Max Vs. The Internet

This whole thing is long and boring. Rather than mill the grist, you can just go here.

This summer, I read some Stanislaw Lem. The qualifier being that for those few short days when I had nothing to do but read (because it was too hot to do anything else), I spent most of my time with a book of Lem's critical essays, Microworlds. It's a short book, but so far it has had a profound effect on my thinking, particularly in terms of games as art, and the challenge each designer faces in elevating a game to critical status.

A large part of Lem's critical corpus is devoted towards indicting American science-fiction's failure to live up to its promise. His main contention (and what he succeeds in skewering a vast tract of my childhood reading with) is that science-fiction, despite claiming that it is the 'literature of ideas' fails to break with the paradigm of the adventure/detective/horror novel. Science fiction plays what he calls "empty games," the endless fantastical postulation of devices and scenarios with little bearing on the conduct of humanity or the laws of physics, and the constant problem of an idea-driven premise devolving into a big space fight. With robots. Or lasers. Or time-travelling telepathic clones...

I could (but will probably never) spend some time fleshing out the relevance of Lem's thoughts and writing as far as games are concerned, but the main thing that came across from his work was that science-fiction essentially failed to live up to its promise. It continues to fail to this day-- look in the science-fiction section of any bookstore, and you will see endless shelves of space opera after space opera, a grand, pan-galactic miasma of ink for the puerile purpose of serving up yet another adventure story. Not that an adventure story can't be done well, but that the value of a well-done adventure story pales in comparison to something fresh or new.

I'm not being entirely fair here-- as far as I know, Lem was largely ignorant of the New Wave science-fiction of the 60's and 70's, and by the time the essays in Microworlds finally made it in to English, he may have changed his opinion. Like I said, I'm trying (and failing) to get to the point here. New Wave science-fiction managed to break the old adventure story paradigm and move towards an understanding of what the human ramifications of the future actually were. Any games its authors played were not quite so empty in their delight for contrivance, at least in comparison to that of the so-called 'Hard Science-Fiction' writers.

In many ways, I fear for games. I worry that they will be relegated to the rubbish heap of popular culture in the same way that comics and science-fiction were (or still are; the point is debatable in the case of the former, not so much in the case of the latter). But more importantly, away from the world of popular media, I worry that games will fail to live up to their potential as art. Games for too long have been occupied with their own set of "empty games" (man, such redundancy! Forgive my diction). I was so incredibly disappointed this year at E3 when I saw another dozen space marine games, and poorly done space marine games at that. There are only so many different ways we can tap the hominid brain's love of connecting missiles with targets, or running away from monsters, or collecting and managing wealth. Just as a child delights in playing with its own fingers and toes for the first time, or just as science-fiction delights in its fantasias of space-war and extraterrestrial invasion, games have found too much delight and ease in their particular set of aptitudes: those of summing numbers in complex ways, requiring a twitchy player, or presenting a fantasy of credible verisimilitude. I fear however, that unlike the child, these patterns of play are not leading to any sort of cerebral development or growth, and like science-fiction, these paradigms have become an ends unto themselves, rather than a means. I fear that in a very literal sense, we may be retarding our capacity to create something beautiful with every space marine game that is published.

Not that there is no hope.

I had one brief conversation with Peggy this summer, where she brought up the exploration of spaces in games and other media. The sort of exploration that is only possible within such media because it would be physically or temporally impossible to create such a space in our world. It immediately made me think of the trailer for Portal that my brother had shown me earlier during the summer. Those of you unfamiliar with Portal can go read about it on Wikipedia. Go do it. Right now! Aside from applying conservation of momentum and visual fidelity to its portals, the game seems entirely capable of creating an infinite-mirror style effect, actually creating the possibility of an infinite loop where paradoxically, forwards is backwards. I'm sure it can bend space in a such a number of ways that it would be impractical to ennumerate them here. It's a small step to be sure, but it's a step in the right direction, a step away from empty games and towards the use of ludic media to explore the previously unexplorable.

Were Lem alive (and if he cared about games), I'm sure the simple beauty of something like Portal would leave him wanting more. What are the ramifications of this game? What does it mean to be able to bend physics into impossible pretzels? What sort of bearing does this have on our lives and how we lead them? How does the idea of jumping through a hole in the sky lead to a greater understanding of ourselves? Maybe it doesn't. Maybe it's just a new empty game, and I'm foolishly excited, but I think this step towards exploring game-exclusive spaces is a good one. It's a good idea, and it's incredibly satisfying to see that students thought of it.

Unfortunately, with Portal's release hitched to that of Half-Life 2: Episode 2, it may be a while yet before we see the game. However, this is the Internet, and therefore, if someone has thought of it, someone else will happily steal it and do it. Go check out Exite (exeo, exire -> plural imperative = "you (pl.) leave!"). Apparently the dudes behind the otherwise completely adorable Pilotable Strider Mod were able to hack this together in a jiffy, which means that the internet has proven capable of loosing a great idea far before its time. Perhaps, here, in a mod hacked together by a team of dudes who stole another team's idea, we have begun to claw our way off of the rubbish heap.

UPDATE:
Crap, this is what I get for not checking Joystiq first: new Portal video here. Thanks, Leipzig.