What's happening during a Half-Life style "playable cutscene"? The game's stopped, but it's still going - the semblance of goals and consequence have been taken away, but the controls still respond the way they always do. In my experience it requires a kind of deliberate effort to pull back and play "in character", or even just leave the controller or the mouse alone, as opposed to absently bunnyhopping around or grinding the camera viewport against the face of whoever's talking in the vague hope that this will speed up the narrative somehow. There's a kind of goofy Wile-E-Coyote-running-off-the-cliff aspect to it, where it just takes a while for the penny to drop. But it's also a little eerie in the same way: the Brownian motion of the target reticule twitching back and forth under the impact of drives too vague and shortlived to articulate, that kind of frantic, static watchfulness, drops and smears of useless energy action-painting themselves through a controller, onto the screen. I don't know that this is play, it seems to have very little to do with choice, but it's familiar from other times I've played videogames, or even used a computer, it feels less like a kind of accidental parody of than the natural terrain for all of those activities, as if the foundational experience of playing a videogame is this kind of feedback loop of alienated consciousness - consciousness with a tape delay, recognising itself a second or a millisecond too late, correcting, revising, circling, re-expressing, trying to correct this alien record, creating in the process a perverse catalogue of elision and mistake. Like Twitch Plays Pokemon on a more individuated level. The feedback loop here is one of estrangement and recognition, both omnipresent as sensations but slipping away as soon as they appear within reach, each one turning seamlessly into the other.
Obviously a sensation most specifically present in a small group of reflex-driven action games can't be extrapolated to the whole format but part of what interests me about it is the feeling that it CAN be extrapolated to computers, to the general state of being on or using a computer, that same dissociated intensity. And of course many of the same ingredients are there: the continual movement towards greater sensitivity of input, less time on an act than on the modification of an act (like the back and forth of typing and checking the autocomplete response to your typing to get the quickest search), the movement towards interfaces that can be "read" as quickly and instinctively as possible to cut down on user-side response lag, that strange sense that results of being outside time, as if what you're watching is less a linear, sequential flow of inputs and outputs than a blurred, circular admixture of them both. And if it's familiar from computer usage then it's necessarily familiar from other computer games too, even the most sedate, if not overtly present then as a certain recurring baseline of intensity which the rest of the experience is implicitly structured around. Videogames remain too close to other forms of computer use to be unaffected by the proximity - it affects not only their production and distribution but also the network of associations about technology, certain forms of input or visual representation or spatial organisation, which we draw upon when playing through the things. And if I'm insistent about connecting this feeling to even the smallest Klik N Play games it's partly because I think it helps us with a way of thinking about those games in particular that a more orthodox game criticism would seem to lack.
Kero Blaster & The Charged Field
Kero Blaster is a Metroid style game about a frog who jumps around and shoots bugs. The frog has a boss who is a cat that seems to get more frantically depressed between each mission, for reasons which remain mysterious throughout. The scenes with the boss are very brief and make up a small proportion of the game - five or six "cutscenes" of under 30 seconds each, that play when you're about to start a new level - but tonally they're a mixture of goofy and plangent enough to stick slightly in the mind, assisted from the break they give from the experience of the levels. These two narratives - frog metroid and depressive cat - are technically connected by the appearance of a kind of plump black insect that appears in each, first as a background feature and eventual enemy / overarching threat in the frog levels, secondly as the boss's "pet", which lives in a tank above a file cabinet and seems to grow larger as the boss gets more unhappy. But the problem here is that, as much as the presence of this pet hints at a single overarching master narrative around both types of segment, it remains difficult to construct that narrative in a way which doesn't diminish or evade our experience of one or the other of the consituent parts. To say the game is about the ominous black bugs that you fight throughout is to take the strangely affecting scenes of cat depression and reframe them through the debateably less relateable lens of being possessed by a malevolent fantasy insect. To say the game is about the unhappiness of the boss character is to draw attention away from the fact that you spend most of the game jumping around and shooting stuff. So while all the pieces are there they remain difficult to join up - as gnomic and short as the game is there's still something like an excess of meaning that consistently threatens to break out from the framing narratives that we construct. This evasiveness extends to the ending of the game, where the defeat of the bug-possessed boss cat simultaneously completes the frog's quest and also signifies the catharsis which allows the boss cat to move from neurotic misery back to regular unhappiness - our uncertainty about the priority of the two frames means we view this less as specific resolution to either one than as a kind of magical synchronicity uniting both, where the solution to one problem resolves a totally different one in the manner of those fairy tales where giving a ring to a fish causes the evil baron to fall down a well. The dream here is one of some radical contingency which could cut across the discrete realms.. but a glimpsed dream it remains, one which the game shows no interest of developing into a broader or more stable thesis about the other two parts: after the credits we're back at the title screen, with the frog once more staring gnomically at the ringing phone that sends it on the missions. Restart Game Y/N.
This is the kind of structure I tend to think of as "the charged field" - where rather than grouping materials by their relevance to some central theme or with reference to some existing set of relationships a work seems to rely on the associations of unity within the concept of an artistic work itself to hold the various components together, as if dropping a picture frame around three random images was enough to, if not relate them all together in a new way, at least prompt the sort of interpretation and attention that notionally could. But what interests me is not the merit of this form or of Kero Blaster specifically so much as the unobtrusiveness of their overlap: the sense that both we and the game remain froggily comfortable in these murky waters, among such diffuse and unclear structural relationships. There's obviously a link between this tacit acceptance and the fact that such interpretation is outside the strict remit of the "mechanics", or those set of readings and adjustments necessary to progress through the game, but it's this very distractedness that the narrative relies on, plays off of - if it's animated by anything it's the constant background churn of micro-recognitions, comparisons, correspondances, surgings and leachings of attention and of intent that are thrown up continuously by the barely-registered activity involved in using a computer or a phone, and it's this churn that allows the narrative level (or condemns it) to operate in odd liminal spaces, shorn of unity or the capability for same, art for a peripheral form of consciousness.
For what it's worth I'd like to avoid from the start the kind of moralism that sees this formal reliance on distractedness as either a good or bad thing in itself, that would immediately reconfigure it as either some grumpy dad pastiche of postmodernity or as utopian anti-hierarchial space, since I think part of the interest of these videogames for us is the way that, carrying associations from both sides, they must find ways of situating themselves variously between, with or against both at different times, when not trying to escape the bind through new configurations entirely. (I'm tempted to argue that the weird persistence of pastoral imagery in videogames is a side-effect of this process, as a kind of rhetorical counterweight to newness and disorientation). And in general I'd like to suggest that what's interesting about new cultural forms has more to do with what they complicate or undercut than what they can more straightforwardly enact - desires or fears which remained unarticulated or secondary now pushed into the light, old distinctions suddenly confused, systems of value less reflected in our art then refracted in them, revealing hidden contours. The ability of videogames to unproblematically depict "choice" in effect dooms efforts to thematise "choice" to empty tautology ("Ah, I see... I made a choice..." "Ah, I see... choices have consequences, sometimes, once they remain within the technical and ideological remit of the game systems...") while supposedly more minor corrollary questions (say, the impact of input and game systems on strategies of visual representation) grow dense, rich and tangled with the effort of reconciling what's peculiar about the new format with what we know about the old ones.
So all this being said I would like to pick out some similar fields of productive confusion that I think have particular relevance to our friend the terrifying consciousness churn and to the (typically small, goofy) videogames that address it most directly.
The first is the impossibility of unity in the computer game format, unity in the sense of the modernist ideal whereby form and content would both sink indivisibly into each other or in the kind of dopier sense of the work where every part can be related to some overall thematic meaning, like in a bad music video. I think this follows from the idea that the churn which this form of narrative relies on is both meaningless and un-representationable in itself, being by definition part of that plane of subconsciousness where both meaning and representation are themselves constructed but also from the more historical sense that the specific form of this subconsciousness is intimately connected with technology in a way which can't help but be embarrassingly, persistently contingent, in a way which complicates the idea of a return to some prelapsarian domain where art and life are one. Technology is also a continuous reminder of such "un-artistic" subjects as labour, politics, economics, subjects which continuously threaten to overwhelm the boundaries of a contained aesthetic work - and I suspect that the struggle of dealing with this history, and this sensed contingency, is central to the persistence of "retro" imagery in videogames, the continual effort to establish a kind of ahistorically organic rootedness in everyday life that we glimpse in people saying that something is "a game for the whole family", or that kids of the future will remember it as we remember the games of our past today, or indeed whenever a multimillion dollar piece of electronic software that would have been unplayable five years ago and will be unplayable again in another five is rhetorically positioned as part of an unbroken continuum with hopscotch and Go. The difficulty of establishing an unproblematic basis for videogames in human life results in a set of perversely historical tendencies, where old strategies and contexts are continuously, obsessively repeated and replayed, like scenarios in the Castlevania franchise.
Another is the question of what kind of claims something existing on such a diffuse level of attention can make as an object of aesthetic totality, when "playing a videogame" can just mean having some videogame-y signifiers float across your screen while the way you perceive and use your computer remain effectively unchanged, and the question of which structures are best suited for existing in that particular space.
And still another, most relevant to my mind to the games I'll be discussing below, is the question of memory; memory less as an extension of the historical focus than as an alternative to it, memory as creating alternative constellations of meanings and intensities and temporal relations outside of those allotted by the official histories of same, memory as something like a counterweight to that most disavowed part of videogames which is the experience of actually playing one. We can say there is no "time" in videogames, just experience - checking Twitter or playing Croc II are both weirdly durationless experiences in the sense that both involve miniscule tics of attention repeating indefinitely across a changeless, frozen void, and in addition we of course have all the traditional awkwardnesses of projecting videogames into a continuous narrative (fail states, reloads, adventure game characters lurking in the same room over and over as they try to use PEPPERMINT on VENDING MACHINE). The result is that what narrative there is takes on something of a sculptural quality: despite what I've said "destroying the bugs" is not really the ending to Kero Blaster, "destroying the bugs" is one of the components within that charged field, but the relationship between all these components is not primarily one of time. Our memories of videogames are similarly nonsequential, a field, jumping, something to do with crystals, feeling tired, a bloody head, a castle wall, and to break up and diffuse the elements of a videogame narrative in advance can be variously to enhance, assist, distort or speak through the operation of this process, within which the undifferentiated sludge of videogame experience can both expand and change shape like one of those dinosaurs that grows bigger in water. And what this comparison of spatialised arrangement of videogame elements with the nonlinear structures of memory gives us is an angle from which to talk about the flatgames.
"Flatgame" is a neologism for a type of homebrew videogame that's been around forever, or since simplified public-use game engines like ZZT, Klik N Play and RPG Maker at the very latest, which is roughly the type where you control some sort of monad that moves around a flat, barely-spatialized plane without much in the way of other "game" elements, interactions, or even such frills as collision detection or checks to make sure you haven't fallen off the screen. Some examples of same are Pink Zone, Donkey Kong City, RPG, Gassy Choose Your Own Adventure Weirdo. It's such a broad category that there's no point trying to ring-fence it but I think we can pick out some secondary tendencies which allow us to focus more on this concept as an aesthetic rather than as a bare structure.
1. Thematically split between the "videogame-y" and the personal, where by videogamey I mean more or less those jarring surface elements that tend to stick out most to outsiders - graphics that are both repetitive and unintelligible, weird little monster people, arbitrary and artificial limitations and objects of focus (BALL QUEST 3000 CAN YOU COLLECT ALLOF THE BALLS? YOU CAN DO IT.. I BELIEVE IN YOU etc), confusions of scale leading to vast bathrooms or miniscule cities. And by personal I mean specifically a kind of oblique vignette-ish interest in specific local occurances or sensations of the type which typically are not considered either interesting or relevant by the culture.
2. "Prefab", referential use of game elements - as a side effect of the various engines if nothing else which all have some variant on a basic four-way movement system, or a platformer mechanic, or similar. These elements are taken as given rather than interrogated or explored and seperated entirely from the notion of challenge.
3. Converse focus on overexpressive content, where by overexpressive I mean things which carry a larger load of affect and association than their structural role necessarily requires - an example is the handdrawn look of something like noclipangelmode, with the waves and blurs of human marker usage thickly overlaying the basic mechanics, or the ripped commercial sprite and compressed but evocative panorama backdrop of Donkey Kong City.
In addition to all these we also have the "flatness" of their name, a tendency to place elements independently around the screen which creates the feeling of a flat, depthless plane, seperated both from perspective and from the idea of a singular coherent viewing position implicit in perspective. It's an effect that tends to decenter the player further from the point of mechanical interaction, such as it is, by refusing to grant that point visual primacy over the rest of the space - it remains just one of many elements, scattered across a field. We could say that what the flatgames suggest is a movement from our idea of the site of a videogame, the site where the videogame happens, from somewhere deep inside a console or CPU onto the screen itself, where our eye meets and tries to process the objects before it into some coherent relationship - a view I think supported by the aforementioned overexpressiveness of the objects themselves, a needless overexpressiveness particular to their appearance on the screen which thus claims the screen as the native site of computer affect, of effects that seem to float free of their particular use or context. This refocusing on the screen as the site of the alien material with which we must grapple when trying to interpret what's happening in a videogame also moves the space of "interpretation" backwards, outwards from the ostensibly neutral territory of the screen - where the attention meets the game elements - to some space outside of it, where attention meets the screen itself. And this insistence on the alien, object-quality of the screen has some side effects - firstly, as mentioned, it drastically curtails the amount of "interaction" thought necessary or desireable in this context. Interaction is recast as a way of dealing with the screen, and the actual interactions themselves - that weird fugue of absently tapped wasd keys - become a kind of artificial sense-organ by which we can be "aware", in the vague way of videogames, of the movement of our insectlike subconscious as it buffers across the screen. Move move move stop move stop stop treasure treasure treasure - to adapt a line from Paul Klee in perhaps a more literal sense than he'd intended, like taking the attention span for a walk.
Secondly, on perhaps a less cosmic and more interesting level, this movement to the screen enables a new awareness of materiality, on the material sensuousness of objects, drawings, lines of text as we engage with them around the screen - now read as things in themselves in addition to projections of some ultimately underlying system and as capable of adjusting and changing said system on those terms, rather than simply being dismissed as irrelevant shadows, as if concentrating hard enough on "underlying systems" was enough to negate the fact that said systems are read, applied and understood in inescapably material and sensual ways. And thirdly, perhaps as a consequence of the latter, this new sensuousness allows for a re-emergence of material which otherwise gets suppressed with the focus on an underlying core system - material like place, history, speech, humming in the shower, half-remembered cutscenes, the entrancing surface jank of videogame representations in general, weird experiences, goofy jokes. The detritus of memory and of daydream as projected into a closed system of that restless probing pseudoconsciousness which lacks either, colonising and colonised by both in turn, and forming temporary new shapes which give us less an understanding of than an analogy for the similar process happening within our heads - the positing of memory as newly central to our conception of whatever "interactive art" might be, a way to counter and rethink our experience of the omnipresence of flux. By saying all this I don't mean to downplay the goofiness and charm of Glorious Trainwreck-type work - if anything I think having a better understanding of the sometimes sophisticated techniques they're using makes this basic goofiness more funny, instead of less - or suggest that this kind of computer consciousness is the ultimately determining meaning of every Klik N Play game. But I do think as a variety of contemporary experience they are riffing off it, and taking in however distant a way some of their humour or interest or livelihood by tuning against this background hum in a way I think deserves more thought, and that I hope the above braindumps provide some initial suggestions for.
