No More Heroes has captured its share of analytical attention. Of course, when Suda said that the game was influenced by the surrealist western El Topo, that was like announcing a $2 buffet to construction workers and college students.
Sadly for me, cowzilla3 wrote the article that I have been planning when I first started playing the game back in February, specifically the idea that in NMH, we are not so much playing a character named Travis Touchdown but that we are playing a gamer, all of us who have ever played a game just to kill and level. But since cowzilla and others have well described the irony and critique in NMH, I'll have to comment on something else, which is, I think, the obvious question for any artful creation that flaunts the rules and smashes the plane between the art and the audience: so, now what?
Spoilers ahead . . . .
NMH is a punk game, which is what makes it so interesting. At least, that's what the Grasshopper Manufacture logo suggests. But thanks to the continuous recycling of punk every few years, we may have lost the vitality of what punk is, or at least was. It was not just thrashing but conscious breaking of conventions, of making music what it was . . . rebellious. And NMH is one of the more rebellious games I've seen in a while, an upstart that disregards and even thumbs its nose at all the conventions that the 'stadium' games luxuriate in--the sexy, photo-realistic graphics, the complex stories, the intricate controls and involved gameplay, layers of sound and music, and especially the violent game play and objectives. (Schlaghund argues that parody is not necessarily punk, a point well taken. However, I think we shouldn't be too fastidious about what is and is not punk: Grasshopper's slogan is "let's punk" which he explained in a Gamasutra interview: "What I mean by 'punk' is to destroy existing ideas and create something new, original.")
Games have largely become a host of set of conventions with minor tweaks that are nothing more than the t-shirts of someone else's rule-breaking. Mixing FPS and RPG elements are not the stuff of ground breaking games, truth be told.
The ending, such as it is, for NMH is where it flaunts the rules the most. Not only do the characters start acknowledging that they are in a game, the ending splinters in a way that we don't really know what the story is.
So, just in case you weren't sure of the point of NMH, Suda has beaten you over the head with this ending to clarify: bullocks to your narrative structures. The ending reminds me of when Public Image, LTD appeared on American Bandstand and Johnny Rotten disregarded the lip syncing conventions of the show and just danced with the crowd.
Anyone who makes a game like this deserves accolades because it is an expression of freedom and creative independence. Yet, we have seen this kind of rebellion before. The problem is that we often find ourselves with the equivalent of the Institutional Revolutionary Party: rebelling requires something to rebel against, and if the revolution becomes successful, then it must invent a foil to rebel against further or face the fact that, as the Who sang, "Meet the new boss. Same as the old boss." Or it must simply fade away.
Rebelling against conventions for the sake of breaking those conventions only works for so long before we ask, "Now what?" and "So?" In painting and sculpture, we've seen artists rebel against a non-existant conformity after the impressionists, then the expressionists, the cubists, and other -ists make the point that artists don't have to paint cherubs to create something meaningful. Deconstruction is really only interesting and post-modern awareness is clever only for so long.
Even though we should enjoy NMH for what it is and isn't, it's hard not to wonder what Suda's post-punk game will be. These kind of creative efforts are significant because they can be watersheds for even more interesting work, something that might not be obvious to the mainstream until much later. Suda might be working on a game that goes even further in its parody and critique, but is it possible that, in flaunting game conventions, we can look for much different games? Will Suda and his games have that kind of influence? Or is he one of the rare types who can not only critique but can create alternatives, too?
I see NMH mostly as trying to accomplish the first aim for punk games, to destroy existing ideas about what a game is supposed to be. In fact, I think you could argue that NMH doesn't so much destroy those ideas as it has challenges them, maybe even bloodies them. Perhaps I'm being fastidious myself when I say that destroying something is not the same as creating something new. While I appreciate the cleverness and freshness of NMH, it strikes me as a transitional game, one that says, "Games don't have to focus on violence, use levels, have tidy endings, use realistic graphics." If NMH is a critique and rebellion against indulgent, violent and soulless games, then NMH really can't be What Games Can Be. NMH is original, yes, but it is not the real alternative to ladders of murderous gaming that it implies ought to be there.
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Punk Gaming and No More Heroes
Monday, February 11, 2008
Cabaret: a different realism for gaming
I was hoping to write a more frothy, light post, but an idea grabbed me a couple of days ago and wouldn't let go. It appropriately starts with the movie Cabaret.
It seems that if anyone remembers a movie from the '72 Oscars, it's The Godfather. Maybe Deliverance. Yet, it was Cabaret that took 8 awards that year. I think part of the reason for the receded success of Cabaret is that musicals aren't done much, but gangster stories are still with us. And if we look at trends in gaming, it seems that they are pursuing what The Godfather and Bonnie and Clyde did so well, making stories more real by making them violent. (Of course, that's not all those movies had by any means--in fact, it might be the least of their good qualities--, but it's what I think most viewers remember them for.)
I'm not going to rant about the violence in games, but I want to point to a different path for gaming. With Cabaret, Bob Fosse made a 'realistic' musical by setting the songs within reasonable contexts. But in doing so, he created scenes like the following clip. First, we hear a golden youthful voice, and then we see the face. Yes, we know where this is going, but it is gripping nonetheless, as the camera pans down and out. Then, we watch as the crowd, quiet at first, joins in.
This scene captures a sense of what happened throughout Germany. It shows how even a boy understands how to manipulate people, how to take something that is beautiful to enlist people's affections and even passion to take them to wholly different ends. The innocence of the line "tomorrow belongs to me" takes a dark turn in meaning even while the beer garden is still sunny and the voices are singing. It's the sort of scene that makes an audience uncomfortable because the face of evil is sweet and youthful. It's easy and even comforting to depict evil as insane and ugly. But it's not true.
What does this have to do with gaming? The point is that realism too often is reduced to outwardly appearance. We see that in Cabaret: a certain dinginess, natural settings. But the movie also gets at another kind of realism . . . a kind of inward realism. It's the reality of how people think and react. What makes the Hitler youth in this scene so frightening isn't that he pulls a gun and shoots people. It's that he manipulates people, and we know where it eventually leads . . . not just to the Jewish ghettos and gas chambers. Even worse, I think, it leads to the public acceptance of these things. (For what it's worth, The Godfather also shows that inward reality as we watch the slide of Michael Corleone.)
Where, then, is the realistic game that shows us the slothful thought, blind and misled patriotism, manipulated values, or self-deception? The horror of a violent act begins with the decision to commit the violence. So, how is it that people decide such things? Or how does a person wreck his life with behavior he knows is destructive? Our games focus so much on the how but have left the why mostly alone.
This is a game that I would like to see. It's a trend I'd like to see. It's not that the game has to be dark, even though a lot of games, especially 'hardcore' games, are quite dark. Cabaret had, in fact, several humorous scenes, although sometimes the humor had disturbing backdrops.