"Reinstate, deactivate"
KMFDM - Get Out of My Head
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I forget in which of Gore Vidal's nonfiction books I first encountered his musings on his generation growing up, for the first time in history, on a diet of moving pictures. It came as a novel thought to me as a teenager in the '90s that this formerly novel technology had by my time half a century later fundamentally changed social interactions, mores, attention spans, etc. It made life seem more staged. Mannerisms shifted toward celluloid theatricality. Naturally via classic adolescent-level introspection I completely failed to connect that shift to my own experiences as the first generation to grow up with personal computers. Of course after WW2 it was television's turn, and you can ask writers like Stephen King about being first on those ramparts. Politicians after sweaty Nixon played to the camera. Computers are an interesting case. The personal computer's cultural impact, in itself, has been somewhat exaggerated. I'll gladly attest in the '80s and '90s television still ruled supreme regardless of the accumulation of 486s, Oregon Trail used as candy in the classroom, or the idiotic moral panic over Doom. It's the internet that really changed everything.
On a completely unrelated topic, I was surprised to hear Larian did not plan to milk their new Baldur's Gate cash cow for more sequels, or even an expansion pack. No matter their motivations, after such a crowd success I'd have expected any developer to be blowing Hasbro execs around the clock for more of that sweet, sweet established and marketable D&D aye-pee. I'd like to imagine Larian driven by artistic integrity, gearing up for something more interesting than Faerun's generic high fantasy mish-mash and vapid narratives, but given the previous Divinity titles I've sampled, I'm not holding my breath. Still, still, props on the backbone. Rare commodity in the snowflake era. Good on them.
But it does seem like every few years we get another of these big name cRPGs, a Neverwinter Nights or a Dragon Age, each of their settings upon closer inspection just the same tedious all-purpose high fantasy routine, expertly handled but deliberately and inanely unchallenging. There's a dragon and dungeon and evil wizard, opposed by attractive young adventurers who discover the true meaning of friendship, zombies, glowing swords, fireballs, conventionally
banal (sorry, meant to say edgy) sex and violence, plus some steampunk crap thrown in for
superficial novelty even though it's been done to death. Garnish the whole mess by just randomly dumping the entire monster manual into the setting or maybe just stick with something-not-called-orcs and call it a day. Oh, but don't forget to save the world.
To the extent that each reminds the public of the nominal existence of tactics and roleplaying, they have their place in keeping a market alive for more interesting campaigns. I maintain that Baldur's Gate 3 in particular was sorely needed after big-name flops from preceding years seemed to nail the cRPG market's coffin shut. But every such title also cements the public's narrow conception of "stab goblin, grab loot" and it's nowhere near clear enough whether newer players are whetting their appetites or merely getting a taste for the lowest common denominator to the exclusion of better options. How much interest in better television was really fueled by sitcoms? By reality tv?
Because someone will always go lower. The bad parts, the nonsensical parts, the pandering, thoughtless parts, will excuse more and more idiocy. I've been trying a "multi"-player FPS. It's Destiny 2, but it makes no real difference. Its half-assed features could and have been the stock-in-trade of a hundred other twitchy pieces of quickly forgotten chaff.
As mentioned last time, your decor is as generic as possible, a nonsensical clutter of abstract shapes meant solely to keep the eye moving without representing anything.
You bounce around constantly to pick up power-ups dropped by enemies which just jump out of the walls on you and teleport around randomly. No need to plan an attack or position for an organized squad offensive. Just point and click like the good little 30-IQ piece of gamer trash you are.
You get three different weapon categories, dozens of weapon types, 1408 individual weapons. Long story short, they all shoot.
Infinite ammo except for a few powerups for fancier rocket launchers and the likes, infinitely respawning grenades. No resource management to speak of. Don't think; just click.
You also get a "melee" attack, which turns out to be yet another grenade/rocket with slightly shorter range, and a superpower, which turns out to be (usually) yet another grenade/rocket. And also your secondary weapon can be a grenade launcher, and also your tertiary. Oh, and at least one of your superpower Voltron swords also throws explosions. That might not be all the 'nades. I'm not sure, I just started?
Everything explodes. Doesn't matter if it's a robot, a fat dude in power armor, or the Lollipop Guild. Boom. Big flashy lights. They all had beans for lunch. Don't you feel powerful? Boom. Boom I say. Boom.
Yes, of course it's got Mario platform jumping. It's a video game. Duh.
You're bombarded with constant loot drops, constant behavioral reinforcement. Not that it matters. Every few hundred guns you might want to pick an upgrade, conveniently tagged with relative power levels so you don't have to worry about actual numbers, just pick the high card. Just so long as you keep hitting that button in the Skinner box you brain-dead rat. You're already in "legendary" gear before the first tutorial mission is even over. Don't you feel speshul?
You get nonstop achievement progress. Badges, titles, decals, levels, "triumphs" and polka-dot top hats and wowie! Don't you feel appreciated, dear user? Use more.
You're put through interminable cutscenes filled with every cliche imaginable, every Saturday morning cartoon heroic declaration and cut-and-pasted action scene. You can't go thirty seconds without realizing they got this one from Predator and this scene from Equilibrium and parodied Star Wars wholesale to the point I'm surprised characters can even talk with Lucas' cock in their mouths.
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| Encased in carboncopynite. |
NPCs are permitted zero personality. The few not occupied spouting generic heroic speeches about hope and light and heroism are just kissing your ass non-stop.
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| No it won't. |
And of course you fight several nominally "different" groups of enemies without facial expressions who do not speak but merely chatter incomprehensibly so you won't feel guilty mowing them down by the thousands. Some are fatter or skinnier, but they sport claws and googly eyes and gnarly, protuberant teeth and hobble to and fro hunched over, inelegantly. Which is to say they're all just goblins.
There's nothing there. All those cozily familiar stimuli you're fed as reinforcement serve to merely keep you clicking, and clicking, and clicking, until you hit a paywall and presumably click-through that as well by sheer habit. I recognize this definition of a game. It's those arcade machines from back in the '80s that just had you mash the attack button until it randomly killed you to eat your quarter when you're all jazzed up and desperate to keep going, keep the dopamine flowing. So, like movies, like da teevee, how has this paradigm changed us?
I also took a chance to watch something labeled "Oats Studios" before Netflix pulled it from their roster. Hell, I didn't know what it was, it just looked vaguely SciFi-ish so I added it to my list on a whim. Turns out it's all on YouTube anyway. But what struck me about Blomkamp's catalogue is not their quality as story ideas. Some are cheesier than others, some pretty decent.* No, it's the fact they don't feel like film shorts. They don't even feel like teaser trailers. They feel like video game quest prompts, and not just because of the CGI. Most of them end not with a premise and promise of further developments, but with a call to action. The enemy has been revealed, the hero's mentor performed his obligatory sacrifice, the audience surrogate protagonist has been geared up and marionetted into a starting position. Screen paused. Player 1 insert quarter.
Hardly my first mention of this phenomenon. Last decade's Hobbit maladaptation was particularly blatant in its arrangement of scenes to be transposed to Warner Brothers' video game franchises, with platform-jumping Mario sequences and boss fights with phase transitions. But I have to wonder how many movie crews even realize they're doing it anymore?
Off the top of my head, you could compare it to a movie called Black Robe from '91 which I looked up thanks to a positive mention in an old Siskel&Ebert episode. While not quite the masterpiece you'd expect based on gushing critics (and rather stilted) it is both laboriously and expertly costumed and choreographed as film. Characters position themselves to be seen by the camera -
One common critique of television held it induced passivity. Sociological commentary on the boob tube summoned images of slovenly Joe Averages vegged out on sofas, baking in the cathode ray, merely absorbing.
"Sit quietly and we will control all that you see and hear" to quote The Outer Limits' immortally audacious opening.
So how have games changed us? They're a call to action, answered uncritically. You are presented with intrigue, a quest prompt, a Space Invader. Now shoot it. And the next. Good boy. Here's a power-up. And the next. Go on. Do not attempt to adjust your pattern. And the next. Why? Because it's next. Keep it moving. It gives you fun.
Note at some point the nature of the action ceased to matter. The activity persists by sheer impetus to continue. To win. It is next. The next mob, the next mission, the next re-tweet. Toss any content in there so long as it's a pretext to keep playing, keep getting re-linked. Go on. Score a point, level up, get the loot. Go on. Fetch. I'm normally more a proponent of nature versus nurture as explaining human behaviour, but it's hard to ignore the correlation of voter apathy during the second half of the 20th century with its popular medium of the time, TV, then increasing activism (upon increasingly dishonest platforms) in the video game and social media era. Doesn't matter what you're shooting or posting so long as you're leveling up, farming those likes. Whatever's trending.
Do not attempt to adjust your feed. Gamification bleeds across other domains. Netflix recently changed its user interface to eliminate the separate page for the user's own collection. Not that it was ever ideal, as your private list was unsortable and had a habit of constantly rearranging itself to bring Netflix' own choices to the forefront, but now you cannot escape the constant barrage of ads for other flicks. A constantly scrambled collage of nothing much in no particular order. Goblins, guns, flashing loot, explosions, level-ups, maybe some Star Wars? At least with a TV remote you could change the channel and it stayed changed. You might also like: Yeah, and I might also finally cancel my subscription, since you're getting as bad as any other control freak media site.
But most won't. They'll click on the next goblin. It's easier. Is unchanging activity all that active? Do you get anywhere by running in circles? Am I asking rhetorical questions?
So, once "playing" a game gets redefined as merely pressing the one button in your Skinner box, which medium is really better at producing that mindlessly obedient public, breeding that idiot housewife mouthing a single line on cue to her TV "family" in Fahrenheit 451? Does it matter? No matter the medium, it is mass appeal that drives degeneration.
“People want to be happy, isn't that right? Haven't you heard it all your life? I want to be happy, people say. Well, aren't they? Don't we keep them moving, don't we give them fun? That's all we live for, isn't it? For pleasure, for titillation? And you must admit our culture provides plenty of these.”
Sorry, Gore, but I think Ray hit closer to the truth. Cinema, television, games, social media, chat bots, the new inventions aren't really changing us. Each in turn merely gradually reveals humanity's true nature as vermin reacting thoughtlessly to sensory stimuli, twitching their whiskers in irritation at any whiff of mental challenge.
"The public itself stopped reading of its own accord."
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* The whole Oats-sowing thing feels more like a set-up for copyright trolling than anything else. Wanna make a movie about a blob monster engulfing humans? Or God toying with humans? Pay Neill for his oh-so-original idea.
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