Human Hand
Videogames, although by their essence, spirit and nature are implicitly “playful” and made to inspire the imagination, are rarely the product of a “free” creative process – the mechanic in Dead Rising 2 which lets the player strap sixteen guns together and customize a fire-breathing assault rifle built using the neck of a guitar probably took dozens of people working tens of hours per day at the expense of thousands of dollars. It’s not an hypocrisy as such. It’s more like a paradox, or a dissonance; a dissonance between the spirit of the videogame, as an object, and the reality of its physical nature.
The quality of The Game as an object is measured commensurate to how much it lets you bend, break and reshape its nature. And at the same time, The Game, in the practical, real sense, is the product of an enormous investment of labor, industry and capital: the videogame enterprise commits multiple millions of dollars to build something that, at some core part of its soul, is defined by boundlessness, frivolity and the absence of consequences. The process of mainstream videogame creation embodies a number of harsh realities, but the end result is something that is designed to be divorced from reality.
The problem isn’t with the player. This isn’t an excoriation about treating the game with respect and playing a certain way, and being a well-behaved media literati who does what they’re “supposed” to do because the game cost a lot to make. The problem isn’t with game makers either. On the contrary, by creating something that allows and accounts for hyper subjectivity and the whims and entitlement of the player, game makers are following the north star of current game-making philosophical precepts. You’re taught, as a game designer, to encourage and facilitate choice and freedom, to facilitate “play,” something which in videogames is often spiritually synonymous with non-reality. This might not even be a problem. It’s a paradox instead.
But the paradox is becoming more pronounced. The proliferation of sandbox, open-world and live-service games is occurring parallel to the advent of “photorealistic” graphics, physics engines, and production teams of hundreds of people. We’ve started mass producing fun. Does playing a videogame ever feel wrong somehow? Not morally. Not recreationally. But experientially, like there’s some kind of essential gulf between what you’re looking at and interacting with and how you’re supposed to feel. I sense disingenuousness with mainstream games, insofar as they’re – effusively, deferentially – asking that I please, please have fun with them, please go where I want, please do what I like. At the same time, they’re produced from the work of hard-sweating, light-eating, no-sleeping computer scientists, using state-of-the-art machines.
Every. Single. Element. Of a mainstream videogame has been researched, drafted, presented to a committee, prototyped, designed, built, redrafted, redesigned, focus-grouped, quality assured and then hotfixed, patched and quality-of-life updated, and the effect of all of that work – all of that process which by its nature is spiritually antithetical to “play” or “playfulness,” insofar as it serves to control, and define, and shape – is to create something that people play with, and that the more they can play with it, the better it’s deemed. It’s the same with blockbuster movies. It’s the same with a lot of things. But also, mainstream videogames are still fundamentally unevolved. The possibility that there could exist at their philosophical core something other, or more voluminous, than “fun” and “play” isn’t being taken seriously yet. The means of creation of a big-budget film might be equitable in laboriousness and seriousness to the means of creating a big-budget game, but with the big-budget film, the idea that the end result might itself be serious and require some level of intellectual labor on behalf of the viewer seems more agreeable.
That idea is not so agreeable with – or been able to really take hold in the wider consciousness of – mainstream videogames. Exceptions exist: Cyberpunk 2077, Metal Gear Solid, The Last of Us, Mafia 3 and Red Dead Redemption 2 are just some mainstream videogames where I sense that “fun” and “play,” in the way that those two precepts are often conflated with “lightness” and player agency, are occasionally subordinate to other creative or artistic goals. But even in these cases, it feels like those “other creative or artistic goals” have to be smuggled in via the Trojan horse of frivolity and player agency. The story of Arthur Morgan’s life and death would probably be more tonally consistent and more affecting if it weren’t also possible for the player to put on a horned Viking helmet and stand in the middle of Valentine throwing sticks of dynamite at the horses, but if you took all that out, would Red Dead Redemption 2 get made?
I started this article with the intention of writing about Dead Trash, by Crowhill Studios, one of my favorite games of the year so far. My feeling is that if there’s an irreconcilable conflict between the nature of the soul of videogames and the realities of videogame making, then rather than try to change the entire nature of games, it might be easier to change – or at least advocate for change – in how they’re made. Obscene and grainy, Dead Trash is an aesthetical contrary to videogames’ mainstream, which nowadays favors fidelity and prestige. What Dead Trash allows you to see, in the stylization of its unfinished-looking levels, its thrown-togetherness, is that it is produced by a group of people. In some cases, this is overt – the characters and in-game sprites are played by the development team, wearing costumes that look like they were bought from the joke shop. Other times, the human hand is present via Dead Trash’s “imperfections”: re-used textures, basic enemy intelligence, low resolution. It’s violent and squalid, but like a John Waters’ movie or other abject art, through that squalor becomes perversely joyous, bon vivant. If you can find the fun in all this blood and shit and toxic waste, both literal and metaphorical, maybe it means you’re a psycho, but it might also mean that you love the world even at its crudest.
But the real point is that you can see this game was made by people. And when games want to inspire something emotional, even if it is (and apparently still always has to be) something as basic as a sense of fun, a sense of play, that inspiration is more likely when a human consciousness is detectable within the game. The process of mainstream game-making seems like it’s been perfected in order to eliminate the possibility that the player senses that what they’re playing was made by people. The process has been formulated to temper and ameliorate the presence of all “impurities,” to provide to the player some kind of informal guarantee of quality by giving them the impression that what they’re playing is the product of a pseudo-automation – benchmarks, milestones, objective standards. And yet, what the videogame aims to facilitate is “play,” which, by nature, is an invitation for deviation – something which not only allows for but encourages individuality and divergence.
Put another way, I think it’s harder to act human or have a human response to a game when what you’re interacting with or “talking to” is produced by processes that are designed to make it feel inhuman. There’s a dissonance when something is immaculately produced – or at least, is the product of a process which aims to produce the immaculate – and also it wants you to express your feelings and your personality. If it’s got to be about play and fun and subjectivity and player agency then that’s another question. But I’m starting to feel like I can’t even get to those basic sensations anymore, because I can’t make eye contact with a machine.
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Edward Smith is a writer from the UK who co-edits Bullet Points Monthly.
