New Games Journalism: The Definitive Review
Nostalgia, ad litteram loqui
I had a happy coincidence this week. I was mulling what to write about and had settled on the one aspect of Kieron Gillen’s1 New Games Journalism manifesto that resonated with me at the time - the idea that videogame criticism should be more geographic; namely that it should become more travelogue than straight product review. Back in 2004, I was immediately romanced by this, as my own innate sense of place and environment has often enjoyed videogame spaces as much as real ones. A big part of Half Life’s majesty came from its depiction of Black Mesa, and its construction of disparate labs connected by utility tunnels, being presented as a real facility instead of some linear corridors-and-arenas artifice for the purposes of first-person combat. To then hear Kieron comment on the idea of videogame criticism as travel journalism with Simon Parkin in the latest My Perfect Console reminds me that videogames are often best thought of as places where systems interact. For me personally, the travelogue perspective chimes with my seemingly insatiable capacity for nostalgia, and nostalgia in a literal sense; the pining for the past as a missed geographic locale, the recording of experience being contextualised within an instinctual framework for storing physical spaces. I think that for humans, these spaces don’t need to be actually physical to warrant the kind of deep, emotionally-tied investment that nostalgia feeds on. Given enough richness - or purity of concept - simulated spaces carry the same charge. In some ways perhaps, a stronger charge than that generated by our memories of real places and events therein. This nostalgia for the simulated space has a curiously fast rate of emergence, too.
Now, I’m not talking about reverie-inducing dreams of the 80s and 90s. I mean the sense of being haunted by videogame spaces within a couple of years - or even months - of last visits. These memories surface impulsively when I’m occupied by the mundane, like my day job’s mechanistic processes or when preparing meals. Suddenly, I’m glimpsing a flash of some videogame map, some viewpoint, some snippet that must have resonated unconsciously. Recently, I have been visited by warm memories of Deathloop’s maps. I had a real love of places like Fristad Rock and The Complex, mostly due to the colliding aesthetics that Arkane expertly weaved together, seeing as I have a perverse love of cold war military-utilitarian architecture and austere coastlines. If I tell you that I spent my first six years as an army child in Germany and spent many a grey day on granite-strewn beaches in Northern Ireland, my love of Deathloop’s non-urban geography is pretty easy to understand. But Arkane Lyon does have that talent for capturing the romance of a place, as Dunwall and Karnaca proved with their evocations of late 19th-century urbanity. I’m finding my affection for Deathloop is constantly growing with the increasing distance from the maddening love affair I had with it, but I wish there was an option to return to the game for an idle wander. I long to empty the maps of enemies so I can stand on a beach and look back at the rocks under a morning sky, and almost feel the warmth of the sun cutting through the chill of the breeze. I remember installing such a mod for S.T.A.L.K.E.R., a game which had a magnificently naturalistic sense of place2, and soaking up its peerless atmosphere - undoubtedly the game’s biggest achievement. Likewise, the waterways and hidden urban infrastructure of the boat sequences in Half Life 2 were convincing enough to trigger deep childhood memories of illicit explorations of a stream running under a road bridge. I could have been no older than four or five when that happened, but the correlation was so strong the two are now inextricably tied. Via the simple visual plurality of the right colour of pebbles and sand diffracted through clear water, my nostalgic recall of either brings up its partner memory in tandem. I love the interaction here, for videogame worlds tend to be more dreamlike than actually real. But then again, don’t your actual memories of real spaces become more dreamlike as you rewrite them with each recall? Do we not struggle to separate distant memories of the real from things we imagined, awake or otherwise? But that similarity between remembering the spaces of videogames and the spaces of dreams has something I think comes from the lack of scent - I can’t remember many dreams where I could smell anything. So perhaps there is some fundamental biological function that processes the imagery and sounds of virtual spaces as if they are dreams. We can all remember at least one dream that haunts us, after all3.
My nostalgia for videogame spaces isn’t exclusively tied to childhood memories or correlation with real-world equivalents. Sometimes the wildly artificial sticks too, namely certain sections of Tron 2.0, though I do suspect there’s a link between the warm fuzziness of Christmas holiday movie viewings and the experience of being free to navigate a precise and accurate recreation of Tron’s wonderland of vector lines and gouraud gradients. But another game haunted me on a far deeper level, where I think its geography was so perfectly tuned that it struck a harmony with its gameplay content that’s incredibly precious. Ultra Ultra’s only game4, Echo, haunted me like no other. Echo strikes so many chords in its compact, short form that it feels like a lost jewel of some kind. Something far too weird to be sufficiently appreciated and understood in its time, instead finding its true value as a tragically overlooked relic. From the fantastic concepts and freshly bright sci-fi setting to the mechanistic proceduralism of its environments, it resounds in a profound homology with the dreamlike. I remember the intro and the descent towards accessing the interior of the planet, where the geometric structures, rendered in the dark tones of a grey autumnal dusk, felt dauntingly labyrinthine. It carried a biomechanical air, feeling somewhat organically, biochemically chaotic5 despite its explicit order. But when presented with that interior, and its gleaming regency opulence, the contrast between the inside and the outside struck a potent chiaroscuro. Basaltic rock and metal oscillates to porcelain, gold and marble. A beautiful symmetry for the oscillations of light and dark that powers the game unfolding dynamics. But it’s in the stretching of the architectural tropes as specific tropes to be stretched where the nostalgic power of the environment is derived. The root is, of course, in reference: Echo takes the environment of Bowman’s generated habitat within 2001: A Space Odyssey’s monolith and exponentiates it. But in doing so, and in combination with its wonderful play with light and dark, Echo admirably steals the aesthetic instead of copying it. The re-purposing as a generative space, both in terms of the game’s narrative and gameplay environment, brings new inferences and understanding, as well as a series of simply wonderful places. And it’s the sum of those places that haunts me. They carry a real tangibility, with a sense of potential vastness (which maybe chimes with cult space-prison movie Cube), so the flashes of memory that surface from Echo were of generated sums rather than specific views. My mind, my memory, was in love with the symmetries, the styles, the procedures as much as the places. It was remembering how to generate Echo-like spaces. Such is the power of a repeated aesthetic pattern and superb lighting? The secondary aspect that gave Echo its haunting potency was its deployment of the ultimate monster for terrifying alienation and paranoia; the soulless doppelganger6. Itself a common theme of nightmares, there’s a deep correlation again between the repetition of the architecture and the repetition of En’s form, this time being turned against you by the unseen, over-watching machine. What I loved about Echo was that the palace didn’t need to have any motivation or even narrative explanation to understand its malevolence, but nor did that malevolence seem arbitrary or exploitative. It seemed to fit with the whole dreamlike logic of the place. A sense that the malevolence comes from your own potential, just as it does with a nightmare. It’s a fractal gemstone, its internal facets every bit as dazzling in its presentation of the unknowably vast and the recursion of multiplicative symmetries as the Monster7 in group theory. At my highest level of pretension, I love to think of the true harmony of a videogame in ludens8 as an instrument for intellectual music, a kind of synaesthesic engine where a unison of finely balanced disciplines synthesise a very singular delight that’s utterly unique to the medium. Very, very few games achieve this for me. Portal, Ikaruga, Echo. It’s likely accidental, but the music still plays nonetheless. I feel blessed to have that experience, even if it is actually entirely subjective bullshit I’ve just made up in my head.
My nostalgia for videogame spaces brings up a fun contradiction. If we assign formal and societal value to videogames based on mechanistic features, such as how satisfactory the gameplay systems are, or how pleasing the narrative journey is, why is that my unconscious mind prizes the experience of navigating the spaces more than the intellectual pleasures those spaces contain? Let’s dive off the deep end and assert that free will, as we understand conscious human agency, is an illusion. Consciousness is a commentary, not a director. Subjective experience lags behind actual reality and all that. Then the notions of gameplay and story become distractions from the real purpose of videogame play; to explore environments for exploitation, a basal expression of life’s endless battle for continuity. As such, perhaps these nostalgic echoes tied to the experience of places are showing me the real value as my unconscious mind sees it. I love that it’s so arbitrary. These fleeting moments of warm enjoyment are plucked from such a small pool within the hundreds of environments I must have experienced in gameplay, I’d love to know what makes the grade. Why Deathloop resonated so much more than Mooncrash, despite the two sharing a similar repetition of visits, which you’d assume makes them stick to your soul. But then perhaps I should be happy with the romance of never knowing and just carry on with the wallowing, and be satisfied with being party to that unique personal experience. Or maybe lay off the drugs for a bit? Fuck knows.
[21]
I was lucky enough to meet Kieron early on in my writing career, at a press event in London. I asked him about his review for Painkiller. Where I saw a wild purity in its relentless hyper-FPS melange, he saw un-engaging mediocrity. I didn’t care about the difference in views, for it was abundantly clear that Kieron’s greatest asset is the degree to which he gives a fuck. It underlined to me that passion really does count.
Seriously, I’d say it was unmatched even today for the degree of impact S.T.A.L.K.E.R.S.’s environments had on me. Startlingly tangible.
Tangentially, I’m reminded of David McCandless’s recall of a Doom-infected dream he wrote about in PC Zone. Doom’s psychic impact was epochal in magnitude, and it certainly affected my dreams in terms of the game’s movement dynamics and the cadence of its violence. David wrote about a transposition of Doom dynamics into his local high street, of how he approached (I think) a cash machine queue with the game’s lumbering gait and head-bob, shotgun in hand. A direct inversion of what I’m writing about, but equally as fascinating in so many ways.
An absolute fucking crime.
It was like descending through a complex enzyme, or unraveling nucleic acid, from the viewpoint of a single atom.
There is nothing more instinctually and immediately comprehensible as alien and ‘other’ than a copy of yourself, devoid of your personality.
Beloved of John Conway (yes, Conway’s Life John Conway), the Monster Group is a mathematical construction of such unimaginably baroque scale (196883 dimensions lol) that it exposes the possibility of a mathematical reality beyond any reasonable definition of richness and complexity. Wonderfully documented by Numberphile here:
I assert my right as an author than when writing about a potentially pretentious subject, I am absolutely allowed to put phrases into Latin because it looks more cleverer.