Here’s a worthy read: The constantly-excellent and terrifyingly smart Jenn Frank recently wrote about her appreciation for horror films, as part of a larger discussion about how we can — and should — still enjoy “problematic” media, and that the subject, imagery and themes of what we like are not always as relevant as the why of our enjoyment.
It’s a topic that really resonates with me. I was recently talking video game stories with a friend (many games have good premises, but few have good stories). My favorite game story is a horror, is as follows:
A man who years ago smothered his ailing wife to death must confront the repressed memory. While she lay dying in her hospital bed he held a pillow over her face, tormented by his disgust at her disease, his fear of human mortality, his sexual frustration, and his resentment as the woman he loved became ever more volatile and unhappy, consumed by self-loathing and guilt at the end of her life.
Haunted by unbearable grief he enters an allegorical purgatory to accept the loss and his role in it — was it a selfish act, a mercy killing, or some combination of both? Can he be forgiven? In the realms of his nightmares he meets emblems of lost innocence, twisted female bodies and his own darkest urges.
I’m talking, of course, about Silent Hill 2, a mournful sojourn through grotesque unsanitary places, rattling locked doors and examining empty nooses. It sprawls opaque amid heavy fog that hides the outlines of unnerving shapes. It is not fun to play.
It is not even necessarily “a good video game,” though the listlessness and tedium settles on you like an immersive migraine, and the clumsiness of the controls evokes an appropriate ugliness, powerlessness. Its unintentional flaws ultimately reinforce the experience, and that the player is constantly uncomfortable, asphyxiated by mechanical frustration and leaden anxiety is apt.
It is problematic, featuring faceless, sexualized nurses who hobble jarringly in your direction, mannequins made of two female pelvises screwed together, flailing legs. It even features what most players have construed as a rape scene.
To say I enjoy Silent Hill 2 or derive pleasure from it would not be quite right, but I consider it among the best and most interesting games ever made. I love the ways it offends me.
Jenn’s article also made me think of the strong attraction I felt several years ago to some incredibly problematic Japanese eroge and other crude internet sex games — in these, themes of nonconsent, underage participants and abuse were wildly prevalent, often without meaningful narrative rationale.
Plenty of them were silly, embarrassing, low, indefensible, but I “liked” them, in a sense, anyway. I wasn’t aroused by them, but they piqued me to ask questions of myself, of others, of games. Part of why I started writing about video games whatsoever in the first place was because I wanted to know why. They were the start of something, for me.
Back then I often tripped indelicately into rationalizing sexism, rationalizing, rationalizing, because I wanted to develop some kind of objective defense to explain my interest rather than to explore what certain themes and dynamics in the context of a video game might mean to me personally. My writing back then was definitely problematic, but it was the start of something.
As Jenn says, asking why of ourselves — and importantly of the media we consume — can sometimes be a far more useful exercise than asking in a blanket way whether something is “okay” or “allowed” in general. Can be. I certainly spend plenty of time making fun of people trying to mount noble defenses of breast physics in fighting games in the name of art, and I probably will do that again.
Even though as a less-mature critic I once did the very same thing. Yeah. I once liked seeing an excessive physicality in fighting games, a tangible fleshiness. It is not the kind of thing for which one can mount a rational defense, because nothing exists in a vacuum and the culture of commercial games has a lot of problems. I’m now more concerned with those problems than I used to be, having seen the extent to which my friends, my medium, my self are victimized by them. But even I’ve been problematic. We are all problematic a little, sometimes. It’s the why that matters.
In healthy contexts power imbalances can be of crucial importance to sex and self-expression. So can difficulty, discomfort, and the role exchanges that happen within trusting relationships — whether that’s a relationship between a person and a person, or a relationship between a player and a designer. In this fascinating collaborative piece that I think must join the permanent canon of game crit must-reads, Porpentine and Merritt Kopas talk about erotics of video games, and play as a safe place for shame, vulnerability and darkness, among other deeply human things.
Both links this week come by way of Critical Distance; most good links generally do, so make sure you give ‘em a shout from time to time.
As regards the header of this post, the phrase “holy dread” comes from Richard Hofmeier (Cart Life)’s wonderfully-apt description of Porpentine’s Howling Dogs, and for me personally I find it resonant for my relationship to Silent Hill 2.
During GDC earlier this year, Hofmeier told me of Howling Dogs: “I don’t want to say that it’s fun or I love it… it’s instilled me with what I call ‘holy dread… It’s a very special kind of territory. Pragmatic, mechanical games can’t touch that kind of territory.”