vidcons were new media when the idea of new media was no longer new, was a path with known waypoints, a citizen kane here, a maus there… except as soon as this path was mapped out it no longer applied, the landscape no longer made sense. as if videogames as postmodern form was still cursed with a modernist conception of itself, this shadowy mirror life that seemed to mock and undercut the achievements available in postmodernity (say it with me: "videogames are bigger than the film industry!!"). the idea of some heroic transformative turn being just around the corner became less and less persuasive every year, until we were left with an unsettling sense that the medium as a whole had stopped, that it had died… this came as no news to hobbyists who had always experienced the medium as dead, who lived and worked inside the grisly material husk the format left behind on its movement from tradeshow to tradeshow - always a decade or two behind the cutting edge that the medium wrapped its identity around. but now even the tradeshows seem ailing and the format's own hype-men have either moved on to more exciting variants of stillborn new media (vr! nfts! ai!) or else were shaken by a sense that the tech industry's own master narrative was no longer looking so hot. the consultantification of the medium, trying to shore up a leaky ship with a delayed appeal to incremental reforms… we no longer just say that videogames suck as that hits too close to home, and there's no longer any confidence that these brash provocations can actually be followed up, instead we're left agreeing with each other that the format is actually doing pretty well, all things considered, and maybe just needs a few extra touch ups to look, uh, good as new. there are still frustrations bubbling beneath the new consensus. something i feel i've seen a lot more of lately is a kind of irritated aversion to the "same old thing but with new aesthetics" school of game design, complaints about formal conservatism etc… and as sympathetic as i am to arguments that videogames should just be weirder, i also sort of feel, well, didn't we just do that? does the desire to feel some kind of momentum again really mean we're stuck relitigating Games Formalism II: The Bitch Is Back?
for a sec let's do the opposite and assume the horrible unyieldiness of videogames, their stuck and stubborn refusal to "evolve", is not a failure in art's traditional relation to the cultural unconscious so much as the way that relation manifests. if we take this failure seriously, take it as something which is itself historically new. what would it mean for game-making - to live and work inside a dead format, to be a worm inside the corpse? the decomposing body becomes a visionary landscape, new colours, unnatural tints, sharp contrasts of vividness and paleness - old boundaries melt and run together, yield to gentle pressure of the penetrating beak. there is no longer such a strong boundary between the inside and outside. the bones show through the skin, the hidden things we took for granted renew themselves in their full strangeness. but also: there is no sense of these discoveries doing anything, leading anywhere. as temporary perceptions they might be startling and immediate but the question of what impact the little aesthetic explorers of the fields, worms bugs beetles millipedes etc, are individually having as they gnaw the corpse into something else is probably too fussy to calculate. meaningless bounded riches of experience… that's right, we're back to that thing everybody hates. we're back to aesthetics.
if videogames are haunted by a kind of pop-modernism then modernism itself is haunted by the aesthetic - by an aestheticism it tried to define itself against, the stale drawing-room air of the 19th century. over and over in reading those manifestos we find artistic calls to move past art, into something the authors frequently defined as more "active" than the "passive" role of aestheticism. and part of how videogames and the wider tech industry as a whole present themselves as modern is by repeating these calls, by drawing an implicit line between heroic activity and passive compliance. the aesthetic is imagined as "internal", as individual in the bad sense - a neutralised and murky inner world. whereas what we picture as non-aesthetic is what brings the individual out of herself, into some new socially legible role. the heroic user vs the lotus eating experiencer…! and as a figure out of time the aesthetic subject is lumped in with the other recalcitrant bogeys of tech - luddites, luddism as "a way to call those with whom they disagree both politically reactionary and anti-capitalist at the same time". but it's hard not to feel the luddites got a bad rep these days, and hard to feel like the kinds of participation allowed in a ringfenced public culture are not if anything even more disspiriting than the most "passive" text. one of the most striking features of the new-new-media, forms of new media more fully adapted to the role new media has as a kind of speculation bubble, is their near total lack of aesthetic interest. it almost feels crankish and petty to say these things (nfts, ai art, various metaverses) are boring and ugly - but that's kind of the point, right? the contempt for mere aesthetics is the sign that what these things are selling is the sense of their own inevitability, an inevitability that requires no consent from the people it's enforced upon. aesthetics themselves don't matter… but of course they do, right? how can they not matter?
videogames, as a weak form, have never really been able to jettison the need to appeal to the senses. their most cherished distinction, between "aesthetics" understood as meaning visuals and sound and the "non-aesthetic" of all the other gamey parts that they encompass, falls apart for me the more i think about it: are the pleasures of solving a puzzle, executing a combo, traversing an area really of a different nature to those of reading a text, following a piece of music or investigating a visual plane? to say reading prose is not a tentative, active, problem solving kind of task is just to say you're bad at it. and there's a sense that the odd blockedness, deadness of videogames as a format is itself aesthetic.. i think of the old adorno line that the aesthetic itself is always the extra-aesthetic, that which threatens to overflow the category of the aesthetic and transform life itself. so maybe the aesthetic is always experienced as a kind of provocative failure or stubbornness, a blockage, in contrast to the greased slide to a future no-one really wants or believes in.
so what does it mean to be interested in making games mostly as an aesthetic activity. right now the "game making scene" feels as fragmented and directionless as i've ever seen it - whatever infrastructure is still there now exists to provide networking or marketing opportunities to professionals, themselves ever more protective of their specialised domains and with ever less patience for any merely aesthetic actes gratuits that might gum up the pipes. the people i know still making weird shit seem increasingly cut off, working just for themselves and some friends, and maybe they're happier, i dunno. to me there's something melancholy about this condition of narrowed possibility - the difficulty of bouncing new ideas back and forth to one another, when everyone's constrained to their own holes and all the space in between is filled with advertisements. but as well as that, it can feel like it's hardly worthwhile even trying to rebuild those networks to begin with if it's just going to get us back to where we were. the same spurious claims to importance or social good or "what we need right now", same sleazy power dynamics, maybe a different handful of guys getting a career out if it this time.
and so i keep coming back to the stuckness, the nothingness of aesthetic work, of work that can't be evaluated in terms of historical importance or evolution or journeyman best practice, existing as nothing but sensibility, at a point where sensibility itself is treated as a kind of uncanny and functionless surplus that weighs upon the living. the golden coin that can never be spent, visible only through its absence in the ledger. we test it in the mouth, thought is made in the mouth, we chew, not knowing why, yet. as the guy says in the thing: why don't we just stick around for a while, and see what happens.
