All That I Can To Keep Track of Time in My Head (Home Alone, Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, Hook)

As with High Speed we have here a swath of my childhood in the wrong medium. Two thirds of these were based on movies I saw and loved as a child; I had the quasi-board game poster that came with the Home Alone VHS on the wall behind the TV I played most of my Nintendo games on and it stayed there for decades of no longer caring about the movie or indeed living in the house until the the entire basement got torn out and redeveloped. Hook meanwhile was a deeply beloved sort of film—a hot mess that nevertheless had all the ingredients to be deeply enjoyable by a nine-year-old. (The Home Alone sequel, on the other hand, was not good enough and too young for a ten year old.) These are not necessarily pleasures that have aged well; I remember Home Alone ageing to a sort of charming cringe last time it was on some Christmas, and while I haven’t seen Hook in over a decade I suspect it’s a softly charming film whose flaws are a lot more evident. Not bad as early 90s popular culture goes, but certainly not the white hot thrill of youth.

But of course, this is not an essay about the films. It is an essay about the games adapted from the films, all of which are, in a pattern designed to remind me why I didn't update this blog for a decade, absolutely fucking terrible. Tie-in shovelware designed to be forgotten the moment the sting of having spent money on it fades. In this regard it resembles Home Alone 2: Lost in New York, the shitty cash-in sequel on a coherent original idea, these days more remembered for a Donald Trump cameo than for actual substance.

Ironically in the world of Nintendo games Home Alone 2 is the stronger game—a banal sidescroller of the "there is no rational reason why all of these things should be dangerous to me" variety that has you dodging bellhops, suitcases, and oddly homicidal hotel receptionists. There's an interpretation to be spun here, the homicidal hotel prefiguring its 1992 owner's later career, but for fuck's sake, I don't want to. The game fundamentally isn't interesting enough to merit an argument like that. It's not even interesting enough to justify this essay, but I've taken two nine months already to write it, so here we are. This is simply an arbitrary collection of symbols arranged into a game-like shape in a broadly bare minimum way. 

Hook is similar—a side-scroller game in which questions like "controls" and "gameplay" are entirely secondary, the point of the exercise being to simply arrange some iconography recognizable as film-adjacent on the screen in a roughly playable fashion. In this case you play as the most inept Peter Pan ever, wielding the world's least effective knife as you use a series of janky and alarmingly loose controls to navigate Neverland. It's vaguely a Zelda II clone, but in the sense of one of those mad scientist laboratories full of failed specimens with monstrous bodies that cling to an agonizing and unholy life.

What is interesting about these two games, however, is that they are almost wholly indifferent to the matter of being games. I've mentioned their flaws, but it's worth stressing just how far-ranging they are. These games fundamentally do not play. Their controls are sloppy to the point of parody, their mechanics are tedious (in both games your only real option is to dodge virtually everything), and none of it is organized around a notion of human interaction. There is nothing here save for the cold reality of the iconography—symbols of the properties these games are really just marketing for. The emptiness here is abyssal.

In contrast, then, sits Home Alone, which is also a bad game, but which at least has some vision of being interesting. It is a tight and claustrophobic thing—its hook is simply that you must survive in the house for twenty minutes while being chased by the bandits from popular kids movie Home Alone. As with many NES games it plays terribly if you simply pick it up, but has a weird appeal that might well have been grasped through obsessive replay due to lack of other options. It is counterintuitive, confusing, but has depth to that, and the central setup of “survive for twenty minutes” is so immediately striking as to carry it through. There are children who loved this, or who at least came to enjoy their dislike of it.

In practice you can glitch it, enacting a foolproof strategy that removes all skill from the game by abusing the limitations of its AI. The old promise of magic, then: that there is a cheat, somewhere, deep in the secret sediment of the world, waiting to be uncovered.

No Such Thing as Society (Hollywood Squares)

Guy Debord writes in Society of the Spectacle about how “In societies dominated by modern conditions of production, life is presented as an immense accumulation of spectacles. Everything that was directly lived has receded into a representation. The images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream in which the unity of that life can no longer be recovered. Fragmented views of reality regroup themselves into a new unity as a separate pseudoworld that can only be looked at. The specialization of images of the world evolves into a world of autonomized images where even the deceivers are deceived. The spectacle is a concrete inversion of life, an autonomous movement of the nonliving.”

Hollywood Squares has existed, in various forms, since the 1960s. Its format is one of bland simplicity: nine celebrities of varying levels of actual fame sit in the titular squares. Two players take turns picking squares. The celebrity is asked a trivia question, and the player must decide if their answer is right or wrong. If they guess correctly they claim the square; if they guess incorrectly their opponent does. Beyond that the game is one of Tic-Tac-Toe. 

This banal setup is, in reality, simply a frame to hold the real and equally bland dynamic, in which the celebrities came up with humorous wrong answers, called “zingers” by the production sta. Which is to say that the core dynamic of the show is simply celebrities making dumb jokes with a broad structure of a game show to guide proceedings. In truth, all of these interactions were functionally scripted; the zingers were supplied along with a right and plausible wrong answer, the celebrities relied upon only for entertaining delivery, which, to be fair, was in fact many of their jobs. 

The Nintendo version strips even more of this away. The likenesses of actual celebrities are, after all, expensive. So instead there are nine sprites given arbitrary names—only nine sprites, to be clear, although there are more names than that, so that these fictive celebrities seem in fact to cycle through an endless number of identities, all of them less distinctive than their actual animations. One is left to think of them in these terms: the annoying bro in the center square, the granny underneath her, the one Black dude in the upper right. Their names become meaningless, empty non-signifiers. Meanwhile you answer trivia questions for money that does not exist, and get an opportunity as a bonus to try to win a car that also does not exist. 

It is a simulation of a simulated situation with all of the markers that gave meaning to the original simulation stripped away. Looked at now, nearly twenty years since any version of Hollywood Squares has been on television, its vapidity becomes a hollow, frightened thing. Nine haunted visages of a spectacle so comprehensively unreal that it is impossible to imagine it demanding, over and over again, to know if they are lying to you.

ACAB (High Speed, Hogan's Alley)

My mother was a woman liked overly big, showy Christmas presents, and one year she decided to outdo herself and buy me a pinball machine. She did her homework on slightly older machines she could get a good price on, and settled on the classic Williams table High Speed. Needless to say, I was gobsmacked. She hid the pinball machine in plain sight with a blanket over it and insisted it was the surprisingly oversized toy kitchen my sister was getting and I bought it because "there's a pinball machine hidden in your playroom" is simply not an outcome I was equipped to imagine.

High Speed was a 1980s machine with a pleasantly frenetic pace and soundtrack. Its plot, such as it was, involved hitting a series of targets around the table to steadily illuminate a traffic light, then made a ramp shot to "run the light" setting off a high speed chase; successful completion of a few more targets constituted getting away and launched multiball.

It's probably too much to ask for moral lessons from a pinball table, and I'm pretty unconvinced by "run red lights" as a lesson in the first place. And yet there is something about the impish anti-authority leaning here that is easy to respect. "Fleeing from the cops is fun and should be rewarded" has an easy charm to it, fitting into the long tradition of the noble outlaw. 

Interestingly, the game's sound effects are from the perspective of the frustrated cops—"Dispatch this is 504. Suspect ran a red light. Over," and the like. Which means that the player is positioned not with the driver whose actions they are nominally controlling via the ball (although the question of avatars in pinball machines is to say the least vexed) but with the cops who exist in a state of endless frustration, always missing the perp. In a pleasant detail, there's literally no victory dialogue: when you lose a ball the cops don't say "we got him" or anything. And so the game is simply an endless recitation of defeated authority that can only ever be revealed as impotent and useless, with the player's pleasure always allied with that revelation. 

The NES port is reasonably faithful as a table—I was able to pick it up quickly and was broadly speaking almost as good at it as I was on the actual table the last time I played it, which was admittedly some eight years ago. It makes the irritating and non-optional decision to add a bunch of gimmicks—little threats that show up on the table and disrupt play, along with random collectable bonuses that tricker extra rounds. From a design perspective, a "Normal" and "Enhanced" mode would be nice touches. But as a pinball port it's reasonable, an entertaining bit of nostalgia that I legitimately didn't expect to find on the NES. (Honestly, if I'd realized I had this coming in just two posts I probably wouldn't have quit the project when I did.)

I remember one evening when my father came to get me. I don't remember what I was doing—statistically speaking it was probably playing video games. He walked me down the front lawn to where a traffic stop was taking place; some teenage girl had been speeding or run a red light or something. And we stood and watched. Eventually the cop decided he didn't like this, and asked my father to go back inside. And my father replied, very calmly, "I believe citizens should watch their police." 

There are no shortage of bad games on the NES. Still, it is hard to think of a more straightforwardly evil one than Hogan's Alley. Another light gun game, this one functions as a shooting gallery in which a mixture of criminals and innocents pop up and you must quickly identify and shoot the criminals. The name dates back to 1920, when the NRA and the Army collaborated to create a training range in Ohio after determining that an insufficient number of cities had dedicated firing ranges. This was presumably named after Richard Outcault's Hogan's Alley, widely credited as the first newspaper comic strip, although as usual the word "first" turns out to be extremely vexed here. The Hogan's Alley range was notable for being a broad simulation of a city, with targets popping out in unexpected places as the officer walked through. This eventually became a generic name for that type of shooting range; two years after the NES game came out the FBI established a range of the same name in Quantico in which actors were hired to portray a mixture of civilians and terrorists for the purposes of training. 

There are multiple levels to this sort of training. On one level the presence of "civilians" constitutes training in threat assessment. But these ranges are also known as surprise ranges, with the idea being that threats might jump out of any corner. The end result is to keep police on edge, paranoid, always afraid that something bad could happen to them. This is the logic that would eventually evolve into Dave Grossman's horrifying notion of "killology," a set of police training seminars that can be boiled down to convincing cops that they need to learn to kill without hesitation or moral qualm. The lethal consequences of this are, I imagine, self-evident. 

Hogan's Alley avoids the worst baggage of this with an entirely white cast of criminals, who are generally in the mafioso style. But its basic logic is still the same. All runs at the game ultimately end the same way, with a failure to clear the room of criminals leading to the player's defeat. Perhaps they're defeated by hitting a civilian, but more likely they miss a criminal. The lesson is still that cops are under constant siege, always threatened, and thus that violence is inevitable and necessary. Ultimately, the goal of the game is still to shoot all suspects on sight.

My father's lesson was one that I was not entirely prepared to absorb at the time. Grounded in realities and systems too abstract to grasp, an insufficient counterweight to the copaganda of D.A.R.E. All the same, it is the lesson that has held; an understanding both of citizen and police that steadily grew to a worldview. The real secret history in all of this,

The Head That Wears The Crown (Heavy Barrel, Heavy Shreddin')

The obvious question—the only one that makes any sense in context, is what exactly is heavy here. Or perhaps more usefully, what is the nature of the weight? The 2.6 ounces of an NES controller are essentially immutable, after all—in a strictly literal sense these allegedly heavy games weigh no more than Bubble Bobble or Airwolf. All pixels are weightless. Clearly, then, we are in a realm of something else; a metaphoric weight akin to moral obligation. 

There certainly is a morality at play in Heavy Shredding; that old familiar logic of cobra command. Here we are on an island, tasked with destroying the enemy's underground artillery base. Who are we? Who is the enemy? The game remains wholly silent on this. We are a man with a gun and they are an island military base; these things combine like knight and princess, plumber and weird mushroom thing, The manual clarifies slightly; terrorists have done this, and the base contains a nuclear weapon. But this is not knowledge—merely further trappings of cobra command, a symbolic system that exists to compel run-and-gun action. It is only in the larger context of Reagan/Bush America that these isolated and compulsory symbols acquire any sort of moral dimension—one of neoliberal militarism and American economic imperialism. Even still, this morality is meant to be automatic—a simple and reflexive symbology. A terrorist implies a commando to shoot him. These things must be. 

This is not weight but its opposite. The entire point is that these are not heavy moral decisions; merely the reflexive consequences of politics as aesthetics. (So politics, then.) The bullets, the tanks, the death tolls, ll of these are as insubstantial as the pixels. Heaviness is forbidden, suspect, probably queer or commie. Once again we reach a dead end.

Of course, had the alphabet run the other way we'd never have made the mistake in the first place; clearly Heavy Shreddin', a snowboarding game that can be described as a sort of proto-SkiFree only with a snowboard. This is a game of blissful amorality; there is simply the hill, the snow, the exhilaration of speed. Moral heaviness lies self-evidently outside of its system, an irrelevance, perhaps even the thing this game is meant to be a tonic to.

A third sense, then—something akin to what is heavy in heavy metal music. This can be understood as a heaviness of aesthetics. Heavy metal is excessive music, a genre whose promise is that it gives too much. The pleasures it offers are explicitly ones of overstimulation. This is, of course, a difficult thing to judge about thirty year old video games. It was bad enough a decade ago. Are these games overstimulating? Were their simple and heavily abstracted graphics and tinny soundtracks a blast of thrilling sensory overload? It's possible in the abstract, but it's hard to imagine either of these being among them.

Perhaps the useful way to think about this, then, is to ask what run-and-gun military action and snowboarding have in common. Once that's determined we can move on to figuring out how this thing might be heavy. The obvious answer is a sense of coolness. Shooting terrorists is cool. So is snowboarding. Indeed, snowboarding is on some level defined precisely by the fact that it has a coolness to it that skiing lacks. These things are heavy because they have a sense of swaggering grandeur.

In this regard "heavy" might be understood as a synonym for "super" (the term that would eventually be used for the cooler successor to the NES, but already used for ten separate NES games) or "power"—prefixes that serve simply as intensifiers. But in this case the two objects in question point towards more concrete terms. Snowboarding and the military are not simply cool—they are masculine. This is boy stuff. And that's true in a way that the other intensifiers aren't. Sure, video games and the NES had a certain masculine aesthetic to begin with—the sleek cyberpunk grey and red design wasn't exactly playing for the same crowd as Polly Pocket, y'know? (There's a lot to be written, incidentally, about the way in which Nintendo console design evolved versus its competitors.) But Power and Super do not suggest the sort of masculine bravado as this suite of heavy games.

One could point out the fragility of this—the way in which the heaviness of these games feels defensive, a point undermined by the ardency with which it's made. But the true is a moment of the false, and this is no exception. And if the secret history of masculinity is that it's a burden to bear, well. What more is there to say on the subject?

Of Illusions (Wario's Woods)

And then, in December of 1994, it ended. The writing had been on the wall for a while - the last releases had been all the way back in August (Disney’s The Jungle Book, The Flintstones: Surprise at Dinosaur Park, and The Incredible Crash Test Dummies), but Wario’s Woods was the last licensed game for the Nintendo Entertainment System.

The history of the game is slightly strange. It came out in Japan in February of 1994, the sixth-from-last game for the Famicom. That it should come out in a different order in the US isn’t strange, of course. What is strange is that it came out alongside a SNES version that never saw Japanese release. On top of that, the SNES version was slightly more elaborate, introducing a handful of new mechanics absent in the 8-Bit version. The result is that, when looked at from a 1994 perspective, without the ability to simply summon up a production history of the game from the Internet, the last NES game looks like a stripped down port of a Super Nintendo game, which, given the amount of stuff that was coming out in both NES and SNES versions at the time, was an entirely plausible interpretation.

And yet in practical terms the SNES version is irrelevant. The game’s claim to historical significance is entirely that it was the last NES game. It’s been released in emulation for four separate Nintendo systems, including as a launch title for the Wii’s Virtual Console, and every time it’s been the NES version. In spite of the fact that the SNES version is prettier and more feature-rich, which, by most definitions at least, means that it’s “better.” (In reality one of the features is a randomly appearing block that screws the player over arbitrarily by provoking a flood of blocks when it lands, and the game is better off without it, but that’s neither here nor there.)

As last games go, though, it’s a pretty good one. The list of classic falling block games is fairly short - indeed, it’s about six letters long, and two of them are T. (No, Dr. Mario is not a classic falling block game - its mechanics are dreadful.) Wario’s Woods isn’t quite classic - the difficulty curve is wonky, and the latter levels are far too dependent on the luck of block distribution. But it’s got an addictive charm to it. The conceit of controlling a character running around amidst the falling blocks and rearranging them is interesting, changing the dynamic from the Tetris-standard “move blocks as they fall” to one where you usually have a several step plan in mind, but have to execute it among shifting circumstances that may require revision of the plan. You have just enough different ways of interacting with the blocks (pick up/put down one, pick up/put down all, jump to the top of whatever stack you’re holding, and kick the block in front of you) to allow for complex tactics, and more to the point to allow for a real learning process about tactics as you go.

And of course it would be a lot to ask for the last NES game to be an outright classic. To call the NES in decline in 1994 all but misses the point. Its continued status as a thing was largely down to the class striations of the video game market - a low-cost option for families that couldn’t afford the Super Nintendo. Its reason for existence was specifically to be not as good as the SNES. In that regard, the fact that the final game is a credible lesser classic has to be taken as an unexpected bonus - a last hurrah that in no way had to happen. And it didn’t really for any subsequent consoles. The last Super Nintendo game was Timon & Pumbaa’s Jungle Games; the last Nintendo 64 game was a Tony Hawk title. Even the last Nintendo-published titles for the consoles don’t have the odd posthumous status of Wario’s Woods. Kirby’s Dream Land 3 eventually made it out on the Virtual Console, but all the way in 2009; Dr. Mario 64 has never seen rerelease.

And it is, in many ways, this latter life that is most interesting about Wario’s Woods. By definition, after all, it could not be a game with much impact in its time. Perhaps it’s a game that never had impact in any time. It’s not like I have sales figures in front of me or anything. But its long afterlife gives it, if nothing else, an opportunity for impact. Or perhaps I’m just talking around the fact that this is a game I’ve fallen for hard, and more than once. I think it was actually the Wii game I played the most at first, which was admittedly easy given that the Wii launch titles were mostly pretty shit. Wii Sports entertained for a week or two, but Twilight Princess was a lesser Zelda to say the least, and past that the initial slate aspired to mediocrity.

Which left the Virtual Console, which wasn’t exactly long on classics either to start. Donkey Kong and The Legend of Zelda were the two A-list NES games, with Mario Bros, Pinball, Soccer, and Solomon’s Key rounding out the launch. The SNES had F-Zero and SimCity, the Nintendo 64 Super Mario 64, and the Genesis Altered Beast and Sonic the Hedgehog. In other words, a list of games consisting of things I’d either played tons of times before and things nobody cared about. Plus Wario’s Woods.

And so I fell down a rabbit hole. My first NES-based rabbit hole in years, actually. It was in no way my first serious dip into retrogaming, but that’s another story and another blog. All the same, though, it was a good rabbit hole, with hours spent on the sofa diligently grinding away at the upper levels. Which were frustrating in that classical video game sense that made you want to hurl the controller violently through the television.

There’s not a ton to capture about this experience that I haven’t already recounted. There’s definitely a point in the game’s progression where it suddenly becomes much harder, and the dumb luck of what order things fall in becomes absolutely crucial. One short stretch of bad luck early on or a small error in block placement can effectively doom you. So the potential for anger is there - when the game gets into its upper reaches death often feels capricious and unfair, not least because 1-Ups are few and far between at that point, and reaching a new continue point requires beating five consecutive levels, which makes the fact that you start with zero extra lives deeply harsh. But the actual thrill of play - running around inside the level setting things up - and the elegance of design whereby big chains of blocks can be set up and destroyed with a reasonably good plan remained captivating enough to glue me to the couch for a week or two. And I’ve had at least two relapses in the decade since, one of which has been gloriously unhelpful in getting this post done.

But perhaps looking for an explanation is the wrong way to go about it. Perhaps a rabbit hole can only be explained in terms of possibility, and the only question that can be asked of a game is whether it’s good enough to create one, not how or why it did. Wario’s Woods has what it takes, yes. But nothing necessarily follows from that. The fact that it enthralled me gives it a certain weight and heft, but  is not itself content.

Let us, then, approach the basics - a simple dualism implicit in the title. On the one hand, Wario - a mocking perversion of Nintendo’s mascot. If this were another blog, you’d even call him qlippothic. This is his sole appearance on the NES, having debuted on the Game Boy two years prior, and there is something strange about him plowing onto the scene here, at the end of things. A strangely atavistic impulse - an instinctive and barely explicable desire to end on an unsettled note. Even more revealing is the fact that Wario is the title attraction and most prominent figure on the cover, despite the fact that it’s Toad’s game. It is as though there is, in the final moments, an urge to tear down, embracing the negation of all that the brand stands for. Taken in the context of larger industry trends, it is as savvy as it is disturbing.

On the other, Woods. Being a concept with millennia of history as opposed to two years, they are rather tricker than Wario. But broadly speaking, words like “mysterious,” “forbidden,” and perhaps even “libidinous” seem apropos. Forests are things to be explored, or better yet to be lost within. They are where magic and discovery take place. They are fraught with possibility. It would be overstating the case to say that these two words conflict, but there is a tension here between the vast possibilities offered by “Woods” and the strange collapse offered by “Wario.”

But if we are to approach this tension from the perspective of history, it is, at least, clearly resolved. In 1994, it was Wario that held sway: the collapse of the NES into technological obsolescence, the rise of Nemesis, and the sense of Nintendo as something rotting away into history. And yet in hindsight, for better or for worse, the NES did not rot. It survived, through emulation, retrogaming, and an endless program of rereleases. And Wario’s Woods proved in practice not a tombstone for the NES, but the door to the vast future it opened onto.

The Persistence of Mercury (Harlem Globetrotters, Hatris)

The Harlem Globetrotters make an odd subject for a video game, given the degree to which their history consisted of kayfabe basketball. Not that there is anything wrong with this history. The Harlem Globetrotters were, by any reasonable measure, a celebration of numerous aspects of African American culture. But they were not basketball as such. Rather, they were a simulation of basketball designed to focus on the moments of maximum fun and trim out the others.

In other words, the Harlem Globetrotters are themselves basically a video game. That is, after all, what basketball video games are about. Trimming the boring bits and getting to the fun bits. It's basketball without tedium, at the frankly fairly low cost of also being without point. But given that sports are already kind of inherently pointless, this just isn't that massive a problem.

The process involved here, alchemically speaking, is one that we would associate with Hermes, also known as Mercury. His name is also given to a planet and metal. Or, rather, all three of these things share the same name because, for a period of thought during which quite a few linguistic roots developed, they were the same thing. The metal, god, and planet were all simply manifestations of a larger concept.

This concept, broadly speaking, was change, but change in a very specific sense. Mercury is not the change of the passage of time. Rather, mercury is change in the sense of creation. Mercury was viewed, classically, as essentially the stem cell of metals - the inchoate chaos from which anything can form, along with, crucially, the process of that formation. Mercury, in other words, is the act of creation itself.

We cannot survive in a world of pure mercury. Some system is needed. Neal Stephenson, among the most brilliant living writers in English, wrote an entire trilogy that ends up with this observation as its main conclusion. But we equally cannot survive in a world that is fixed. There must be mercury - inchoate moments of unfathomable creation. There must be sparks. This is what the various dunks and stunts of the Harlem Globetrotters are - the moments of inspiration and passion and beauty that make basketball worthwhile. They are pure mercury. But they are not the world.

Still, a video game based on it turns out to be kinda dumb. It turns out not to be possible to take something that is already a distilled simulation of an object and create a distilled simulation of it. All you get is a generic basketball game with a lone "stunt" that you can pull to get an automatic basket. There is nothing to it. All is fixed and determined, and there is no room for chaos.

There is not enough mercury in the world, however. Case in point, Hatris. From the creator of Tetris, Hatris is another falling objects game in which you try to stack sets of five identical hats with six columns to maneuver in and hats falling in pairs. It demonstrates a key facet of game design, which is that just because you came up with one brilliant concept it doesn't mean you can do it again. Hatris isn't bad, but it lacks all of the spark of Tetris.

Ironically, of course, hats themselves lack that vital spark of mercury they once had. For some time mercury was a vital ingredient in manufacturing felt hats, leading to lots of toxic vapors and the phrase "mad as a hatter." Broadly speaking, mercury in general is something we lack today. Where once it was something everyone encountered, whether in thermometers or toys, now the fact that it's horribly dangerous and toxic is used as a pretense to remove it from as many things as possible. The resulting lack of brain damage and death is, admittedly, nice.

But something is, as we can see in Hatris, lost in the conversion. There is no spark to the game. Which is a problem. The falling objects genre, after all, depends on the dynamic of the game slowly but surely spiraling out of control until you die. This requires mercury - a formless chaos to which you descend. This is the problem with Hatris. Death may be inevitable in it, but there is no sense of things getting out of control. Usually you die because there aren't enough slots for the hats - six slots and six varieties of hat means that it is basically certain that you will be unable to maintain a stack for each hat type. But this dynamic never feels like spiraling out of control. It just feels like bad resource management.

Tetris, as we'll talk about in the Ts, avoided this. The dynamic that kills you in Tetris is subtle. You don't quite know why you always die. Thus there is a sense of chaos. In Hatris, you know why you're dying, and get no opportunity to be driven mad by it.

Mercury will kill you, sure enough. But so will life. In the end, the cause of death is always inevitability. Better to live in a world where that fact remains strange.

The Widening (Gyruss)

I've been down on video games lately. Admittedly, I've been down on life lately. But I'd be lying if I said I enjoy this blog as much as I used to. Much of this may be down to the fact that I've been pretty hostile to video games lately. Some of this may in turn be down to the fact that NES games are largely a bit lackluster. But in any case, this blog is feeling like a chore, and I dislike that.

So let's take my own advice.

One of the things that I've been contemplating as I teach the handful of sections of courses I can get is the fact that we've really done an awfully cynical job of teaching people to read. Not necessarily a bad one - actually my students are very good at following plot and comprehending the reading. Apparently we've gotten that down. No, where we fall flat is that we've somehow created an army of cynical readers who go looking to dislike things.

It's our own fault. The unfortunate downside of the wave of "ist" and "X studies" approaches. Not that these have been by and large negative - the work they did in opening up how we think about art and power is invaluable. But so much of the work that all of them - feminist theory, queer theory, disability studies, post-colonialist theory, the lot of them - was to show us the seedy and uncomfortable underbelly of "classic" texts. The problem is that now we know to use this approach, and it becomes increasingly difficult to actually enjoy anything.

The actual ists and Xes have long since sailed past this problem into new territory with their approach of finding marginalized literature worthy of more attention than it's been given. This does not mean the "liking the bad thing ironically" approach of hipsters, which is really just what we've been calling "camp" for decades now, only with more cynicism and patchoulli. Rather, it means finding literature that gives voice to people the classics often ignore.

But there's another tactic I've been thinking about lately. What I call redemptive readings. It hit me while watching Love and Other Drugs, a film that is neither particularly good nor particularly bad. But watching it, I found that I could watch the film and enjoy it by focusing on a narrow, somewhat idiosyncratic, but largely valid reading of it in which the film is about playing Anne Hathaway's bland starlet characteristics off the fact that she actually can act and provide a compelling portrait of someone with a fatal illness, and how it makes it very difficult to support a for-profit medical industry in the context of the film. Whatever its myriad flaws, that bit seems good.

I call this redemptive reading. Going into something with the active goal of liking it, and trying to find a reading that makes it work. Ideally this shouldn't mean ignoring any obvious flaws, but it should mean trying to find reasons to like something. The appeal of it is that it's charmingly subversive. People are going to watch television. Television, by its nature, is never going to actively give voice to oppressed and silenced minorities, because it's a corporate-controlled broadcast medium. Finding good things in it is, more often than not, going to involve taking something that might not actually be good and thwapping it upside the head until it behaves.

So let's try that with NES games. Here, most of the time, we don't have terribly large racial issues, we have very standardized and entrenched gender issues, and the class issues are... well, OK, that's where we're going to need to be working.

Thankfully, for our purposes, Gyruss is not half bad to begin with. It's a rotational shooter. By which I mean that it basically functions in the shooter mould that I'm running out of things to say about, except instead of constantly scrolling forwards you move in a circle around the playfield. Enemies come in along the Z-axis, and cluster at the center of the screen for you to destroy them.

The gameplay is pleasantly pacey, the controls are at a nice midpoint between intuitive and frustrating, and almost every time I died I felt like I deserved it. The minimum threshold is thus cleared. But, for once, there's more than that!

I mean, one thing I am increasingly coming to believe is that the interesting parts of video games are the play mechanics. This does not mean I am becoming a hardline ludologist, as I still believe play mechanics can tell a story, but, for instance, if we take my favorite game in recent memory - Braid - the story extends from the gameplay. It's a story about the passage of time, memory, and regret, but all of the aspects of the story are simply thematic meditations on things about the gameplay. When the game introduces time-locked objects, the story introduces the idea of mistakes that cannot be undone. When it introduces the ability to have a shadow Tim carry out one set of actions while Tim carries out another, it introduces the idea of regret for lives unlived.

The thing about Braid that I think a lot of people miss, despite it probably being the most important thing about the game, is that it is one of an increasing number of games to operate in a lyrical mode as opposed to an epic mode. Implicit in this, of course, is the idea that the nearest textual medium to video games is poetry. And so Braid, instead of telling a narrative story about rescuing a princess, instead offers an extended poem in which video game mechanics, growing up, the apocalypse, and love are all intertwined into a... well... braid.

It is impossible to port this approach directly to Gyruss, simply because there's not enough formal complexity to have the multiple moving parts that so enliven Braid. And yet all the same, there is something to it. These endless loops and circles that stretch the solar system as an infinite tunnel straight through the back of my television. The spinning about in giddy circles, dodging and destroying wildly as all the cosmos lifts off my screen and through me. This is what games are for.