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I feel like I should preface this with some sort of spoiler warning. I’m going to talk about a shot in Gates of Heaven, Errol Morris‘ documentary (superficially) about pet cemetaries, where an old lady talks meanderingly for a couple of minutes. I’m not going to give any big secret away, but I think it’s most affecting if you don’t anticipate it. Her monologue has almost nothing to do with the rest of the film, but for me the unexpectedness of hearing her speak and the depth of realness conveyed in her scene is the essence of what makes documentary filmmaking great.

Here she is, Florence Rasmussen:

And here is what she says:

I’m raised on a farm, we had chickens and pigs and cows and sheep and everything. But down here I’ve been lost. Now they’ve taken them all away from here up to that - What’s the name of that place? Up above here a little ways? That town? Commences with a ‘B.’ Blue. It’s - Blue Hill Cemetery, I think the name of it is. Not too far, I guess, about maybe twenty miles from here. A little town there, a little place. You know where it’s at. But I was really surprised when I heard they were getting rid of the cemetery over here. Gonna put in buildings or something over there. Ah well, I know people been very good to me, you know. Well, they see my condition, I guess, must of felt sorry for me. But it’s real, my condition is. It’s not put on. That’s for sure! Boy, if I could only walk. If I could only get out. Drive my car. I’d get another car. Ya… and my son, if he was only better to me. After I bought him that car. He’s got a nice car. I bought it myself just a short time ago. I don’t know. These kids - the more you do for them… He’ s my grandson, but I raised him from two years old… I don’t see him very often. And he just got the car. I didn’t pay for all of it. I gave him four hundred dollars. Pretty good! His boss knows it. Well, he’s not working for that outfit now. He’s changed. He’s gone back on his old job - hauling sand. No, not hauling sand; he’s working in the office. That’s right. He took over the office job. His boss told me that on the phone. But, you know, he should help me more. He’s all I got. He’s the one who brought me up here. And then put me here by myself among strangers. It’s terrible, you stop and think of it. I’ve been without so much, when I first come up here. Ya. It’s what half of my trouble is from - him not being home with me. Didn’t cost him nothing to stay here. Every time he need money, he’d always come, ‘Mom, can I have this? Can I have that?’ But he never pays back. Too good, too easy - that’s what everybody tells me. I quit now. I quit. Now he’s got the office job, I’m going after him. I’m going after him good, too - if I have to go in… in a different way. He’s going to pay that money. He’s got the office job now. And he makes good money anyway. And he has no kids. He has not married. Never get married, he says. He was married once - they’re divorced. Well, she tried to take him for the kid, but she didn’t. They went to court. It was somebody else’s kid. She was nothing but a tramp in the first place. I told him that. He wouldn’t listen to me. I says, ‘I know what she is.’ I said, ‘Richard, please, listen to me.’ He wouldn’t listen. He knew all, he knew everything. Big shot! But he soon found out. Now that’s all over with. I’ve been through so much I don’t know how I’m staying alive. Really, for my age… if you’re young, it’s different. But I’ve always said I’m never going to grow old. I’ve always had that, and the people that I tell how old I am, they don’t believe me, because people my age as a rule don’t get around like I do. (source)

I don’t really know how that reads, but when it came in the middle of the film I was knocked out. It’s like a brilliant photograph that lasts two minutes, a snapshot that captures events beyond what’s immediately visible. It’s all those things that writers struggle to convey: it’s universal, surprising, sad and happy, funny and poignant.

And despite being so out of place that it’s jarring, the scene somehow fits perfectly at the same time, evoking the same type of pathos that runs throughout the rest of the film, with it’s pet owners griefstricken at the loss of their dogs.

This is why I love documentaries. A great one can ostensibly be an investigation of a subject, a simple storytelling, but then gradually reveal itself to be about something much different, something much more important. A great documentary will stay with me for days the way no film can, and I won’t shut up telling anyone who will listen to me all about it. Watching something that scratches away at the surface of the ordinary is to realise how fake so many actors and dramatic writers are. Watching someone like Florence living out her story, abstracted on screen yet somehow brilliantly illuminated just by having a camera pointed at her, hammers the point home.

Third and final post for now about games. I promise. James Corbett points to Matt Jones‘ observation on how virtual copies of physical space can allow us to relate to the space itself:

What realisations and reactions would we have if we could gaze into this mirrorworld knowing it was real, not a simEarth, and further more - the only we’ve got?

It would be the software-equivalent of when the space program in the late-sixties afforded us the first view back at the pale blue dot we’re stuck on.

This is a wonderful analogy. In 1966 Stewart Brand came to the drug-assisted realisation that if humankind could see a photograph of the whole of planet Earth as seen from space, it would prompt a revelatory moment for us all¹. The image of the planet as a tiny island floating alone in the vast infinity of space would help people to conceive their relative size within the world and thus, the thinking went, the importance of ecological thinking. In other words, this representation of the world could help us to further understand the world itself. An alternative view can afford a new understanding.

The mirrorworld thing also reminds me of some of the thinking behind psychogeography, the line of thinking that started with the Situationist movement that looks at how paying close attention to your surroundings can affect how you feel. It’s the process of engaging and interacting directly with a place in order to understand it in a new way. The relationship between the engagement of psychogeography and the abstraction of representation is strange: they take almost opposite approaches, yet aim to arrive at the same destination, that of an alternative perspective of a reality.

This was supposed to be about videogames.

Playing a videogame is something between these two types of engagement. On one hand the game is a complete fabrication, an invented reality that sometimes reflects the real world and sometimes is completely alien. So when you’re playing a game you’re dealing with a representation, a mirrorworld. On the other hand, the act of playing a game can be an intense interaction with the environment, and a lot of the time the aim is to get completely lost within the act of being in the game, to focus on nothing but your immersive environment, just like alert walking.

Videogaming is essentaillty a postmodern activity — tied to the fact that it means engaging with a simulation, an image of a reality, but with with enough freedom to realise and undermine this fact — and so it’s plagued by all of the confusion and self-contradiction that comes with that label. Somhow though it has the potential (at least as a medium) to reach the same place via opposite routes, just like the different approches of representation and engagement can both open up new perspectives.

So I have exactly zero conclusions, but maybe that’s a reflection of the fact that the knot of gaming’s cultural impact is so difficult to untie. And changing so fast! Have you seen the promo video for the Nintendo Wii? It’s all hurtling along at a thrilling pace, much too fast for anyone to control or steer, or even criticise or pick apart with any real confidence. It’s fun to try to keep up though.
 

[1] Brand worked with Buckminster Fuller and Marshall McLuhan on this project, which is said to have infulenced NASA to release the Apollo missions photos of the earth in 1969. He also hung out with Ken Kesey during the Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test days and helped Doug Engelbart deliver The Mother of All Demos in 1968. He founded the Whole Earth Catalog and now runs the Long Now Foundation with Brian Eno and Danny Hillis. Quite the fellow.

Despite what the internet seems to be trying to suggest, I’m going to keep not taking the hint and carry on here.

Following swiftly on from The Great Comment Spam Siege of last month, there was a week in the dark here due to domain name problems. The matter wasn’t helped by my laying out in the sun and playing with my new Nintendo DS for a couple of days before noticing. All’s well now, but stay tuned, as I may well break the entire internet before winter.

There’s been some discussion online recently about video game criticism, arising from The Lester Bangs of Video Games in Esquire and the response Why No Lester Bangs of Gaming? in Wired. A comparison is being made to music and film (as in the cases above), despite the fact that outside of blogs there seems to be little in the way of innovative, creative commentary on gaming. Most commissioned video game reviews are a couple of short press release-style paragraphs of what the game is about, not a substantial reflection on what it means.

Clive Thompson deals nicely with spelling out the answer to the immediate Lester Bangs question in the Wired article — editors don’t know enough about games to appreciate the good writers, the good writers do exist and are already self-publishing online, games take too long to play before reviewing — before getting to the point: everyone just got here, and nobody has yet figured out how to contextualise games, or the act of play as something more meaningful than vapid entertainment, especially in relation to other media. He points out that gaming is simply too different to expect it to fit in the same sphere of criticism as music or film. A broader perspective is needed to assess the cultural significance of games:

You don’t write about Grand Theft Auto as if Rockstar has shot another Godfather. You write about it as if it Rockstar had created the next football.

But that’s not how games are being written about. When it comes down to it then, the question is not yet “where are the cultural critics of this artform?”, but rather that old chestnut that faces any medium finding it’s feet “is this really art?”

It’s not difficult to draw loose comparisons between the history of gaming and that of other media. I think you could say that the heyday of shareware games was gaming’s underground punk phase; people in there for the love it, three chords and the truth being passed around on rewritten floppy disks like cassette mix tapes, guys getting together in basements to tear up the rulebook and just make innovative and edgy new things as quickly as possible, before the whole scene became co-opted and packaged and went mainstream.

Or maybe games today are like cinema of the first half of the twentieth century, advancing only as quickly as the still-developing technology will allow, struggling against the perception that it is are nothing more than entertainment, certainly not an artform. There were well-respected films being made for years, but it wasn’t until the 1970’s that American cinema went through it’s own punk phase and became the most relevant popular artform of the decade. It’s probably a bit trite to say that video games are currently in the same state of infancy that cinema was a century ago, but I’m tempted.

Another analogous medium: photography went through the same growing pains, for years having to justify and defend itself against the philosophical and practical criticisms levelled at it. Susan Sontag wrote an essay about this in On Photography:

For about a century the defence of photography was identical with the struggle to establish it as a fine art. Against the charge that photogrpahy was a soulless, mechanical copying of reality, photographers asserted that it was a vanguard revolt against ordinary standards of seeing, no less worthy an art than painting.

The fact that questions about the validity or value of any medium as an artform exist just goes to show it’s relative immaturity, or at least it’s perceived immaturity. It seems to be a rite of passage that new artforms need to go through.

And once all that’s done, and video games are finally high art, we can get around to arguing that the game is in fact not art at all, but the playing of it is.

I’m getting back into gaming a little bit, having pretty much dropped it for a few years. These things seem to go in cycles - Aldo’s Adventure, Kings Quest… the NES… Sim City 2000, Lucasarts adventure games… Metal Gear Solid, GTA…

Now. Shadow of the Colossus (flash site) is a Playstation game, and it’s very nice.

The philosophy of the game is pure wabi-sabi, the very definition of simplicity. It’s interesting to note that the (very little) dialogue in the game has not been translated from it’s original Japanese, the lingua franca of all things beautifully simple.

The first thing that strikes you is how bare everything in the game is — simple, stripped down. As pretty much the solitary living being in the world, you feel isolated and in control at once. I’ve never played a game that evokes such a strong sense of space. It’s completely uncluttered, without buildings, characters, enemies, coins, weapons, power-ups. There is no need for a map in the game; the landscape is the map.

In traditional character-based games, the avatar is presented as the centre of the world, with the environment revolving around him. When I command my character to turn to the right, he doesn’t actually move to the right on screen: the whole world moves to the left. A rather medieval view of things.

Anyway, Colossus feels different. The main character moves through the world. The aim of the game is simple and singular, to defeat sixteen giant monsters, or colossi. The scale, both of the environment and the colossi, is phenomenal. And it’s a different sort of phenomenal to the dense, detailed mass of Grand Theft Auto, in the same way that standing in the centre of a towering city inspires a different type of awe than standing on the edge of a cliff.

For a console game, it’s pretty innovative in it’s treatment of space and openness. Online gaming would seem to be the key to opening this type of innovation up even further, but to me games like World of Warcraft seem rather stuck in a self-imposed genre lockin with restrictive rules in all the wrong places. Rather than expand upon the sense of freedom hinted at in single-player games like Shadow of the Colossus and GTA, online gameplay still mostly deals with artificial concepts like points and levels to indicate progression and missions to structure activity.

The comments on this post (incidentally the most worthwhile comment thread I think I’ve ever read) suggest where the future of online multiplayer gaming might go from here:

I’m going to guess that WoW is as big as the current style of grind-until-you-level, static, old school MMOG play can get.
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Given the popularity of the high fantasy game setting it seems to me that a logical continuation is actually implementing something like Lord of the Rings. Perhaps one side could take and hold cities, eventually even winning the war (and the game) on that particular server.
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I’m looking forward to a game experience where your actions and contributions as a character have lasting meaning beyond a stats rat race.
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Dynamically changing worlds in which players can have a real impact on the entire world will be the way games are evolving in the future.
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Once a player is gone, there’s little to distinguish them from all the others who have been. Impermanence, rather than stifling, endless congruity, is the watchword.
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I think the next big step should be a collection of missions that are designed to help an overall war effort. I am a big fan of WOW but I have to say that no matter how many missions you complete or fail, it makes no difference in the game as a whole. Nothing Changes.

There are also some ruminations on why MMO gaming is mired in the fantasy genre, and whether fantasy has the legs to sustain growth or has only a finite appeal. No word yet on the chances of any other literary genres at success. Why not a sci-fi or noir crime game, or more to the point, an illegal immigrant drama game or postmodern Japanese fiction game? A top-down developer-designed game like this probably isn’t going to be released any time soon, simply because (as with console games, Hollywood movies and any other expensive to produce media) the smart money in online gaming is with the established genre; the free market stifles innovation. All the same, changes are inevitable.

Here’s a table of how freedom to effect change on in-game environment has evolved as I see it:

It’s interesting to note that each column progressed from top to bottom before moving onto the next row, with King’s Quest coming out around the same time as MOOs, and Myst appearing just after Ultima Online. This trend would seem to indicate that multiplayer gaming is ready to enter a new column, a new medium (location based gaming and distributed social presences would be contenders).

However, on not much more than a hunch and what the above commenters have to say, I’m guessing a new horizontal row in the table will be created next.

What will this new game look like?

Some guesses. It will be more flexible that WoW, but more mediated than Second Life. It might be more like TV than a computer game, or at least like TV in the loose participatory sense that the media surrounding Lost is like TV. there will certainly be more cross-pollination between the game and the web, and between your activities in-game and your activities on the web. Just like your real life bleeds into your online life via your blog and your Flickr account, that reflected online persona will in turn become drawn into your gaming persona. Gaming will probably become a pretty poor label for what eventually emerges (as it becomes less about play and more about interaction and creation), but the name will stick, just like “talkies” never really caught on over “movies” in the cinema. Virtual space will feel more like an actual space (it might even be actual space), more like something you inhabit than somewhere you pass through. You’ll leave traces of where you’ve been behind you, and you’ll return after a break to see the traces of others that were there in the interim, and this sense of effect and permanence will infuse the entire game and encourage continued interaction, just as the gradual accumulation of an archive of blog posts rewards the ongoing effort of writing.

I’m sure it will all come in drips, as online games, TV, the web, consoles and all the other bits and bobs of interactive media iterate and undulate, attracting and repelling each other, crawling along like the proverbial emergent slime mold. You might see an element of it in every piece of innovative interactive media of the next couple of years.

[image credit: football pitch on flickr]