Shadows on the Screen: The One I Wrote For Myself

Over a week ago I sat down across from a brunch table with my good friend Art Tebbel and I said “Why am I writing about video games?” And he answered “Write about what you want to write about.”
The issue here is simple. What we do is write about video games. I like video games a lot, I promise I do, even if I’m constantly bashing them. I critique because I love. After all, I don’t sit around writing essays on welding equipment. I rarely even write about hip-hop or post-rock or indie pop, things I very much enjoy. But with thousands protesting in Iran, North Korean boats hiding something, dozens of issues here on the home front that I feel strongly about, and weeks straight of rain, it is easy to reach a logical moment of clarity, a high contrast viewpoint where you get to look at the things you value easily separated from and measured up against each other.

For me, that clarity demanded I reconcile the fact that I wrote about video games, but that my favorite writing is about things other than video games. I hold a handful of video game writing/journalism/critique above the rest – Ian Bogost’s work, Jeff Green’s old Greenspeak columns, the catalog of essays by fellow New Yorkers N’Gai Croal, Stephen Totillo, and Leigh Alexander – but these don’t even breach my top 100 list of top non-fiction writing.

For that matter the subject of my scalpel doesn’t fare much better. When discussing games as pieces of fiction, even my favorites wouldn’t come close to being peered up with Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, Brothers Karamazov, Blade Runner, The Third Man or Long Day’s Journey into Night. Hell, even against other “genre” works that I love they pale. I’d take Phillip K. Dick’s Dr. Bloodmoney over Fallout 3, Robert Kirkman’s The Walking Dead over Left4Dead, and Ayn Rand’s… Well, no, Bioshock wins that one, but my writhing distaste for her writing makes that an easy win for Ken Levine and Co.

Besides my own bias towards other media, why is it that I feel a successful game critic is worth less than a successful political or film critic? To some degree it is that games don’t affect people, or try to affect them, in the same ways (which are ways that I value.)  I am rarely if ever emotionally affected by games, and just as common is how often I feel like I’ve learned something in play.

I am insulted by our refusal as game buyers to demand more hefty products. Even the indie development scene (so far as I can tell) hasn’t addressed the specific issues in Iran yet, and while I know that game development takes, well, a while, even the broader issues like freedom versus safety, the loss of loved ones, concepts of free-will, desire versus reason, the existence of a supreme being, all of the other core concepts that have driven humans towards art for thousands of years, they are all avoided (or worse, lazily drawn upon in order that unique  work need not be done.) There are exceptions, but they are exceptional. The goal to play for play’s sake exists, but is tertiary at best in my media consumption – I want to write about games, not toys. Why should it be a shock that I don’t want to be writing about one-in-a-thousand exceptions and toys?

The point of it is that for my thousands (tens of thousands? hundreds of thousands?) of hours playing these things which I would and have argued are interactive artwork, neither they nor the writing around them are the most valuable part of my artistic life. I have deep-seated fears that I am squandering time and talent writing about power-ups instead of political philosophy, citing bad fiction in games instead of writing my own fiction.  But here I am writing this, and reviews on games I don’t like, and editing stories about Pokemon games.

What keeps me in this field? Well, fear of mediocrity, for one. I’ve read good writing, and as it stands I don’t fit that bill. If anyone lists these editorials in their favorite pieces of writing, I’d be almost insulted. To quote Woody Allen quoting Grouching Marx, “I would not join any club that would have me as a member.” To you, hypothetical fan, I say “Read more.” I’m a damn good video game critic, but in the shadow of real journalists, philosophers, psychologists, novelists, poets, and playwrights, well, I’m just not there and i don’t seem to have the determination or desire to get there. Am I just choosing to write about video games in hopes that here I’ll be worth something here if elsewhere I’d be worth naught?

Algerian philosopher and novelist Albert Camus is most famous for his short novel The Stranger, which is about an absurd killing and an absurd man. Outside of his fiction he strikes similar issues. Most important for me is The Myth of Sisyphus. “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem” Camus begins his essay, “and that is suicide.” If the world truly is absurd, with no objective meaning to be found in life, does one’s realization of that truth demand immediate suicide since this is in intense opposition to the rational man?

Unlike other philosophers, Camus doesn’t dodge the premises. Where other’s would say “And that’s why God exists, to give us meaning” or “We must strive towards rationality in the face of absurdism” or even the common-sensical (and deeply unphilosophical) “Well, we give life our own meaning,” Camus never backpedals. Instead, he attributes the absurdity of life towards man, and orders us to live as much as possible, never denying the absurdity of our existence but likewise never enjoying that we are stuck in absurdism. We can revolt, grimace, and be scornful like Sisyphus might be as he chases the boulder down the hill to begin pushing it again. Those moments are our glory moments, and we should cherish them and seek them most of all.

If Camus is right, and we live in a world without objective value, then it doesn’t matter that I’m writing about video games instead of overseas wars or workers’ rights. We are stuck in this, and while we can not give life meaning ourselves, we can at least be bitter about that fact and feel content in that bitterness. If we slide the question over, just a bit, and ask why I pursue this path instead of another the answer has to be a grit of the teeth and a few more strokes on the keyboard, still writing about gaming.

That’s not all the Algerian has to give to this topic, though. Besides trying to answer the absurdism problem, Camus also establishes a simple truth from which other arguments can grow: Actions dictate value. When Galileo faced a choice between life and scientific integrity, he chose life. When faced with the choice of writing about games or writing about anything else, I seem to be choosing games. Why? Why pursue a thing until you realize it is absurd, note a sharp distaste for it, and then keep going?

After much thought, a lot of reading, and a lot of hesitation, I’m ready to say why: I write about games because I see potential for the form that is unmet. Because for every Bioshock or Fallout 3 there are hundreds of Red Faction: Guerillas. Even if all I can do is say “Well, [PROTOTYPE] was fairly mediocre, but I enjoyed being placed in a facsimile of Manhattan thrown into chaos by a biological outbreak – that resonated with me” then I’m pushing us ito do something new and more interesting. Since the only thing that variable in this Sisyphean task is the amount of times we push the boulder up the hill, let’s not rest with a boulder on our shoulders, releasing the same stale games, and reacting to them in the same way. Let’s push more times, never to achieve anything concrete, but always making it one step closer to a new high score.

Next up: The most absurd Shadows on the Screen yet