Dear Player: Game Realisms, The Rise and Fall of the Indie Game
I’ve torn a newspaper again. A few more mistakes like that and I may not be able to renew my trade licence, let alone afford a place to sleep. In my defence, the thing was so pixellated I couldn’t even make out the crease – but that’s Cart Life for you.What follows is a short and biased story about the changing nature of game fictions. This is an opening into the recent history of computer games and how they relate to the mode of production in late consumer capitalism and the redistribution of leisure time. Above all, it’s a story about one of the terms most often abused, by game critics: ‘realism’.
For decades game’s have attempted increase the naturalism of the experiences they offer. From smoothing the game-world’s edges (AA) to simulating the reaction of the eye to light (HDR), from smothering their surfaces with bump-map textures to stuffing in yet more particle effects – the blockbuster titles of the last 5yrs have given us saturated, lush and luminous paradises and sand-blasted gritty dystopias a plenty.
But increasingly a new kind of in-game realism is dawning, and to look at what this might mean requires we take a step back.
To guess at the future of markets is tricky at best – it can land you a jail sentence, or billions of tax dollars, depending how rich you are. Simplifying history is tricky too, but is also easier to get away with. Risking it, I would argue that a promising change of winds has hit the world of game development. Five years ago, games were Big Business, with capital ‘B’s – the biggest even, in entertainment – and this looked good for gamers. Finally their medium was being validated it seemed, and technological progress was unstoppable – smoothing those pixels out, and smothering them in light bloom. However, diminishing returns in blockbuster titles owing to escalating production costs and the ease of piracy, combined with an increasing crisis in profitability in dedicated games machines in the face of phones and tablets, has checked the growing market share of these massive developers. In fact, during the recession, and amid the explosion of ‘casual’ games, some fears were raised that games quest for realism and progress, and its pretensions to be considered serious art, may have been ended for good.
But then along came everyone else. Indie developers had always been there of course, but the gap left by changing market conditions, aided by the development of new platforms like kickstarters and Steam’s Early Access, along with the realisation of reliable download services that avoided the need for costly physical production processes, opened the market to masses of Indie developers over the last few years. The biggest entertainment market in the world looked like it was also becoming one of the most democratic spaces of content creation.
Suddenly technological progress and technical development were relativised. Graphical improvement, decreasingly profitable, was no longer lauded as the basis of a new games worth. Everything seemed possible, and indie innovation unstoppable.
But recently what ‘s ‘possible’ has started to look more and more worryingly like what’s already, guttingly, ‘actual’. While voxels and pixels reared their heads again in flagrant disregard for visual naturalism, they began more and more to emulate the gritty realism of lived experience and behaviour in capitalist society. And this was a problem quite literally because it was meant to be a fantasy.
The rise of the survival genre (Don’t Starve, Under the Ocean, Organ Trail etc.) now faces the player with a fantasy landscape of subsistence living. As with Terraria and Minecraft before it, players ceaselessly mine resources and recombine them or face penalties – a repetitive act in exchange for abstract gain. In Cart Life every action from stacking papers to smoking cigarettes is valued and atomised into mundane game-like tasks to the extent that for all its 8-bit graphics, there exists no more grindingly ‘realistic’ game on the market. As its tagline directs: “Work Harder, Hard Worker”. What should we make of this?
In The Culture Industry, Adorno makes an insightful observation that history, if anything, only seems to add more weight to. He argues that leisure time is the inseparable complimentary of work time, looking at its evolution in France’s second empire. Far from being an escape from work, it reaffirms the primary importance of regimented and exploitative work as the inescapable basis of life in late capitalism. Increasingly, he argues, leisure time has even come to openly mirror work time – we partition it, subordinate ourselves to mod con machines and engage in passive relationships with film and TV that reflect the banal soap operas of our lives, while we expand and articulate our free time almost exclusively through the consumption of the goods we work to produce. More and more the spaces of desire and fantasy become those of work and mechanicity - the last thing employers want is for us to lose our work ethic or our hunger for consumer goods. Our time becomes homogenised, our attentiveness never relaxed.
Games have long been one of the largest ‘proofs’ of Adorno’s thesis, relying as they do on a system of repetitive actions rewarded by abstract points reinvested to increase one’s ability to perform repetitive actions. But the retreat from naturalism (and with it, the retreat from the naturalisation of labour relations in game spaces) unleashed a bolder phase of the work ethic’s war on desire. WoW gold farming, the Second Life Linden Dollar, and the broader trend of Xbox Live and Steam’s facilitating purchaseable in-game items in reward for playing and DLC for, well, money, all gestured towards the open fusion of play and production.
These were again, ominous developments if we read games as representations. But for many of us they also seemed to hold promise. With Kickstarter, Early Access, large-scale community modding, the Humble Bundle and Indie development there were yet more signs that the opening of game economies in general might allow a space for small developers with radical ideas. With the trend of increasingly small, responsive developers engaged in low-budget innovation embracing open source and open Alphas, it started to look like the involvement of the player and the expansion of the market might really herald not only a capacity for increased immersion and involvement but also an escape from games’ marketisation into an open economy of play, where the creation of games itself responded to our desire.
But what emerged was the reification of capitalist modes of production in an even purer form. In Diablo III real cash can be used within the game to buy virtual objects, in EVE you can exchange credits for cash, which you gain by mining and trading, but in the survival genre, consumption and production have become a closed and brazenly self-justifying system. An insular model of life. Moreover, in games such as Minecraft, Gnomoria and Organ Trail immersion and realism are dependent on the rejection of naturalism.
By foregrounding the pixel, the indie game has won over our trust. It seems more truly a game because it reflects its components with transparency. While in monolithic MMORPGs and photo-realist FPSs units of exchange are woven into a convincing fiction or at least loosely veiled by a narrative, Indie RPG and Survival games ground themselves in transparency. Openly self-mocking and self-aware they are also all the more beguiling, and for all that, ends in themselves. In conjunction with google maps, Minecraft players can even geotag and render their creations in the real world through augmented reality – with a smart phone you could see the voxel car someone fabricated over hours with the virtual labour of their hand.
Increasingly, in an age some have been calling ‘post-digital’ or the ‘New Aesthetic’, we have come to embrace the pixel rather than hide it behind high-budget filters. The pixel is the new unit of the real, even used as the basis of the most cutting-edge camouflage designs, it has come to declare itself as an art which nature strives to imitate. “Don’t forget to build walls”, “Don’t starve”, “…watch your friends die of dysentery!” We no longer want to disguise the logic of games, we want to embrace it. What began as a critique of the market model of the game, that seemed to open up the world of ‘meta-games’, now also most concretely represents the realism of consumer capitalism’s commodity and labour relations. While the pixel symbolised an alienation, a separation of game world and real world, now we embrace the alienation of society itself.
Perhaps even more worryingly, ‘gamification’ promises CEO’s and HR managers the means to incentivise its work force by making work more like a game - with points, levels, scaled challenges and smart interfaces. As Cart Life would remind us: “Work Harder, Hard Worker”. Even in the kickstarter stretch goal the indie market has converted the funding of games into a game itself.
While games came to reflect capitalism, first by illusion then by a hyperrealism, now business looks to games for a model of productivity. Increasingly games are being lauded by marketers and employers as a new window onto human nature without realising their own role in its genesis, and this is a fiction the Indie Game’s promise of an ‘alternative’, ‘unrealistic fantasy’ merely serves to legitimise. And so we find our games less life-like but our lives more game-like.
This is not to demonise the Indie game, but to show how on one analysis their advent constitutes a symptom. And this is a process game designers have begun to confront head-on.
In Cart Life, a self-reflexive masterpiece, incidental and banal conversations meditate on the harsh boredom of the daily grind rendered in blocky greyscale. In bleak gestures and a constant foregrounding of the player-as-person it pushes us to question why we play. In this ‘retail simulation’ there is no dissimulation – a player interacts performatively by literally typing the thoughts and actions of their avatar. In this it even questions reality, representation and the nature of performative language for an ASCII generation. But as artful games push the limits of radical critique, like the avant-garde before them, marketisation is constantly encroaching. At the limits of Brechtian, self-critical transparency, we wonder how much freedom for critigue is left in the medium before its complete reversion to exchange value. To see the trend I’ve outlined in Indie games is not to see something new, but it might be something ending.
What does it take to change your Cart Life avatar to Vinny the Bagel Vendor? Well, that will be $5
Merlin Seller