It is also not suprising how popular this medium is set to be when you consider the average age of serious video game players these days. There are a lot of 30 – 40 year olds out there with a nostalgic view of the handful of decades that video games have been around.

He has a point: nostalgia probably has a lot to do with recent high-profile examples of the pixel aesthetic (I wrote a comment on his post with some ideas about why this happens).

The problem with nostalgia, however,  is that its power inevitably (ironically?) weakens over time. Right now, it is working to our advantage by appealing to the older generation of gamers. But some day these older gamers will die, taking their nostalgia with them. Worse, our nostalgic longing will steadily lose much of its power during our own lifespan, since eventually we’ll have to yield control of the medium to a  new generation of developers and players who  are being taught to see 3D as standard and pixels as “retro.”

So how can we protect pixels from the certain death that awaits us? Obviously, the first thing we need is to continue developing awesome pixel-based games. But just as important, we need to  secure a permanent place for pixels in videogame discourse.  Future gamers might not be able to fully understand our sense of nostalgia regardless of what we do (and this is a good thing, given that it is our nostalgia, not theirs), but by making a forceful case on its behalf, we can at least ensure that it remains a dignified and relevant option for game developers far into the future. This is what happened to black and white in film, and it will happen to pixel art as well if we make a strong enough case for it (a few more youtube documentaries Pixel and we’d already be halfway there). Hopefully we’ll do better than film, so that pixel art won’t be as rare as black and white movies have become nowadays.

Speaking of pixels and nostalgia, check out this super sweet stop-motion tribute to classic NES games!

The pixel is alive indeed. For more info on the film, see this Kotaku post.

This short pixel art documentary by Simon Cottee is required viewing for readers of this blog (thanks for reading, by the way). An unassuming film with an unassuming title, Pixel may be modest in scope, but it is also a deeply enjoyable and thoughtful account of the rise, fall, and triumphant return of pixel art in videogames and other media.

Perhaps the most memorable part of the film is an interview with Jason Rohrer in which he attempts to justify the use of pixels in his own work with an interpretation consisting of two distinct but complimentary claims. His first point is that abstract, pixelated graphics make it easier for players to identify themselves with the characters, a concept that should come as no surprise to people with an interest in games or animation in general. His second point is a bit more surprising, given that it’s about technology, and given Rohrer’s reputation for being one of the least nerdy, least techie, and most artsy game designers around. Even more surprising–he actually makes a lot of sense (okay, maybe that isn’t so surprising, but it definitely makes for a more powerful defense of his taste in graphics).

Essentially, Rohrer’s point is that pixel art offers the most natural and transparent approach to making videogame imagery, due mostly to the fact that pixels, like videogames, always take place inside a computer. It’s a powerful thought, but a relatively simple one when you think about it. More importantly, it shows that Rohrer recognizes the need to reconcile the expressive nature of videogames with the technology that makes them possible.

Reconciling these two ideas is especially important in our 3D-dominated world, where pixelated abstraction is often portrayed as a reactionary move deployed by those who remain suspicious of polygons. Consequently, it becomes extremely easy to buy into the notion that pixel revivalists are simply part of a “backlash” against advances in game technology. Rohrer’s response turns this idea on its head by depicting pixels as the authentic and “hardcore” style, while simultaneously implying that 3D is the real format of choice for “casual” gamers (that means you, Halo fans…you casual gamers you).  Simply put, pixels are not a backlash against technology, they are the quintessential videogame technology. Likewise, the use of pixels does not constitute a rejection of realism, but rather an affirmation of abstraction.

At one point during the documentary, Rohrer suggests that an appreciation of pixel art is inextricably tied to achieving videogame literacy. He’s right, which is why this documentary should be applauded for doing its part to remedy the situation. But of course, even those who speak videogame fluently should watch the film, as it is sure to enrich your gaming vocabulary in one way or another.

You can watch the entire video above or on Cotteen’s YouTube page.

I’ve mentioned before that L.B. Jeffries is, in my estimation, one of the most capable videogame critics in the blogosphere. That is why I was taken aback by an essay titled The Trouble Shooting Review, in which he proposes a more technical approach to game criticism not unlike the one you would use to review a car. I want to think that either Jeffries misstated what he wanted to say, or perhaps that I misread it. I’m hoping that’s the case. In any event, I’ll use it as an opportunity to explain why games aren’t cars (in case you were wondering), and why the kind of technical analysis he seems to endorse is problematic for an expressive medium like videogames.

I’ll begin with two of the most baffling passages in his essay, which seem to summarize his general view as well as any other.

It’s easy to dismiss technical critiques like bugs or load times as irrelevant to a game’s value, but the notion of bringing them up still has merit. What can be gained by approaching a game review from a more technical perspective than things like fun factor or story? Looking at a game from a technical perspective really just means treating games like experience generating machines instead of experiences themselves. [...]

A lot of what I’m describing is basically what you do when you’re reviewing something like a car (Peter Johnson, et al, “How to Write a Car Review”, Wikihow, 27 October 2009). You don’t just drive on paved roads, you take it down some dirt roads and maybe slam the brakes at high-speeds a few times. Maybe even take someone for a ride with you and see if the passenger side is fun. Applied to games, it makes the reviewer consider things like if it has co-op, then you should do your best to play it that way.

1.

Let’s assume Jeffries is right to describe games as “experience generating machines” (truthfully, they can be called many things besides, but for now let’s stick to his fine term and agree that they are machines–figuratively speaking, since a game is not the same as the machine that reads them). Let’s assume, furthermore, that the goal of an experience generating machine is–what else?–to generate experiences. If this is true, then surely we must also accept the notion that an experience producing machine is only as good (interesting/powerful/profound) as the experience it produces in the player. Accordingly, Jeffries’s desire to treat games as “experience generating machines instead of experiences themselves” seems dangerously close to undercutting the entire purpose of the game.

In other words, games invite us to treat them as “experiences [in] themselves” first, and it is entirely beside the point to downplay this part of their nature on the grounds that such experiences have been “generated.” After all, every experience is generated by something. There is no such thing as a stand-alone experience. “Experiences themselves” are always the end result of external factors that frequently exist beyond our control or understanding. For instance, I could describe my first summer job as a teenager as a “wonderful, life-changing experience.” But why was this such a wonderful experience? What made it so transformative? That experience is not the result of nothing–surely, something must have made it a pleasant and transformative one. Maybe I was lucky enough to have a wise and patient boss; maybe I had great colleagues; maybe I met the love of my life in that job. One could cite hundreds of different potential explanations to support my recollection of that experience.

And yet, these explanations are secondary to the experience itself. They are my way of trying to rationalize something I have already experienced, not the other way around. Simply put: expereiences come first, then come the explanations and rationalizations.

This is also the case when we’re talking about videogames as experience producing machines. If the point of a game is to produce an experience, then how could we not give priority to the experience of playing it? Imagine if we applied that same reasoning to a painting. Say that the “point” of painting is to produce a visual. If that’s the case, then it would make no sense to approach a painting as anything other than a visual artifact. A painting’s worth is not determined by the materials that the artist used to construct that painting. One does not say that a painting is “great, unless we consider the materials involved in creating it.” That would make no sense. Of course, identifying the materials is an interesting and useful thing to know, because it might help to explain the causes behind our reaction to said painting. But they do not precede our value judgments on the painting–they merely help us to justify and rationalize those reactions.

2.

Aside from being misguided and unrealistic, Jeffries’s approach risks courting the resentment of some readers. For it implies that the reviewer has somehow transcended his own initial experiences with the game and is therefore uniquely positioned to impartially dissect and predict the experiences of others, when in fact the opposite is true: i.e., our initial experience with a work often plays an essential role in determining not only what we think of the work, but also what we think of the public’s reaction to that work.

(A recent example of this phenomenon: many film critics and analysts explained the poor box office of The Hurt Locker by suggesting that the movie is simply ‘too heavy” for a mainstream audience that already finds itself coping with the grim reality of two wars and an economic recession. But if this is true, then what do we make of Transformers 2, which is just as violent and was also released during the same tumultuous period, only to make hundreds of millions of dollars?  The answer to this riddle is quite simple: film critics saw The Hurt Locker and determined it was very, very good. They also saw Transformers 2 and determined that it was very, very bad. Accordingly, they politely blamed the audience for Hurt Locker’s failure and Transformers 2’s success by describing the former as “too heavy” and the latter as “easy escapism.” In other words, they assumed that the success or failure of either movie had nothing to do with their actual value as a work. Transformers was a success not because it did things right, but because it did things wrong. Conversely, The Hurt Locker was a commercial failure because of everything it did right! At this point, it is worth mentioning that there is nothing wrong with this attitude. My only wish is that more videogame critics followed suit.)

3.

An ideal approach to reviewing an “experience generating machine” would begin with a subjective appraisal of ‘the affects’ or sensations that the game communicates to us as a player. Only after we’ve reflected and formed an opinion on these matters do we begin to search for clues that explain how the game was able to transmit those feelings in the first place. In other words, we do not determine that a game is “good” after evaluating how the experience machine works. To the contrary, we first determine that a game is “good” and then look to the machine’s structure in an attempt to understand why it “worked” for us. Looked at from this perspective, the study of “experience machines” is really a study of the self. It is a study of the conditions (both real and virtual) that must be met for certain feelings and sensations to be triggered within us. And if you accept the notion that emotional triggers are only as valuable as the emotions they trigger, then it becomes crucial to reflect on the value of the experience itself before getting down to a functional analysis of the game design.

This is also why the “car review” analogy just doesn’t fit. A car is not an experience or an experience generator. Yes, we may find that driving a particularly nice car results in a pleasurable morning commute. But in this case the pleasant experience is incidental to tha act of driving the car. One does not buy a nice car because the experience of driving it is worthwhile in and of itself (unless you’re Jay Leno, but no one wants to be him nowadays, lol). No, we buy cars because we need it to go places. Once we’ve made the decision to buy it, we might say to ourselves: “Hey look, it seems like I have some extra cash burning a hole in my pockets! And seeing as I’m already buying a car, why not use this extra dough to buy a really nice one, so that I can get to my destination more comfortably.” Notice how the need to buy a car precedes our decision to go for the one with the fancy features. The fancy features are just our way of making an otherwise necessary purchase more pleasant than it otherwise would be.

Games as “experience machines,” however, are designed for the express purpose of generating worthwhile experiences. We technically don’t need to play them, but those of us who recognize the medium’s expressive power and limitless potential actually want  to, believing that our lives can be enriched in the process.

If not cars, then what else could these experience machines be compared to? Perhaps the well-known “game criticism as ‘travel log’” approach gives us a better analogy. Ideally, we play games for the same (ideal) reason that we travel: to experience an ‘alternate reality,’ to disrupt the monotonous flow of daily life, to unsettle our notion of what is ‘normal’ or ‘necessary,’ to engage others on their own terms, to learn from and experiment with different modes of being in the world, etc. There are times when these cultural exchanges require you to push the limits of what’s possible in the way Jeffries suggests. But oftentimes it is best to temporarily surrender to the experience itself and abide by the rules in place in the country we’re visiting so as to allow yourself to learn something meaningful in the process.

4.

At the beginning of his essay, Jeffries suggests that reviewing games might be harder than any other kind of review, because our experiences with games tend to be more unique and varied than  they are with any other medium. I think he’s right.  Accordingly, I don’t want to suggest that this is somehow the definitive way to approach game criticism. Not even close. In fact, I’m not entirely sure that games are best understood as experience generating machines, though I certainly find that description persuasive and believe it applies to many types of games.

Rather than seeking to impose a single methodology on this endlessly complex medium, perhaps we should be embracing its many ambiguities and enigmas. We should be flexible, adapting our styles according to the games under review at any given time. Critical gaming “schools” will come in due time, but we shouldn’t be in any rush to get there. The fact that game criticism remains a largely uncharted field might make it more difficult to navigate, but it also allows us a degree of freedom that is no longer present in more established mediums.

So let’s enjoy this freedom while it lasts, for it might no longer be available by the time the next generation of game critics arrive. Once you adopt this attitude, you might even find that the medium’s many ambiguities are precisely what make it so interesting.

Pictured above: “Deep Horizon” by UBERMORGEN.COM

Videogames communicate through the strategic use of space. These spaces are virtual, but no less “real” than actual spaces in so far as they depend on the very same kind of spatial relationships that define how we relate to an environment.  These virtual spaces allow us to briefly escape the moralities and identities that define (and limit) our actions in the “real world,” only to replace them with a new set of values and identities determined by the game designer. It is in this respect that a videogame can be said to resemble a heterotopia.

A heterotopia is a space that exists outside of the society that it forms a part of.  Their relationship with the rest of society might seem paradoxical at first blush, but it is central to the crucial role that heterotopias  occupy in most cultures: generally  speaking, these can be understood as the designated spaces on which various kinds of rites of passage may take place and/or a place where one may take refuge from society without really leaving it. There are many types of heterotopias, but all of them share at least one thing in common: namely, that one cannot enter and/or exit them without first meeting a set of criteria. We don’t work or live in a heterotopia, instead, a heterotopia is that place which we only visit for specific reasons at specific times. We can return to the broader society once the task has been completed (i.e., once the heterotopia has served its purpose).

Boarding schools, “love hotels,” museums, the theater, and even cementeries can all be understood as heterotopias, for  the various reasons that Foucault explains below. Towards the very end of the essay, in a beautiful (and uncharacteristically earnest) passage, Foucault identifies ships as the ultimate type of heterotopia in Western civilization, one that sadly began to disappear with the advent of air transportation and has yet to be replaced.

He thinks this is bad news, but you don’t have to despair! For there is something new emerging on the horizon. You guessed it: videogames. Could it be that a new heterotopia arrived just in time for Foucault’s lament about the imminent disappearance of most Western heterotopias? Perhaps, but I readily concede that it is a very debatable proposition. Many basic questions remain. For one,while it is certainly  true that videogames and heterotopias share a lot in common, is this enough to regard them as essentially serving the same functions? Is the gaming medium best understood as a heterotopia with expressive attributes, or as a mode of expression with heterotopian functions? Should we even think of these alternatives as being mutually exclusive in the first place? Can’t a game serve both functions without fear of contradiction?

I’m keeping my opinions to myself for the time being, since the aim of posing these questions was never to find “the right answer” for them (assuming  one exists), but rather to frame the heterotopia-gaming relatioship in a way that productively problematizes both. After all, no one cares about the actual connection between a heterotopia and a game. The connection itself is meaningless–what’s important is trying to connect the two concepts in ways that can enrich our understanding of both games and heterotopias alike.  Who knows, maybe we’ll even expand our critical-gaming vocabulary in the process!

So, without further ado, here is an excerpt of Michel Foucault’s Of Other Spaces, Heterotopias. The full text is available at Foucault.info, a great online resource for many of Foucault’s shorter writings.

HETEROTOPIAS

First there are the utopias. Utopias are sites with no real place. They are sites that have a general relation of direct or inverted analogy with the real space of Society. They present society itself in a perfected form, or else society turned upside down, but in any case these utopias are fundamentally unreal spaces.

There are also, probably in every culture, in every civilization, real places – places that do exist and that are formed in the very founding of society – which are something like counter-sites, a kind of effectively enacted utopia in which the real sites, all the other real sites that can be found within the culture, are simultaneously represented, contested, and inverted. Places of this kind are outside of all places, even though it may be possible to indicate their location in reality. Because these places are absolutely different from all the sites that they reflect and speak about, I shall call them, by way of contrast to utopias, heterotopias. I believe that between utopias and these quite other sites, these heterotopias, there might be a sort of mixed, joint experience, which would be the mirror. The mirror is, after all, a utopia, since it is a placeless place. In the mirror, I see myself there where I am not, in an unreal, virtual space that opens up behind the surface; I am over there, there where I am not, a sort of shadow that gives my own visibility to myself, that enables me to see myself there where I am absent: such is the utopia of the mirror. But it is also a heterotopia in so far as the mirror does exist in reality, where it exerts a sort of counteraction on the position that I occupy. From the standpoint of the mirror I discover my absence from the place where I am since I see myself over there. Starting from this gaze that is, as it were, directed toward me, from the ground of this virtual space that is on the other side of the glass, I come back toward myself; I begin again to direct my eyes toward myself and to reconstitute myself there where I am. The mirror functions as a heterotopia in this respect: it makes this place that I occupy at the moment when I look at myself in the glass at once absolutely real, connected with all the space that surrounds it, and absolutely unreal, since in order to be perceived it has to pass through this virtual point which is over there.

As for the heterotopias as such, how can they be described? What meaning do they have? We might imagine a sort of systematic description – I do not say a science because the term is too galvanized now -that would, in a given society, take as its object the study, analysis, description, and ‘reading’ (as some like to say nowadays) of these different spaces, of these other places. As a sort of simultaneously mythic and real contestation of the space in which we live, this description could be called heterotopology.

Its first principle is that there is probably not a single culture in the world that fails to constitute heterotopias. That is a constant of every human group. But the heterotopias obviously take quite varied forms, and perhaps no one absolutely universal form of heterotopia would be found. We can however class them in two main categories.

In the so-called primitive societies, there is a certain form of heterotopia that I would call crisis heterotopias, i.e., there are privileged or sacred or forbidden places, reserved for individuals who are, in relation to society and to the human environment in which they live, in a state of crisis: adolescents, menstruating women, pregnant women. the elderly, etc. In out society, these crisis heterotopias are persistently disappearing, though a few remnants can still be found. For example, the boarding school, in its nineteenth-century form, or military service for young men, have certainly played such a role, as the first manifestations of sexual virility were in fact supposed to take place “elsewhere” than at home. For girls, there was, until the middle of the twentieth century, a tradition called the “honeymoon trip” which was an ancestral theme. The young woman’s deflowering could take place “nowhere” and, at the moment of its occurrence the train or honeymoon hotel was indeed the place of this nowhere, this heterotopia without geographical markers.

But these heterotopias of crisis are disappearing today and are being replaced, I believe, by what we might call heterotopias of deviation: those in which individuals whose behavior is deviant in relation to the required mean or norm are placed. Cases of this are rest homes and psychiatric hospitals, and of course prisons, and one should perhaps add retirement homes that are, as it were, on the borderline between the heterotopia of crisis and the heterotopia of deviation since, after all, old age is a crisis, but is also a deviation since in our society where leisure is the rule, idleness is a sort of deviation.

The second principle of this description of heterotopias is that a society, as its history unfolds, can make an existing heterotopia function in a very different fashion; for each heterotopia has a precise and determined function within a society and the same heterotopia can, according to the synchrony of the culture in which it occurs, have one function or another.

As an example I shall take the strange heterotopia of the cemetery. The cemetery is certainly a place unlike ordinary cultural spaces. It is a space that is however connected with all the sites of the city, state or society or village, etc., since each individual, each family has relatives in the cemetery. In western culture the cemetery has practically always existed. But it has undergone important changes. Until the end of the eighteenth century, the cemetery was placed at the heart of the city, next to the church. In it there was a hierarchy of possible tombs. There was the charnel house in which bodies lost the last traces of individuality, there were a few individual tombs and then there were the tombs inside the church. These latter tombs were themselves of two types, either simply tombstones with an inscription, or mausoleums with statues. This cemetery housed inside the sacred space of the church has taken on a quite different cast in modern civilizations, and curiously, it is in a time when civilization has become ‘atheistic,’ as one says very crudely, that western culture has established what is termed the cult of the dead.

Basically it was quite natural that, in a time of real belief in the resurrection of bodies and the immortality of the soul, overriding importance was not accorded to the body’s remains. On the contrary, from the moment when people are no longer sure that they have a soul or that the body will regain life, it is perhaps necessary to give much more attention to the dead body, which is ultimately the only trace of our existence in the world and in language. In any case, it is from the beginning of the nineteenth century that everyone has a right to her or his own little box for her or his own little personal decay, but on the other hand, it is only from that start of the nineteenth century that cemeteries began to be located at the outside border of cities. In correlation with the individualization of death and the bourgeois appropriation of the cemetery, there arises an obsession with death as an ‘illness.’ The dead, it is supposed, bring illnesses to the living, and it is the presence and proximity of the dead right beside the houses, next to the church, almost in the middle of the street, it is this proximity that propagates death itself. This major theme of illness spread by the contagion in the cemeteries persisted until the end of the eighteenth century, until, during the nineteenth century, the shift of cemeteries toward the suburbs was initiated. The cemeteries then came to constitute, no longer the sacred and immortal heart of the city, but the other city, where each family possesses its dark resting place.

Third principle. The heterotopia is capable of juxtaposing in a single real place several spaces, several sites that are in themselves incompatible. Thus it is that the theater brings onto the rectangle of the stage, one after the other, a whole series of places that are foreign to one another; thus it is that the cinema is a very odd rectangular room, at the end of which, on a two-dimensional screen, one sees the projection of a three-dimensional space, but perhaps the oldest example of these heterotopias that take the form of contradictory sites is the garden. We must not forget that in the Orient the garden, an astonishing creation that is now a thousand years old, had very deep and seemingly superimposed meanings. The traditional garden of the Persians was a sacred space that was supposed to bring together inside its rectangle four parts representing the four parts of the world, with a space still more sacred than the others that were like an umbilicus, the navel of the world at its center (the basin and water fountain were there); and all the vegetation of the garden was supposed to come together in this space, in this sort of microcosm. As for carpets, they were originally reproductions of gardens (the garden is a rug onto which the whole world comes to enact its symbolic perfection, and the rug is a sort of garden that can move across space). The garden is the smallest parcel of the world and then it is the totality of the world. The garden has been a sort of happy, universalizing heterotopia since the beginnings of antiquity (our modern zoological gardens spring from that source).

Fourth principle. Heterotopias are most often linked to slices in time – which is to say that they open onto what might be termed, for the sake of symmetry, heterochronies. The heterotopia begins to function at full capacity when men arrive at a sort of absolute break with their traditional time. This situation shows us that the cemetery is indeed a highly heterotopic place since, for the individual, the cemetery begins with this strange heterochrony, the loss of life, and with this quasi-eternity in which her permanent lot is dissolution and disappearance.

From a general standpoint, in a society like ours heterotopias and heterochronies are structured and distributed in a relatively complex fashion. First of all, there are heterotopias of indefinitely accumulating time, for example museums and libraries, Museums and libraries have become heterotopias in which time never stops building up and topping its own summit, whereas in the seventeenth century, even at the end of the century, museums and libraries were the expression of an individual choice. By contrast, the idea of accumulating everything, of establishing a sort of general archive, the will to enclose in one place all times, all epochs, all forms, all tastes, the idea of constituting a place of all times that is itself outside of time and inaccessible to its ravages, the project of organizing in this way a sort of perpetual and indefinite accumulation of time in an immobile place, this whole idea belongs to our modernity. The museum and the library are heterotopias that are proper to western culture of the nineteenth century.

Opposite these heterotopias that are linked to the accumulation of time, there are those linked, on the contrary, to time in its most flowing, transitory, precarious aspect, to time in the mode of the festival. These heterotopias are not oriented toward the eternal, they are rather absolutely temporal [chroniques]. Such, for example, are the fairgrounds, these’ marvelous empty sites on the outskirts of cities that teem once or twice a year with stands, displays, heteroclite objects, wrestlers, snakewomen, fortune-tellers, and so forth. Quite recently, a new kind of temporal heterotopia has been invented: vacation villages, such as those Polynesian villages that offer a compact three weeks of primitive and eternal nudity to the inhabitants of the cities. You see, moreover, that through the two forms of heterotopias that come together here, the heterotopia of the festival and that of the eternity of accumulating time, the huts of Djerba are in a sense relatives of libraries and museums. for the rediscovery of Polynesian life abolishes time; yet the experience is just as much the,, rediscovery of time, it is as if the entire history of humanity reaching back to its origin were accessible in a sort of immediate knowledge,

Fifth principle. Heterotopias always presuppose a system of opening and closing that both isolates them and makes them penetrable. In general, the heterotopic site is not freely accessible like a public place. Either the entry is compulsory, as in the case of entering a barracks or a prison, or else the individual has to submit to rites and purifications. To get in one must have a certain permission and make certain gestures. Moreover, there are even heterotopias that are entirely consecrated to these activities of purification -purification that is partly religious and partly hygienic, such as the hammin of the Moslems, or else purification that appears to be purely hygienic, as in Scandinavian saunas.

There are others, on the contrary, that seem to be pure and simple openings, but that generally hide curious exclusions. Everyone can enter into thew heterotopic sites, but in fact that is only an illusion- we think we enter where we are, by the very fact that we enter, excluded. I am thinking for example, of the famous bedrooms that existed on the great farms of Brazil and elsewhere in South America. The entry door did not lead into the central room where the family lived, and every individual or traveler who came by had the right to ope this door, to enter into the bedroom and to sleep there for a night. Now these bedrooms were such that the individual who went into them never had access to the family’s quarter the visitor was absolutely the guest in transit, was not really the invited guest. This type of heterotopia, which has practically disappeared from our civilizations, could perhaps be found in the famous American motel rooms where a man goes with his car and his mistress and where illicit sex is both absolutely sheltered and absolutely hidden, kept isolated without however being allowed out in the open.

Sixth principle. The last trait of heterotopias is that they have a function in relation to all the space that remains. This function unfolds between two extreme poles. Either their role is to create a space of illusion that exposes every real space, all the sites inside of which human life is partitioned, as still more illusory (perhaps that is the role that was played by those famous brothels of which we are now deprived). Or else, on the contrary, their role is to create a space that is other, another real space, as perfect, as meticulous, as well arranged as ours is messy, ill constructed, and jumbled. This latter type would be the heterotopia, not of illusion, but of compensation, and I wonder if certain colonies have not functioned somewhat in this manner. In certain cases, they have played, on the level of the general organization of terrestrial space, the role of heterotopias. I am thinking, for example, of the first wave of colonization in the seventeenth century, of the Puritan societies that the English had founded in America and that were absolutely perfect other places. I am also thinking of those extraordinary Jesuit colonies that were founded in South America: marvelous, absolutely regulated colonies in which human perfection was effectively achieved. The Jesuits of Paraguay established colonies in which existence was regulated at every turn. The village was laid out according to a rigorous plan around a rectangular place at the foot of which was the church; on one side, there was the school; on the other, the cemetery-, and then, in front of the church, an avenue set out that another crossed at fight angles; each family had its little cabin along these two axes and thus the sign of Christ was exactly reproduced. Christianity marked the space and geography of the American world with its fundamental sign.

The daily life of individuals was regulated, not by the whistle, but by the bell. Everyone was awakened at the same time, everyone began work at the same time; meals were at noon and five o’clock-, then came bedtime, and at midnight came what was called the marital wake-up, that is, at the chime of the churchbell, each person carried out her/his duty.

Brothels and colonies are two extreme types of heterotopia, and if we think, after all, that the boat is a floating piece of space, a place without a place, that exists by itself, that is closed in on itself and at the same time is given over to the infinity of the sea and that, from port to port, from tack to tack, from brothel to brothel, it goes as far as the colonies in search of the most precious treasures they conceal in their gardens, you will understand why the boat has not only been for our civilization, from the sixteenth century until the present, the great instrument of economic development (I have not been speaking of that today), but has been simultaneously the greatest reserve of the imagination. The ship is the heterotopia par excellence. In civilizations without boats, dreams dry up, espionage takes the place of adventure, and the police take the place of pirates.

Read up on texts by Foucault at Foucault.info; if you’re new to his ideas, this site serves as a good introduction to his life and work.

I just got my copy of the inaugural issue of Kill Screen in the mail. It comes in a smaller journal-sized format which looks great and fits quite nicely in a regular bookshelf. The decision to release it in this format is a good one. It gives the magazine an air of permanence, as if to say that “this is not a regular magazine; magazines are disposable, this is not; magazines belong in the magazine pile, this belongs in a public library, you know, next to that Daedalus“

I’ll comment on the magazine’s content once I get the chance to read it. But for now, I encourage you to visit their site and grab your own copy. There is nothing like this magazine in the videogame world: a magazine geared not towards consumers or fans, but to those chosen few who see games as a powerful mode of expression with serious cultural implications. The first issue features contributions from some of the smartest peeps in the business, including journalists Leigh Alexander and L. B. Jeffries, and game design mega-legend Peter Molyneux, creator of the mega-legendary Populous and more recently the Fable series. Okay, I’m going to end this sales-pitch right here. I’ll try to post on the articles when I’m done reading.

The computer scene in the earlier days was often dominated by “uber nerds” who would collect lots of hardware and not actually have that much to use for it. My impression was that a lot of games were created for this market in the earlier days.

I love my “uber nerd” friends (“omg my new rig runs Crysis 67 at 3000fps” etc) but the downside to this market is that it encourages the “feature list”. We’ve all seen this – a list of bullet points on the back of a box with goofy names of “systems” (the ultimate blood engine!), gameplay “features” (eviscerate your foes with 70 different finishing moves!) and general masturbation. (9.5 billion polys each with 256 shader layers!) The end result feels like a weird “macho” male stereotype. The downsides of this “macho” illusion spill into misogyny, unnecessarily contentious competition and other silly things.

–Alec Holowka

Anger is the righteous emotion, and anything worth a shit is worth getting angry about. The games which please us make us furious, the games we hate are disgusting, sad, and, furthermore, boring. Nobody who ever played a video game past the age of five did so because they were bored and frustrated. They did it because they were controller-chewing furious. We know that the Super Nintendo was the best console we ever owned, for the simple reason that there are the most teeth marks in it (our religion is such that we believe everybody goes to Silent Hill, whether they’re good or bad, and enjoy it to varying degrees based on their own comfort with their quirks — in light of this, we strive to get to a place, spiritually, so that when we see the tumor bristling with molars that rolls over King of the Monsters cartridges while shrieking hideously (probably moments before Pyramid Head wanders into view to place a quarter on the urinal, because “he’s got next”) we will feel nothing but pride (so far, it’s not working). You could autopsy any given gaming device this way to determine its age by tree-rings of animalistic rage. It’s very clear to the gamer why some women are beaten. Only something you love can make you truly furious.

If you think we’re mocking spousal abuse, you’ve underestimated how much we love games.

-ABDN

In video game literature and video game reviews, video games are often divided into two distinct parts: interface and gameplay. Good video games, it is assumed, have easy to use interfaces, but they also provide difficult gameplay challenges to the player. But must a good game follow this pattern, and what is the difference between interface and gameplay? When does the easy-to-use interface stop, and when does the challenging gameplay begin? By analyzing a number of games, the paper argues that it is rare to find a clear-cut border between interface and gameplay and that the fluidity of this border characterizes games in general. While this border is unclear, we also analyze a number of games where the challenge is unambiguously located in the interface, thereby demonstrating that “easy interface and challenging gameplay” is neither universal nor a requirement for game quality. Finally, the paper argues, the lack of a clear distinction between easy interface and challenging gameplay is due to the fact that games are fundamentally designed not to accomplish something through an activity, but to provide an activity that is pleasurable in itself.

Suda 51, sitting on his protagonist's favorite chair.

I’m not sure what to think of No More Heroes : Desperate Struggle. The original No More Heroes took me completely by surprise when it came out in 2008. I was expecting a sword-waggling action game and what I got instead was a darkly funny and deeply unsettling excercize in idiosyncratic game design and storytelling. The game is also one of the few video games that tries to address (in a critical manner) gaming culture itself.

So why am I worried about the sequel? Well, the fact that there even is a sequel is somewhat baffling, since the first game ended on a deeply fatalistic note that would seem to preclude this possibility. It is troubling that Suda 51 would undermine the dramatic power of that ending by arbitrarily continuing a story that had already concluded so brilliantly. But I’m not going to pass judgment on this until I play the game–let’s hope he proves me wrong.

Alas, what really has me worried at the moment has to do with the genral tone he has been taking in recent interviews, where he seems to be implicitly apologizing for things that, if anything, should be celebrated. IGN’s interview, published yesterday, is only the latest example:

IGN: How has the open world changed or been enhanced over the first game?

Suda 51: Rest assured that the city of Santa Destroy has been much improved and will offer you many more interesting opportunities. Sorry but I can’t discuss the details yet, you will find out more about this soon.

[...]

IGN: How have you enhanced the graphics over the first title?

Suda 51: We certainly think the graphics are better, you can be the judge.

The game did have ugly graphics and a laughably plain open world environment–a San Diego-esque city called Santa Destroy (Suda 51 tends to like names that are equal parts cool-sounding and absurd)–that functions as a hub but looks like an half-finished Nintendo 64 version of GTA: San Andreas. This crude presentation, however, fits in quite nicely with the themes explored later on in the game. For example, the generic architecture and empty sidewalks in Santa Destroy, rather than ” lacking polish,” can in fact be understood as a darkly sardonic portrayal the world as Travis sees it, one that is characterized above all by the general helplessness of his situation (e.g., living with his cat in a motel room, working at horrible part-time jobs for very low pay, sexually frustrated and lacking a partner), which he then attempts to transcend by entering the assasin’s tournament at the behest of an attractive French woman who recognizes his desperation.

It doesn’t take too much imagination to make artistic sense of No More Heroes’ graphical “problems;” and yet, part of what gave the game its ‘cool’ edge was the apparent indifference of its creators to geeky concerns such as “graphics” in the first place. Jesse Costantino made this point beautifully in his review for Game Revolution:

It’s as if to say, “HD? Who the ‘f’ needs that? We’ve got blood, money, chicks, cars, guns, swords, and endless amounts of fun. We’ll leave the pretty graphics to the pretty boys.”

Travis Touchdown, the protagonist of No More Heroes

He calls this type of gamer a “pretty boy,” though my preferred term is “dork.” It doesn’t matter: we’re speaking about the same person. It is the kind of person that complains about NMH’s part-time jobs because they aren’t “fun;” the kind of person who was devastated when he first realized that Bioshock did not include online co-op; in other words, it is the sort of person that will never accept (or understand) a game like No More Heroes, regardless of what Suda 51 and Grasshopper Manufacture do to try to appease him.

Ultimately, my fear is that Suda’s implicit recognition of graphical “shortcomings” in this interview might also extend to everything else that was  so brilliant about the original game. Let’s hope not. After all, the first game evidently had a large enough audience to warrant a sequel, so it would make little sense to risk alienating these fans (not to mention compromising his original vision for the series) in pursuit of acceptance from the pretty boy demographic.

Suda doesn’t need them, nor do they need Suda. And fortunately for us, these gamers are currently distracted by Halo spinoffs, E3 “booth babes” and the like, so there is still plenty of time to ignore them.

Games are supposed to be safe places, where we experiment with strategy and compete without fear of consequence. When we play, we come to even the most violent, sadistic variety of game bearing an implicit assumption — an assumption so ingrained and absolute that we don’t even acknowledge it consciously — that we are not responsible for our actions. One of the deepest evolutionary tenets of play, embraced not just by us humans but by the entire mammalian world, is that play is free of repercussion. Play, at least temporarily, is supposed to liberate us from morality.

Brathwaite has smashed this covenant, brilliantly, and anyone who plays Train — or even reads about it — will never be able to approach a game so naively again. Forever after, they will have no choice but to question the mechanics of the games they play, to interrogate their rules instead of blindly following them and to be wary of their shifting contexts.