Super Nerd Sunday Presents: Of Orcs and Men and Four Letter Words!

Frequent, or even occasional or intermittent readers will know that I’m not easily offended by obscenity.  I think it’s an important and effective part of speech and language, crucial to both everyday discourse and certain rhetorical settings – there are occasions where saying “fuck you” is simply the best way to make your point or leave a lasting impression.  Obscenity is protected for a reason – it’s something we fight for our right to use with good cause.  Without obscenity, we are all impoverished.

But there’s a tendency to use obscenity to cushion poor writing.  Bad poetry is perhaps the most profligate culprit: if you’re having trouble writing something interesting, writing something offensive is often a great way to get attention.  If people are forced to sit with your obscenity they’ll find some sort of meaning in it.  There’s also a lot of fiction that relies heavily on obscenity, the way that such luminaries as John Updike did, oftentimes sacrificing things like “plot” and “story” and “character development” to lengthy descriptions of what John Updike – sorry, John Updike’s authorial stand-in character in a place of moderate white empowerment – wishes he could do to the women he sees in his daily life (I still haven’t forgiven him for Toward the End of Time, which edges out The Namesake for “worst book I’ve read written by a Pulitzer Prize winner”).  And, of course, there’s games.

Games are a long standing bastion for bad writing, but I wouldn’t categorically classify them as being prone to the misapplication of obscenity.  Usually games are silly, uneven things with poorly constructed stories and plots and dialogue that sounds like it came out of a freshman screenwriting class.  But recently I began playing Of Orcs and Men, a game I bought because it looked like an interesting concept and, while I’m only about an hour into it so far and thus don’t feel comfortable commenting on it as a product overall, its shown a tendency to pepper its speech with obscenity for the sake of sounding “edgy” or “mature” that I’ve found offputting in the extreme.

It’s not the only game that does this, and I don’t even think it’s the worst culprit, but it’s so brazen and heavy handed with its application of obscenity that it’s eye-roll worthy.  Fuck and shit occur once every four or five words in the opening scenes of the game, and only once characters have been established as “tough guys who don’t give a fuck” does it start to ease off in favor of more developed and flavorful exposition for one of the more interesting fantasy worlds I’ve spent time in of late.  Even then, obscenity creeps in, obvious if only for its incongruity.  It took me a while to figure out just what’s going on in Of Orcs and Men with obscenity, and it’s not, as I mentioned in that previous sentence, trying to make dudes seem more like dudes.

It’s attempting to mimic the speech of soldiers, thieves and “working class heroes.”  It’s trying to make it clear that you’re not engaged in a high fantasy epic that begins far above the tree-line with a set of moral objectives and a narrative about good triumphing over evil.  It’s trying to tell a human story about genocide and fighting a kind of monster that we see in our lives every day.  It’s trying to posit a world where orcs and goblins talk like the guys who fix your car because, shit, they might as well be.  But the obscenity is rooted in such high-toned dialogue, such speechless speech acts, that there’s no real sense of balance: the dialogue never blossoms into dialogue, it’s almost always exposition telling me this or that with a few fucks peppered in.  There are references to a character’s shadowy past in a way that makes it clear everyone but me knows who he is, prepping me for a mid-to-late game revelation of his past that will totally change the way I see him in the game, shifting him from a one-dimensional killing machine to a two-dimensional killing machine.  The actual language that could accomplish this goal is far more subtle, far more prone to silence and pause and expression than what Of Orcs and Men has attempted.  They shot for an admirable mark, but they lost their way, mistaking obscenity for authenticity.  A willingness to use obscenity is crucial in developing authenticity, but its use does not, in and of itself, make dialogue authentic.

This isn’t the worst example of how obscenity is applied in games writing.  It’s just the example that spurred me to write this piece and think of obscenity in this way.  The worst that comes to mind is easily the Grand Theft Auto series, where obscenity is a stand-in for “maturity,” the attempt of a pair of woefully juvenile authors to develop a sense of adulthood in a collection of characters marred not by real, childish flaws but the childish “ain’t it cool” impulses of the American adult in arrested development.

This is the kind of cursing in games we’re used to, the kind that make me deeply sympathetic to Tom Chick’s campaign against unearned obscenity.  This kind of obscenity doesn’t accomplish its goal of making a story more “mature” or “developed” or raising the stakes of a given conversation.  It just forces audience members from outside our cultural collective to phase out the dialogue they don’t want to hear.  It gives people pointing fingers at us for social ills fuel for their campaigns against  video games, evidence that we are, indeed, the bastion of the adult male locked in perpetual childhood.  It presents the world with a touchstone exemplifying everything that’s wrong with games.

Now, I’m not positing that this sort of speech should stop.  It’s protected with good cause, and it always should be protected.  The same way the Westborough Baptist Church’s speech has and should continue to be protected.  Because though it’s dumb, mean spirited, ill founded and conceived of by people who don’t have a terribly well thought out approach to human interaction or life in general, it’s important if only for the dialogue it presents and the example it sets for us of both the strength of the protections afforded us and the idiocy that those protections allow us to aspire to.  There’s something great about being able to use foul language as we like in games, something that warrants protection.  But examples like this, where it’s used for its own sake, solely serve to remind us of why people accuse us of being childish.  And it’s important that we don’t lose sight of that fact, as we continue to mature as a genre and an artistic form.  It’s important that we remain aware of how we present ourselves to our own audience, and to the world at large, because if you want to say fuck, it’s fine, but you better have a fucking good reason to say it.