I’ve been reading Joseph O’Neill’s Netherland, which is a novel about many things, but largely about detachment and loss. It’s concerned with those things which were a part of our world, once, but are not now and cannot be again. In O’Neill’s novel we find Dutch-born Hans van den Broek in the strange and tense setting of New York immediately post‑9/11. Like the New York skyline, Hans is experiencing the emptiness that follows loss, the sensation that something is wrong, something is missing. Estranged from the structure and support of family, friends, a home or a purpose, Hans is detached from anything meaningful, anything that might ground him in the day to day experience of actually being a human. Without overemphasizing it, the novel is pervaded by an essence of mourning, that sort of downbeat resignation in which life goes on but is seemingly more hollow.
We usually associate mourning with death and specifically the passing of a loved one, perhaps even a pet. But what we are really doing when we mourn is lamenting changes in our life, changes that cause the removal of something which has ingrained itself in our identity. Because we are a social species this is most acutely felt with other people, but the loss of anything which conjures an emotional attachment can cause that same lump in the throat. Homesickness is a type of mourning, as is that melancholy you feel at the end of a truly great game, book or film. They say that only one thing is certain in life and that is death, but by the time we even reach that point we have already experienced a series of endings which punctuate our lives like… well, like punctuation. From education to relationships, jobs to sports, novels to holidays, videogames to telephone calls, their completion both destroys us and recreates us anew. The location referenced by O’Neill’s title, Netherland, is a place where our past selves lurk, defined by its very distance and inaccessibility.
We can’t escape into the past, but we can revisit it. Hans’ situation is dire, and to combat it he invests himself into the incongruous sounding underworld of New York cricket. Cricket in New York is very different from the purer form of the game played by the Hans as a child, but not so different that he cannot pick up his old gear and slot back into his old place at the crease with the relief of one returning to his or her childhood home. We might call it therapeutic, or at least anaesthetizing. Certainly for a time Hans finds himself abdicating the complexities of his life in favour of his sport.
My own childhood was a fairly standard mixture of sports, gaming, books, outside play, and so on. Certainly videogames took up a fair chunk of my time. Somehow, though, I don’t feel that in similar circumstances I could fall back upon games the way Hans does upon cricket. Last year, Logan Westbrook wrote an emotive feature for The Escapist Magazine called Getting Back in the Game, relating his use of gaming as an escape after the breakdown of his marriage. That I can see: gaming as escapism. But there’s a subtle difference between the ways Hans and Logan escape in that Hans’ cricketing is very clearly related to a specific connection between the sport and his past. Hans is escaping into that netherland in an attempt to re-experience it; Logan is avoiding thoughts of his past, trying to disconnect. While Logan plays contemporary games to take his mind off his pain, Hans goes one step further to relocate his mind somewhere else completely.
There’s a consistency in sports which carries over the years. In spite of the differing styles of New York cricket and the more formal, normal cricket of Hans’ youth, it is the same game. The mechanics of actually playing, the physical act and emotional experience of the game, is the same. This is what draws Hans into his past. Like many sports, cricket has experienced cosmetic changes over the years, but moment to moment the performance of taking part in a match is little different from that of decades and even centuries ago. The same cannot be said of videogames, which are children of the accelerated digital age. Change in videogames is constant, with developers constantly pushing at the boundaries of what is possible, acceptable and desirable. A videogame is pretty much obsolete soon, if not immediately, after release. For established franchises, the next sequel is already in production; for original titles, any innovations which work are hybridized into the next generation, those which don’t work are discarded. New games come like waves breaking on the shore, some crashing momentously and some fading with barely a splash, but all forgotten when the next wave rolls in. And the next wave always rolls in.
My favourite game is Metal Gear Solid. Let’s not go into the reasons too deeply right now, suffice it to say it’s a great game that came at just the right time to etch itself onto my consciousness. I remember with fondness the adoring previews in various magazines before it came out; I remember my building desperation to play it; I remember playing the demo over and over and then after all the anticipation being not in the slightest bit disappointed by the final product. It’s my favourite game, and one that I associate along with the likes of God of War, ICO and Shadow of the Colossus in a decade-long heyday of my gaming education. Those three (incidentally, excellent) games have been at the forefront of the recent PS3 run of HD remakes of classic titles. There are whisperings that Metal Gear Solid, being from the same era, might well be for the same treatment.
Which would be great, sort of. I’ll play a remake and no doubt enjoy it for what it is, but in playing it I am always very aware that this is an ‘old game’. If there are failings I let them slide, because it’s an “old game”. HD remakes are draped in nostalgia, but lack the thrill of the original experience from when their innovations were still innovative. In the case of God of War, the spectacle of the original, the sense of sheer scale it made great use of, is diminished by its own sequels which each took things up a gear. Once outdone, something is no longer impressive. You can give them all the facelifts you like; time is unkind to aging games.
The Metal Gear Solid franchise plays on the theme of remake and replay with a recurrence of imagery and character throughout the series. This culminates in Metal Gear Solid 4 in a section in which protagonist Solid Snake finds himself back on Shadow Moses, the setting of the original game of which I am so enamoured. Along with Snake the player is thrown into a reminiscence of their first experience on the island, literally replaying part of the opening section of the first game. This is a smart piece of game-making which rounds Snake out as a character with a past, one which we have been privileged to be along on the ride for, but wait a second: This isn’t the game I remember! This game… Well, this game sucks! For me, the flashback scene is difficult to play. In my memory everything about the first MGSis much smoother, in graphics and gameplay. Where have these blocky pixels come from? Why is the AI so terrible? Once upon a time the fact that the enemy soldiers would see and take notice of my tracks in the snow was the coolest thing in the world. Now? Now I find myself wanting to make use of all the abilities Snake has picked up in the interim years: interrogations, camouflage, shooting out someone’s arm to keep them from firing or grabbing their radio, and so on. Rather than being taken back to my joyous first play of this game, the rose-tinted glasses of my memory have been removed. Re-experiencing it underlines the boundaries and limitations of the original, the advancements we have made become obvious, and my earlier experience is devalued.
You can return to gaming, but returning to a game is a more complex and often, for me, dissatisfying affair. Metal Gear Solid as an experience is as tied up with a particular point in my life as cricket is in Hans van den Broek’s, but it cannot return me to that point in the same way. Too much has changed, both for me and for gaming.
What I’ve written here might seem a little down on gaming, as though games are somehow not living up to something, but it isn’t. Or it isn’t meant to be. Games inhabit a specific time and place in my life; they tie themselves into my identity through experience. That identity changes, day in and day out, a process that is as inevitable as it is irreversible. Those changes might ultimately make me now incompatible with that which once spoke deeply to me, but that doesn’t mean it never did. I can look back on it with fondness, just as one who has been through the trauma and upset of bereavement might come out the other side with the warmth of knowing “At least we had the good times”. I lied, above, when I said that Metal Gear Solid is my favourite game. Rather, it is my favourite memory of a gaming experience.
Cricket doesn’t work out for Hans, of course. You cannot dodge real life forever, and you cannot ignore change. An unwillingness to accept loss simply places it on hold; it’s a temporary measure. Eventually Hans re-enters his life on new terms, a life which is both different and the familiar.
I used to have a poster on my wall, as a child. It was for the clothing brand No Fear, though that barely matters. The poster was a photograph of the surfer Taylor Knox riding an enormous, almost impossibly tall wave. That moment must have been the kind that Taylor lives for, catching the perfect swell and performing everything just right upon it, allowing the momentum of the situation to play out. But in the end the wave always crashes down, the moment always ends. Taylor will have found himself in shallow waters, knowing that that particular experience can never, ever come again. And then what? He swings back up onto his board and paddles out to find the next great wave.
I enjoyed this quite a bit! You do a good job of capturing that uneasy nostalgia that comes with returning to the cherished experiences of one’s youth.
I am curious, though, whether there is something intrinsic about games-as-art that makes it even more difficult to “go back home” than in other forms of art. I might pin it on gaming’s relative youth, or the fact that a player interacts with it so closely and is intricately involved in the production of the experience.
After all, I often return to excellent films or books that astounded me or were definitive in some way, and sometimes even enjoy them more the second time around. But I have, like you, found it more difficult to return to excellent games from my childhood and truly exult in them.
As I noted, it might be that gaming is still growing very quickly, and that the language games use to translate their experiences to the player changes much more often than it does in other art forms. By “language” in gaming I refer to all facets of the game (graphics, controls, etc.), the meaning-making tools of a game experience. There is experimental story-telling, sure, but generally one can return to a book written in the last fifty years and manage just fine.
Perhaps the speed in language development has an impact. Is playing a game made eight or ten years ago a little like coming to Shakespearean English? It might be structured around an old design philosophy, use old tropes that have become outmoded, and simply lack the sort of grammar that modern games contains. Is returning to Atari games, then, sort of likely coming to ancient religious texts, where lots of translation and training is required to “read” it properly, as it would have been experienced?
Obviously, there’s still a lot to learn about old games. The Shakespeare stand-ins (Super Mario World comes to mind) are still worth coming back to, since they’re the sort of games that mastered the tools at their disposal, and they can still be totally enjoyable experiences. But I think a great deal of great games might be great because they established a new facet of “game language,” and I think that new games which serve that role are more difficult to return to and re-experience.
In any regard, thoughtful article, and thanks for contributing to the Ontological Geek!
Thanks for the comment Matthew. Really it should be me thanking both you and Bill (and your other guest writers, of course) for creating the type of atmosphere at The Ontological Geek that has room for my meandering little thoughts! I’ve really enjoyed venturing through the archives and getting to know the place.
You make some really good points, some of which I too mulled over while putting the article together. I get the sense that, like me, you’re finding that while this is certainly a recognizable phenomenon it’s difficult to put your finger definitively on what’s going on. There’s an answer to be had, I’m sure, but it’s probably a complex interplay of experience and memory along with changes in both our selves and the state of gaming.
What draws my attention, (and again this is perhaps symptomatic of gaming’s relative youth) is that developments in what you very appropriately call the ‘language’ of games seem to be regarded more as evolutions than changes in older and more established art forms are. So while there have no doubt been changes to English in the years since Shakespeare was writing, in coming to one of his texts we wouldn’t necessarily treat it as a more simplistic work than those that followed. Quite the opposite in fact! In reading, say, Hamlet we need to work to grasp an understanding of the language being used, but unlike Super Mario Brothers we don’t need to situate it in terms of being an impressive use of limited available tools. My feeling is that once gaming’s highly accelerated rate of development begins to slow and level out we will be able to more successfully disassociate ‘what a game says’ from ‘how a game says it’ and the latter from ‘when the game said it’.
Coincidentally I just today read a glorious article by Jessa Crispin on homesickness which I think taps into a lot of similar themes. If you’re interested it’s here:
http://www.thesmartset.com/article/article02081201.aspx
Thanks again for the response; I’d be interested to hear any further thoughts!
-Jim
That’s a very interesting response! I’d like to respond to two main points — first, that you don’t see Shakespeare’s earlier works as more simplistic than his later works, and second, your hypothesis that gaming’s accelerated rate of development will slow.
So first, do you think it’s totally fair to say that Shakespeare’s work didn’t evolve? And why wouldn’t we account him like Super Mario Bros., as using limited, “archaic” language and tropes (from our standpoint, both Super Mario Bros. and Shakespeare would fit that criteria) to great effect? What makes the resources seem “limited” to us? And, to some extent, we’re looking at an entire field here; surely literature has continued to evolve, both to better suit a modern audience, and because writers have actually been *building* on the tropes and tools of the past, continuing to play with and master elements of storytelling.
Second, and I may be reading too much into this, but do you believe that this leveling out will happen soon? What signs do you see of that occurring? Is it possible that gaming’s “rate of evolution” will stay roughly consistent, and by what criteria might we gauge that?
I think you are tapping into something, though; gaming’s close relationship with technology means that the pace of its growth is necessarily increased, and that will certainly alter our perception of it.
I’m interested to see more of your thought on this! And I’m very glad that you’ve enjoyed your time here at the Ontological Geek.
Thanks for the follow up thoughts Matt. This is why I like chatting to philosophers, you guys always want to delve right down into the nitty gritty!
I must apologise for not making myself completely clear in my first response. I do have an excuse in that I had that dreadful situation where you write out a nice detailed reply and then something fails to load and you’re left trying to repeat what you wrote and end up missing valuable chunks. It’s completely my fault, though, that the reply turned out a little… ambiguous, shall we say. Let me try to be a little more lucid:
I didn’t mean to suggest that Shakespeare’s writing didn’t evolve over the course of his career, but was thinking more in terms of situating him within the literary genre as a whole. There are a great many who would argue that the very pinnacle of literary art is still contained within the words he put to paper 400 years ago. Whether it’s the best or just very good is pretty much irrelevant really, the point is that the experience of Shakespeare’s language and the meanings he created are still valuable all this way down the line. If we compare Shakespeare to a more recent playwright, say Alan Bennett, I don’t think we could necessarily say Shakespeare was in any way hindered by a less developed language in comparison to Bennett. Early 17th Century English can look a little strange to us, and that can slightly hinder its accessibility, but I don’t think anyone looking at Hamlet in any depth comes out thinking ‘It was pretty good, for its time’, they just think ‘Bloody hell, it’s good’.
But then of course even 400 years ago literature was an old medium. Shakespeare made use of themes and even direct plotlines that go all the way back to the Ancient Greeks, and perhaps further. I think that when you have that bulk of historical resonance behind you its difficult to make a (forgive the term) game changing development in the form. Gaming lacks that kind of resonance to the extent that we’re still in perpetual discussion over what gaming actually is, let alone what it does or is for. And that’s great, but what it does mean is that changes to the language of gaming can be irrevocable and very difficult to contend with when going back to older games. For perhaps the first time we’re seeing repeated groundbreaking developments in the language of an art form within a single lifetime, and thus I think certain stages of gaming’s development attach themselves to certain stages of our own lifetime, making them very difficult to relive. If you’ll forgive me getting metaphorical we might picture these art forms as being created by a blacksmith (wow, too much Skyrim for Jim, clearly). Shakespeare’s influence on literature was like the grindstone bringing a blade to a sharp point. Gaming, I think, is still red hot and molten on the anvil, every whack changing things forever.
As to your second point, my sense of the levelling out (a solidifying plunge into the water bucket, perhaps!) is that it must come. Soon? I’ve no idea. I’m no technology expert and my sense is that gaming’s evolution will continue to be affected by advances in that area. An apt thing to note, I think, is that whatever its rate of acceleration even the fastest car levels out at a top speed eventually. The thing is that I’m not even sure what ‘soon’ is in this period of digital evolution. There were 24 years between Shakespeare’s first and last plays. Look how far we’ve come in that time. He wrote 400 years ago. How can we even pretend to know how things will look that far ahead?