November 7, 2014 | Filed under: External Sources, Recent Posts and tagged with: Anime, Non Play Criticism
It is a truism in video game circles of serious thinkers that video games are a young medium and that we are forging new territory with our criticism. That is of course bullshit in both respects.
Video game critics are often cut off from other mediums. May perhaps that our medium is so new that more energy is required to get anything done as each new step is not just walking along a singular path among the fold, but having to stir and pour the concrete before a step may be taken. So much time gets spent toiling away on our own medium that we rarely look up and see the critical spheres of other mediums happening around us and the realization that so much that is considered with art is true for however an artist wishes to express themselves because it is all still human expression.
Non Play Criticism is my attempt to occasionally highlight some piece of criticism relating to another medium, educate whatever readership I may have by pointed it out and try and bring back into the fold whatever lesson it may have to offer.
If nothing else, I share an interesting piece of criticism from another medium.
Because I don’t want to duplicate mediums too often: Anime.
First off, an introduction. Foldable Human is one of my favorite media critics out there right now and I only wished he would put out more material, more often. Unlike other blip critics in the TGWTG fame or ChezApocalypse, he doesn’t narrow himself to one medium but concerns himself with the concept of communication as represented by the author/audience relationship through a work. The Foldable Human is also a puppet made of styrofoam, cardboard and sticks. Just run with it.
Of course, his most recent video has possibly made that introduction rather pointless as you may have heard of him already thanks to it as it does deal with video games. Instead, I’m going to focus on an older video: his critique of the end of Neon Genesis Evangelion and the movie The End of Evangelion.1
It’s interesting what happens when you put something off. Originally, I was going to post this two weeks ago at another high swing in the gamergate cycle. But then they started bringing out the dictionary to defend themselves and I had to get that one out for timeliness. Now, two weeks later, we are on the low output of the constant cycle of this clusterfuck, which means I can’t do what I was going to do.
Originally, I was just going to list some of the more striking quotes that summarized what Anno, the show’s creator, thought of his audience and by extension the entitled culture around the superfan that defines themselves by their obsessions. First the set up:
The End of Evangelion is reductio ad absurdum, a reduction to the absurd. But that doesn’t really do it credit. It is Hideaki Anno standing naked atop a mountain, at dawn, dick flapping in the wind as he gives the double deuce action to an ocean of fanboys.
And:
The fans hated it. They sent death threats to Anno. Like actual death threats. They didn’t want all this metaphor and meaning. They wanted giant robots; they wanted more Asuka being sexy; they wanted more fighting; they wanted more Rei being strange and aloof and sexy; they wanted Shinji, their avatar and surrogate, to get everything he ever wanted; they wanted more crazy; more pseudo-religious imagery; more about NERV and AT fields and instrumentality and SEAL. They wanted more, so Anno gave them more. He gave them a twisted perversion of everything they wanted. He took their entitled fanboyism and threw it right back in their faces in the least subtle way possible.
Followed up by a particular repetition in the video describing the action of a character clearly analogous to the present situation:
Shinji masturbates to completion over Asuka’s comatose body.2
Ending with the appropriate stinger:
Remember, Shinji is, was and always will be the intended audience surrogate. The opening 10 episodes are practically by the numbers magic boy pilots giant robot story. He was the audience surrogate for the first 10 episodes. He was the audience surrogate for the following 16. Why should he stop now? Why would he stop now? At what point did he stop? At the point where you started feeling icky about yourself?
And then wrap it up with a trite, venom filled, concluding line with full on sarcasm like: “Sound like any group we know?”
No that was terrible. But you get the idea.
Frankly, while Foldable Human did create a video that has directly addressed the gamergate phenomenon and all of its specific particulars, I think his End of Eva video is far more incisive, far more pointed and far more powerful critique. It’s like a needle through the freaking heart of the issue. And everything he talks about happened in the late 90s. This shit has not changed.
But like I said, we’re on the low end of a cycle with all the bullshit,3 which means I actually have to put some effort into this.
Instead of the usual one, there are two ideas from the video I want to comment on.
1. The artistic opportunity offered by the pulp metagenre.
He describes anime as a medium that is “a pulpy format, often cheaply made, heavy on formula, low on critical respect and low on scrutiny.” In this situation, often what gets made is recycled junk that may offer a modicum of entertainment value, maybe enough to be remembered as above the cut, but often is just forgettable as another retread with pallet swapped archetypal characters and stories with the proper nouns altered. However, with these same circumstances, opportunity is constantly offered. Because of all those factors, a work in such a format is offered unprecedented artistic freedom. So long as they hit the main points checklist, who cares about the rest of it. It may not work, but hey it might.
Overall, video games don’t offer such a freedom. FH does mention indie video games while listing off other spheres where such things are possible. I personally think we might have passed that short window of opportunity where it was true. So, take where I’m about to go with this with a grain of salt and consider if we are in fact passed the point where such things can happen.
While mainstream culture looks their noses down on the medium, there are enough marketers and moneyed interests on the high end of the bell curve to make video games some of the most scrutinized products out there. In fact, I think something important would have to change in market viability for pulp masterpiece to become a possibility once again. I have argued elsewhere that the inverse situation also offers the same level of freedom. A work so scrutinized and well known and as a consequence expensive is potentially offered an unprecedented level of artistic freedom, because it will sell gangbusters no matter what, but such a situation still requires cojones to implement. And as GTA, Assassin’s Creed and Call of Duty have shown us, they do not.
Back the smaller scale of things, I feel that while platforms and tools have expanded the possibilities for creators, at the same time the spoiling for choice has somewhat kneecapped artistic freedom. Offer so many options and the mind reverts to the tried and true. Too much choice shuts down our cognitive ability to make one.
Yet, this artistic freedom of the pulp format unabashedly existed back at the dawn of the medium’s first golden age. And from that golden age we granted a specific software term for what is essentially being described here: shovelware. The Wii offered this opportunity back in 07-09 and everyone complained about it. However, no developers really capitalized on the opportunity and simply fulfilled our worst expectations. No developer tried to elevate their shovelware, by simply trying something. Not like anyone was going to complain if they did.
But we did get that experimentation and bumper crop of ideas from cheaply made, bedroom programmed games in the 1980s. Though we don’t call the successful ones of that era shovelware now. We call them all time classics. For crying out loud, the original Metal Gear for the MSX2 was exactly this. Just another shooter on a not too important system that was in the works and handed over to the new guy just so they could say they got it done.
I guess what I’m advocating for in a weird way is to bring back shovelware. It’s not about the indelible auteur pouring their heart into a single work. It’s about the auteur emerging from out of the hundred of people quickly shoveling out stuff. An infinate number of monkeys writing Shakespeare and all that.
2. The entitlement of the audience.
Now this relates somewhat back to the rather snarky original framing of the video above. Putting that aside, however, there is a discussion to be had about audience entitlement that doesn’t descend into harsh misogynistic obsession over what their surrogate and they in turn deserve from women. Hell let’s remove the capitalistic exchange from consideration and think only of what you as a member of the audience are asking of the creator.4 In short, do not waste my time. It comes down to the creator saying to the audience passively saying, “hey I have something to say” and the audience responding, in their own time, “ok, let’s hear it.”
The problem is when you have innumerable creators all saying it at once. It becomes a cacophonous noise of silence as nothing will invariably be heard. So, the creator tries to stand out of the crowd. They give hints to what they want to say or at least the general area of what can be expected. One says “I have a deep treatise on human nature,” another says “I have an exciting tale of heroism and prowess” and other says “you won’t believe this crazy thing that happened to me the other day.” Suddenly, the possibility of informed choice exists, but also the behavior of adjustment of expectations exist as well. Does a member of the audience want to be considered, enthralled or amused? The audience can now fulfill that desire as the know what to look for and where. The audience can also now be deceived.
So where does that line lay?
What is deception? Or rather, what is deceptive?
Advertising promises us a good experience. The work is in fact terrible. We get angry at the work for being bad.
Advertising promises us a rip roaring adventure with fighting and pirates. We are given a deep introspective costume drama with a single scene of a pirate attack. We get angry at the advertisement.
Advertising shows us superspy Solid Snake infiltrating a tanker and taking soldiers protecting an amphibious war machine. Game gives us a blond pretty boy to play as instead. We get angry at the creator.
Advertising shows us just another generic war shooter in a desert, with by then clichéd ironically toned music and pacing to what is understood to be another run and gun cash in. Games betrays everything we understood about modern shooters and confronts us with our own culpability. We praise it.
Advertising shows us nothing about the game, tells us what we see is not in the game or is in anyway about the game and the narrator is cheeky about it. Game lives up to this promise and does it’s own thing about itself. We praise it.
Advertising shows us a game about a girl coming to an empty house and has to figure out where everyone is. Game lives up to everything the advertising said it would. Death threats to anyone who praises it.
A creator gives a paint by number giant fighting robots story with weird subtext, slowly turns subtext into text and concludes story on said note working with all the building blocks it brought up and like it or not transcends the genre conventions it otherwise could have slavishly adhered to. Death threats.
It’s a crapshoot, isn’t it?
What is the audience entitled to? I don’t know anymore. Is the promises made ahead of time important to the actual work or merely as a tempering of the at the time zeitgeist in which it exits only to become meaningless later down the line. Yet, what happens when the prestige and potentially ability to be evaluated later is primed on the initial impression that no amount of recontextualization later can undo due to the notoriety? What of the implicit promises made within the work itself to stake its ground as what the work will consider and is ultimately about? What of convention? Where the ground is so well worn that any advance in a certain direction is considered a specific promise rather than a general one thus limiting the creator to the fanwank and demands of the audience before the creator can or is allowed to assert their own place in the conversation?
What does the audience think it’s entitled to? It’s important and you all should ask yourself that question before critiquing, but after that list. I’m not sure I care. We live in a world where someone goes, “wouldn’t it be cool if…” and then gets supremely pissed when the universe doesn’t later conform to their offhand remark that in no way resembled reality to begin with. Are creators even necessary anymore when we’ve been completely subsumed by the demands of the audience? Do we have a right to complain when a work conforms to said demands of the audience and thus the lowest common denominator for being a work of the lowest common denominator when we ourselves conform to that status? If the idea in any person’s head is, in the end, more important than anything that actually gets produced, what’s the point in experiencing anything outside our own expectations we ourselves create?
The answers to all those questions cannot all be “fuck off.” The audience in part of the conversation, even those parts you don’t like.
- He also did a follow up video, sans puppet, to address some of the ideas the comments brought up regarding localization framing and fan theory. ↩︎
- x5 ↩︎
- I have changed my language to reference it as a cycle rather than earlier comments where I thought of it as a crescendo peak followed by a crash. We’ve gone through at least three of these crescendos and crashes already. This shit is not going anywhere. ↩︎
- Creator is a dubious enough term when it comes to collaborative media like film and animation. It’s even more so in video games, which have production staffs just as big, but also hand over their part of the experience’s creation to the audience by its very nature. We’ll ignore that question for the moment and consider creator as a person/persons/large group of persons and term the group with which they hand over their work and who would play their game as the audience. ↩︎