Archived commentary: https://web.archive.org/web/20111009211242/http://insomnia.ac/commentary/
On Set Theory and the Bastardization Process
By Alex Kierkegaard / January 24, 2014
Let’s kick off the second circle of videogame culture essays with a bang: with stuff that will blow your fucking mind and with theories which no one else besides a bona fide genius could devise. Now, the issue of the connection between art and videogames should already be a dead horse for everyone who’s read my Genealogy: videogames are not merely an artform, but the highest artform possible, and therefore also the last — and this can be seen, as I explained in detail in that work, by considering the evolution of art from the perspective of immersion and the technological sophistication of the tools invented and employed throughout the ages in order to increase it. Thus in the Genealogy I approached the issue from the angle of the history of art. There is another angle from which we could approach the same issue, however, and gain a slew of amazing new insights in doing so: the angle of mathematics, and more specifically that of set theory, and in particular the distinction between supersets and subsets. What is set theory? Here is its definition:
Set theory is the branch of mathematical logic that studies sets, which are collections of objects.
And this is the definition of supersets and subsets:
In mathematics, especially in set theory, a set A is a subset of a set B, or equivalently B is a superset of A, if A is “contained” inside B, that is, all elements of A are also elements of B. A and B may coincide. The relationship of one set being a subset of another is called inclusion or sometimes containment.
According to this definition, then, the various primitive artforms are subsets of videogames, or equivalently videogames are a superset of all the primitive artforms. But what exactly does this mean, in everyday language? Brace yourselves, because here comes the mind-blowing part. It means that music, novels, paintings, sculptures, photographs, movies and the like are TYPES OF VIDEOGAMES. The issue therefore is not so much that videogames are art, but that ART IS VIDEOGAMES. Hahahaha. Ebert must be turning furiously in his grave right about now. But, thankfully for us, no amount of turning in a grave can change reality. Let’s consider some examples to solidify our understanding of what all this means in practice. Take a videogame and strip away all aspects — text, graphics, sound effects, user inputs and force-feedback — except the music. What are you left with? A piece of music, obviously. Now take another videogame and strip away the music, the sound effects, the graphics, the user inputs and force-feedback, and in a similar manner you’ll be left with plain text. If it’s fiction, it’s a novel. Similarly, a movie is merely an unbroken cutscene, an illustration is a static screen, and a painting or a sculpture is a three-dimensional object which can be viewed (and even interacted with) from all angles in stereoscopic 3D via a VR headset. Moreover, not only are the primitive artforms subsets of videogames, they are in fact proper subsets of them. What is a proper subset?
A proper subset S’ of a set S, denoted S’ c S, is a subset that is strictly contained in S and so necessarily excludes at least one member of S. The empty set is therefore a proper subset of any nonempty set.
That is to say that, in the case of novels, for example, all novels ever written, and that will ever be written, are videogames, and it is not possible to find — indeed it is not even possible to imagine — a novel that is not also at the same time a videogame. No technological advance will ever be able to change this. No amazing novelist will ever be born who can surmount this issue. It is simply a mathematical fact that all novels are videogames and that is the end of that. And voilà: we’ve demonstrated that all primitive artworks can be reduced to videogames in which the majority of the means of artistic expression ARE SIMPLY NOT BEING USED. In other words, we have demonstrated that all primitive artforms are ARTISTICALLY INFERIOR ARTFORMS (since they can only allow for a far lower level of artistic expression than that which videogames can).
Now, there is no way to get around these conclusions. This is mathematics, not journalism or pseudo-academia, in which black can be made to seem white and white black. There is no room for “opinion” here — you either understand what you’ve just read, or you’ve failed the class and will not be allowed to graduate until you’ve taken it again and passed. One thing, however, remains to be explained, and this is the question of how on earth it was possible for mankind to become so hopelessly confused on something which, after a genius has explained it, appears to be such a simple matter. As always, it’s an issue of semantics. “Mankind” — that is to say homo sapiens — is simply not adequately equipped to handle abstraction and conceptualizing beyond the level of the most basic grunts and groans, and the merest change in terminology will often suffice to send entire millennia of “human beings” into a whirling frenzy of ideological wars and terminal confusion. It is only one in a million who, by a fortuitous turn of fate, is born with a brain capable of thinking beyond mere words (which is to say, with ideas), and this is what the common people call a “genius”.
Take the case of movies, for example, to see how the confusion first begins and, over the course of generations, finally grows to envelop everything and stifle all reasonable discussion and lucid thought. The original movies were black and white with no sound. After sound was added, movies (which were named thus to distinguish them from “stills”, i.e. from photographs) were not called movies anymore — they were called “talkies”, to distinguish them from the original movies, which were now called “silent films”. But after a while ALL new movies produced were talkies, so the “talkies” label was dropped and everyone went back to simply calling the talkies “movies”. But something fundamental had changed. The new movies were by no means equivalent to the old, since an ENTIRE NEW DIMENSION OF ARTISTIC EXPRESSION HAD BEEN ADDED: the AURAL dimension: that of sound and music. The scientists and engineers had done their job, by giving the artists a whole new avenue, in addition to the old one, in which to express themselves, and thus the old artform (that of silent films) had been killed, since no self-respecting artist would ever bother with it again. Of course the older artists and critics, who failed to make the transition to the new artform, regarded it with contempt and many of them scribbled long and impassioned essays in defense of their doomed craft; but sooner or later they all dropped dead, and their manuscripts ended up decomposing in the trash along with their authors, which is precisely where they all belonged. Finally, a September 2013 report by the United States Library of Congress announced that a total of 70% of American silent films are now believed to be completely lost, and I for one would be too busy watching and enjoying modern 3D color “talkies” to shed a single tear if I one day learned that every last one of them was forever gone.
What we have just examined then is how the definition of the term “movie”, originally intended to signify an artwork consisting of 24 black and white photographs being projected every second onto a theater screen, was progressively ENLARGED over the years and decades to include first sound, then color, then eventually even stereoscopic 3D and force feedback technologies — and of course ever higher levels of visual and aural fidelity in the form of higher resolution source images and sound. To realize what a gigantic level of confusion this seemingly harmless little semantic mixup has caused, consider that most movies, even today, are referred to as “motion pictures” or even “photoplays” in legal documents. Just watch the end credits of practically any modern film (another obsolete term that refuses to die, since there is no longer any filming involved in modern “films”) and wait for that last burst of logos and the legal mumbo jumbo in the very end, and you’ll see what I mean. Why is such an obsolete term as “photoplay” still being used in the twenty-first century to describe 48 frame-per-second, 4K 3D digital color films that support D-BOX force-feedback seats and 7.1 Dolby Surround sound? Because average people have a massive incapacity when it comes to abstraction, and all it takes is a slight change of terminology for their tiny little brains to completely lose track of what is happening. If, instead of continually enlarging the definition of the term “movie” WITHOUT REALIZING IT, they had simply adopted a new term for every new invention — e.g. talkies, colories, 3Dies, force-feedbies, et cetera — “videogames”, or “games”, or “interactivies” or whatever you want to call them would have simply been seen as yet another term in the long sequence of terms that started with “scratchies” (aka cave paintings), and no one would have got their panties all in a bunch over them. But, people being what they are (which is to say, stupid), they didn’t, and this is why we are presently in the mess we are in, and why it took nothing less than a genius to come in and clear up the accumulated subhuman confusion of millennia.
Aesthetics and Mechanics and the Grand Unified Theory
By Alex Kierkegaard / May 30, 2017
Let’s finally take care of this debacle that’s been giving everyone so much trouble for over a decade now, but its solution is a subtle, delicate one, on top of being extremely long, so do me a favor and pay close attention and, hopefully, you’ll get it. My 2007 essay Arcade Culture was the first that brought the concepts of difficulty and mechanics to the fore of videogame theory and criticism, and subsequent essays such as On Complexity, Depth and Skill cemented the dominance of these concepts in the minds of the hardcore, at precisely the same time that journalists and pseudo-academics were going in the exact opposite direction with their cheerleading support of the Wii, casual games with no complexity and modes that play the game and finish it while the player sits back and watches. Considering the orgy of shitty, stupid articles (and even books, chief among them Jesper Juul’s Casual Revolution) that were being furiously scribbled at the time to justify what would be later clearly seen to have been a mere fad, the warmth with which the hardcore spread my essays and adopted all my concepts, as summarized a while ago by a reader in an STG forum [ > ], shouldn’t have been surprising.
“You know, just last night I realized that the whole ‘complexity’ thing (and also ‘depth versus complexity’, even though no one seems to be sure of what the distinction between the two is) is a really popular discussion on pretty much every gaming forum I know of. Anyway, it got me thinking. Before icycalm, was there anyone who even wrote any theories regarding videogame complexity? I’d never heard terms like ‘possibility space’ and ‘meaningful complexity’ before icy. He was also the first person I know of to state that videogame complexity could be mathematically calculated. Even if you are of the opinion that icy’s ideas are stupid and your own theories about complexity are superior, it seems no one would even have their own theories if not for icy’s ’errors and drivel’. Regardless of who ’likes’ him and who doesn’t, it seems pretty hard to deny his impact.”
There was, however, a misunderstanding. Actually, there were several of them, but chief among them was the notion that my criticism and theory championed mechanics above all. In fact, they champion complexity above all (and even that as merely a means to immersion, and not for its own sake); but that’s where a further misunderstanding occurred, closely related to the first: the notion that by complexity I meant mechanical complexity only, whereas — as any careful reader of my large body of criticism should have figured — I mean mechanical and aesthetic complexity combined. Already in such early essays as 2006’s PS3 and 360: Not Nearly As Powerful As They Should Be I am clamoring for hardware capable of photorealism — how could this have been missed and my writings lumped with the pathetic scribblings of autists who think that wireframe graphics settings are preferable to full detail because “they make you” a “better player” (lol), or that tapping on a keyboard or clicking a mouse should be considered a sport?
Nevertheless, I will admit that, in the early theory essays — the essays, not the reviews, mind you, which are another matter — I do appear to come down overwhelmingly on the side of mechanics, but that was only because you guys are retards and wouldn’t have got the message any other way. When a stick is bent, you must bend it the other way by at least an equal amount in order to straighten it out, after all. That was the guiding pedagogical principle I employed in those early essays. And anyway, I couldn’t say all I had to say at once, not least because all I had to say was several hundred pages long, on top of which I hadn’t clearly articulated all of it in my own mind yet, let alone arrived at the required conceptual clarity to write it down and communicate it. I had to take it slowly, one subject at a time (always a tough proposition, since all subjects are ultimately related to and connected with all others), and when that subject was “arcade games” — which were being woefully misunderstood at the time and written off as “shallow quarter-munchers” — the chief concept to be employed against that gross misunderstanding was “difficulty”, with the concomitant ones of “no continuing” and “one-credit completion”. So of course that essay would apotheosize difficulty and 1CCing! — but only in the context of arcade gaming, for christsake! At no point am I saying or even implying that every type of game on every type of platform ever should be designed in a similar manner! Nor am I saying that arcade games are inherently superior to console ones, as was for years — and still sometimes is — believed to have been my stance. All I was saying, if you read the text properly instead of merely skimming it and plugging the gaps with your imagination, was that, on average, arcade games are superior to console ones — and that remains true today as always; but there could still of course be plenty of console games that are superior to plenty of arcade ones, and even to all of arcade ones (as can be seen by my top 10 game list, for example, which doesn’t contain arcade games at all [ > ]), without the average budging much due to the mountain of trash that’s simultaneously being released on consoles every other day (Xbox 360 “indie” section, anyone?) that would never in a billion years make the cut to be released in an arcade, or survive on an arcade floor past a day if it somehow miraculously made it there. The goal of the arcade essay was to stomp all over the pitiful opinions that were being spouted about them at the time and help you see the magic of arcade gaming, and by Crom that’s exactly what it accomplished, and by the end of it anyone could see it as long as they weren’t completely fucking blind, and even many of those who were. “I can write with letters that make even the blind see”, said Nietzsche, and that’s precisely what I can do too, as evidenced by the countless people whom that essay has helped over the years to understand and respect arcade games, even when they themselves don’t really enjoy or play them much (which meant they were effectively blind to them, which is why they had so readily adopted the “shallow quarter-munchers” theory that the journalists had been peddling).
But as the essay’s influence spread, so did the misunderstandings, which I’ve been fighting ever since, all the way to my monumental 2012 scoring essay, in which I finally explain that difficulty is by no means the number one quality I look for in a game, especially when this difficulty comes in such an autistic and aesthetically-destructive form as it does in modern games with scoring systems, or, worse still, in games with leaderboards and competitive scenes situated outside the game — all the while carefully building in the background, in essay after essay after essay, the idea that there is an order of rank of genres, sorted according to immersion (which is itself determined by each genre’s ceiling for complexity: mechanical and aesthetic complexity combined), and that the rules of optimal game design radically alter as one moves up or down the scale. That’s why scoring systems are absolutely essential in such primitive, low-immersion games as Asteroids and Galaga, yet annoying and borderline superfluous in mid-immersion games like R-Type and Street Fighter, while being completely fucking retarded in high-immersion games like Shenmue and GTA, never mind in the brain-jacking virtual reality games of the future.
But all this will be analyzed and explained in detail in further essays. What I would like to do in this one, in the meantime, is focus on the aesthetics/mechanics distinction, and nail down once and for all how this works and how we should think about it and analyze it. The first, and hardest, task we have before us, then, is to finally settle the question of their relative importance. Are mechanics more important than aesthetics, or is it the other way around? In my “Narrative Delusions” essay I seem to imply — indeed I explicitly state — that mechanics trump aesthetics because they are the new thing that videogames bring to the artistic table and therefore they should trump them, but that’s me merely bending the stick the opposite way again, to help rid people of their “narrative delusions”, while the fuller, deeper answer is far more complicated than that, subsuming the partial answer I gave in that essay (as it subsumes all the answers I’ve ever given on any topic in every essay — which is what a grand unified theory is supposed to do, after all) without cancelling it out and falsifying it. And what is that fuller, deeper answer, you might ask? You should have figured it out by now: it is that the relative importance of aesthetics and mechanics alters as we move up or down the order of rank of genres, which is to say the order of rank of their capacity for immersion. The lower a genre’s ceiling for immersion, the more crucial and dominant its mechanical aspect is and should be (which is why primitive genres thrive on scoring systems and high difficulties), while the higher a genre’s immersion ceiling the more the aesthetic aspect should come to the fore and dominate (which is why in future brain-jacking VR games there’ll be no scoring systems and it’ll be impossible to “lose” in them, and even, ideally, to replay them, just as it is in life, which is precisely the Great Game: i.e. the most immersive game ever).
And what about QTE games like Dragon’s Lair, which are extremely primitive, low-immersion games but with simplistic mechanics and full aesthetic focus? Don’t examples like that falsify my theory? No, because games like Dragon’s Lair were shitty games, which focused so much on their aesthetics precisely because they had such shitty mechanics that, if the aesthetics hadn’t been stellar, no one would have bothered playing them. I mean Dragon’s Lair came out at a time when many flight-sim-type games still had wireframe-level graphics; can you imagine anyone playing Dragon’s Lair if it had had that type of graphics? I mean, press a key at the exact right time to see a scene made out of a dozen squares and triangles? Who would have bothered? While lots of people bothered grappling with thousands of far more complex and tougher games at the time, though the aesthetic payoff in all those games was far below Dragon’s Lair’s standards, and that’s why Dragon’s Lair’s genre contains barely a couple of examples (Space Ace being the only other one that comes readily to mind), while the genres of the other games contain untold thousands.
At the same time, the casuals, the “indies” and the artfags will be delighted at my intimation that in the future all games will focus on aesthetics above all and feature minimal-to-zero difficulty; they’ll even go as far as to claim that their lame, ugly abortions of non-games paved the way for them! But they’ll be demonstrably full of shit again because, according to my theory, you only get to justifiably focus on your game’s aesthetic aspect and feature zero difficulty if your game belongs to a high-immersion genre! But not even Shenmue and GTA3 were immersive enough to shortchange their mechanics and do away with difficulty altogether, so doing so for the type of minimal immersion dreck that casual devs, “indie” devs and artfags make would be retarded. So Jason Rohrer entirely removed difficulty from a platformer, in his Passage, and that’s why no one bothered playing that game and why no one knows it today. Or other “indies” removed all existing mechanical conventions from their games and focused on aesthetics to such an extent that the software they produced amounted to glorified screensavers. But did anyone “play” that software? Did anyone use it at all — even as just screensavers? (They were bad even as screensavers, nota bene.) And does anyone besides me (and I don’t count because I am a scholar) remember it now? So the public and its tastes and preferences adhere to my theory just fine, because I have designed my theory precisely by abstracting it from my own and the public’s tastes and preferences! It is only complete social outcasts and assorted marginalized miscreants like hardcore autists and the pseudo-intellectual journaloacademic complex that seems to fall outside my theory — and I say “seems” because if you look closely enough my theory accounts for their preferences too just fine: even the most hardcore Counter-Strike aspie would balk at really playing CS with genuine wireframe graphics, while the entire journaloacademic complex, when observed carefully, will be seen to spend far more time on the high-budget “corporashionalized” mega-games that they trash than on the “quirky”, “independent”, “meaningful” rubbish that they waste entire careers evangelizing. It’s just that the former group (the autists) have very rudimentary senses, while the latter (the pseudo-intellectual fag complex) have tiny brains that struggle with any significant degree of complexity and difficulty, so they both generally stay away from games that feature these respective qualities, and therefore tend to trash and revile them. But even the world’s top autist has at least SOME degree of aesthetic sensitivity — he’s not blind and deaf for christsake! — and even the world’s dumbest, most limp-wristed pseudo-intellectual fffffffagot has a brain, however tiny and ridiculous and wretched, and rudimentary motor-neurone skills, so they both can and do appreciate games that require and exercise these faculties — but only up to these people’s very low aptitude ceilings for them. Everything that rises above those extremely low ceilings, however — which is precisely what the dreaded “mane streem” prefers and plays — is completely lost on these people and that’s how laughable tripe like Passage or autism simulators like Counter-Strike also get their adherents and advocates. So, you see, my theory accounts for everyone perfectly fine, thankyouverymuch, while of course ultimately focusing its spotlight on its author and his tastes — as all theories in the end must — which is to say on me. The autists and the fags can write their own theories if they like and focus on themselves and their own tastes and preferences instead — and good luck getting anyone to read them and pay attention to them, or even so much as understand them, what with their theories being illegible, incoherent dribble that no one can make any sense of much less agree with and put to actual use.
In short, the purpose of my theory is to lay down the rules which, if followed, will result in better games; it doesn’t deny the existence of bad games, which are bad precisely because they failed to follow those rules, like Dragon’s Lair and Passage. And if you would retort to this that my theory didn’t exist when Dragon’s Lair and Passage were being made, and that good games were being made just fine before my theory appeared, I will reply “indeed”, and that’s because the people who made all these good games were following my rules nevertheless, having arrived at them unconsciously by years and years of trial and error, to the extent that it would never even have occurred to them to flout those rules — those dreaded hateful “conventions” — by for example making a platformer with zero difficulty or a “game” with the interactivity level of a screensaver. But then the “indies” and the artfags arrived on the scene — belatedly, as they always do, when the barriers to entry had been lowered so much that even they could clear them — and what happened then, and why, has already been fully explained in my Genealogy, so I won’t be getting into it here. All that needs to be said for the moment is that “the most valuable insights are the last to be arrived at” (Nietzsche); “but the most valuable insights are methods”, i.e. theories, and that’s why my theory is arriving today, after five decades of videogame design, as opposed to at the start of the whole debacle. Otherwise, how would I have arrived at it in 1978, before there were even any games around from which to abstract it? And that’s why Darwin’s theory of evolution arrived several billion years after that evolution had got started; but once the theory had arrived it sped things up, because that evolution henceforth had this theory to guide it, instead of proceeding randomly, in the dark, as before, via brute force and sheer trial and error. Even Baudrillard — the sworn enemy of performance — could see that the whole point of theory is “to speed things up” — i.e. to improve performance — and that’s precisely what my theory will accomplish, by articulating and neatly codifying all the unconscious and barely conscious rules and guidelines that the world’s best game designers — who always have the best instincts, otherwise they wouldn’t have become the best — have been employing for decades, and then extrapolating from those the principles they’ll need to employ to create the masterpieces of the future. And even middling developers — who have middling instincts, and are thus more prone to error than the masters — will benefit by studying my theory, thereby avoiding committing many mistakes they would have otherwise committed due to their middling instincts. So now that all the above has been cleared up, and we’ve realized that the relationship between aesthetics and mechanics is much too complex to allow us to make simplistic blanket judgements as to which of them is more important in all genres and under all circumstances, it remains to determine precisely why, as I contend, mechanics are more important in low-immersion games and genres, while aesthetics dominate in higher-immersion ones. For I have merely stated this relationship, and at most provided examples of it; I haven’t explained it yet, and this is what I’ll do now.
And I will do this with the help of an analogy. Imagine sitting on a beach in some paradisaical tropical island. The sun is shining brightly on your skin, giving you a fuzzy warm feeling all over; the onshore breeze is lightly toying with your hair and filling your ears and nose with pleasant ocean sounds and smells; all the while your gaze is lost in lazy contemplation of infinite horizon, fluffy clouds and ever-shifting waves and groups of tribal surfers. All this is aesthetics, and most people would happily sit there immobile and take it all in for hours on end, and perhaps, with breaks, even for days.
And now imagine that the breeze dies, the sounds and smells and sunlight warming you disappear, the clouds and waves and surfers vanish, and the entire ocean is rendered with a single shade of blue, and the beach with a single shade of yellow. We’ve demade reality to an 8-bit 1975 videogame standard, in other words. How long could you spend sitting on that “beach” now, and staring at the half-blue/half-yellow “distance”? Since there is no longer anything to smell or hear or feel, since we’ve removed all the olfactory, aural and tactile dimensions from the scene, and barely even anything worth seeing — since we’ve essentially reduced the visible dimension to two solid colors — “sitting” on that “beach” for any length of time now would be unbearable. Being forced to do so would almost amount to torture! And the only way to remedy this situation, while leaving the aesthetics at that wretchedly primitive level, would be for us to give you something to do there, some sort of activity to perform and occupy yourself with, or, ideally, a game (since games tend to be some of the funnest activities around, and therefore the most distracting from the boring simplicity and blandness of the environment you would have found yourself in). And that’s where mechanics come in. At the bottom end of aesthetic complexity mechanics dominate quite simply because… we are the bottom end of aesthetic complexity, and there aren’t enough aesthetic elements to dominate, duh! And obviously, as the aesthetic complexity begins rising, it comes to occupy more and more of our attention — and therefore the attention of the devs making the game, who are creating all this complexity, nota bene — for the simple reason that perception is an active process that requires energy expenditure. The more complex the aesthetics therefore get, the more energy we must expend to perceive them, and therefore the less energy we have left to spend on mechanical tasks, because a person’s energy capacity isn’t infinite!
Does that mean that, at the opposite end of the scale, when aesthetic complexity is maxed out, the player is frozen on the spot for the entire duration of the game, since the aesthetics have become so complex by then that he has to expend all his available energy merely so as to perceive them? In a way, yes, it does! That’s precisely where my theory leads us, if faithfully followed to its astonishing conclusion! And yet that conclusion no longer seems so astonishing when considered in the light of science fiction works such as e.g. The Matrix, where all the humans are immobile in life-support capsules without even realizing it, while the “reality” the matrix spins and feeds directly to their brains occupies the full capacity of their powers of cognition. If the humans were aware of the state of their real bodies (which would be a requirement for them controlling those bodies), the matrix’s reality would instantly lose the greater part of its appeal — and thus its capacity for complete immersion. So we see that it is precisely by completely losing control of their real bodies — even to the extent of knowledge of those bodies’ mere existence! — that the humans’ virtual ones acquire full force of reality, and the world which they inhabit reaches its maximum level of immersion.
This is no mere pseudo-intellectual’s or journalist’s blundering, laughable attempts at a theory that you are reading, dear reader: the scope of my understanding of these concepts and the terrifying, laser-like precision with which I define all of my terms and relate them to each other mean that my theory works for everything: from Spacewar to Far Cry 2 to The Matrix, and even beyond, to the innermost reaches of the brain: to pure will, and to the rest of the universe outside of it, and everywhere in-between, as we’ll be seeing shortly, to an extent, and ultimately in the last chapter of my philosophical work, Orgy of the Will, in which the full scope of my theory will be revealed at last for the benefit of the two or three people who possess the required intelligence to grasp it.
“I’ve been banned from his site twice. He’s a grammer-stalinist and is incredibly judgmental (although he is usually pretty accurate with his judgements) but absolutely brilliant. I completely believe that in a few decades some of his theories are going to get huge: like biographies being written about him huge. There’s no backtracking, opinion-changing, or trend-seeking in his writing. He’s had the same concepts for over a decade and continues to build on them which is why his stuff has so much depth. A normal journalist only explores something when it is trendy and then never discusses it again, jumping to the next trend. I sort of felt guilty after getting banned.”
On Why Bigger Has Always Been Better, And Why It Always Will Be
By Alex Kierkegaard / December 6, 2014
Games are getting too big, we are told. Dev team sizes and budgets are “skyrocketing”, and this is hurting creativity, by diluting the creative process and making publishers risk averse, so that the amazing games churned out every year by all the big publishers do not really exist and we are merely hallucinating them. The solution to this problem is clear: return to the primitive mechanics and programmer graphics of the 2D games of the ’70s, which is more or less the equivalent in the film industry of dropping Marvel’s astonishing masterpieces and going back to cave paintings. And I am not even exaggerating: if you have understood my essay on Set Theory, you should be able to see that moving from Far Cry 2 to Hotline Miami is about equivalent to moving from Spider-Man 2 to cave paintings, and just as disastrous for the artforms concerned. Thankfully, it is also impossible, because the general public (the much-maligned “Mane Streem”) is too healthy to allow it, so it’s simply not gonna happen. But the wretches who propound this resentful, decadent ideology are still hurting the artform with their repugnant lies, so it’s time someone stepped up and put them in their place, figuratively speaking (because their actual place is in concentration camps and gas chambers). So let’s start getting our shit straight and introducing some REALITY into the debate (or at any rate the illogical, hysterical bleating that passes for debate among subhumans). And the first thing we need to get straight is that THERE IS NO FUNDAMENTAL PHYSICAL OR MENTAL REASON WHY BUDGETS AND DEV TEAM SIZES CANNOT INCREASE, MORE OR LESS, FOREVER. Obviously, the “forever” here does not stand for infinity. No need to get too philosophical about it, but since nothing can expand forever, neither can budgets and dev teams. However, we are so far away from any theoretical limit on their increase, that it is ludicrous to discuss it. For we could easily imagine a state of things where half of the universe is being used to power a fantasy for lifeforms living in the other half. And yes, I went that far, but that is the sort of ridiculous exaggeration one needs to employ when dealing with utter retards like you guys, otherwise you’d never understand anything. Even now you hardly grasp 10% of what I am saying to you (I can tell by checking my referrals [ > ]), but at least this way you can grasp that 10%.
And here’s a more reasonable example, to bring the discussion back to the present, and the near future. How much does the typical big budget game cost to make nowadays? Fifty million? A hundred? Two hundred? And the subhumans are saying that this is too much, that a lot of it goes to marketing anyway, and that no director would ever be able to spend that kind of money in an effective manner on a videogame. But actually, there are directors who spend MORE than that ON A SINGLE CUTSCENE. Have you heard for example of the Iron Man 3 cutscene? It cost $200 million to make, and is by no means the most expensive cutscene ever. Now try to imagine if Kojima wanted to make EVERY SINGLE CUTSCENE IN AN MGS GAME TO THAT STANDARD. We’d be looking at a budget of BILLIONS, merely for the cutscenes. And since the mechanics are more important in a videogame than the aesthetics (let alone the cutscenes), he’d need yet more billions to make them complex enough to properly reinforce the aesthetics (so that the game wouldn’t end up as lopsided as a Dragon’s Lair: an absurdly visually lush environment that affords less interactivity than Tetris).
So there’s no doubt that the best game directors working today could easily spend BILLIONS on a single game, and make every cent of it count, and be reflected in a superior player experience. We are talking full VR, voice recognition with AI to match, reality-matching environments, etc., where several million dollars would be spent ON EVERY SINGLE ROOM IN THE ENTIRE GAME. The only reason games like that are not being made today is because the market for them is not big enough to support them, but if it were, Ubisoft, Activision, EA and the rest of the arthouse developers would jump on them in a heartbeat, as they have been jumping on every opportunity to increase the interactivity and aesthetic complexity of their works since day 1 (EA and The Bard’s Tale: putting the Art in Electronic Arts since 1986. I was there. Where were you?), which is why they are the biggest, most influential and most widely respected developers and publishers today (respected by people who love games, of course, not by douchebag hipsters who hate them, or by impressionable journalists and quasi-casual gamers who are merely repeating the lies the hipsters are spouting because they somehow sound cool and appropriately communist to them).
So, budgets and dev teams have a ceiling today (which ceiling is much higher than it was ten years ago, which itself was much higher than it was ten years before that, and so on and so forth) because of practical market constraints, not as the pseuds say because of some genetic incapacity in homo sapiens to cooperate. Of course, their confusion is understandable — they are subhuman after all. In a similar vein, if you went 10,000 years in the past and told the people there that one day a single person would be commanding continent-spanning empires, they would have laughed themselves to death, right there in their dirty, stinking caves. The poor neanderthals could barely keep a 20-person tribe in check, and the Roman Empire or the Third Reich would have seemed about as impossible to them as my suggestion of a fantasy being powered by harvesting half the universe seems to you, my dear subhuman readers, today. But what subhumans deem impossible is for the human everyday reality, and for the superhuman so boring it’s not even worth doing.
Or if you went to the earliest silent film directors and told them that 2,000 people would eventually be spending 300 million dollars and working two years nonstop on a film? Everyone but a philosopher or science fiction author would have laughed at you. And that’s what subhumans do. They ridicule today as impossible tomorrow’s easily predictable realities. You’d think they would have learned by now, after committing countless identical mistakes over untold millennia, but they also have the memory capacity of a gnat, so learning from the past is out of the question for them too, unfortunately.
So, the best games have always had the biggest budgets and dev teams: get that into your little subhuman heads, at last. I even plan to publish a study that will clearly demonstrate this, charting the rise of budgets and dev sizes from Spacewar and Defender of the Crown, to Civilization and Deus Ex, all the way to Far Cry 2 and PlanetSide 2 and beyond. The data is incontestable. There are no “buts” or “if” or “whethers”. You either understand this simple fact, or you are subhuman, in which case nothing you say or do will matter in the long run, and the inevitable progress of the artform (and indeed of art itself) to full VR experiences costing billions will happen anyway, despite your asinine contrarian bleatings. And Ubisoft, Activision and EA will make the trillions that they deserve in the process, and the genius directors will get their luxurious mansions and Buggatis, and I will be acknowledged as the only person who foresaw and fully analyzed this artistic evolution, while you wasted your youth savestating your way through despicable student abortions that would have been laughed at in 1985.
So game development should be understood as an escalating arms race of technological tools and artistically effective manpower that has been going since 1962 (or since 40,000 BC, if you want to include the entire history of art into your thinking, which you should). Ever since the beginning, since the original Spacewar team brought in Peter Samson to add a starfield background to the game, instead of doing it themselves to be “independent”, videogames have evolved according to the principle of DIVISION OF LABOR and SPECIALIZATION, on which OUR ENTIRE FUCKING CIVILIZATION IS BASED, and without which CIVILIZATION AND CULTURE CANNOT EVEN EXIST AT ALL. For over fifty years, everyone in the industry has known that the way to make superior games is to throw at them more people and more money than the other team — what I am saying here is no new insight. If I had ventured to write such opinions as recently as ten years ago they would have been ignored as preaching to the choir. That’s why no one wrote such articles back then — it would have been like writing an article on the indispensability of breathing. We’ve known this stuff for fifty years at least. It is only in the last five or six years in which the combined effect of pseudo-developer lies and slander and the complete hatred towards the artform and ignorance of the journalists have at last created the opposite view, and even brought it to predominate, until the brainwashing has reached such a level that the few commonsensical things I am now saying are regarded as apostasy. People link them to their friends and they all gasp with disbelief and shake their heads at me. But they are not gamers — not even art lovers at all — so of course they would. The entire history of artistic evolution seems absurd to such people; it always has and always will (in the exact same manner that biological evolution, from an amoeba to the Overman God, seems absurd to liberal fags and other inhuman and subhuman creatures).
And don’t tell me about 2D action or some crap. These aren’t even videogames, and if you are having a hard time grasping this you’d do well to realize it works the exact same way as with the movies. When we say “movie” now, we mean TALKIES (in fact we mean colories, 3Dies, force-feedbies, and so on). A silent film IS NOT A MOVIE ANYMORE, it’s merely a silent film (i.e. something obsolete and endangered, and with good reason). Same with videogames. The term “videogame” today DOES NOT MEAN THE SAME THING IT MEANT TWENTY YEARS AGO. So, in online-retard-speak, 3dies »»> colories »»> talkies »»> silent films. To which of these four categories does the term movie now apply? When we say “the best movie of all time”, we do not include black and white films or silent films. We don’t even consider them at all if we are not a hipster fagot who doesn’t even like movies. “Best movie of all time” means “the best colorie of all time”. The black and white and silent films are so inferior, they are out of the competition by default. Maybe in the early days of colories they weren’t, because colorie directors hadn’t had enough time to fully take advantage of the newly introduced dimensions of color and sound, but by now the question has long been settled, and so it is with videogames. There is no currently existing or possible 2D game that could conceivably compete with a Far Cry or a PlanetSide. And THAT is what we now call videogames. We are only using the same term for stuff like Super Mario Bros. because we haven’t been diligent in our terminology creation over the years. Read my “Set Theory” essay and stop being retarded about these things. Having understood that, the next thing we need to understand is that businessmen and marketers have been absolutely necessary to take the artform from Spacewar to Civilization to GTA3 and Far Cry 2 and beyond. Whatever mistakes of judgement and bad taste, or even of pettiness and venality, that these people may have committed are irrelevant. IT IS NOT THE JOB OF THE BUSINESSMAN OR THE MARKETER TO HAVE SOUND AESTHETIC JUDGEMENT AND GOOD TASTE — those are the jobs of THE DIRECTOR! The businessmen and marketers are merely the director’s tools, necessary tools he needs to get the job done, and therefore blaming any deficiencies of the final work on them instead of ON HIM WHO PICKED THEM AND DIRECTED THEM is equivalent to putting the blame for Napoleon’s demise on his lieutenants! It’s retarded!
So, precisely because bigger teams and bigger budgets = better games, businessmen and marketers are not merely useful but of paramount importance. They are absolutely essential. There would have been no Heat or Blade Runner, no Far Cry 2 or GTA3 without businessmen and marketers (and no movie theaters or computers and consoles either, fyi. There basically wouldn’t have been any civilized life on earth beyond the level of medieval feudalism without them). They are an integral part of the equation, just like there would have been no empires or armies without logistics people or lieutenants, and so on. Hatred of the entire logistical machine that makes complex and synthetic undertakings POSSIBLE is equivalent to hatred of complex and synthetic undertakings, period. It is HATRED of the artform. HATRED of progress, and CHAMPIONING of the “eternal primitivism” that Fred Ross of the Art Renewal Center [ > ] rails against in his wonderful, passionate essays. There is no way around this.
Take Kickstarter, for example, to see how absurdly hypocritical the anti-business, pro-communism gamers are in all their sayings and doings. When it comes to the MILLIONS that businessmen are risking in order to advance our art, the communists scream for “innovation”; they demand it, and don’t give a shit how many fortunes may be risked and lost, and how many people’s livelihoods and careers may be destroyed in the process. But when it comes to THEIR OWN 20 MEASLY DOLLARS, they will only back sure bets! In an astonishing turn of irony, Kickstarter has proved, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that MULTINATIONAL CORPORATIONS ROUTINELY RISK FAR MORE AND INNOVATE IMMEASURABLY MORE THAN A RAGTAG RABBLE COMPOSED OF SICK, RESENTFUL COMMUNIST CHANDALAS. That’s how truly innovative Kickstarters like Chris Taylor’s Wildman [ > ] and Uber’s Human Resources [ > ] keep failing, while rehash after rehash (and INFERIOR rehashes, like Wasteland 2 et al.) keep getting funded and overfunded. Because Taylor’s concept had never been seen before, because it was so wildly innovative, and therefore difficult to explain to YouTube-watchers — since there was nothing else available to directly compare it to, at the time, as there still isn’t — the playerbase didn’t back it. And neither would they have backed Civilization or Deus Ex, never mind Call of Duty or Gears of War, Red Dead Redemption or PlanetSide. This phenomenon is so prevalent that even the journalists have noticed it. So next time you see a pseudo-hardcore gamer lambasting EA or Ubisoft or Rockstar for being risk-averse (which they so plainly AREN’T, otherwise they would have never developed the astonishingly elaborate and complex free-roaming masterpieces that they have), remember that that lying little scumbag son of a bitch would not so much as risk the price of a pack of gum to back an ambitious and risky project.
Time and again, it all comes back to the businessmen and marketers for these ludicrous little wretches. But blaming the businessmen and marketers while leaving directors scot-free is stupid, since the weight of responsibility, as I have already explained, falls clearly the other way around, like blaming the lieutenants for the failure of the general to get good lieutenants, or keep them in check and following his orders. It is one of the qualities REQUIRED of a director to have the necessary skills to maneuver in the world of businessmen and marketers without losing sight of his ultimate goal. All the great directors are virtuosos in this: Kojima, Mikami, Bleszinski, the Platinum dudes, Sid Meier in his director days — every single director who created what I call Videogame Art at some point in his life, and many of those who didn’t. When a director blames businessmen and marketers for what are clearly HIS PERSONAL FAILURES, what is really happening is that he’s merely WHINING ABOUT HIS LACK OF ABILITY TO DEAL WITH THEM. Or his lack of talent or hard work to impose on them, by virtue of his fame and stature within the industry, his standards and demands. I’ve already covered all of this in “The Myth of Independence”. Or they say marketers are useless, but who knows if Sega had had a better marketing team if Smilebit’s games would have sold more, and if they’d still be around. If I was releasing a game I sure as hell would want to hire the best marketing team around. Only a complete and utter imbecile wouldn’t — but a complete and utter imbecile would be a shit director. From which you can see that anyone who whines about marketers being inherently bad and spoiling his work — is a shit director. None of the great directors would ever say a bad word about the hard-working and risk-taking businessmen and marketers on whose endeavors the commercial success of their artwork to a large degree depends. And not only the commercial success, but even the critical one, since, as I have already explained, without these people you cannot have game-producing companies at all, and therefore no critical success, since you won’t even be able to make the damn game in the first place!
As for how I would handle the marketing aspect of my own game? I would employ THE BEST FUCKING MARKETERS on the planet. They’d viral that shit right into your tiny little subhuman brain! Employing the best marketing team means maximization of sales for the type of game and game quality I am making, means maximization of profit, means more money to increase the team and the budget for my next, better (and therefore more expensive) game. Ergo the marketers are an INTEGRAL part of the artistic creation process, and just as you want to maximize the quality of everything, you want to maximize this too. So not only do you ABSOLUTELY need businessmen and marketers to make a great artistic work; if you want to make the best such work ever you need THE BEST BUSINESSMEN AND MARKETERS EVER.
Do I still, after all this, need to explain WHAT MARKETERS ACTUALLY DO? How their job is to effectively and efficiently communicate your creative vision over as wide a range of potential customers as possible, so that it ACTUALLY REACHES your intended audience, and in a TIMELY FASHION (i.e. not 100 years after you are dead). so that you can actually reap the profits from your hard work and reinvest them in creating something even better; so that you can create more in your lifetime, so that you can achieve more? How is that not contributing to the creative effort?!
Or take Chris Taylor’s comments regarding the crowdfunding process, during the Wildman kickstarter. He said that if you spent all day interacting with the public you’d have no time to make the damn game. AND THAT’S WHY YOU HIRE PR PEOPLE TO DO THIS WORK FOR YOU. BECAUSE THE DIRECTOR HAS HIS OWN JOB TO DO ALREADY, AND THE PR PEOPLE ARE ANYWAY FAR BETTER AT PUBLIC RELATIONS THAN A GAME DIRECTOR COULD EVER BE. That’s what they are TRAINED to fucking DO! You might think, from internet horror stories, that PR people suck at PR, but surprise surprise, game directors suck a million times MORE at it. Just look at Kamiya’s daily petty spats with all his fans on Twitter, or how badly Uber’s management botched communication with their fanbase, to the point where they started trolling their own fans and banning them left and right. They had to call Jeremy Ables from Germany to come back and sort their mess out for them, so that fans and developers would stop hating each other so much. A single trained PR professional tasked with dealing with the fans from day 1 would have avoided ALL these problems, and generated a ton of goodwill, and therefore money via increased sales, for the company in the process. Money which could be reinvested in the game to make it even better, leading to yet more profits earned and reinvested, leading to the growth of the company and the complexity of the game, which — who woulda thunk it — is exactly how Ubisoft and co. got to where they are today.
So, when you are the commander in chief the name of the game is DELEGATION. It’s not so much how good you are at doing particular things, but how good you are at finding the best people to do particular things for you. This is not, I repeat, a separate quality from “artistic creation” — this IS artistic creation — in highly advanced and complex artforms like videogames, at least. If you are writing novels or doing oil painting it’s another story. But in theatre, movies, and videogames, this is how it is — and it’s only going to get “WORSE” as time goes by, SO GET USED TO IT QUICK, and the quicker the better. The slanderers and defamers claim that this process dilutes or destroys the creative vision, but their lies are pathetic and obviously pure horseshit. For it is precisely this process that ALLOWS complex artistic visions TO EXIST AT ALL. This is such an elementary fact that I am astounded that I am forced to even talk about it!
What the communist wretches are asking for, in their insane, utterly deranged hatred for greatness and the strict hierarchical structures that make it possible, is the equivalent of throwing Napoleon in the front line and asking him to beat up a huge punk. But that would be retarded, since beating up huge punks with his bare hands IS NOT IN NAPOLEON’S JOB DESCRIPTION. There are millions of hunks of meat that can beat up a big punk, but only Napoleon can do the job that Napoleon does. That everyone thinks everything was handed to Napoleon and anyone can do his job is the ignorance of realities and ressentiment of losers talking (like the contemporary hatred of the rabble for CEOs and their absolutely merited astronomical salaries).
So, when you are running a show, you don’t choose the thing, you choose the guy that chooses the thing — while STILL holding ultimate veto in your hands over what goes in the final product. And this is the harder task — this is THE hardest task in an advanced civilization or cultural endeavor such as artistic creation — the task of COMMANDING! And since by their very nature such positions are rare, and since everyone naturally wants them, competition for them is utterly cutthroat, and those who come to dominate in the end are monsters of talent, hard work and dedication (which is why everyone hates them). Or take me designing my site. The envious say, “He just used Joomla and a commercial template”. But motherfucker the bottom line is that I have the most gorgeous and most functional videogame site on the internet — how is my choice of tools and partners a mark against me? Quite the opposite is obviously the truth! It is precisely my genius in making such awesome choices and customizing them to my needs, all the while minimizing the effort invested so that I STILL have strength left over to also prepare and oversee the best content ever that is responsible for making the site as amazing and unparalleled as it is. You would have respected me more if I had sat in Notepad to code the entire site from scratch, but then I would have wasted years of my life, AND THE SITE WOULD HAVE SUCKED, i.e. you would have respected me for doing A SHITTY JOB, and now you heap scorn on me FOR DOING THE BEST JOB EVER.
Zarathustra: “They punish you for all your virtues. Fundamentally they forgive you only — your mistakes.”
And yet you STILL claim that the top positions of power are easy to manage, and that you would have performed as well as if not better than me in my job if “luck” or “fate” or some other absurd scapegoat you dreamt up to hide from your own eyes your personal incapacities and failures had somehow magically dropped you in my shoes! The internet simply has no lols big enough to adequately convey what an absurd little figure you cut in the eyes of anyone who’s not retarded!
So I customized every last detail of my site, I chose every aspect of it myself, despite the fact that I didn’t personally code every last piece of code or draw every last image with my own hand, any more than an architect who builds pyramids or World Trade Centers personally carries the bricks and stones to the building site on his bare back. My superior taste is on display in every page and every last pixel of the entire site, and even if I outright GAVE you all the right software and the templates that I used you STILL wouldn’t have made anything even remotely as awesome as I did. With my pitiful resources I made something that the giants of publishing throwing millions around can’t ever even HOPE to make. And no, that’s not a proof that my ideology of bigger is better is wrong, because if I had had the millions I would have made something STILL better. Given a million dollars I could make a site that — theory essays aside, which would be common to both sites — would make Insomnia seem like a teenager’s GeoCities blog. I’d hire the best gamers in the world (that only I know, and who would only listen to me because they respect me), and I’d get them on a full salary, playing games and posting about them 20 hours a week. It’d blow everything else out of the water in days, and get all the best gamers in the world so hooked on reading my site that they’d forget how to sleep.
And of course I would lose all my investors’ money in the process, because there simply doesn’t exist sufficient demand for intelligent videogame analysis to keep such a site afloat. So my investors would lose their hard-earned money, and the site would have had to close down anyway, and that’s why it’s not being made in the first place — because investors aren’t stupid, and know a bad investment when they see it. But the market for intelligent games, thankfully for us, is much larger than for their intelligent analysis, and CAN support Far Cry 4 [ > ] and Tom Clancy’s Splinter Cell: Blacklist and Assassin’s Creed IV: Black Flag [ > ] and Crysis 3 and Call of Duty: Advanced Warfare [ > ], and that’s why Ubisoft and EA and Activision, and all the other arthouse developers and publishers keep making them, and will continue to keep making them for a long time yet, amen!
So, to wrap up this long litany of the absurdly obvious, just as I will show in the Bastardization essay that the neckbeards’ championing of the narratives in schlock like Braid, BioShock and Gone Home are due to the fact that NECKBEARDS DON’T READ REAL NOVELS, their hatred of businessmen and marketers and their practices are due to them not being responsible adults who have gone out into the world to realize how it works. This is said for the well-meaning among them. The well-meaning who are spouting stupidities merely because they don’t know any better. And then there are also the ill-meaning ones, who know very well how things work AND THAT’S PRECISELY WHY THEY HATE THEM, because the entire industry establishment can see how talentless, incompetent and lazy they are and won’t have them. And it is the lies and slander of the second group with which the first group is infected and brainwashed, and so later on EVERYONE comes to hate businessmen and marketers — save the handful of industry insiders who make everything happen (i.e. who create all our hardware gear and good games for us), but who keep their mouths shut because the journalists, like the good little shameless bandwagon-jumpers that they are, have adopted the resentful rabble’s pseudophilosophy and multiplied it, until it’s all lies, lies, lies and despicable quasi-communist propaganda in all directions as far as the eye can see!
Enough! Bigger is better — it’s as simple as that! That’s why America is the greatest nation in the world, and why they are the ones who invented videogames instead of some “minimalist” tribe of Eskimos or African niggers or whatever. He who has ears to hear, let him hear! Death to communists, and God Bless America! (and I do indeed bless it). icycalm out.
The Motion-sensing Dead-end
By Alex Kierkegaard / January 7, 2017
I’ve been meaning to write this essay since the Wii days, believe it or not. Actually, those who’ve been paying attention to the titles of forthcoming Videogame Culture essays on the sidebar of existing ones should be easily able to believe it, because “The Motion-sensing Dead-end” has been sitting there provocatively for years. I didn’t just figure all this stuff out now, is what I am saying: I’ve had it figured since the Wii arrived and flooded the market with shitty motion-sensing games that very few played, none of whom actually enjoyed them. And yet here we are, over a full decade later, and no one’s learned their lesson. If anything, everyone seems to have learned the opposite lesson, because instead of one shitty motion-sensing controller and a handful of games for it we now have so many controllers and so many games being designed for use with them that the situation has gone from a mild illness to pandemic status. It’s time, in other words, for icycalm to step in and bring some sense to the debate.
So players and pundits today are generally divided into two camps, both of which are very, very wrong in their visions of the future. The first camp is the VR deniers, who say this stuff won’t work because stupid reasons, and the second camp is the VR enthusiasts, who say this stuff will work because yet more stupid reasons. The VR deniers are very easy to refute. Anyone who’s ever read or watched science fiction artworks requires no refutation of them; the idea that the control pad and the monitor are the last word in videogame hardware interfaces is simply laughable to such a person, and can only be taken seriously by crippled autistic child-fagots who view life as a disease and Super Mario World as art’s crowning achievement. So there’s nothing to analyze here; to merely bother speaking to such people proves that you are one of them, and thus as much of a non-entity and lost cause as they are. And then there are the VR enthusiasts, who mindlessly lap every new development up and want to convince us that running around the streets carrying a laptop on your back and not being able to tell where the fuck you are going is what thousands of people will be doing while playing videogames in the future. This is also a retarded notion, but one which is worth analyzing and refuting in some detail.
So first of all, understand that healthy mature adults do NOT want to MOVE while playing videogames. Like, you want me to come home after four hours of surfing or six of playing basketball and MOVE? And that’s on top of several three-hour strength workouts a week. My week is so full of physical exertion that there are exercises I want to do but can’t because I have no energy left for them. So I sure as hell am not going to load my schedule up with running about in a Far Cry game. I would rather add cycling instead, but I can’t because I don’t have any energy left for it, so I have to prioritize my physical activities, and since surfing and basketball are much more enjoyable to me than cycling, I rarely ever cycle, even though I have a 1,500-euro carbon fibre racing bike sitting in the corner of my living room and I live in Tenerife, the kind of island which people like Lance Armstrong visit when they are training themselves up for competition. So, I don’t want to move while playing a videogame. I play videogames precisely to relax from moving around too much. By the time I am sat down to play a videogame I have no energy left with which to move. And that’s why I am sitting down goddammit! Of course, the kind of autistic shut-in child-fagot troglodytes that dominate discourse about games on the internet have the opposite concern: they don’t want to move in videogames because they don’t want to move, EVER, and that’s whom Nintendo’s Wii Fit board was marketed towards. So you see, it is quite possible for the highest and lowest individuals to agree, but for opposite reasons, which means that we do NOT agree, and never will. And then you have everyone else, who stands somewhere between us, and whose view of the situation is therefore a type of hybrid of my and the shut-ins’ views. When I explained some of the above to a reader and friend recently, for instance, he replied dubiously with “Hmm, that makes sense”, with the “Hmm” denoting that he’s not really sold on my analysis because his physical training regime is much milder than mine, and, as a consequence, he doesn’t mind doing some running and flailing about in his videogames since he does have the energy for it, or wouldn’t mind scaling back on physical activities to make room for it, which I WOULD mind, because my taste in physical activities is just as elevated as my taste in everything else, and the idea of trading in an hour of surfing for an hour of mere jogging in a Far Cry game is utterly repugnant to me. But of course, those who don’t surf have a hard time seeing much of an issue here, and can only be brought to a mild understanding of my viewpoint via means of lengthy analyses such as the one you are currently reading.
In videogames, then, we want to AMPLIFY movement — that is our goal here. So that if I move my finger, Marcus Fenix cuts a Locust in half. We don’t want to do the OPPOSITE, which is cut something in half in real life so that a few pixels on a screen will change color. How can you not see that that would be RETARDED? It’s like all those morons who spend years playing those stupid music games, putting untold hours into mastering a dozen songs on a guitar controller instead of learning REAL guitar, which is not at all harder to learn and on which you can play ALL GUITAR SONGS EVER WRITTEN instead of just a dozen, and to a far greater degree of fidelity. But I will talk at length about this phenomenon and disease in the upcoming Guitar Freaks essay; the point you should take away from this for now is that guitar controllers are motion sensing interfaces too, and whoever uses them is a moron precisely because these devices simulate everyday, banal activities that are so easy to perform in real life that the idea of simulating them can only ever appeal to complete and utter morons.
VR versus Motion-sensing
What you need to do then, to start grasping what the hell’s going on here, is to disentangle VR in your minds from motion sensing. VR, in the form of headsets, is a new thing (at least workable VR, because there have been older but unsuccessful versions), while motion-sensing is an old thing, a very old thing indeed — far older than the Wii even. VR doesn’t need motion-sensing to succeed — indeed, as I’ll be explaining in an upcoming essay, the success of these two enterprises is ultimately mutually exclusive — and motion sensing doesn’t need VR anymore than the thousands of flight simulators or racing games or light gun games throughout the decades have needed it, all of which relied on motion sensing to an extent for ideal performance. I am in fact a huge advocate of motion sensing WHEN IT CAN BE DONE WITH 1:1 CORRESPONDENCE; i.e. when the motion the player performs is more or less identical with the one his avatar does. I would never for example dream of playing a flight sim without a stick, a racing game without a wheel, a light gun game without a light gun. But a 1:1 Street Fighter motion-sensing game? You want me to attempt to pull off in my living room Guile’s moveset, which doesn’t even make mechanical sense? Which defies even the laws of fucking physics? If I could do those moves I wouldn’t need the game! And SF and Guile are even some of the most tame examples of the genre I could give. Let’s not even get into the Guilty Gears and the Arcana Hearts! (which are the best games, by the way, precisely because they are the wildest, most imaginative ones). It’s no wonder that when motion sensing companies want to demonstrate the “full power” of their products (read: their full stupidity) they bring in frigging acrobats and gymnasts! Otherwise you’d get a fagot hopping on the spot while Guile did somersaults on screen, and the only conclusion that the viewer would be able to reach after the demonstration would be that everyone involved in it is mentally retarded — exactly as happened with the Wii’s shit. Or think of a game in which you fly. A jetpack game like Gun Valkyrie. What are the devs gonna do, insist that you buy a jetpack and go to the park to play the game? And the wilder the game, and the cooler the stuff you do in it, the more absurd the demands required to play it in 1:1 motion-sensing become. I mean, what about a space-based zero-g game? They’ll tell you to go to space? Or hire an airliner set up as an experimental zero-g environment? This shit’s retarded, G!
So all the coolest things you can do in videogames become impossible when you demand 1:1 motion-sensing input from the player. Forget about Hong Kong-style actions scenes, backflips and cartwheels and jumping off buildings onto the backs of moving trucks. How the hell are you gonna set all that up in your living room? The most you can achieve is some retard-level shit where hopping on the spot stands in for Assassin’s Creed parkour moves; but it will be as unsatisfying as the original Wii motion controls were, which weren’t 1:1 either. That’s why no decent games were made for use with the Wii remote, or no games at all, nearly. In fact even simple walking is impossible with 1:1 correspondence beyond a couple of feet. Take the famous walk in Silent Hill 2. Unless your lounge is the size of a football field — and utterly devoid of any objects — the only way to simulate this walk in 1:1 motion sensing is to go round and round your room in circles. Now isn’t the whole point of motion-sensing to increase immersion? And wouldn’t going round and round your room in circles while your avatar in the game followed a straight path be detrimental to that objective? Indeed, since with the controller you would be pressing the stick in a single direction, mimicking the essence of the action your avatar would perform, the controller would be more immersive than the motion-sensing setup!
Bottom line is that one of the simplest motion sensing moves — mere walking — is impossible to properly simulate with 1:1 motion sensing, which is where yet more bizarre motion controls like treadmills or laptops in backpacks come in. But they too still suck if you spend but a few moments properly thinking about them. For ok, let’s say you solved the walking problem, what about running or jumping or crawling under objects or crouching next to them? Not to speak of more involved stuff like climbing or sliding down a hillside, for example. So if you persist with your futile efforts for 1:1 motion sensing, all games that will adhere to it will end up being extremely physically mundane. Forget about Assassin’s Creed; even a Far Cry or a Just Cause would be impossible to pull off, with their hangglider rides or parachute dives (which are precisely the coolest parts of the games!), or swimming lol, etc. (“Just flood your living room with water”, it said on the back of the box, officer.) So either future Far Crys and Just Causes will have to tone down significantly their excitement, essentially KILLING OFF those games, or the only types of games playable in genuine 1:1 will be artfag walking simulators that last a couple hours (more walking that that would be decried as “hardcore” by the artfags); i.e., in both cases, games that players with good taste will regard contemptuously while continuing to play and to support the Far Crys and Just Causes with traditional controls which we got into videogames to play in the first place. Meanwhile, the motion-sensing enthusiasts will be outdoors with their laptops in their backpacks trying to find an open space in which to play their glorified walking simulators. Perhaps a forest or something. But there are trees getting in your way there too! I guess a desert would be the best environment for this stupid shit; the arid environment a perfect match for the arid art design philosophy that engendered their stupid games. May all the artfags and moronic “indies” of the world go there and get lost and die a stupid death, as far as I am concerned, amen!
Think of it this way too. Which genres have been the most successful motion sensing genres in the history of videogames? Flight sims and racing games, of course. And why? Because all these games simulate real-world activities in which the person performing them IS SITTING DOWN. So in order to achieve 1:1 motion sensing correspondence in these types of games, all you need is a stick or a wheel and some pedals, and so on; i.e. stuff that works fine on a desk or even in a couch, with some modifications. And light gun games work so well precisely because the walking part IS NOT SIMULATED, because it CAN’T be simulated with 1:1 correspondence! So 1:1 motion sensing increases immersion through the roof, but it HAS to be 1:1! Anything less than that, and you may as well use conventional controls, which are more efficient under those circumstances because they have been designed to require a MINIMUM amount of motion, and which therefore make more sense than trying to simulate a real-world move by performing a TOTALLY UNRELATED real-world move. The disconnect between me hopping in place and Guile doing a somersault is far greater than the disconnect between me pressing up on the controller and Guile somersaulting. If you don’t understand why, google “uncanny valley”; this is the uncanny valley of motion sensing. And that’s why the controller is more immersive in such scenarios; it’s more believable, not to mention far less physically strenuous, so that I can play SF for half a day if I want without having to train myself to endure 1000 jumps in place per hour. We already know what happens when you try to force motion sensing into every game that comes out: the Wii’s library is what happens, which my dear friend Nick the SEGABASTARD has explained in detail that it’s “the absolute worst library of any major videogame console in history. It demonstrably, empirically has the most wretched, unplayable, unwanted, unsold roster of bargain bin fodder ever to be compiled for a major home game system” (Woes of the Wii U, October 31, 2014).
So when you force motion-sensing onto a game the very best case scenario is Bokutai, Kojima’s GBA game that forced you to go outdoors and gather sunlight with its light sensor; a novelty in other words, that added nothing to the game’s genre, which is why no one followed it up and even Konami itself dropped the gimmick for the DS installment and why we don’t have a light sensor genre now. In most cases though you just get stupid boring unplayable shit like the Wii catalog that actually tried to use the remote. Gems like Kororinpa are the exception of exceptions, and tend to be complete odd-ball one-offs that still lack the punch to launch a genre (since, no matter how much you may have loved Kororinpa, it’s still just a goofy action-puzzler in the end and no one in their right mind would want to play 100 different variations of it, unlike the dream action scenarios seen in Far Cry and Just Cause and their kind).
In fact the Wii underwent a similar explosion of goofy peripherals in its time as the motion sensing companies are delivering to us now. Am I the only one who remembers the “Wii Breakfast” video? [ > ] .
“And, ummm… what is the point of all this?” “It’s just like having real breakfast!”
And the point the video is trying to make is that having breakfast is such a mundane activity that simulating it (=glorifying it through art) is retarded. Same with the “indie” walking simulators. And buying accessories like the Wii Frying Pan, Wii Toaster, Wii Eggs and Wii Milk and Wii Newspaper in order to do something with them that you do every morning anyway is even more retarded. And that’s why HTC and Oculus are busy funding HTC Rocks to jump over in Far Cry or Vive Laptop Backpacks to carry around in the desert with the other losers. And just as with the Wii all its best games used traditional controls, so it will be with all the new VR games that support all these new-fangled motion controllers. Except if some of those controllers do not require you to move much while delivering a greater breadth and depth of control than traditional controllers. The VR headsets already do this, in some respects, with head tracking for example, which removes the need e.g. for panning the camera with the mouse in FPSes — at least for subtle movements — and therefore increases efficiency of control. That’s all well and good, and even represents 1:1 motion sensing which increases not only efficiency but even immersion to boot, and any technology that functions in such a manner is welcome and will be widely adopted and celebrated. But all the rest of the stuff is for autists.
For “serious” games, on the other hand, i.e. for TRAINING SIMULATORS, things will work differently. No doubt e.g. the military will have recruits running around with laptop backpacks in specially designed warehouses before long, but that stuff will be about as exciting to play as real flight simulators, which get zero stars automatically on Insomnia compared to PROPER ART like an Ace Combat. Or consider e.g. Microsoft’s Flight Simulator. You couldn’t pay me enough to play that shit PRECISELY BECAUSE it’s far more realistic than Ace Combat. I mean what do you want at the end of the day? If you want realism what the hell are you doing reading a videogame site? What the hell are you doing involving yourself with art in the first place?
Ultimately, as far as training goes, there will eventually be a machine filled with some type of liquid, and the trainee will be immersed in it and able to perform any action physically imaginable, with the liquid adjusting its hardness on the fly to simulate every conceivable object or scenario; but that stuff will be EXTREMELY PHYSICALLY DEMANDING, which is why it will be used for training. I.e., if you want your avatar to perform a somersault in that machine, YOU WILL HAVE TO ACTUALLY PERFORM IT; so it will take many years of tough training to be able to do even a fraction of what SF2 characters do in the screen of the average videogame player every day today; all of which has nothing to do with art, because art is precisely “the craft of illusion”, as I have explained in my Genealogy, therefore training is not our goal here. Here, we want to simulate PRECISELY the moves that the special forces military trainee WILL NEVER BE ABLE TO PERFORM NO MATTER HOW LONG HE TRAINS FOR THEM BECAUSE THEY ARE NOT PHYSICALLY POSSIBLE FOR HUMANS. Here, we want to become James Bonds and Jason Bournes for a while. We want to escape our bodies and to dream, and the demands of 1:1 motion sensing make this impossible past a certain very low threshold, and it is precisely beyond that threshold that the best games and game designs lie!
The highest level of immersion in art can indeed only be achieved when the player is motionless. So motion controls are by definition a dead-end, as it says in the title of the essay you’ve been reading. For more details, wait for the upcoming essay, “Aesthetics and Mechanics and the Grand Unified Theory”, but until then, let me mention the ancient Greek philosopher Parmenides of Elea, who maintained that at the level of the universe motion is an illusion (Zeno, of the famous paradoxes, was his pupil). And isn’t the universe the most immersive environment ever? Shouldn’t therefore videogames learn from it, and try to copy, as much as they can, precisely this quality of motionlessness from it?
The future of videogame controls is mind control, my dear readers! Figure out how we can mentally control our avatars, and then we’ll have 1:1 MENTAL control VR play without having to get out of the couch, or even the bed — which is the whole point. Where is the Palmer Luckey who will figure this out, and take the technology out of the laboratories, where it is currently residing, and into the hands of game developers? I will be watching Kickstarter.