The Real and the Unreal
Hanging out in the Dark Place at Christmastime
Happy Holidays everyone. I hope everyone stays safe and successfully avoids Nazis and cowards who seek to empower them. Actually, now that I think of it, I fell out of the habit of sharing a song to get things started. Sorry about that. Hang on.
That’s better. I might sit down next week and share some fun gaming experiences this year. I’d love to do a GOTY, but I haven’t played THAT many games, and more than ever I’ve been playing games that came out before 2023. And I typically get together with Bob over at History Respawned to do one.
So what to talk about now, on the eve of the eve of the twenty-fifth day of December? Something festive? Joyful? Or Festivus-appropriated and wrathful? I think I’ll write about Alan Wake 2 for a little bit.
Alan Wake 2 is very, very good. You don’t really need me to tell you this. It’s a widely held opinion and there’s a lot of good reviews. But I want to share a little bit about why I think it’s just so very good - and this actually puts me in direct opposition to one of the more negative appraisals of the game, from Eurogamer’s Alexis Ong. Ong’s review is entirely fair, though I disagree with it. Her main criticisms are that Alan Wake 2 is on the one part highly derivative and on the other a narrative posing as innovative that in truth prizes style over substance.
I can see where that comes from, though it’s a little hard to talk about here without getting into detail about why I think that. It’s a game that really benefits from going in as blind as possible. Not a pun, by the way. Let’s just leave it at this: if you liked Control, Remedy’s 2019 effort, the crazier things got, you will like Alan Wake 2. If you can handle the updated-but-not-by-a-whole-lot action mechanics of the Alan Wake series, which for me mostly amounted to running around scared out of my mind for a while before switching the difficulty to Story Mode. After which, I’m pleased to say, I have continued to run around scared out of my mind. I’m just making progress through the game faster.
One of the great challenges in critiquing games is figuring out how that critique should work. As a community we’re not huge on precedent; there’s not that many examples of criticism over the decades to decode and work through. When you take a degree in English literature, chances are you’re discussing criticism directly by some point in your upper division classes. The other day, for fun (I’m a fun guy), I was reading an interesting essay on modern poetry in the United States. The author argued that for decades American poetry and been characterized by disagreements between more traditional forms and intentionally experimental efforts, contrasts of Frost and Cummings or the apparent mid-century cataclysm of Allen Ginsberg; but that now (at the time of the essay’s writing in 2009) the reality of American poetry had become a synthesis of both.
It’s an old, recurring trick. My own undergraduate years brought my first introduction to the historiographical concepts of “revisionism”, “counter-revisionism” and “post-revisionism”. Historians and other writers care about concepts like this. Quite a lot. But they do more than give us a chance to be pissy at the Friday evening conference mixer. These distinctions give us something to build on.
Games… don’t really have that. The writing I most admire tends to do what Ong does in her review: they bring in other forms, particularly those such as cinema and television that many video game creatives do intentionally emulate, or at least profess to be influenced by, and hold the game to standards set by those examples. Thus Ong’s argument that Alan Wake 2 is impressive but derivative.
At the same time, the older I get - I am old you know, older than the stones, at least in the world of The People Who Play Video Games - the less interested I am in the ultimate insult of something being derivative. Because… a lot of stuff is derivative.
There’s also a clear line between being derivative and taking inspiration. I do think the line is clear. I think it lies in the execution. Which is where Ong and I depart from each other. The game is stylish, yes; I would argue that it is executed exceptionally well.
It is now ten years since Ian Bogost wrote “Perpetual Adolescence”, an ostensible review of the that year’s extremely well received Gone Home that remains in my mind one of the best pieces of writing on video games, ever. Really. Read “Perpetual Adolescence.”
Bogost subtly and skillfully pointed out that Gone Home was indeed something artful but also something chillingly limited at the same time. Video games are so eager to be seen to be grown up, but the growing up is taking an awfully long time. For Bogost there was a larger problem, that wider popular culture as a whole has lost its own interest in sophistication. He’s written a lot since; no one paying attention will be shocked by the massive expansion of games in every possible direction. The AAA title still exist but so does… everything else. Just go over to Itch and hang out.
Sadly though, I don’t think we’ve cracked it really. Some of the stronger arguments invoke what games do that other media cannot do. This has been a popular topic in academia for years. So we all talk, quite a lot, about interactivity. I do think that Ong is right not to let Alan Wake 2 skate on that. It’s not enough. I like the game because of what it does narratively and stylistically. Frankly its gameyness - its mechanics and it’s boss-adjacent fights and its puzzles - mostly gets in the way for me.
My favourite moments come when the game decides to let it all hang out. Not to dip a toe into live action sections but to exorcise the demons of Night Trap by dancing with them. Preferably to songs in Finnish or that sound a bit like they were written in Finnish first, then translated. Scenes and set pieces that completely define the next thirty minutes of the game for the player usually drive me crazy, but here it feels intentional. I am being moved along through a story, one that I am enjoying very much.
It’s been true for a long time but there’s a massive schism in the world of games criticism (or appreciation?) between the celebration of player-generated experience and authorial intent. What can any game developer do to rival an eight hour Crusader Kings 3 campaign where nothing really happened in terms of wider European medieval geopolitics but you were riveted the entire time? Or that moment in Far Cry 2 when the plains caught fire and you found yourself caught between gun-toting enemies and flames carried by the wind?
Well, I think they can still do an awful lot. And in truth there are a lot of people like me, who hop across the schism to sample either type of game. Maybe my tastes are changing. The recent teaser of GTA VI left me cold, honestly. A big part of that comes from what unpleasant experiences I had with GTA V, which I found mostly puerile and vile, an act of adolescent violence more than it was any kind of satire. But I also wonder what the game will provide that really makes me love games any more than I do. What worlds are left to conquer? Morgan Park argues that Avatar: Frontiers of Pandora is the best open world game Ubisoft has produced in years. Who cares? That Avatar crap is just the worst dreck imaginable, for one thing. But I don’t know. There are a lot of ways to enjoy the things games can do that films cannot. We’re already at a point where being an “open world game” isn’t enough. Not when you can have an open world and say something beautiful, like Tchia does.
Last night I became the last human in North America to see Greta Garwig’s Barbie. It’s an excellent film. One of the things I liked most about it was how freely it traveled between the real and the unreal. Games have been doing this for decades but less well and often with a lot more hang-ups. Alan Wake 2 is drunk on the difference between the two. I can see how it turns some off. But I do think it’s doing something special.