Flying Gogoplata

Though I don’t intend my writing to solely to follow Clive Thompson, he’s written on quite a few interesting topics. His most recent Wired commentary criticizes the enormous lack of so-called “B” video games, a criticism I can’t help but take issue with.

Primarily, the definition is off.

Why isn’t there such a thing as “B game” — a game so bad it’s good?

Certainly, the phenomenon exists in every other form of entertainment. Everyone loves B movies — films that are so atrociously acted and scripted that they become perversely enjoyable. There’s also plenty of B television. (For two seasons I religiously followed Pam Anderson’s show V.I.P., mostly for the odd joy of tallying up the clichés and acting so wooden it was nearly Brechtian.) The pleasure of B entertainment is pure, narcotic-level irony — the peculiar joy that comes from seeing something that is trying to be good but failing on every level.

Something that is a B is still really good. B-Movies I think have gotten this strong association with awful movies with cult followings. It seems to me that a B-Movie is more generally a film that misses the “A” grade, but still has very strong redeeming qualities (hence the name). It isn’t a masterpiece of cinema, and can fail or miss the mark at one or several levels, but is nonetheless enjoyable. This can be (and often is) because the trainwreck is enjoyable in an unintentional manner, but it doesn’t have to be. Sometimes the production budget leaves the presentation wanting while still having an engaging story (Serenity). Sometimes the narrative and dialogue can be clichéd and predictable but still have enormously endearing characters (My Name is Earl). The flaws are obvious, but forgivable in the totality of the experience.

Given this definition, I think it is easy to see a great many games as B-Games. I would argue that very few of even the best games are actually A level, primarily because there are slightly more levels on which to evaluate games. The evaluation modality Thompson highlights is interaction; most games that master the interaction and gameplay typically get an A grade so long as the presentation is reasonable. Most of these games also have awfully cheesy and clichéd narratives, story arcs, and characters though. They have really really enjoyable total experiences, but are by no means masterful in their totality. Even some of the most well reviewed and received games, like Halo for instance, suffer from this flaw. Other games can’t afford or don’t reach high presentation quality but are nonetheless fun. Presentation is even more problematic because it’s such a moving target in the video game medium.

Even when setting the bar a little lower, there are still plenty of B-Games out there. Let’s look at publisher Electronic Arts for example. They often produce those movie licensed games that are said to sell regardless of their quality. But they often also produce games like Return of the King which are just good enough. They’re a little lacking in substance, but for the most part are pretty fun. Aside from the EA Sports arm, EA has quite of business of making mediocre to B level games, a plausible result of their scale. They have the resources to make a LOT of games but must walk the corporate balancing act of keeping production costs as low as possible, pushing quality down, while also keeping revenue as high as possible, pushing quality up (you might recognize this process as profit maximization). This produces throngs of games that are more than playable, but less than stellar.

Thompson does, however, raise an interesting question about the importance of interaction and gameplay. For the experience of a game to be enjoyable for its interactive audience it must necessarily be usable; it must be playable. A poorly implemented game mechanic or control schema will more than likely break the total experience irrecoverably. There are plenty of games with mediocre to flawed to sub-perfect mechanics, but it is difficult for me to imagine a game that has a broken mechanic and is still redeemable.

Every so often I like to think of the various links my mind makes among different ideas. Sometimes they’re arbitrary, sometimes they are supposed to be there. Here are a couple I got from 300.

When I hear Spartan, I think of two things. I think of the legendary Greek citizen-warriors that were so awesomely depicted in 300. There size and stature were massively depicted in this film, easily 6′5″ at a minimum. And then there was Xerxes who towered over them, making him easily 8-10 feet tall. This massive size and stature was about the same for the depiction of the UNSC cyborg warrior, the SPARTAN-II. The link here is intentional. The SPARTANS of the Halo universe are an obvious allusion to the Greeks. Even in their story arcs there are similarities. The Fall of Reach is often compared to the Battle of Thermopylae, and the united forces of the Covenant to the many nations of the Persian Empire.

The wolf imagery used in the film is obvious foreshadowing to the tactics of the Pass of Thermopylae. But the imagery goes beyond tactics. It is used as a unifying image, in the pack mentality of the Spartan Hoplites and their loud unison bark-howl battle cry. I can’t help but think of my homies at the Wolf House, and our tightly knit pack. The best of us have often referenced the Battle of Thermopylae when playing Assassins.

I get the impression that many of you either will or do hate this movie. I got the same impression coming out of A Hisotory of Violence as the Wheeler crowd booed the end credits. The response wasn’t quite as intense in Wheeler at the end of 300, but there was definitely a grumbling sensation among the audience.

Again, in this case, I loved the movie. I was, however, happy for the opportunity to see it for free. Had I paid 10 dollars to see it, I may have left disappointed by the stark difference in my expectation of the film and my experience of it. Having seen it for free, I will happily pay 10 dollars to see it again.

The movie is melodramatic, over-the-top, cheesy, for lack of a better word. And for the first 30 minutes of the film I almost forgot what kind of movie I was watching. The hype surrounding the film made me expect something different from the genre I enjoy so much. This is a comic book emulated on film. This is exactly why I loved both A History of Violence and Sin City. The violence is disgusting and visceral. The sex is gratuitous. The presentation and narration are excessive. But we are not dealing with realism in this world. We’re not even dealing with fantasy. This is purposefully stylized. This is the world of legend at its best, so riddled with holes and bias and half-truths but holy hell does it make you wish you could be among men like that. No men like that exist. But that’s the point.

In light of my own impressions and the criticisms of others, I think the film’s presentation is its greatest asset and biggest alienator. It is clearly stylized in my opinion. The sepia-toned tints, the graininess, the massive people, the massive beasts, the grotesque deformities, the God-men, the Warrior Poets all speak to a stylized legend translated to film through the template of Frank Miller and Lynn Varley. But through the eyes of others I can see it differently. It seems somewhere within the pseudo realism of Alexander and the absolute fantasy of Lord of the Rings in its presentation, neither genre quite doing this film justice, and conversely with this film doing no justice to either genre. In Sin City the stylization was obvious. It was a firm combination of comic book and film noir that was very hard to miss, making the more melodramatic elements more accessible and easier to swallow. I have found that people who hated Sin City also didn’t get that it was stylized. They took it too seriously. On the other end of the spectrum is A History of Violence which takes as its source a gritty realism heightened by mafia drama and comic book. The stylization there was much more subtle, and a lot of the elements of that style were lost on many people. The few people I know that enjoyed the movie loved that it payed such true homage to its source genre.

300 clearly falls between these two markers, but it probably falls a bit closer to the latter side. I was asked by a friend “if you take out the comic book element, would you still consider it a good movie?” Reflecting on that contraposative, I think that’s an unfair question to ask. It is possible that had I heard nothing about this movie and had gone to see it naïvely, that the specifics of its stylization would have been lost on me. I think however, that in most cases I would have caught on fairly quickly that it was a comic book movie. The other unfair part of that question is that there is no way to remove the source and inspiration of the film from its evaluation. It is what it is because of its source and would be a completely different film without it. The film, in fact, must be evaluated in consideration of its source or else all the artfulness of it is lost.

But its more than just a film emulating a graphic novel. It is very much a film emulating legend. A legend is a story about the people we would hope to be in the situations we would hope to never be. There are no real people in a legend, only heroes and villains, the idolatrous poles of our moral spectrum. There is no complexity in a legend, no gray areas, there is nothing to deconstruct or analyze. It is a simplified model of the world with absolute rights and wrongs. There is nothing real about a legend except maybe the names of the people and the places. The tale is entirely constructed.

But it has a purpose. In each of these grand images we know that we house these feats of the body. We don’t wish to be, we are 6.5 foot, perfectly sculpted masters of force and precision and despite my obvious flab and horrid hand-eye coordination, I can leap 10 feet off the back of my comrade and hurl a mortal spear at hordes in front of me. But more than that, I know I can stand against a God and the world’s population and claim victory in my slaughter because I fight with my clan. I know this by extension of the tales of these humans to myself.

This genre of film and this film in particular makes excellent use of body from its source material. Comic books have always used extremes in body size, position, movement, and expression to convey in single cells motion, physical feats, emotion. These extremes are necessary for the static media, but creates something much larger than life. These images transfer very well into film. I am both a fighter and an actor (though I am admittedly good at neither) and every time I see a good fight or battle sequence in a film I see a very highly choreographed dance that is so artful in its planning and execution that it successfully feels like an actual fight. It has a perfection even in its carefully planned noise that emulates the image perfectly. In the case of this film, no actual fighting or body movement is emulated, but the stretches of imagination, the body image, the motor patterns that seem plausible in our minds if we could only make full use of the flesh and bone machines we occupy. These heightened spaces are not the world of realism, but they tie our humanity to the best of our collective qualities.

I make no attempt to convince any of you to ignore the cheese. I certainly make no attempt to convince you to like this movie. I do, however, implore you to embrace its style and heightened presentation and find the purpose in it. Otherwise you’ll have wasted your money and missed a very good movie.