The postmodern temptation
The postmodern temptation
Plenty of writers of more or less unreadable critical and theoretical works have claimed that their books are intended for that mythical beast ‘the general reader', and I am not keen to join their company. I have, therefore, attempted to keep the amount of theoretical jargon (rather than serious thought) to a minimum. Nor am I alone in my scepticism towards some of the more extreme language that can be used when this new technology is up for discussion.
As Jon Covey has argued in his introduction to Fractal Dreams, ‘Each onslaught of hyperactive technobabble becomes more tedious than the last, until we become just plain bored would not even attempt to glorify my own argument - it is intended to be introductory, preliminary, and to raise questions as to where we go next as critics and readers, as much as it is intended to provide comprehensive answers about the past, present, or future of the computer game. The endnotes are there for those who want them, although not to any length or extent that would protect this work from possible charges of being overly reductive in aiming for clarity of argument over fullness of scholarly reference. The computer game-fiction is a form of popular fiction and I, like many other critics who work in the hinterland of what goes under the name of cultural studies, would argue that scholarly rigour is as essential in approaching such popular texts (and I use Roland Barthes' term ‘text’ selfconsciously, just as I have insisted on the italicisation of their titles as if they have equal standing with films or novels) as it is when approaching the supposedly high-cultural textual artefact. This present work, however, is primarily intended as introductory in tone and content -1 do not want to bury my arguments for what is new, distinct, or different in this form of popular entertainment too far under a language or methodology that is undeniably popular in academia, but is rarely accessible, understood, or even particularly popular beyond its confines. I seek to inform, but not to validate my arguments through either jargonistic ‘technobabble’ or philosophical musings that are not firmly anchored in observation.
As Jon Covey has argued in his introduction to Fractal Dreams, ‘Each onslaught of hyperactive technobabble becomes more tedious than the last, until we become just plain bored would not even attempt to glorify my own argument - it is intended to be introductory, preliminary, and to raise questions as to where we go next as critics and readers, as much as it is intended to provide comprehensive answers about the past, present, or future of the computer game. The endnotes are there for those who want them, although not to any length or extent that would protect this work from possible charges of being overly reductive in aiming for clarity of argument over fullness of scholarly reference. The computer game-fiction is a form of popular fiction and I, like many other critics who work in the hinterland of what goes under the name of cultural studies, would argue that scholarly rigour is as essential in approaching such popular texts (and I use Roland Barthes' term ‘text’ selfconsciously, just as I have insisted on the italicisation of their titles as if they have equal standing with films or novels) as it is when approaching the supposedly high-cultural textual artefact. This present work, however, is primarily intended as introductory in tone and content -1 do not want to bury my arguments for what is new, distinct, or different in this form of popular entertainment too far under a language or methodology that is undeniably popular in academia, but is rarely accessible, understood, or even particularly popular beyond its confines. I seek to inform, but not to validate my arguments through either jargonistic ‘technobabble’ or philosophical musings that are not firmly anchored in observation.
That said, I freely admit that I have drawn far more on theories of narratological analysis (and to give an early example of the kind of simplifying gloss I will be guilty of throughout this study, I would define narratology for my purposes here as the study of how stories are told) than on poststructuralist or even postmodern thought.3 My ambition is relatively limited - the games I isolate as my examples, I contend, require informed reading as fiction and as texts. They deserve, and get in this study, no more and no less. To give an early indication of where 1 hope to have travelled to by the end of this study, my provisional answer to the question of whether the computer game is ‘more than a game’ is a qualified ‘yes’ - it can also be a form of fiction making, and in the cases I isolate presents a fictional text that rewards close critical scrutiny. Is it ‘more than a game’ in that it requires a reformulation of our understanding of self, identity, art, or culture? Is it representative of a truly radical break with the ways in which we have previously told ourselves our stories? ‘No’, or at least ‘No, not yet'.
This is a form of self-denial and self-restraint, and not always of ignorance. This is not intended to be a work of theoretical enquiry, but a work of close textual criticism. In concentrating on specific game-fictions as fictions, and looking in detail at concrete examples of the form, I try to avoid making too many hyperbolic claims, and to restrict myself to that which can be supported by readings sourced in the texts themselves. Specifically, I have recognised in myself a tendency to make too much of an apparent correspondence between the texts I have been reading ‘through’ or ‘on’ my PC and PlayStation, and those I have been reading that exist within works of contemporary critical theory. What I have termed the‘postmodern temptation’ in this section heading is something I have sought to both recognise and deny, partly to keep this study manageable, and partly to try and avoid moving too far into abstraction and generalisation. In particular, I have tried to avoid ‘applying’ theory to texts, and using the tricks and tropes of rhetorical argument to patch over the resulting gaps and absences.
Before I completely alienate a possible academic reader-ship, however, I would like to make it clear that this is not an anti-theoretical move. What I want to suggest is that it is far too tempting for the academic critic to consider the future possibility of what the computer game might become, rather than address the mundanity of the object we actually have access to. This is not that potentially oxymoronic thing, an ‘untheorised reading’. Rather, it is a reading that draws on namatological and structuralist thinking and criticism for the most part, and tries to leave its more speculative digressions until the closing chapter. Those who wish to read about Tomb Raider, Half-Life, Close Combat, or SimCity are advised to skip ahead to the beginning of Chapter 2 and read on. Those who wish to see if I have anything new to say about the future possibility of the computer game might be best advised to endure this section of the text and then skip ahead to Chapter 6. Much of the (hopefully unobtrusive) theoretical material that follows and informs this study emerged out of enquiries into supposedly‘simple’ or ‘primitive’ narrative forms such as the fairy tale or folk tale, and seems to have particular utility in the examination of the computer game if we recognise its own ‘primitive’ or ‘simple’ current state. What theoretical material there is that talks to and about intimately related cultural phenomena such as ‘virtual reality’, however, is concerned with a far more complex and sophisticated object of study. Jean Baudrillard’s essay ‘Aesthetic Illusion and Virtual Reality’, discussed in Chapter 6, for example, would seem to be as astute and as forcefully argued as much of his other work, but not to be straightforwardly applicable to the world of ‘left click this’, ‘hit that shortcut key’ and ‘save the game’.
The very materiality of the experience of playing the computer game, its engagement with bits of plastic and metal, silicon and glass, fix it still within the age of mechanical reproduction that was identified by Walter Benjamin even as there is a potentially digital or even cyber’ age evolving or revolving about it.s Things might be about to change, but the reality of playing computer games at the turn of the twenty-first century requires a mass of cables and plugs and extensions. Wires snake about everywhere. Get too involved in playing and your back will ache, your eyes will suffer strain and your mouse hand will begin to cramp. The computer game takes its toll on the body even as it promises a disembodied and virtual experience. Next time we feel inclined to chuckle about our digital forebears and find it amusing that huge mechanical monsters used to occupy the computer departments of our universities, we should take a long hard look at the cables and peripherals that trail across the floor of our living rooms or underneath recognition that the compound term game-fiction I deploy throughout this volume incorporates rather than rejects the game element within game-fiction, it is certainly a case of‘play* over‘purpose’, as so much of the negative criticism levelled at the computer game has made clear.9 Less certainly there is the presentation of chance over design - as the game reproduces the effect of‘chance’ (the availability of plural possibility) over‘design’ (the inevitability of a singular outcome, some kind of fixed and ‘authored’ outcome). Similarly, we see in that plurality of possibility a ‘dispersal’ rather than a ‘centering,’ and at least the illusion of the scriptable (writable, privileging the reader) over the Usable (readable, privileging the author).10 What we would lose if we succumb too readily to such critical temptations, however, would be this need for a specificity of analysis. As enough literary critics have found, if we are not careful in our definitions we are in danger of finding ‘the postmodern’ in every time and place, in the history plays of Shakespeare, and in the very first novels in English. I sometimes wonder what we might make of the prehistoric cave art of Lascaux if we always carry our postmodern critical apparatus with us when we confront an artwork.
Having been subject to intense theoretical debate since the 1970s, terms such as ‘simulation and ‘hypertext’ also press obvious critical buttons. In the terms of common usage (at least with regard to the textual organisation of the World Wide Web, both within specific pages and between websites),‘hypertext’ offers nonlinear and non-hierarchical communicating linkages between textual fragments, but it is not simply a technological enactment of what Gérard Genette is concerned with when he discusses ‘hypertextuality’.11 Context might well be boundless, but we would do well to remember its specificity. As Jean Baudrillard has noted when discussing ‘simulation’ in a wider social and cultural context it is possible to argue that ‘simulation threatens the difference between ‘true’ and ‘false,’ between ‘real’ and ‘imaginary’. As such it seems to offer an attractive point of access for thinking through the computer game - particularly for those who might foresee a technological future in which we might ‘lose ourselves in the consensual hallucination’ of the ‘matrix’ of cyberspace.13 We should, however, continue to be careful in our use and understanding of such terms, never coined and rarely subject to critical reassessment in the face of the encounter with the computer game. As the actual experience of reading computer games should remind us, such terminology does not always survive its transportation to the specifics of that experience. I would ask the reader to pause and insert the words computer game’ before Baudrillard’s statement. Is ‘true’ and ‘false’,‘real’ and ‘imaginary’ really‘under threat’ in such games?
It is worth pointing out here that the ‘sim’ of SimCity is truncated and partial for a reason - ‘simulation’ in computer games is not the same as the kinds of ‘simulation’ that necessarily pose any such ‘threat’. In the games themselves, rather than the hyperbolic copy written by their promotional teams, they rarely support any claim to threaten this distinction in any meaningful way. In Chapter 3 I argue in detail that if the first-person computer game is simulating something, then it is certainly not simulating lived experience. It might, however, be useful in explaining my reticence towards ‘using’ postmodern thought if we quickly look here at some of the ways in which we can draw a distinction between Baudrillardian ‘simulation’ and the forms of‘simulation’ one actually encounters within the computer game as it currently stands. In Gunman Chronicles (2000), for example, we encounter a comparatively advanced visual experience that uses the same graphics engine as Half-Life. It is presented from a first-person point of view that allows us to pretend that we are ‘in’ this environment. Gunman Chronicles is a three-dimensional text, in which we use a combination of mouse and keyboard to move about this ‘virtual’ world.
Largely we move about in order to reposition the gunsight that allows us the crude form of interaction (shooting things) that is central to the playing of the game, but we are also provided with an illusion of freedom of visual movement. Playing for a while, how ever, indicates that there is a hierarchy of effective ‘simulation’ in the game. The artificiality of topography and architecture are barely noticeable as we become accustomed to what amounts to the visual ‘style’ of the game. There are too many angles and bright colours for this to be convincing in its illusory potential, but not in a way that intrudes too much on our reading experience. Water does not look like ‘real’ water, but is recognisable as water in terms of negative definition. It has enough markers of the characteristics of water (it moves, it reflects, it is semi-transparent) that we recognise it as not earth, not corridor, or not lava.
But the human figures of the other gunmen that move and shoot and run about this landscape are recognisably not human. We might be fooled for a moment that they looked ‘as if’ they were human, that there was ever an ‘original’ (as there is in the traditional filmed image before it is manipulated in the studios of Industrial Light and Magic), but not for long. Glimpsed for an instant in the distance we might not bring our knowledge of their graphic limitations to mind. But close up, they look remarkably inhuman - there is little individuation, they‘pose5 like bodybuilders at rest rather than stand naturally, and they are square-jawed not because they are action heroes, but because the framework of graphical boxes (or polygons) from which the image is composed is still evident on the most superficial level. The games designers have built in some nice touches, and these figures twitch and fidget with small random movements rather than stand stock-still, for example, but there is absolutely no way that anyone could mistake the computer-generated image for an apparent image of the real such as film. When the figures speak then the lack of effective lip synching reminds us of just how primitive this is if it is understood to be an attempt at ‘simulation.
Computer-animated films that have attempted this feat of presenting an image with no original as if there was an original, such as Shrek (2001), Monsters Inc (2002) or Final Fantasy (2001) are interesting enough as technical demonstrations of what hap pens visually when millions of hairs are modelled individually, or how the potential of each successive advance in computer processing power is harnessed to give apparent texture to skin, but in their attempt at the representation of the human always suffer comparative failure. Who could not have noticed, for example, that Princess Fiona in Shrek is far more convincing’ a figure when she is in ogre form than when she is her ‘human’ self? Or that the toys of Toy Story convince’ in a way that the humans do not? Ogres, or the walking eyeball of Monsters Incy or the hardware of a science fiction future in Final Fantasy, are comparatively convincing in their ‘illusion’ that the image presented could have been connected mechanically with a ‘real’ object because that ‘real’ object is actually located within the imagination (and our tradition of representation of the imagination) and not in the observed world. This is far harder to achieve digitally when it is poor flawed humanity that is the subject of representation. And I am sure those actors who provide the voices so essential to the success of such films will be laughing all the way to the bank when they read of the imminent redundancy of the human because of technological advance.
It is telling that where a game like Gunman Chronicles succeeds visually is in its rendering of images that have no meaningfully real reference - at the top of its hierarchy of‘simulation’ is not the human or the inanimate, but the dinosaurs that populate the first alien landscape that the player encounters. Of course, when we test the representation of the human in the computer game for its ‘accuracy' or its ‘realism' we make comparison with the observed real as well as with other acts of representation - when we test the ‘accuracy’ or ‘realism’ of the dinosaurs we test against a tradition of representation. These are not lizards with bits glued on, as we once encountered in the monster movies. Nor is this the stop-motion animation of models, as in films where animators such as Ray Harryhausen stunned audiences with the realism of the reptiles, such as One Million Years B.C. (1966). What it refers to is the current‘state of the art’ and not the state of the real. Jurassic Park (1993)
showed the way, and (at least in the UK) BBC television’s Walking With Dinosaurs (1999) moved us a little further along. But at the end of this particular pathway is the ‘imaginary’ and not the observed ‘real’. The sophistication, effectiveness, or plausibility of the dinosaurs on screen is judged within its comparison with the subsub-genre of the computer-animated dinosaur film, whether it claims to be documentary or entertaining in effect. For all any of us know (and 1 stress the‘know’) all dinosaurs hopped and bounced about the landscape like squealing schoolchildren at playtime. Or had perpetual hiccups. Or had polka dot markings. 1 ‘know’ how they should move and look on screen, but I do not ‘know’ how they did move and should look in life. We might ‘suppose’ or even ‘deduce’ things from the fossil record, but we do not ‘know’ if and how simulation matches real. No human observed the creatures in question, and the prehistoric is best known for its lack of record keeping even when there was a human presence. It is a disappointment encountered by every schoolboy that no recognisable ancestor feasted on brontosaur steaks or ran from a marauding Tyrannosaurus rex. Use of flocking algorithms based on the observation of the flight of birds to model the behaviour of dinosaurs can only simulate the flocking of birds - otherwise we are left with the possible and the ‘imaginary*, whatever the stridency of the claims for the ‘real’ made by those who will take observation of one event to another. This takes nothing away from the images with which we are confronted, however. They are aesthetically pleasing, they offer the pleasure of spectacle, and there is something simply ‘fun' about walking around the grazing dinosaurs or staring up at the wheeling pterodactyls in Gunman Chronicles before everything goes haywire and the running and shooting begins in earnest.
This is not to deny that the technology, rather than the deployment of technology within the computer game, cannot be read as posing a ‘threat' to a distinction that is already under strain. The same technology that is used by the computer game obviously has the potential to deceive, and probably not too far in the future.