The game opens with a man barking orders at me. He sees me pining over a picture of my ex,
acting all sappy, acting all sad. He
tells me to snap out of it, that there's some space-marine-ing to do, and off
we go, to the stars, to fight things and people and stuff. There's no hint of any affection in this man,
for me, for his friends, for the institutions he represents, or for the woman
in the picture I was pining over, the picture that he confiscated, the picture
he will later take from me as he makes out with the woman in that picture, hard,
in just about two hours game time.
Kris Straub, in his dissection of Creepypasta memes, touches
on an interesting consideration to keep in mind when discussing digital media
and amateur art: some art objects are not intended for consumption. Some objects are produced for catharsis, for
practice, for self-exploration, and we sometimes see them by happenstance
(Kharms' Notebooks constitute a more
literary example of this phenomena) or as the result of an attempt to document
a consideration of how fringe art takes shape (Mark Borchardt's Coven, better known as the subject of
the superlative American Movie, is a
cinematic demonstration of this concept).
These objects often function erratically. They often have poor or lackluster writing,
but often expose something about their creators, a raw need to express
something that, without these objects, would go unsaid. In Coven,
artistic frustration bubbles to the surface.
Kharms' Notebooks engage with
meandering considerations of process and publication, while obliquely engaging
with endemic censorship in the early days of the Soviet Union. You can look at these works as art objects,
presenting "content" that can be dissembled by readers, but if you
try to pick apart their craft, the seams quickly become apparent, and, as a
result, they might seem lacking in that department. Kharms' work was largely assembled and
published posthumously, and Borchardt's film, while undeniably heartfelt,
developed in a manner so dramatic that the process easily outweighs the shine
of the project. Even so, there's
something to be found by investigating these objects and discerning within them
how they, as art objects, separate themselves from more polished or complete
art objects, intended for consumption: it's worthwhile to consider the process
that went into these works, and how their existence as objects outside of a
consumptive media framework speaks to the mediums they exist within as a whole.
Dead Space 3
doesn't have the benefit of existing within this fringe framework. When I talk about how Dead Space 3 feels like something a teenager wrote to get over his
girlfriend dating a jock, I can't look at it with the same misty eyes that
Straub assesses "Jeff the Killer" with. While it's clear that whoever wrote Dead Space 3 wanted to engage with some
sort of deeply personal emotional experience they're not entirely finished
processing, they had the misfortune of doing so in a video game, intended for
popular consumption and, as a result, I'm left looking at the story they're
trying to tell as part of a product that cost millions of dollars to produce,
that you expect people to spend hours and hours playing and resolving and, when
all is said and done, you expect people to quietly investigate through both
reflection and replay. Dead Space 3 exists to be sold and
consumed by a general audience, and yet its story is as bad as anything I wrote
as a teenager. In fact, a friend recently
sent me some fantasy fiction she wrote at the age of 15, which depicted a better
conceived world with a longer history and more articulate consideration of
character and function than Dead Space 3. But, despite this, Dead Space 3 was widely praised.
While its story was occasionally mentioned as a detractor the game was,
by and large, celebrated. I'm not saying
it shouldn't be - it's tremendously fun.
Even after finishing it last week, I want to go back into space to clean
up some ships and be a stellar-monster-janitor again for a while. But there's something problematic about the
occurrence of its writing, of the fact that an entire development team thought
that it was okay to release a game with streaming plot holes, arbitrary plot
action, and weird adolescent emotional politics saturating its every line of
dialogue, something that speaks to a more troubling an unnerving trend within
video games as a genre, as a medium.
As the plot winds up and the team of survivors begins to
winnow down in typical horror movie fashion, I find myself emerging on a snowy,
windswept cliff side. Waiting for me
there is the military man who has started dating my ex. He's there with the man he was trying to
rescue me from in the beginning of the game.
As it turns out, he's been betraying the team the whole time! Never mind that he's the last, ostensibly
loyal, member of the group fighting the man who he's been trying to rescue me
from, never mind that he's literally had a dozen or so opportunities to kill me
up to this point, never mind that he has, at this point, become trapped on a
planet where me and my crew, using a shuttle craft, just barely managed to walk
away from a crash landing where this other man, the obviously hostile one, has
just landed an entire army with relatively little bother. Damnit, he's upset that my ex is kind of okay
with me being around, trying to save the world, after he brought me here to
possibly save the world, and he's going to keep her from getting back with me
any way he can, or something. When I
shoot him in a few minutes, nothing significant will shift in the plot. My space-ex and I will get back
together. I'll continue cleaning
monsters out of ancient ruins. It'll be
good fun. The plot will be less than
ancillary. It will be an active
detractor from my game experience.
The intellectual gymnastics required to find logic this plot
framework are ridiculous. The level of
seriousness I just had to commit to potentially decode meaning from the action
of Dead Space 3 thoroughly outweighs
the apparent concern its writers had for character motivation or plot or
continuity of action. The underlying
emotion, the feeling of loss and confusion, is apparent, but nothing else is really
there: if this was a song, it would be a collection of clichés under-toned by a
marvelously constructed series of bridges.
But this is the plot of a well received, critically acclaimed game. This is the story that we thought of as, at
times, poor, but for the most part, serviceable. Someone was paid money to write this. They received royalties when I purchased this
game, most likely, and will continue to receive royalties when people purchase
this game in the future.
I don't have anything against amateurs receiving pay for art,
in fact, it's something I aspire towards, but this is a little ridiculous. The fact that amateurish, poorly constructed,
completely unstructured bullshit doesn't just pass for game, but gets funded by
large game companies, even celebrated by the critical apparatus surrounding
games, makes my blood boil. Games, as a
medium, don't need to reflect poor or absentminded writing. The adolescent phase of the medium is, by and
large, over. Nowadays, the mainstream
has proven that no writing is be better than poor or lackluster writing. Consider minimalist narrative, or the
spontaneous, player driven narrative of Rogues: these games don't suffer from a
lack of writing, they benefit by allowing players to generate their own
narrative and inhabit this mitigating story-space as it unfolds. Story driven writing in games, with the
influx of writers like Ken Levine, Erik Wolpaw, Chet Falsiek, and Sean
Vannaman, is no longer being held to its Carmack-and-Romero-era standards. We expect games to have serviceable plots at
least. Even games with writing that
doesn't pop off the page are expected to make some measure of sense with their
internal logic. Games that really shoot
themselves in the foot, like Mass Effect
3, draw the ire of critics, even if they manage some nice, quippy dialogue
and a few enjoyable scenes. But these critiques
are problemized by critics ill-suited to discuss the problems of poorly
constructed narratives; many critics seem uniquely ill-suited to discuss the
finer points of written language in general, in an especially infuriating
twist.
Dead Space 3 is a
fine game with a terrible story and poor writing throughout. It's indicative of a trend on the part of EA
towards generating play-products over narrative-products, which isn't a
terrible thing, if it can just let itself disconnect from narrative completely in
its AAA projects. What's more troubling
is the manner in which it represents the acceptability of, not just mediocre,
but straight up poor storytelling in a medium that is, on its surface, all
about inhabiting a story-space. It makes
me long for days of yore, when protagonists were silent, days as distant in memory
as the first Dead Space game, where
Isaac Clarke had the sense to never open his mouth, and the writers had the
courage to kill off his girlfriend and keep her dead, instead of enacting weird
self-effacing wish fulfillment in the 5th act.
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