heroes to believe they can have their wives back, despite the overwhelming proof that they are merely imperfect copies or self-induced delusions. And of course their suspension of disbelief mirrors that of the viewer/player, who as Kirkpatrick insists, is always vulnerable to having the ‘ridiculousness’ of their absorption in a fiction/simulation made bathetically clear to them.

There is then evidence that games might be uniquely suited to exploring bathos and immortality, that they could put a fresh twist on a set of tropes and figures – or, as Bogost might have it, ‘unit operations’ – that underpin everything from the myth of Sisyphus to Groundhog Day, and in so doing address their inflection by technology. There is also evidence – and this is something we mustn’t forget – that Alexander Pope was indirectly responsible for The Nutty Professor 2: The Klumps.***

* He also links this revelatory flash to Walter Benjamin’s notion of jetzeit, the implications of which for animated gifs are explored in an intriguing piece by Daniel Rourke

** It might be worth noting that Alan Wake and Shadows of the Damned both borrow this ‘haunted by repeated visions of beloved dying’ trope, and for that matter that SotD lays luridly bare the strain of fetishistic misogyny it’s bound up with

*** Though as a mitigating factor this means he can claim to have had a hand in Nothing Really Matters – for me one of Janet’s finest hours

Vermoulu

Just read, via Steve Baker's The Postmodern Animal, about Helen Mayer Harrison and John Harrison's project Casting a Green Net: Can It Be We Are Seeing a Dragon? which saw the two artists delimiting an area of the Pennines bounded by the Humber, the Mersey and misc. Roman roads in order to consider cultural and ecological interlinkages within it. Only when they'd set these bounds did they find they'd outlined a dragon. Wilfuly hallucinated out of OS maps, the Harrisons' dragon - with its two marigold wings and beaked profile - is illustrated above, as are a couple  of AGF's even more Rorschach-y blot-dragons. It's kind of like the woman-shaped map in Rider Haggard's She (with regard to which, transposed into a chic Gallic electro register, this too).

Dragons, as the mapping of one onto (or maybs the discovery of one within) the Pennines suggests, are instruments of territorialization and deterritorialization. Always occupying as-yet unmapped frontiers  (hence 'here be dragons' plus also 'It Came from Outer Space') they embody the negotiation of borders - between places, between species, between the real and imaginary. AGF's Dancefloor Drachen - the LP which the inkblot dragons were produced to illustrate - is about digital property, about modes of acquiring and altering others' music in an age when bricks&mortar pressing plants & record shops are increasingly superfluous, and is as such preoccupied with shifting boundaries. 

As with giants and Krakens, dragons speak to a kind of animistic need to imagine animals on the same scale as the landscape, who are or at least are able to shape that landscape, animals the forms of which are suggested in rockfaces and bunched clouds - hence the Rorschachiness of AGF's and the Harrisons' dragons.  Also pictured above is a plastic dragon-islet playset which I owned as a kid that opened up and had a smaller dragon in it. Pictured too is Shadow of the Colossus, a recent, deeply melancholy videogame where you kill 16 behemoths that turn, dead, to piles of mossy rubble which look from the right angle like like the monsters they used to be pre-ossification. The game takes some design cues* from the earlier Panzer Dragoon Saga, wherein you rode a dragon over ruins and deserts. One of the interesting things in Panzer was the dragon's malleability; there's three images above of the screen where you moved a cursor between 4 points in order to genetically reconfigure your mount in real-time. Aspects of the dragon would evoke a rhino, a narwhal, a cricket, a gecko, an egrit without its ever looking entirely like any of them, or even like a straightforward chimera-like composite. 

Reading Baker grapple with Deleuze and Guattari's notion of 'becoming-animal'  - which has to do with creating new, contingent combinations of attributes, with multiplicity and metamorphosis, 'deterritorialization' and the liquidation of known boundaries -  reminded me of this facet of the game. Becoming, in the Deleuzo-Guattarian sense, is not a matter of A turning into B or A + B turning into C but of perpetual, indefinable flux (nothing is and nothing becomes; everything is becoming) and  'becoming-dragon' is no more or less viable than 'becoming-antelope.'  As often w/ Deleuze, its an attractive idea insofar as it gets close to something of the way I find I think or intake stuff. I spent the lengthy tail-end of a recent party propped up frazzledly watching maybe 4 hours worth of Planet Earth, hours which are only now imperfectly recoverable - so that while there's odd gestures or textures or images that've stayed with me I can't, for example, say just what species the animal that tore out a long, red shoehorn of inner neck from another animal on a pebbled, spumy shore was - I've just a sense of scattering, slickness and blubber, mingled somehow w/ tactile data from the bubblewrap on the fancy-dress costume of the girl sat next me. The emotional residue smacks a bit of being a kid, back when it was okay to imagine or credulously read about or draw up dragons.

 

 

*not to mention its mood (which is that sort of bereft, coastally-salty bleakness you get in Old English poetry) plus a taste for portentous Engrish titles

(AGF's dragons from her website, poemproducer, worth-seeing-in-motion dragon morphing from this vid, Dune-y colossus from here, OS map dragon from Steve Baker's The Postmodern Animal, dragon islet from here)