{"id":1975,"date":"2014-08-13T11:43:03","date_gmt":"2014-08-13T09:43:03","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/?p=1975"},"modified":"2014-08-14T14:10:15","modified_gmt":"2014-08-14T12:10:15","slug":"are-game-experiments-apolitical","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/2014\/08\/13\/are-game-experiments-apolitical\/","title":{"rendered":"Are Game Experiments Apolitical? Avant-garde and Magic Realism."},"content":{"rendered":"

This is my seventh monthly\u00a0Patch Wednesday<\/a>\u00a0post where I discuss a question about video games that I think is unanswered, unexplored, or not\u00a0posed yet. I will propose my own tentative ideas and invite comments.\u00a0<\/em><\/p>\n

The series is\u00a0called\u00a0Patch Wednesday to mark the sometimes ragtag and improvised character of video game studies.<\/em><\/p>\n

\"avant-garde\"<\/a><\/p>\n

Here is a figure from Brian Schrank’s interesting new book\u00a0Avant-garde Videogames<\/em>.\u00a0In the book, Schrank discusses various types of art-world avant-garde, and examines\u00a0how they correspond to experimental video games.<\/p>\n

Schrank structures the discussion around two axes of radical-complicit and political-formal. (I am personally placed\u00a0in the bottom-right mainstream formal and complicit quadrant, but that’s OK.)\u00a0He acknowledges the simplicity of this\u00a0model and\u00a0has many\u00a0nuanced points and observations.<\/p>\n

But let me just look at the political-formal axis.\u00a0It represents video games, and art, such that a video game is\u00a0either<\/em> political or it is a formal experiment.\u00a0Art historians can talk about this question at great length, but it is certainly an idea that\u00a0was also expressed in 1940’ies denunciations of experimental, formalist<\/a>,\u00a0art. In that\u00a0case,\u00a0a powerful political entity felt threatened by experimental art and therefore decreed that\u00a0artists should simply stop experimenting and rather\u00a0only express established ideas in well-known form. And of course,\u00a0the well-worn argument about\u00a0art for art’s sake<\/em>\u00a0– that\u00a0art should be judged on its own terms outside politics – sets up a similar\u00a0opposition between the political and the formal experiment.<\/p>\n

But is this really what we see in video games? Consider\u00a0any of the high-profile political video game such as Howling Dogs<\/a>, Dys4ia<\/a>, Unmanned<\/a>, September 12th<\/a>, Cart Life<\/a>.\u00a0All of\u00a0these games are highly experimental in form and<\/strong> political. <\/em>In fact, it is clear that their political messages are expressed\u00a0through<\/em> their experimental form. And it seems the formal-political distinction breaks down\u00a0in most of the obvious examples of political video games.<\/p>\n

Fortunately, there is an alternative view which has much more explanatory power. Here is Salman Rushdie reviewing Gabriel Garcia M\u00e1rquez’ novel\u00a0Chronicle of a Death Foretold<\/em>. Rushdie says that magical realism (where supernatural events\u00a0naturally happen in seemingly realist settings) is a way of expressing experiences that cannot be expressed through established more forms such as plain naturalism. The formal experiment is necessary in order\u00a0to express political ideas and overlooked experienced:<\/p>\n

El realismo magical, magic realism, at least as practised by M\u00e1rquez, is a development out of Surrealism that expresses a genuinely \u2018Third World\u2019 consciousness. It deals with what Naipaul has called \u2018half-made\u2019 societies, in which the impossibly old struggles against the appallingly new, in which public corruptions and private anguishes are somehow more garish and extreme than they ever get in the so-called \u2018North\u2019, where centuries of wealth and power have formed thick layers over the surface of what\u2019s really going on. In the works of M\u00e1rquez, as in the world he describes, impossible things happen constantly, and quite plausibly, out in the open under the midday sun. (Salman Rushdie, Imaginary Homelands<\/em>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

This, I think, is a more convincing\u00a0way of seeing the issue.\u00a0New and experimental literary forms are necessary\u00a0because<\/em> they are the only way to express complex and hitherto unexpressed experiences. Political\u00a0video games are\u00a0also\u00a0<\/em>formal experiments in game design because\u00a0this is the only way to express new and radical ideas. There is no opposition between the political and the formal experiment. Fortunately, for think how drab the world would be otherwise.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

PS. And\u00a0this\u00a0is not\u00a0a\u00a0criticism of Schrank’s very useful\u00a0book. It’s just a discussion of a particular view on the relation between formal experiment and political expression.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

This is my seventh monthly\u00a0Patch Wednesday\u00a0post where I discuss a question about video games that I think is unanswered, unexplored, or not\u00a0posed yet. I will propose my own tentative ideas and invite comments.\u00a0 The series is\u00a0called\u00a0Patch Wednesday to mark the sometimes ragtag and improvised character of video game studies. Here is a figure from Brian … Continue reading “Are Game Experiments Apolitical? Avant-garde and Magic Realism.”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[2,25],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1975","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-games","category-patch-wednesday"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1975","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1975"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1975\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1975"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1975"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.jesperjuul.net\/ludologist\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1975"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}