Every modern art form has had a
Golden Age, and the most brilliant content produced within the medium has been
the most controversial and provocative. Film, literature, music, theater, and
the pictorial arts have all “pushed the envelope” with regards to their subject
matter and its presentation.
Video games have notoriously been
no exception to this, and attempts to censor them have been as diverse and
inane as any other. Yet for all the best efforts of the medium’s founding
members, it seems that no one could have predicted where the most dangerous
threat would emanate: from within the Audience.
Gamers and designers have, by and
large, “sold out” with regards to the normalizing tendencies of the millennial
marketplace. We live in such an era wherein creativity must bow before
commerce, and the laws of commerce have been worked out with such daunting
bureaucratic accuracy that they have come to act as surrogates for ethics. This
puts us in a precarious position indeed, for while we might be tempted to pride
ourselves in “how far we’ve come” and departed from the “archaic” religious
superstitions of previous generations, this has only made us susceptible to
more absurd and arbitrary control schemes.
What are the effects? Most
immediately: we see something which might be called a tendency towards making
things “family friendly”. Whenever any art form becomes commercialized in the
mainstream, it tends to become gentrified, sentimentalized, and made palatable
and “wholesome”. There is, of course, nothing intrinsically wrong in
such an aesthetic, and it certainly has its place, both therapeutically and
socially… yet it has its limits, and to confine an entire art form to such
limits is to put a tiger in a box.
Attempting to reach the “widest
possible audience”, we initially target nuclear families. “Children’s films”
become “family films”; cartoon animals are set against the backdrop of a
narrative that not only inherits adult subject matter but that would be most
recognizable only to the adults of the target generation of parents. Disney and
Pixar’s Finding Nemo had no such nonsense; its genius was in its appeal
to a primordial sense of wonder that is timeless and does not wither with age:
the Oceanic State. DreamWorks’ response Shark Tale is another matter.
Hardly as subtle nor as profound as its predecessor Shrek, a truly
inspired take on faerie tales, many of whom were originally quite gruesome on
purpose, Shark Tale was a shameless attempt to cash in on the undersea
market in an iconically DreamWorks fashion, complete with the voices of Will
Smith, Angelina Jolie, and, of course, Martin Scorsese. The famed
director of gritty, brutal crime films lends his unmistakably high-pitched
voice to a comical pufferfish who navigates an underwater crime world that, in
large part, is modeled unsubtly but tactfully after Goodfellas and Casino,
as well as old-school rival The Godfather. How is this a “family film”?
Because to kids it appears to be a “children’s film”; to parents, it makes
light of DeNiro’s darker moments.
Already we can observe the dangers
of the “family friendly”. Even in targeting the nuclear family, producers of
popular media are all-too-often tempted to substitute adolescent defiance for
childlike wonder, pretending the former to be more mature than the latter
simply because it follows in biological chronology, as adolescents are also
often tempted to presume. The consequence is that the films we show our kids,
often the films we watch alongside them, always have an element in the background
of that depravity which is typically sequestered to the mature rating.
The problem is aggravated when
marketers observe the modern family. It’s become a matter of common horse sense
that a large, probably growing faction of the market does not conform to the
tradition of the nuclear family. The adult animated series BoJack Horseman
uses this to both great commercial and artistic affect; Raphael Bob-Waksberg’s
postmodern fable uses animals and people to illustrate the lifestyles of
unwanted children, sexual deviants, chronic divorcees, and the infertile, often
poking fun with that heavy hand (hoof, or paw) that only the sufferers
themselves brandish. Yet what spurs BoJack Horseman’s genius is its
brutally honest attempts to buck the jockeys of modern media: Political
Correctness.
The “Politically Correct” is
essentially the “family friendly” for grown-ups. Most significantly, its target
audience is a class of “disenfranchised consumers” (a paradox peculiar to
countries with prosperous economies) who seldom reach the conventional standard
for psychological maturity, owing to various extenuating circumstances. Thus,
the game becomes to pretend that such a standard is nonexistent or illusory, to
coddle the outlier and to make the target audience feel “safe” and “included”,
“respected” but not “understood”. Upset any one of these prerequisites, and the
curtain falls, the illusion of inclusion shattered. So essential is this
strategy to contemporary commerce that it has even become an expectation, so
that any sort of majoritarian marketing is ostensibly tantamount to Fascism.
No generation has bought into this
as completely as the youth of the present day, and the media of the new
millennium has been so saturated with this tendency, one that has haunted the
backgrounds even more menacingly than the mobster references in Shark Tale,
that we have by and large come to regard it as (though it were) an ethic.
There’s hardly a popular form of media alive today which does not bend to the
demands of the “underrepresented”: the all-too-common outcast.
So what’s the problem? In order to
summarize the dangers, we must return to my generation’s most treasured art
form: the Video Game.
When I first played the original God
of War on PlayStation 2, I was not entirely sure why. I hadn’t
played any hardcore hack-and-slash combat platformers since EA Games’
acceptable Lord of the Rings games, which at least had the advantage of
incorporating elements of Tolkien’s books that had not made it into Jackson and
Walsh’s film franchise (upsetting the prejudice that Electronic Arts is just a
bunch of Nazis with no sense of respect for tradition). Truth be told,
Ubisoft’s Prince of Persia: the Sands of Time had its fair share of
fighting, but it was just choppy enough to render me averse to the genre, and
were it not for Prince’s time-based puzzle gaming, I would not have
endured it. The main quality that drew me towards God of War was a
nostalgia for ancient Greek culture, most significantly its timeless mythology
and that style of drama we call “tragedy”, which everyone from the Florentine
Camerata who invented opera to Friedrich Nietzsche, Stanley Kubrick, and Brad Pitt
have tried to recreate.
To put it in Spartan terms: this God
of War did well. The story of Kratos was gripping, captivating,
devastating, exhausting, intriguing, grueling, and fundamentally cathartic.
None of this could have been achieved were it not so brutal, though perhaps
Roberta Williams of King’s Quest would give Sony’s Santa Monica Studio a
run for its money. What I knew to expect going into it was what I’d grown to
expect from some of the imagery in Prince of Persia and The Lord of
the Rings: “puzzles” would be less akin to Tetris and Bejeweled
and more akin to positioning a human sacrifice for execution.
What I had not gleaned from reading
the reviews was that game reporters would often expose the most damning plot
details without a spoiler warning. With regards to that “human sacrifice”, it
ended up being as significant for character development as some of Walt’s most
unforgivable moments in Breaking Bad. The human sacrifice was far more
than a mere ragdoll on a string, his execution far less “family friendly” than falling
from a cliff in Wile E. Coyote fashion or, as DreamWorks had managed, getting conked
on the head by an anchor. (Not to be confused with Newswoman “Katie Current”.)
Before my eyes I watched one of Kratos’ unsuccessful predecessors get pushed up
a slope in an iron cage, begging, whimpering and screaming for mercy, with each
step coming inches closer to a device designed to burn him alive… and I
was doing all the pushing and the immolating!!
How did Sony Santa Monica get away
with this? It was obvious: God of War was a game for adults who loved
Greek mythology and war games. Kratos had to be the sort of guy who would light
a “loser” on fire just to “honour the Gods” and to advance himself; he was a
Spartan warrior with a vendetta again Mars Himself. We’d already seen the
remains of Kratos’ other predecessors decorating both the entrance and the
interior of the gauntlet. We know that this will be our hero’s fate if he does
not progress, surviving at all costs, including the lives of those he meets
along the way, however harmless and friendly. The Gods demand it, and those Rationalists
who are snide enough to challenge Divine Command Theory would do well to read a
bit of Greek mythology before they spite a Greek Deity’s Will. On top of all of
that: the deceptively convoluted series of death traps and challenges is quite
linear. When the time comes for Kratos to light that guy on fire, he has no
practical alternative; there are no side-roads, and this road goes only one way.
Thus we see the three core
ingredients in edgy game design that pushes the envelope, heightens the Art,
and makes our stomachs squirm: Cultural Context, Machiavellian Rationalization,
and a Mature Rating that, like a good fence, a harness, or a dog leash,
empowers to the same extent as it restricts. Already, too, we see the dangers
inherent in this: boys who hear tell of these M-rated games get the distinct impression
that this is “okay for adults” but “not for kids”. To the same extent as they
wish to be “grown-ups”, they might play with matches and toy with the idea of
arson, however flippantly. They recognize that “mature” material is “really bad”,
but they also internalize the notion that it is considerably MORE bad than that
which they see on Tom and Jerry. Lighting someone on fire is only “okay”
in the context of Reservoir Dogs; dropping an iron or an anchor on
someone’s head is relatively acceptable.
Thankfully, we need not busy
ourselves with too much dispute about the effects of media upon the mind of the
child, for most children operate under a significant amount of supervision. Yet
what about those aforementioned “disaffected” adults who are stunted in their psychological
development? When media becomes censored, a veil is cast over it. The
stoppering of progress is akin to the shutting of a hatch, especially when a
leak has broken out within its chamber. We were content to tread water as the
water level rose, but now that the ceiling has been sealed we are to drown.
God of War, to my
mind, was never intended to promote violence, nor even to glorify it, though
Kratos’ fate does raise some questions on that point I shall not address herein.
Like most games notorious for their “graphic” depictions of violence, (“graphic”
by the standards of the Sony PlayStation 2 console) God of War produced
a sense of release, achieving that sort of catharsis that Greek tragedy was
known for, meeting its artistic goals. By pushing the envelope, it shocked us
into a state of vulnerability; reminded of the brutality of history, we were
pacified and grateful for modernity.
Yet what happens when that envelope
is stopped? All of a sudden, that depraved, Dionysian psyche which is seeking
new forms of shock value must content itself with trails already blazed.
Producers begin to mass-produce those forms of evil which are proven to sell,
given a long and growing blacklist of those forms of evil which are too “triggering”
even for millennials. The shock wears off, as does the talk, but the material
remains, getting recycled, over and over and over again, like the “consumable T.V.
violence” of David Lynch’s Twin Peaks. For want of new, ingenious forms
of catharsis, developers repeat the same old tropes: immolation here, hanging
there, et cetera. All of a sudden, the new generation comes to regard THESE
things as being “normal”. The modern adult is in the position of the
aforementioned boy: so long as one believes one’s self to be indulging in a “permissible”
evil, one worthy of an audience, one not QUITE “as bad as” a less conventional
evil, one can content one’s self in feeling “normal”.
Most people, clinically, make
decisions MORE based upon projections of normalcy and abnormality than they do
off of Good and Evil, especially when the latter distinction is so difficult
for modern scientists to quantify, whereas the former is all too easy. It is
for this reason that practices such as mob lynchings and dragging men behind pickup
trucks were so prevalent for so long in the United States (though let us not
forget that equally violent forms of anarchist protest against Police Brutality
are no better, by the same token). Even in fighting evil, we commit
conventional evil, and most often it is against the unconventional evils
that we express our own evil impulses. Ergo, the rapist is everyone’s favourite
scapegoat, the racist following closely.
That which is a marginal danger for
the boy becomes an imminent problem for the adult. Because we KNOW that we are
adults, we are less likely to suspect our own susceptibility to suggestion. If I
produce games, those limits which I must observe in publishing are presumed
absolute. A boy aspiring to play his older brother’s fighting games is not in
the same position; he understands the relativity of restrictions based upon
age. Yet such a sense of relativity disappears in a globalized marketing
standard that might very well be enforced by the United Nations as a Human
Right. If I cannot put rape into my game, though I can put immolation, the line
I observe is presumed to be absolute; if NO one is allowed to see the former
but the latter is acceptable, I internalize and outwardly affirm this ethic:
rape is absolutely bad; arson is relative. What is to stop a vigilante, then,
with my same, universalized conviction, from setting an alleged rapist on fire?
Not much, and let us not pretend that human beings do not have a history of
burning people alive under suspicion of evils that are not conventional by
accepted moral orthodoxy.
It is this combination of forces –
a stagnating form of generic tropes on one hand and a patronizing imposition
upon the adult conscience on the other – that poses the greatest threat to the
millennial Zeitgeist. The irony would not be lost on the great critics of
modern media such as David Lynch and Raphael Bob-Waksberg. When Diane tells
BoJack that television “normalizes” behaviour, this is only partially true.
Media in itself does not normalize behaviour, until media itself is
normalized. So long as media remains a forum for free expression, it keeps
innovating ways to shock us into our catharsis. Yet the moment that it is met
with a bureaucracy which treats its marketing interests as moral imperatives,
having won a generation of loyal consumers who act as a mob ready to lynch
anyone’s career, (or worse) media collapses in on itself, and that which was
previously “daring” and “provocative” becomes the new “normal”. This is
aggravated by the peculiarly millennial tendency for forgetfulness.
Critics in defence of political
correctness might cuttingly contest that normalcy is nothing new in itself,
that even the classic Greek plays reused tropes, yet “society” continued to “progress”
and “mentally healthy adults” were not afflicted. That would be well and good, but
for several bugs: in the first place, those who were NOT regarded as “mentally
healthy” all too often saw a side to their “healthy” social superiors that
those same “adults” would have been loth to see within themselves, hence the
scapegoat gives the “tragedy” its name. Furthermore, to speak of “society” as
though it were one entity and “progress” as though it were culturally universal
is a conceit only imaginable to modern Westerners. The integrity of Greek “normalcy”
lay in its adherence to tradition, one peculiar to a Greek
society. To be born Greek was to live Greek; Kratos makes his deal with a Greek
God (one indigenous to Greece, apparently, for Kratos later meets the Norse
Gods in Scandinavia) in the context of a war against the “barbarian” non-Greeks
(some of whom were likely those same Scandinavians).
Yet this is not our current “society”.
The globalist culture can no longer accommodate the nationalism or communalism
of earlier societies established upon peculiar traditions, and all such
traditions become secondary to “Universal Human Rights”. To be born American in
the nineteen-nineties is not the same as to live American in the year
2020, and few of us will be able to repeat the sins of our fathers nor to
attain those goals we set out to attain as boys (though perhaps the girls will
adopt new dreams to make up for the boys’ loss, since these dreams may be won
at the latter’s expense).
Political correctness operates not
like a temple but like a marketplace, for it was within the market itself that
this disease was born. It is an ethic for consumers and those wishing to sell
to them. In sales training, we learn that people like to buy but not to be sold
to. The most effective sales agencies are those who manage to sell your desires
TO you, and if they should disappoint you, it is because you are no longer the
target demographic, and salespeople go where the money goes. Millennials who
preach Human Rights and Political Correctness are simply the most pious
consumers of conventional evil, and their enemies are simply those whose evil and
whose virtue are too abnormal to be advertised. So long as traditions are the
preferences of an older demographic and a regressive society unfit for the
global market, we do not question the Present.
By and large, the universal rating
used by Designers to regulate one ANOTHER is “N.S.F.W.”: “Not Safe for Work”, a
fitting slogan for a generation of corporate guinea pigs turned into automatons
on a production line devoid of either voice, dignity, or imagination. The
implication is that nothing is too “mature” which is permissible and “correct”,
yet it may not be the sort of game that your boss would want to catch you
playing. (Perhaps supervisors would rather see you spending company time on Tetris?)
One game Not Safe for Work (or Home,
probably, though when has that stopped anyone?) is House Party, a
raunchy dating game set among a group of young singles wherein the male
protagonist (female coming soon!! No puns intended.) manipulates nonplayable
characters, mainly women, into various sexual and suggestive acts. Several
times, voluptuous girls presumably in their twenties are exposed to the
elements by avenue of blackmailing and deception.
None of these achievements further
the story, usually. By contrast with God of War, the game is very
admirably nonlinear. No Divine Authority mandates a sacrifice of clothes or
dignity; the protagonist rarely needs to compromise another character in order
to “advance” towards a teleological destination. One might therefore suggest
that the sexuality in House Party is “gratuitous and male-gazey”, as Gina
Cazador says of her own role at the start of BoJack Horseman’s fifth
season and the first season of the show-within-a-show Philbert. Yet it
is precisely BECAUSE these indulgences accomplish nothing that they are so
tempting, so reflective of the mind of the player, and so cathartic for players
who would NOT do such things in Actuality but who might harbor a vendetta against
those who do, a vendetta which is often irrational and subconscious, much like
Diane Nguyen’s media crusade against Hank Hippopopalous.
Most of us would sooner have our
flesh seen than seared; there ought to be no doubt that lighting someone on
fire is worse than coercing that person to take off her pants. It is precisely
BECAUSE God of War rationalizes acts of utter depravity that it seems
relatively noble, and it is precisely BECAUSE a striptease is an indulgence
which more civilians enjoy that we invent so many rules for its proper context
and we harbor such antipathy to those who overstep those bounds; they mirror
our own perversions, as the success of games like House Party evidences
beautifully. Yet even if one evil were tantamount to the other, (by extremely
puritanical standards) what is most important is that BOTH be allowed to exist,
to perform their respective dances, and then to waltz offstage in the manner of
the BoJack Horseman penultimate episode. Each form of shock, however
gruesome or uneasy, serves a vital human function, both psychologically and
socially, and so long as it does something new for the medium it furthers the
Art. Place even one expressive form in a cage, and the Art ceases to be an
upward striving and degenerates into a brutal, fatalistic sacrifice.
[({Dm.R.G.)}]
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