Whenever I write, I nurse self-hatred for my lack of emotional wonder. I just can’t get tied up in fiction anymore, which often makes my perspective on narrative entirely worthless. I’ll start on something new, and abruptly quit when I grimly realize that I haven’t empathized enough to make the critique worth reading. However, I can sometimes disguise my numbness by asserting that a story didn’t do enough to make me care, a statement which sounds wonderfully cogent while actually being entirely empty. It doesn’t really answer the question of why something may or may not be worth experiencing, it’s just a circumstantial punt, it’s the argumental equivalent of cutting the Gordian Knot. If Alexander wanted to be the ruler of all Asia, he had to find a way to untie it, but he simply cut it apart and said it was the same thing. A convenient trick to be sure, but destroying a question isn’t the same as answering it.
Despite having some flagrantly terrible views, DMX also had one quote which I spend a lot of time thinking about. "Sometimes people want to feel worse, they don't always want to feel better. However the fuck you want to feel, there should be a song that helps you feel that way… who the fuck wants to be happy all the time?". The popularity of difficult games, horror games, or even sad story-driven games proves the point to some degree, but each of those genres are associated with niche appeal. Maybe it speaks to the idea that people’s lives generally skew towards negative emotions, so mainstream media leans towards positivity in response. However, emotions don’t always fit nicely onto a negative-positive line, and the most profound moments in life almost never do. So, if your doctor recommended that you experience something existentially confusing for a well-rounded emotional diet, would you act on that?
Every night, I do a routine, in a neat loop around my house. I check my bathroom sink for drips, I check all the electronics in my office are off, I check my garage door is closed, I check the front door is locked, I check the stove is off, I check the dog’s fed, and I check the back door is locked. I choose to do all of that so I can sleep without worrying. However, I’ll do it twice, and that’s not something I would say I choose to do, necessarily. It’s a compulsion, something I’m emotionally pushed to do despite the fact that there’s no reason for it. I’m someone who’s proud to be logical, but I end every day with what’s essentially a ritual to ward off evil. My brain has a recurring argument against itself and loses.
What stood out to me about Marathon was that it wasn’t fun. Specifically, in how that un-fun quality felt intentional, as you fight through cramped, winding corridors with a tight ammo supply provided by a mad AI who deems you hardly worthy of the effort. Again, it feels like Marathon was reevaluating the rules of its genre before they had been firmly established in the first place, as if it was satirizing an event which had yet to happen. You don’t get thrilling arenas where you get to go nuts, you don't get a BFG, and you don’t get any boss fights. You certainly don’t get a story even as minimalistically gratifying as killing every demon on Mars. The question you have to grapple with as a player is how much that’s worth experientially, when you know the design intent of its unorthodoxy was only to set it apart from its contemporaries, and is only incidentally set apart from later games. I think that’s why the series exudes a certain mystery though, it feels equidistant from the past and future no matter when that happens to be.
There’s a celebrated episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation which really bothers me. It’s titled “Tapestry”, with Picard living the alternate life he would have led, had he been a more risk-averse person. He comes to rage against the path-not-taken and how his alternate self never lived up to his potential. I always thought that was an extremely unfair assessment though, since prime-Picard completely inhabited the shoes of alt-Picard, rather than viewing his life and perspective in totality. Maybe alt-Picard’s lifestyle was truly more fulfilling, with a career he genuinely enjoyed as a balanced part of his life, rather than being submerged in the all-consuming responsibility of captaining a starship. Maybe he would rage just as much against the prime timeline’s lifestyle, of commanding people to their deaths and perpetuating astro-political conflict. I think the message of the show should have been twofold, in that it’s easy to feel like the grass is greener on the other side, but when it isn’t, you should try to be holistically understanding of your alternate selves.
This review contains a minor spoiler for Marathon, specifically of a plot detail mentioned in an optional terminal near the start of the game, and heavily implied throughout the rest of it. That spoiler is how the main character is a battleroid, a cyborg created by enhancing a dead body. So, even in the earliest days of shooters, we had a perfect hero to satirize the genre: a corpse electronically commanded to propagate. If that’s the hero of this world, maybe it should have been left to rot the same way. For games this bleak, you’ll often hear “the best narrative choice is to not play the game”, but that’s a smug punt of the issue if you ask me. It’s sorta like saying that you should destroy the universe when you get hungry. Something’s gotta die for your biology to keep functioning, or you have to just accept your own death, but the ideal solution isn’t to erase the concept of life altogether.
Puzzle games are designed around balancing signal and noise, nudging players towards correct solutions while also obscuring them enough to provide satisfaction. That’s the reason why Portal increases the amount of white portal-able surfaces over time, it creates difficulty by flooding areas with possibilities while removing distinctiveness from areas relevant to a solution. The same concept applies to mysteries in general: butlers have killed enough nobles to where the choice of murderer goes without saying, but that’s also why they’re chosen as red herrings to obscure the truth. However, in either case, the difference between signal and noise is only revealed once a solution has been found, and in the case of a surreal mystery, there may not be an unambiguous solution at all. You reach a point where logic fails and you’re forced to arrive at a conclusion based on a feeling. That’s what's unique about the surreal, though. It gives you the intellectual freedom to find signal through noise, but only if you’re capable of doing the same on an emotional level.
Despite having some flagrantly terrible views, DMX also had one quote which I spend a lot of time thinking about. "Sometimes people want to feel worse, they don't always want to feel better. However the fuck you want to feel, there should be a song that helps you feel that way… who the fuck wants to be happy all the time?". The popularity of difficult games, horror games, or even sad story-driven games proves the point to some degree, but each of those genres are associated with niche appeal. Maybe it speaks to the idea that people’s lives generally skew towards negative emotions, so mainstream media leans towards positivity in response. However, emotions don’t always fit nicely onto a negative-positive line, and the most profound moments in life almost never do. So, if your doctor recommended that you experience something existentially confusing for a well-rounded emotional diet, would you act on that?
Every night, I do a routine, in a neat loop around my house. I check my bathroom sink for drips, I check all the electronics in my office are off, I check my garage door is closed, I check the front door is locked, I check the stove is off, I check the dog’s fed, and I check the back door is locked. I choose to do all of that so I can sleep without worrying. However, I’ll do it twice, and that’s not something I would say I choose to do, necessarily. It’s a compulsion, something I’m emotionally pushed to do despite the fact that there’s no reason for it. I’m someone who’s proud to be logical, but I end every day with what’s essentially a ritual to ward off evil. My brain has a recurring argument against itself and loses.
What stood out to me about Marathon was that it wasn’t fun. Specifically, in how that un-fun quality felt intentional, as you fight through cramped, winding corridors with a tight ammo supply provided by a mad AI who deems you hardly worthy of the effort. Again, it feels like Marathon was reevaluating the rules of its genre before they had been firmly established in the first place, as if it was satirizing an event which had yet to happen. You don’t get thrilling arenas where you get to go nuts, you don't get a BFG, and you don’t get any boss fights. You certainly don’t get a story even as minimalistically gratifying as killing every demon on Mars. The question you have to grapple with as a player is how much that’s worth experientially, when you know the design intent of its unorthodoxy was only to set it apart from its contemporaries, and is only incidentally set apart from later games. I think that’s why the series exudes a certain mystery though, it feels equidistant from the past and future no matter when that happens to be.
There’s a celebrated episode of Star Trek: The Next Generation which really bothers me. It’s titled “Tapestry”, with Picard living the alternate life he would have led, had he been a more risk-averse person. He comes to rage against the path-not-taken and how his alternate self never lived up to his potential. I always thought that was an extremely unfair assessment though, since prime-Picard completely inhabited the shoes of alt-Picard, rather than viewing his life and perspective in totality. Maybe alt-Picard’s lifestyle was truly more fulfilling, with a career he genuinely enjoyed as a balanced part of his life, rather than being submerged in the all-consuming responsibility of captaining a starship. Maybe he would rage just as much against the prime timeline’s lifestyle, of commanding people to their deaths and perpetuating astro-political conflict. I think the message of the show should have been twofold, in that it’s easy to feel like the grass is greener on the other side, but when it isn’t, you should try to be holistically understanding of your alternate selves.
This review contains a minor spoiler for Marathon, specifically of a plot detail mentioned in an optional terminal near the start of the game, and heavily implied throughout the rest of it. That spoiler is how the main character is a battleroid, a cyborg created by enhancing a dead body. So, even in the earliest days of shooters, we had a perfect hero to satirize the genre: a corpse electronically commanded to propagate. If that’s the hero of this world, maybe it should have been left to rot the same way. For games this bleak, you’ll often hear “the best narrative choice is to not play the game”, but that’s a smug punt of the issue if you ask me. It’s sorta like saying that you should destroy the universe when you get hungry. Something’s gotta die for your biology to keep functioning, or you have to just accept your own death, but the ideal solution isn’t to erase the concept of life altogether.
Puzzle games are designed around balancing signal and noise, nudging players towards correct solutions while also obscuring them enough to provide satisfaction. That’s the reason why Portal increases the amount of white portal-able surfaces over time, it creates difficulty by flooding areas with possibilities while removing distinctiveness from areas relevant to a solution. The same concept applies to mysteries in general: butlers have killed enough nobles to where the choice of murderer goes without saying, but that’s also why they’re chosen as red herrings to obscure the truth. However, in either case, the difference between signal and noise is only revealed once a solution has been found, and in the case of a surreal mystery, there may not be an unambiguous solution at all. You reach a point where logic fails and you’re forced to arrive at a conclusion based on a feeling. That’s what's unique about the surreal, though. It gives you the intellectual freedom to find signal through noise, but only if you’re capable of doing the same on an emotional level.