Mythic Dimensions: Digital Technology and Performative Art

 

Recently, I went to go see Peter Jackson and Weda Digital's latest opus The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey in theatres. I enjoyed it, which should say something given what it takes to actually drag me *to* a movie theatre, let alone appreciate whatever's onscreen. I'm not going to talk about the movie itself here though: I'm far from a Tolkien fan so I have precious little investment in the plot or characters. Basically I thought it was an entertaining, if clunky and painfully padded, children's fantasy movie frequently weighed down by its desire to canonize itself with the fundamentally tonally incongruous Lord of the Rings trilogy. In other words it's just about a perfect film adaptation of the book.

No, what I primarily wanted to talk about is the other big thing that's been fueling discussion over The Hobbit for the past few months: The fact it was shot entirely in 3D and a “High Frame Rate” 48 frames per second (HFR). This has apparently made a great deal of people very angry, leading critics whose opinions I would otherwise tend to respect to make stupidly sweeping statements about “The Death of Cinema”. I'll deal with this argument a little later on, but for the moment let's focus on why someone would even want to shoot a movie this way in the first place.

For those who might not know, traditional movies are filmed in 24 frames per second. This has been the industry standard for, well, just about as long as there's been an industry. Now, the human eye processes information about the world at 60 frames per second, which means movies, and really any medium that is descended in some way from cinema (such as television, though crucially not typically video games) plays at a significantly slower speed then what we're used to in Real Life. Choosing to shoot a movie at a higher frame rate means filmmakers can by definition convey much more, and much more nuanced, visual information than was previously possible, meaning their movies will look much more naturalistic. Indeed, in a video blog about the choice to shoot the Hobbit trilogy in 3D/HFR, Peter Jackson described the experience, in the words of a pre-release screening group, to be as if the screen at the back of the theatre had been removed and replaced with a window into Middle Earth.

Jackson's comment reminded me of some things Shigeru Miyamoto had said in the past about the Legend of Zelda series. According to Miyamoto, the original Zelda game on the NES was originally built around the idea of a fantasy world inside a desk drawer, which makes a lot of sense if you stop and think about it: Imagine opening up your drawers and looking down at Hyrule and all those tiny little sprites-It's a wonderfully imaginative and very typically Miyamoto way of phrasing ideas. The original Zelda even helped to popularize a top-down perspective for action RPGs. Coincidentally enough, a year prior to the release of The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, Nintendo released a handheld console built around the concept of portable, glasses-free 3D video games, and one of the first marquee titles on that system was a 3D conversion of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time.

In a previous post I've already argued for the use of stereoscopic 3D in video games in strictly technical terms. To briefly summarise my earlier argument, I feel stereoscopic 3D, via the reintroduction of naturalistic depth perception, can help bring back some of our innate ability to orient ourselves in our surroundings that polygonal games lost due to their lack of kinesthesia and fixed, flat perspectives. This would prevent things like the troublesome platforming in Mirror's Edge and the godawful camera in Super Mario 64 (or indeed any other polygonal platformer to come in its wake: Despite a generation of gamers becoming accustomed to it, the problem's never gone away). Here though, I'm arguing from strictly aesthetic ground, because if anything felt like a literal window into a fantasy world it was The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D running at full tilt with the 3D slider up all the way. 

 

Ocarina of Time 3D is one of the most visually stunning video games I've ever played and remains possibly the best showcase for the 3DS' kit to date. Hyrule has an unmistakeable depth and weight here, and running out onto the field at dawn as you shield your eyes from the realistic sun rays glinting above the horizon is a powerfully vivid experience that can be described as magical. Like so much about 3D, the beauty of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D comes subtly and in small moments, like sunrise on Hyrule Field or using the built-in gyroscope to aim Link's bow, a trick which really gives the sense the game exists in an actual place that's just on the other side of the 3DS, or perhaps more accurately a place that exists *within* the 3DS. It lives up to Miyamoto's pitch for the series like absolutely no other game in the series has: It truly feels like you're holding the gateway to a fantastic realm in your hands.

Despite how vivid and clever this effect was and how it was clearly designed to hold up the original guiding tenant for the series, you know what *didn't* happen during my playthrough of The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D? I didn't trick myself into thinking I was Link trekking through Hyrule. I never forgot I was playing a video game. Likewise, when I saw The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey in 3D/HFR I never forgot I was watching a movie. Apparently, if you listen to some critics, this is a major failing on the parts of both works and both Weda Digital and Grezzo should be absolutely ashamed of themselves. Indeed, this even seems to run contrary to Peter Jackson's own statements on the matter. Thing is, the way I see it both Jackson and the film critics are barking up entirely the wrong tree. Since the argument against 3D, and now HFR, is the most fully formed and bandied about the most in film critic circles, Jackson is most likely talking in marketing buzzwords and video game critics seem to mostly be parroting film critics (as opposed to gamers, who seem to be mostly being reactionary and opposed to any sort of change) it's the film critic version of the argument I'll focus on responding to.

Film critics seem to be having a bit of an identity crisis from where I stand. On the one, hand, there is, as always, a push and a desire for things to be as “realistic” as possible, hence the popularity of dark, anti-romantic and “cinematic” filmmaking techniques (see a similar trend in video games as publishers and developers race to improve graphics technology at all costs to make games look as much like movies as possible at the expense of everything else). On the other hand, there is a contingent of cinephiles who seriously argue that movies ought to be watched in a “dreamlike reverie” and only the combination of 35mm film and a 24 frames per second frame rate will achieve this. I guess we're supposed to be completely lost and overwhelmed by the rapturous cinematic spectacle of the director's vision...somehow...and anything else is nothing short of blasphemy. I've never experienced anything remotely resembling what these critics are proselytizing with any movie I've seen, but as someone who doesn't really enjoy movies all that much maybe I'm not the best person to be talking about this subject.

Even so though I find a lot of problems in this argument, especially as it relates to 3D/HFR. There is a belief that 3D is nothing more than a distraction and the enhanced detail of HFR makes everything look unnaturally fast and “hyper-real”. There is a legitimate technical argument to be made against the use of 3D in movies (see this article from the Chicago Sun Times), but this really isn't it and at least for me personally, 3D has done nothing but enhance my enjoyment of anything I've seen it used in in recent years. In regards to HFR though, rebutting this argument requires a great deal of technical explanation and knowledge about how eyes and the visual centre of the brain works. So it's a good thing Tested already did that then as I am neither an engineer nor a cognitive scientist (in brief, those bemoaning HFR's “hyper-realness” are frankly deluding themselves. Even the creator of Adobe Photoshop agrees with me).

As for the “dreamlike reverie” part of the argument, this actually gets at something that's a bit of a touchy subject for me. See, the flip side of this argument is that anything with an enhanced clarity of detail gets a negative reputation for looking “campy” and “theatrical” (say, a TV show), as opposed to being “cinematic” and “realistic” (like an old movie) which is, apparently, better. My good friend and colleague Phil Sandifer has already looked at this argument in the context of the switch from television being shot on film to television being shot on video tape here and here. When put this way then, the big film critic objection to 3D/HFR seems to actually be that the enhanced detail provided by the new digital technology breaks artifice and suspension of disbelief. In other words, it makes the movie look like a movie.

In The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey, most critics I read yelled and screamed about how HFR made Rivendell look like a Matte painting (which it was), the interior shots look like movie sets (which they were) the lighting look unnaturally harsh (which all movie lights have to be due to the nature of being movie lights) and the prosthetics look like rubber and plastic headpieces (which I shouldn't have to explain). This is apparently a Bad Thing. It's also an argument I simply cannot get behind: The Hobbit doesn't look “hyper-real”, it looks just plain *real*. This is demonstrably and provably what a movie set looks like, period. Putting aside the troubling and I sincerely hope self-evidently false possibility that some film critics don't know what a movie set looks like, this leaves the argument that movies shouldn't look staged because of a need to be “realistic” or, alternatively, to uphold some lofty ideal about the Magic of Cinema™. I've always been opposed to the idea fiction has to be representationalist at all costs. To be blunt I think the fixation on making things look “cinematic” and “realistic” has been one of the most dangerous and distasteful trends in visual media and it irks me more than a little to see things assigned objective value because based on how cleverly they hide the fact they're make believe.

Because this is the thing: Movies and video games, despite what most people seem to want to believe, are not real things. They are facades; storytellers playing pretend. They've never been anything else, and they will never be anything else. Trying to cast them otherwise does nothing except fool people into thinking filmmakers who are being stupidly crass and hegemonic are actually representing reality, thus continuing to perpetuate harmful stereotypes and lead to dangerous assumptions such as thinking the reactionary and truly reprehensible Lincoln is actually a historically accurate biopic or that romantic comedies are an accurate representation of the way relationships and people in general work. The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time 3D and The Hobbit: An Unexpected Journey are not windows into Hyrule or Middle Earth and they were never going to be: They're windows into a crude technological facsimile of what Weda Digital and Grezzo *imagined* those fantasy worlds to be like. Fictional worlds do not exist in and of themselves: They are imaginary spaces made real by the interaction of readers, writers and the works meant to act as representations of them.

Possibly my favourite video game of all time is The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim. As a series, The Elder Scrolls has the intriguingly paradoxical reputation of being a trailblazer in immersive world building and for pushing the limits of game technology to such an extent each and every game is plagued by an incalculable number of glitches and bugs that range from hilarious to game-breaking and are frequently both at once. One could make the argument Skyrim fails as a work of fiction because the constant technical problems take players out of the game and it's world and keep players from getting “lost” in the dreamlike reverie, but I would sternly disagree: Never once have the glitches in Skyrim caused me to enjoy the game less as a work. Sure, I get upset if it randomly crashes and deletes hours of progress or spontaneously decides to make my save file unusable forcing me to start the whole game again, but I accept that as part of what Skyrim is because it posits a fantasy world that could only exist as a video game. Inexplicably levitating mammoths and farmers falling through the ground are as much a part of the world of Skyrim as dragons, wizards and Blakean Eldritch Abomination Dwarves. Skyrim is a game that embraces being a video game and all that comes with it, and that includes the glitches Skyrim is a game world in every sense of the word, but that's a topic to which we must return at a later date.

I have no problem accepting the fact that my movies and games are actually made by people with technology and imagination instead of Real Places I can escape to that magically come into being out of nothingness. In fact I think that's marvelous, because it just helps me get to know the creators more *as people* rather then aloof Gods. I celebrate the death of artifice instead of bemoan it because, in its dying throws, it reminds us that art, and all art by definition, is performative. Fiction and art cannot represent reality; they can't even be a 100% accurate depiction of any individual creator's vision. At best, all they can do is provide a brief, blurry glimpse into the minds of those who helped usher it into being or strike a chord with individual readersXplayersXaudience members to form an entirely unique kind of meaning.

In a famous and frequently circulated interview (well, comparatively so given the participants) philosopher Avital Ronell, a personal role model of mine, though she'd probably resent that label, flatly rejects the title of “Writer” or “Creator”, preferring instead to call herself a “writing being” or “secretary of the phantom”. For Ronell, writing is not something one, in the manner of a patriarchal God, makes happen and wills into existence. Rather, it can be more accurately described as the act of taking dictation from an incomprehensible ethereal force and trying one's hardest to throw up a facsimile that in some way could be construed as a crude representation or simulacrum of the original set of ideas. One does not “Write”, one is possessed and consumed by “writing”. Ronell compares those who write to drug addicts: Figures imbued with a manner of unreliability and social stigma who nonetheless have a grasp over a unique perspective and insight.

I love this description for a number of reasons: Firstly, as someone who identifies as a similar “writing being”, I can honestly and confidently state this is exactly what writing feels like for at least me personally. Secondly, it's a great argument for the inherent performativity of all forms of personal expression. Indeed, interviewer D. Diane Davis even uses that exact term when referring to Ronell's breakout work The Telephone Book, a piece designed to invoke static noise, contradictory information and the deconstruction and destruction of the book itself as a concept. A play doesn't represent reality and doesn't even try to: Its actors and stage sets are meant to *stand in* for things and situations the audience is familiar with and the real erudition comes from the interaction of all the pieces working together to create a larger, weirder whole. Just as Ronell says, any kind of creative endeavor, be it a book, a movie, a literary text, a journalistic piece, an ethnography, a video game or a blog post, works the same way, no matter how much certain people might wish to pretend otherwise. Personally, I find that a far more fascinating and inspiring concept then the idea our works of art and fiction spring magically fully-formed in the manner of Athena from the skulls of patriarchal Godlike Creators whose Works and Actions must be respected and worshiped in the same manner.

I think of all forms of modern media video games have the biggest potential to emphasize and reinforce this fact, which is part of the reason I'm bothered so much by the language from certain developers and critics that games need to be more “cinematic”. Due to the irreducible factor of player agency, by definition there's no way a video game can force a passive narrative or specific experience onto its audience, despite the efforts of some developers to do exactly that (but that's perhaps another post). Games are fundamentally set up as dynamic interactions between multiple parties at a very overt, literal level, so this performative thread shines through the brightest with them. For a good example of how developers can write this back into the text, let's look at one of the best spokesperson characters for games-as-plays around: Princess Peach Toadstool. Yes, it's once again time to do one of my signature hyper-redemptive readings of a character or text either nobody likes or has nobody has ever heard of.

But how, my indignant readers wail, do I think I can redeem Princess Peach of all gaming characters, the poster child for sexist, stock damsels-in-distress? Well, I respond, it's actually quite simple once you realise what the Super Mario games actually are. The common perception of the Mario games, most famously and succinctly articulated by Yahtzee Croshaw in articles such as this one, is that despite the original Super Mario Bros. (or Super Mario Bros. 3 depending on your preference) being an indisputable classic, it's a tepid and unchanging series that has somehow managed to last over 25 years telling the same basic story and rehashing the same basic game over and over again with absolutely no variation. Also, Peach is reprehensible because all she does is look pretty and get stupidly kidnapped, serves no purpose and lacks any personality or characterization, which would be a valid complaint were any of it actually true. The Mario series' lack of so-called gameplay innovation is one thing and an argument to be examined another day (and one I think might have merit, at least as it pertains to the games of the past decade or so), but Yahtzee's dead wrong when it comes to plot and here's why.

First of all, I'd mention that despite my universal disdain for any kind of kidnapping plot, King Bowser actually had a somewhat acceptable motivation for kidnapping Princess Peach in the first Super Mario Bros. and one most modern critics seem to have forgotten. See, what no-one remembers anymore is that in the story printed in the original manual, it's stated Princess Peach is an extremely powerful sorceress, possibly the most powerful in the entirety of the Mushroom Kingdom, and the *only* one with the power necessary to push back the Koopa invasion force and secure the land. Naturally, Bowser wants to seal her away where she can't do any damage so he can stomp over the Mushroom Kingdom uninhibited. Frankly, Peach is the one who saves the world in that game: You, Mario and Luigi, are just there to give her a hand and clear a path for her. Even if the plot of Super Mario Bros. made sense though, that doesn't explain or excuse all of Bowser's subsequent kidnappings of her, does it? Well, no it *wouldn't*, if he had done it again, as I'm inclined to argue Bowser never kidnapped Peach a second time, and even the first time is debatable.

Shigeru Miyamoto is not a hack writer. I mean I really don't think I should have to state this, but a lot of critical readings of Nintendo games seem to operate with this as an implicit fundamental premise for some reason. Even in the more recent games where he has little-to-no creative input, he still has to sign off on the game and let the developers know they're being somewhat loyal to his original vision. They have to be meeting his expectations to some extent, and unless he's a terrible writer there must be something more going on here. And indeed there is: Look *very* closely at the Super Mario games that came after the original, starting with the US version of Super Mario Bros 2 (A.K.A. Super Mario USA), the next game Miyamoto had a major hand in. The story is, as is well known, meant to be a dream, but the game opens up with a *curtain call* and you select your character by *shining a spotlight* on them. Super Mario Bros. 3 takes this to the logical extreme by not only having the title screen be a big stage with a curtain and props, but the level design itself looks like it's been built by stage hands, as there are conspicuous amounts of bolted-on scenery and scaffolding and Mario and Luigi even “exit, stage right” whenever the level ends. The Super Nintendo games Super Mario WorldXSuper Mario Bros. 4 and Yoshi's Island take a slightly different tack by opening with fairy-tale narration, but the main point is still there: These games are stories being retold via the act of playing them.

Not a spotlight. I think it happens in the SNES version. Still, picture is worth 4.532 words.

\

I think it should be obvious what the logical conclusion to all this is: The Super Mario games are plays, and Mario, Luigi, Bowser and yes, Peach, are part of a travelling acting troupe. Peach just happens to be comparatively badly typecast, or maybe it's an attempt to retell the same story many times with subtle variations as a kind of metaphor. This isn't, I hasten to add, solely my interpretation: It's a fan theory gaining significant momentum online (to the point even Cracked mentioned it) and has even been confirmed in a statement from Miyamoto-san himself. This also handily explains the various Mario spinoff games and why Mario and Bowser play tennis and go kart racing together when they're not at opposite ends of a plan for world domination (incidentally, this revelation, paired with the working-class origins of the characters, leads to the intriguing conclusion Miyamoto is likening Mario's acting troupe to William Shakespeare's. Do with that what you will). This reading does seem to hold: If we look at just about any Mario game made since the original five or so, we see that curtains, stages and retelling stories have become fundamental parts of the series, not to mention the infamous fact it's difficult to read the Mario and Donkey Kong from the original Donkey Kong as being the same characters from Super Mario Bros., Donkey Kong Country and their successors. Obviously they're not: They were playing different roles in a different play at that point.

To return to the main thrust of this post, which was how high-end digital technology like 3D and HFR enhances performativity in media, let's look at the most recent Mario game as of this writing (or at the least the most recent one I've played): Paper Mario: Sticker Star on the 3DS. The case for HFR is fairly straightforward and self-demonstrating in my opinion, something I feel I've sufficiently justified and not as relevant to video games, so we'll talk about 3D here. The Paper Mario spinoff series has always driven home the theatrical production reading harder than other Mario series, and this new game is no exception and clearly delights in having stereoscopic 3D to play with. Mario can move in, on and around various bits of scenery, which can be knocked over, picked up again and rearranged to suit different gameplay needs. Everything looks to be made out of cardboard and a key aspect of the game is remembering that the levels are literally cut-out facades in a three-dimensional world, and the game forces players to keep checking things from all angles to find everything. It feels as if Mario's in a play and improvising on the fly when props and sets don't always do what they're supposed to. While the game's major point could probably be conveyed without it, clearly it's relying on stereoscopic 3D to get it across particularly vividly.

Another 3DS game I've been playing recently, Atlus' Code of Princess, uses a similar approach. It's a cross between an arcade beat-em-up and a JRPG that's wholly aware of the inherent ludicrousness of both genres. The characters are all delightfully self-aware parodies, and even more laudably mostly female, but the most interesting aspect of it from our perspective is the way the battle stages work (and as an aside, note the ubiquity of the term “stage” to describe video game levels). Like in most beat-em-ups, Code of Princess uses a static camera angle that slowly follows the character as she fights her way from left to right. The main innovation here, aside from the aforementioned RPG experience system and genre awareness, is the fact there are three main battlefields on the screen at once, and the characters can leap into the background and foreground at various degrees, which is where the stereoscopic 3D comes in. It's not as overtly theatrical as a Mario game, but the world of Code of Princess definitely feels much more like a stage set thanks to this sort of gameplay (in addition to the general look-and-feel of the game on the whole) than a fully developed fantasy land, and that's to the game's benefit.

Just like a play, these games work by recognising they're inherently performative and gain a lot of their strengths as works by playing off of the audience. Each playthrough of a video game is different, even before you factor in the different styles and tastes of individual players, just as no two performances of the same play, even if it's put on by the same troupe, will be identical. This is abundantly clear here, as it is in all video games, but I maintain a thread of performativity runs through all creative works: We wouldn't have differing interpretations of things if it didn't. So why pretend it isn't there? Why pretend movies, music books or your medium of choice exist in a vacuum separate from human emotion and thought? That's the perhaps uncomfortable truth things like 3D and HFR force media critics to come to terms with. Far from getting us closer to some mythical Truth, all these new technologies will do is remind us of the multiplicity of meaning, and I for one couldn't be happier.  

O Objectivity our subjugator, your legend is lies, lurid and false; your dreamlike reverie a con for the ages.

“Dear lost companions of my tuneful art”: Gamer Culture and A Life on Video (Part II-At Home and Abroad)

WYSIWYG

One of the ways Nintendo was able to rebuild the viability of home video games after Atari imploded and took the whole industry with it in 1983 was to reconceptualize video games as children's toys. It may seem strange to look back from our vantage point and observe how bizarre and radical a shift this was, but it was a very deliberate and tangible change in direction with repercussions. Nintendo had been expressly warned that launching a new game console in the wake of Atari guaranteed them failure as Atari's collapse had tainted the entire industry. Therefore, Nintendo consciously marketed the NES in the US as a hot new toy for kids in an attempt to avoid comparisons with the failed Atari 2600 and other personal computers that were starting to dominate the consumer electronics market. Afterward, and once it was a reasonable assumption that the majority of youngsters had access to an NES, it became very easy to take this fact and build a huge merchandising empire out of it. There was Nintendo breakfast cereal, Nintendo bedsheets, Nintendo clothes, Nintendo action figures, Nintendo stuffed animals, Nintendo sports equipment (*yes*) and even Nintendo Saturday Morning Cartoon shows (they were all crap, in case you're wondering, but this really isn't the place to talk about Saturday Morning Cartoon shows in any detail). But that's far from all that was going on with NOA and the NES: the clever idea they had was this. Once all the parents bought their kids Nintendo consoles and games for the Holidays, they'd be able to subtly start showing off the machine's true potential and capabilities. It worked, and worked amazingly well.

The conflation of games with toys that really started with the NES may be where some of the stigma gamers claim to experience originated from, as it could be said they never “outgrew” their “toys”, but it's telling no similar strategy was used in Japan, where the thing was simply dubbed the Family Computer and even had a floppy disk drive and a planned rudimentary Internet-like system. It's also crucial to note that Shigeru Miyamoto's early arcade games, Donkey Kong and Mario Bros. were expressly not designed to be solely kids' fare, meant to to be played as they were in bars. But of course we know better: NOA's little scheme to sneak the NES into households under the radar was absolute genius, and it was a common occurrence in many homes for parents to put their kids to bed after an evening of watching them play Mario and then, after the kids were asleep, to creep back downstairs and spend the rest of the night playing Nintendo themselves. Many grandparents were enthralled by the new games too and would discuss them just as earnestly and fervently with each other as their grandchildren did.

This was of course Nintendo's goal from the start: To make games anyone could enjoy, appreciate and share. This is an intellectual tradition of theirs that dates back to Donkey Kong, the Game and Watch series and their skeet shooting ranges. I surely need not remind my readers their first console was called the Family Computer. This is why I'm so continually baffled by people who bemoan the Wii and it's abandoning of the “hardcore” to court the “casual, social crowd”. As if Nintendo had ever catered exclusively to the “hardcore gamers” (a term of self-definition I personally find incredibly intellectually and historiographically lacking). Nintendo's games have always been for anyone who possessed a child's unconditional love of life, no matter what the biological or calendar age. No-one is entitled to a monopoly on them.

In any case, given the Nintendo saturation that was prevalent in the late '80s and early '90s, and even after Nintendo of America made a concerted effort to make video games synonymous with kids' stuff, which the medium absolutely had never been before 1985 or so, I can say from my experience at least that neither myself nor anyone I knew was ever persecuted or bullied for liking video games. It was just something kids did: You talked about Nintendo on the playground, went home, ran around outside for a bit, played some video games and watched TV. If it was the summer, you'd split your time between traipsing around forests building forts and playing kick-the-can and eating lunch with the Nintendo. To be perfectly honest and fair I was homeschooled for a lot of my childhood so the interaction with friends and the use of the playground as a social centre was a bit limited for me personally a lot of the time, though I did witness it and have comparable experiences with the friends I did make and members of my own family. In a previous post I've already recounted my memory of playing Super Mario Bros. at my cousins' house: Playing video games together with them was a regular occurrence, either at our place or theirs and was usually done after coming in from having adventures outdoors for the day and before dinner (and after at times as well) and those evenings spent playing local multiplayer on the NES or passing a Game Boy back-and-forth with my cousins are some of my most treasured.

As I got older and travelled elsewhere, home video game consoles continued to be a source of social bonding for me. For a time in my teenage years I attended a school where Olympic-bound athletes would take their lessons during their training period. The campus during that time was a weird confluence of extremely determined professional athletes, serious academic-minded scholars, artists and conservationists. It was an utterly unique and valuable experience and I even got to train with the local snowboard team for a bit while I was there. Video games were a big part of my social life there too, as me and the rest of the trainees would often hang out in the lounge after school taking turns on the communal NES and various SEGA consoles (there really were quite a lot of those, weren't there? And all out at the same time too). One of the at once coolest and strangest things I remember happening was hanging around the lounge alone after hours one evening playing Super Mario Bros. and having my science teacher, a charming young lady fresh out of college who split her time between teaching at the school and working as a tour guide and ecologist on the summit of the tallest mountain in the state, walk in and, seeing what I was playing, excitedly sit down next to me and jump into the game with me. She even taught me some of her signature tricks to navigate the underground levels-it was awesome.

Every new place I go games have traditionally been a kind of glue that held my various social connections together. From joining my whole dorm in an impromptu Halo: Combat Evolved tournament on the lounge XBOX, throwing LAN parties with my suite-mates over a local network we Gerry-rigged together for us and us alone to late-night Super Smash Bros. jam sessions with the guys from the common house, video games have continued to frequently go along with some of the best memories I've shared with my friends and family. And, just as always, everybody played: Girls, boys, athletes, alpine tundra ecologists, creative writing students, artists, frat guys, humanities scholars and astronomers. There was never anything strange or unusual about that: Video games were a universally shared cultural experience, just like any other kind of media, hobby or activity. I'd never thought of them otherwise.

Because of this, I've been presented with quite a few large and confounding philosophical problems these last few years. Things like “When did video games ever fall out of the 'mainstream'?”, “Where did the self professed gamers come from, why are they apparently so horribly persecuted?” “Why does playing video games constitute a subcultural lifestyle any more than watching movies, reading books or listening to music does?” and perhaps most annoyingly “Where are all these big mean jocks who are supposed to bully me for playing video games? I mean, I went to a jock school forchrissakes: If anything qualifies for that label it's a school for Olympic athletes in training. The only jocks I knew were the ones playing Nintendo with me in the lounge. Does that make me a big mean jock too? Do gamers just watch too many John Hughes movies?”.

In spite of the attitude my above glibness might imply, I'm not intending any of this to belittle anyone's personal experiences with video games as a medium or in anyway claim their positionality is imagined or fallacious or that mine is more valid. What I am saying is that my positionality is radically different from theirs, to the point of complete incongruity, and I don't understand why. There certainly does seem to have been a shift in the way video games were generally perceived and a clear-cut turn to a presumption that the medium has always been underground and fighting for legitimacy, I'm just not sure when and why that happened or where it came from. I certainly remember some half-baked moral panics in the mid-1990s to early 2000s over games like Mortal Kombat, Grand Theft Auto III and some of id Software's early games and that some especially obnoxious politicians were complaining games were corrupting the youth, but I honestly remember that never being something anybody really took too seriously (the Columbine school shooting aside, of course, but even that seemed to resolve itself rather quickly) and the sort of thing that happened to all young media, like rock music and witchcraft. There is of course the omnipresent existential nightmare of how video games handle narrative and how they compare to other forms of media in terms of artistic expression and value (goodness knows I've written enough on that already and I'm far from through yet), but that's a problem of self-reflection the industry brought on itself, not had imposed on it from the outside.

I'm also not saying bullying and bigotry isn't a problem for far too many people: In fact, the older I get the more convinced I am it's the defining aspect of Western society. I was picked on as a kid too, though not nearly to the same extent as others and nowhere near as much as I would have had I not been an extremely private person, and only so far as the fact my elementary school was full of egomaniacal bastards who were horrible to everybody. In other words, of all the things I was made fun of for growing up, playing video games was not one of them. And while I never experienced any video game-driven harassment as a kid, or at any other age for that matter, this does segue nicely into my final point which is, if video games had never been a harsh, exclusive, unwelcoming environment in the past, they bloody well are NOW and most of the vitriol is coming from within the so-called “gamer” community and is being perpetuated by the industry itself.

While I of course am going to avoid generalizations and stereotypes and know full well not all self-professed gamers are angry, bigoted people there's no way to put a fine point on this: The games industry as it stands today is a damn scary place as far as I'm concerned and honestly makes me ashamed to be involved with it at times. The treatment of women is particularly unforgivable: Just this past year we've had competitors at a Capcom-sponsored Street Fighter tournament sexually harass a female player to the point she was forced to drop out, a sizable army of cyberbullies send incalculable amounts of appalling hate speech and threats of violence to a female producer attempting a startup campaign for a Web TV show about Male Gaze in video games and not one but TWO high profile games journalists getting fired for verbally abusing female personalities over the Internet in clearly sexualized ways. I'd go into these cases more and scores others to boot, but I'll instead link to this article which summarises them all nicely.

It's not just from the gamers: Our industry thrives on sexualized violence, and why not if that's what its consumers want? I briefly mentioned the male domination subtext in the blockbuster hit Batman: Arkham City in the past and the questionable gender politics inherent in franchises like Call of Duty and Gears of War should hopefully require no elucidation. This year we even got a lovely trailer for the new Hitman game, Absolution, which took great pains to show protagonist Agent 42 brutally slaughtering a group of supermodel female assassins dressed in fetish nun gear. However, for my money there's no better example than the games proudly showed off to legions of jubilant games journalists at E3 2012. The Far Cry 3 demo began with a minigame where the player gets to grope a submissive female NPC's blocky breasts and proceeds into a horrific bloodbath of explicit and brutal violence. Assassin’s Creed 3, the latest entry in a franchise already about creative ways to murder people, clearly revels in the new elegant ways to dispatch the many representations of living things contained within. New entries in the Splinter Cell and Tomb Raider series were no different, the latter even being an exciting reboot where pioneering video game leading lady Lara Croft gets a new violent and depraved backstory and gets threatened with rape at numerous points in the game to make her feel more “vulnerable” and “realistic” so players would want to “protect” her. Hell, even Watch Dogs, arguably the most interesting reveal at the show, has one or two fairly disturbing moments.

I'm not one to defend censorship or claim violence has no place in fiction, but there's a difference in the way the violence was treated here. If you must use overly violent content in your work, it ought to have a purpose, usually to show off how serious and disturbing the setting has become. None of these games do any of that, and it seems more and more like gamers don't care. This violence is sexualized and celebrated in a way that alarms me (especially given this industry's obvious problems with women in general), and both the producers and critics seem on the whole fine with this. This editorial from GamesRadar adequately relates the sickening feeling and impending sense of dread I got sitting through this year's E3 and the problem is so pervasive and evident that both Warren Spector and Shigeru Miyamoto have publicly come out to condemn it. What this year has ultimately shown me is how out-of-touch the games industry has drifted from reality and I from it. Simply put, this medium is unrecognizable to me and both the latest crop of games and the sentiment I'm getting from the “gamer culture” these past few years is most assuredly not why I fell in love with video games. Should the industry continue down this path, I'll eventually, and sooner rather than later, run out of positive things to say about it or really anything to say about it at all.

It seems to me, to quickly and unfairly psychoanalyse a ludicrously large swatch of people, that these most vocal aspects of “gamer culture” seem terrified their Old Boys Club might actually be split open to allow other people entry, even (gasp) women. This is positively ludicrous. As I've spent the last obscenely long tract arguing, video games are, and always have been, for everybody. They are, at least from my experience, a unique and intimate way to connect people separated by distance, worldview or even (and especially) in the same room. If “gamers” continue to complain about being unfairly marginalized and this is the best they can come up with to argue their case, well then frankly they ought to be ignored. Any creative outlet or culture this insular and hateful has no right to any kind of voice at a public forum or really even to exist. I still may not know who these gamers are and where they came from, but to be perfectly honest if this is how they represent themselves I don't want to know, nor do I want anything to do with them and I'll be damned if I let them selfishly hoard our shared cultural traditions and experiences. What I'd rather learn is what happened tho the kind of communal spirit and attitude towards video games I remember from my childhood and I know for a fact existed thanks to historical record. More to the point, I'd like to know if there's any way to ever get it back or if it too is forever doomed to be an artefact of history alongside my NES, the Pong cabinet at my local pizza parlour or the video arcades that used to be on every kid's street corners.

“Dear lost companions of my tuneful art”: Gamer Culture and A Life on Video (Part I-Arcade Memories)

Pictures of the past...

“Social game” is not a genre. It is a redundancy. All video games are, by definition, social. All video games are, in some form or another, fundamentally about interaction between two or more human agents, even single player games: The experience is simply shared between the player and the designers, not multiple players. As I have mentioned before, in terms of media, video games are most similar to theater and music, both of which also rely very heavily on aspects of performativity and agency. As this begins to segue into territory I'd like to cover sometime in the future, let's for now just say that this is due to the nature of certain kinds of media and the way they utilise narrative (or the lack thereof) because a more sweepingly general and relevant statement to make for the time being is that all of art itself is fundamentally a social thing. I mean, why wouldn't it be, given that its entire purpose is to facilitate humans sharing very human ideas and experiences? No art, no game, exists in a vacuum and neither does any one player, artist or patron of the arts.

Anyone who has been paying the slightest bit of attention to this blog ought not to be surprised by my arriving at this conclusion, but I bring it up because of some observations I've made about video games, the industry that makes them and the kinds of people who play them. Some of them are very recent, some are trends that I have seen linger and evolve over the course of several decades, and not all of them are all that inspirational to talk about. This is going to be a slightly different series then is the norm here; a bit less academic and a bit more personal. I've always been unapologetically subjective on this site and in my writings in general, but this topic necessitates a bit more self-examination and reflection than usual as explaining my positionality is rather crucial to the argument I'm going to try to make. Also because, frankly, I cannot begin to understand the positionality of some of the people involved in this industry, I would like to, and tend to feel the best way to start to come to a kind of understanding is to articulate one's own perspective as meticulously and as clearly as possible. It is also more than likely going to come out a little tetchy and bitter. With that disclaimer, please allow me the rare luxury of diving into my life story, as it were.

It may come as a surprise to my readers, but one of the most confounding and baffling terms I've ever encountered in my travels is “gamer culture”. I mean, theoretically I understand what it means-A group of people with games, presumably (given the context) video games, as a commonality. As someone with a background in both sociocultural anthropology and social studies of knowledge (SSK) I'll be glad to debate the meaning of the term “culture” with anybody. But see to me, a culture has to have more then an affinity for a specific kind of media or artistic expression in common. I have a hard time seeing how video games alone can provide the foundation of an entire societal structure. But I'm being willfully thick and obstinate: Of course “gamer culture” means more than just video games. Let's play along, to torture a metaphor, and try and discern a quick-and-dirty general conception of “gamers" given different cultural patterns and stereotypes I've been able to pick up through years of working in, studying and observing the games industry and give a horrible name to my entire field by trying to cram this into the introductory section of a blog post instead of dedicating a 700 page ethnography to the subject:

“Gamer culture”, in its loosest and most superficial terms, can be defined as a group of socially marginalized, though curiously by-and-large still white, middle-class straight male, individuals who have been brought together in solidarity due to their communal appreciation of video games, Japanese animation, horror movies (especially super-gory slasher films), professional wrestling, heavy metal music, tabletop RPGs, computer science, camp cinema and an overwhelming dislike of physical activity, especially athletics. Another thing near and dear to the hearts of many gamers is a feeling of constant persecution and a strong desire to be validated by others, often explained by a lifetime, and more commonly especially a childhood, of being bullied or ignored for their interests. They claim their interests in general, and video games in particular, have never gained mainstream approval and they have been forever shunned because of it. Those who claim to be a part of it also have a tendency to be socially awkward and express a dislike of unnecessary social interaction. I hasten to add I'm not trying to be intentionally mean, sarcastic or snarky here: This is exactly the way the vast majority of self-professed gamers I've met or read in my life describe themselves and these shared truisms form the basis of a large amount of reflexive, self-deprecating humour.

Clearly I've simplified and stereotyped the situation quite a lot here, but I maintain there's a kind of truth in that last paragraph. Hang around enough gamers or read enough of what they write and I have a feeling you'll find similar motifs, undercurrents and trends. But this is the thing; the inevitable conclusion of the above train of thought: I play video games, many video games. They have indisputably changed and shaped my life. I write about them constantly and follow the industry incessantly. And I relate to absolutely nothing in what I just wrote in the paragraph above. I am not a “gamer”, nor have I ever been one.

My history and experience with the video game medium has been so radically different from those who call themselves gamers I can't even really talk to them intelligently, though I clearly have had one of some kind. What's more, “gamer culture” seems to be a relatively new phenomena from my perspective, appearing on the scene for the first time in the last decade or so (although I freely posit the possibility I just never met any proper gamers before then). One of the biggest cognitive dissonances I seem to have with gamers is over the conception of “social games”. At the moment it's a relatively hot topic in gamer circles, though not nearly as much as it was a few years ago. According to the typical account, “social games” are a new subgenre of video games brought on by the popularity of the Nintendo Wii and its me-too console motion control imitators, as well as smartphones and social media like Facebook, that's designed to be more physical, more based on local human interaction and to provide simpler, more accessible, (though shallower), experiences than “traditional” games. This is a very large debate, with some gamers claiming it's good to get the medium more “mainstream” exposure and others worrying its diluting and cheapening video games and mainstream exposure isn't worth it if this is how the industry is going to go about getting it.

We should all know the answer to this debate by now: There is none, because the debate is pointless. Games have always been social-It's in the fundamental structure of the medium. I would take this statement even further, however, and claim the essential social structure of video games goes beyond the medium's inherent performativity, playerXdeveloper interaction and the basic fact all art has has a necessary human component. No, video games have always been social because from the very dawn of the medium they fostered social interaction and powerful bonds of friendship and communal solidarity. And here, at long last, is where I come in.

When I was young, I never remember video games being a marginalized and taboo thing. I remember video games being for everyone; consciously, intentionally and always. The Magnavox Odyssey, the first home video game console, was expressly marketed as a mass-market consumer electronics device. When Pong kickstarted the Golden Age of the Arcade of the 1970s and 1980s, the new machine debuted in bars, pubs and later found a place in dedicated arcades. Far from the current conception of gamers as being primarily adolescent (or with adolescent interests and mindsets) shut-ins, these early arcade games seem to me to have been made for adults and installed in places adults would congregate. Very quickly Pong, and most importantly its descendants, earned its place alongside the jukeboxes, pinball machines, dancefloors, bar counters and wall-mounted televisions broadcasting football games as iconic aspects of the world's eating and drinking establishments. As the '70s blurred into the '80s and video game-centric amusement arcades began to spring up to became respected community fixtures in their own right, but the original and natural home of the arcade game remained the townhouse. I can still remember walking into my local establishment, grabbing some pizza for lunch and then my friends taking me into the bar to fire up a game of pinball or whatever Midway or Atari cabinet the place had in the back corner. It was as natural and expected a thing as popping a quarter in the jukebox or on the bar for a drink.

Bars and arcades are social places. They're businesses people go to with the express intent of meeting and spending time with actual, flesh-and-blood human friends. What's even better is that they're places anyone can go-People from all walks of life go to bars: Men, women, people of all different cultures and creeds. I would never be so reductive as to declare any cultural artefact universal across all societies, but if any one of them had any sort of claim to that stupidly overreaching title it would be the bar. And guess what? All those people used to play video games too. A game of Ms. Pac-Man, Defender, Donkey Kong or any one of those numerous light game outfits (I seem to remember at least one for every blockbuster movie that came out, though the only ones that immediately jump to my mind were the Jurassic Park and Terminator 2: Judgment Day ones, not to mention any number of the ones not based on movie licenses) was a great way to bond and make memories with your friends. If you were a kid and too young to drink, you could patronize any of the dedicated video arcades, and there were a ton of them throughout the Long '80s. They were a kind of community centre and a favourite hangout for any kid after school, and even for adults who were perhaps more interested in beating their personal high score than drinking. Many an afternoon, or evening rapidly turning into night was dedicated to friends challenging each others' high scores and teasing each other in the process. Heading to the corner arcade or bar to play video games used to be just as accepted a way to socialize as going to a mall or coffee shop with friends. At least, that's how I always used to feel.

Near the end of the Long 1980s and into the early part of the 1990s, the omnipresence of arcade games in bars and the dedicated video arcade itself seemed to go into a decline, most likely as a result of the rise of home video game consoles (the Atari 2600, it must be noted, was originally just as much a consumer electronics product as the Odyssey with all that entails). Before they disappeared completely, however, they made one last stab at greatness with the legendary Super Street Fighter II, Capcom's Hail-Mary that completely redefined the fighting game genre gave the video arcade its one last blast of brilliance (well, in the US at least-It's well-known there are still many dedicated arcades in Japan. As great as that is though, this article is about me and my story, and I've never been to a Japanese arcade). Now I don't care how iconic the Super Nintendo version of the game is, to me Super Street Fighter II is an arcade game born and bred and the purest way to experience it is at an actual cabinet. I mean, at the very least they were complimentary experiences; I have fond memories of both, for example practicing at my friends' houses and then trying to take on the arcade. But Super Street Fighter II was originally an arcade game and it's in the arcades that it had its biggest impact and where its most powerful and resonate legacy lies.

I have very vivid memories of jockeying for position amongst the swarms of people hovering around the fight stick just to get in one quick match with Chun-Li, my favourite fighter, against someone from that frenzied ball of humanity. I sucked at the game and lost horribly all the time (I'm still not amazing at Street Fighter) but I didn't care: It was unbelievably fun. Not just the game, but the whole atmosphere and the experience. There's no feeling quite like the compounded communal enthusiasm of people enjoying each others' company in a shared activity: The air simply crackled with energy. Super Street Fighter II was a landmark in the medium as a work, but it was also the arcade's Indian Summer and that's how I'll always remember it.

All my nostalgia for the bars and arcades that helped shape my view of video games and their place in my life is not meant to marginalize home consoles or claim that their games are not as social as arcade titles. The contrary: They were just as reliant on communal bonding, just in a different way. The Atari 2600 originally built its name on making home versions of popular arcade titles for families to play together in the living room, or for bachelors and bachlorettes to hone their skills away from the bars and socialize one-on-one. It was a rousing success and paved the way for a whole new market in video games that were targeted just as much at people who stayed at home as they were at people who went out every night. However, after a series of blindingly poor business decisions at Atari and parent company Warner Brothers directly resulted in the infamous game industry crash of 1983, home video games no longer seemed like a profitable investment. But nobody counted on an unknown toy company from Japan entering the market seemingly bewilderingly late and changing the game, so to speak, forever.

“Filled was the air with a dreamy and magical light”: Mí Bhealtaine and the Dream-Child

"A cat may look at a king..."

A pet hobby of mine has always been studying the often-uncanny reoccurring patterns that surround different facets of history, mythology, folklore and language. Call it the result of synchronicity, “name games”, the emanation of a mysterious Fortean psycho-social “Twilight Language” phenomenon or simply the human brain attempting to make sense out of randomness, such patterns seem omnipresent and have always caught my interest. One of the key premises of this school of thought is that certain names, dates, places and events, via coincidence and written historical narrative, become “vortexes” for an unusually high concentration of sociological artefacts and are transformed into, in a sense, pseudo-sentient forces that inspire mimicry and happenings.

Take May 4 for example: This date has born witness to a number of intriguing historical events and movements over the years, particularly those involving politics and power structures. A cursory look at Wikipedia reveals that on this date in 1493, Pope Alexander VI split the Western Hemisphere over the Line of Demarcation, a key moment in the development of colonialism; in 1776 Rhode Island rejected the authority of King George III, the first American colony to do so; Napoleon began his exile on Elba on this date in 1814 and key battles in the War of the Roses, the Fourth Anglo-Mysore War, the American Civil War and World War II also all took place on May 4. In addition, Margaret Thatcher first took office as Prime Minister of England on a May 4, a date which, perhaps ironically, had in years past also seen two infamous civil uprisings: The Haymarket Square Riot in 1886, in which a bomb was leveled at police trying to break up a labour protest in Chicago, and the Kent State Massacre in 1970, in which peaceful Vietnam War protesters were gunned down by riot police at Ohio Kent State University.

Perhaps the most important happenings on this date, at least the two most relevant to the purposes of this article, were two events a world apart geographically and decades apart temporally. On May 4, 1919, students gathered en masse in Tienanmen Square, Beijing to protest the Chinese government's response to the Treaty of Versailles. By this point China was governed by a fragmented group of warlords, the Qing Dynasty having been overthrown during the Xinhai revolution in 1911. The fractured government was easily taken advantage of by influential Western powers, who attempted to divide China into spheres of influence. The tipping point came when the province of Shandong, annexed by Germany during World War I,was transferred to Imperial Japan as a result of the signing of the Treaty of Versailles, resulting in large-scale student revolt. This protest, dubbed the May 4^th Movement, could be seen as the political climax of a larger cultural movement known as the New Culture Movement, typically seen as lasting from 1911-1921. The New Culture Movement was initially born out of young scholars' reaction against traditional Chinese values and society, seen as having failed after the fall of the Qing Dynasty, and was guided by a desire to explore and embrace concepts such as democracy, globalisation, cosmopolitanism, individual liberty and sexual equality.

Meanwhile, thousands of miles away and decades earlier, a young girl named Alice Pleasance Liddel was born on May 4, 1852, a date which a mathematician friend of hers who went by Lewis Carroll would later use as the birthday for another Alice, and the setting for one of the enduring classics of literature.

Speaking more broadly, the first week of May has traditionally held a very unique power over people, dating back to some of the earliest historical records we have. The Celtic peoples of Ireland, Scotland and the Isle of Man referred to May 1 (another date with a history of political turbulence) as Beltane-Technically Lá Bealtaine, literally “The Day of Beltane”, as opposed to Mí Bhealtaine, or “The Month of Beltane”. As it marks the halfway point between the Vernal Equinox and Summer Solstice, this was considered the start of summer and one of the most important times of the year: A time for purification, transition and reverence. Beltane is in many ways a mirror image of Samhain on October 31, the day now known as Halloween: Both are liminal dates between seasons set aside for festivals and introspection and times at which the boundaries between the physical and spiritual realms are particularly loose and permeable.

The Celtic people believed that, in addition to the domain of the living, there existed a separate plane where the spirits dwelt: Sometimes described as lying across the sea on uncharted islands to the west, underground within the barrows that dotted the landscape or simply in a related, but separate dimension alongside the physical world (or perhaps some combination of all of the above), the Otherworld was the domain of the aos sí. Comparable perhaps to modern conceptions of fairies and elves and indeed the basis for many of these beliefs, the aos sí were mysterious, unpredictable nature spirits, deities and deified ancestors. Sometimes they were the descendants of the Tuatha Dé Danann, the original inhabitants of Ireland forced underground by invaders who mastered spiritual and arcane arts to become beings of mysticism. Beltane and Samhain were two of the dates it was said the aos sí could walk freely among the mortals, and the mortals could walk freely among them owing to their liminal position on the calendar. Liminality on the calendar, it would seem, translates to liminality in our lives.

It is perhaps worth noting that modern astronomical research actually places the precise date for the solar midpoint between the Vernal Equinox and the Summer Solstice closer to May 5 or May 7 (the former of course being celebrated today as Cinco de Mayo, the commemorative date of the unprecedented Mexican victory over occupying French forces in the state of Peubla, Mexico in 1862), but this can of course change year to year.

The start of summer then, the time of Mí Bhealtaine, would appear to be in general a time of year marked by transition, change, upheaval and liminality. It is also a deeply spiritual, mystical time according to the ancient Celts, the melding of the human realm with the Otherworld offering a profound, if temporary, restructuring of philosophy and cosmology. It's perhaps fitting then that summer is the time of year most beloved by Lewis Carroll, whose fond memories of summers gone by inspired his greatest work, the diptych Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. Wistful, nostalgic yearning for the enchantment and spirit of the season is the dominant theme of the prefatory and closing poems of both Alice books, plays a significant role in the closing words of the first book and, in his Easter Greeting dedication to the 1876 edition of his oeuvre, Carroll encourages his readers to remember the dreamlike atmosphere of a summer morning and to hold on to the knowledge that, no matter how dark life may get, we will all “one day see a brighter dawn then this”.

It's clear that summer was a special time for Lewis Carroll. He seems to have associated it with childlike innocence and strength, two virtues he treasured and valued almost above all else, certainly helped by his summer boat trips with Alice Liddel and her sisters during which he would tell them stories, one of which became the first draft of Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and provided the inspiration for the poems book-ending both works. For Carroll then, summer represented a time when we could let go of our vice-grip on the dull, pragmatic realities of this world and allow our imaginations to view the universe with rapturous, if sometimes fleeting, sense of wonderment. Perhaps curiously, both parts of the story are set during Mí Bhealtaine: The first book is set on May 4, while the second is set on November 4, marking a key moment in the development of that book's theme of mirrored reversals: Alice leaves her house in early winter through the Looking-Glass and comes out the other side to find a sunny summer day. Also, November is, of course the start of summer in the southern hemisphere.

Despite this however, the most engaging connection between Carroll and the season may actually come from the pseudo-sentient life force his own text has acquired, and, in particular, that of its heroine. Perhaps contrary to popular belief, it's quite clear the Alice in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There is not meant to be anything so dull as an insert avatar of Alice Liddel. Although he initially told an early version of the story to Alice Liddel and her sisters, the books' protagonist does indeed share her name and undoubtedly owes much else of herself to her, Carroll went out of his way to remove or bury personal signifiers, identifiers and in-jokes in the versions that made it to print. John Tenniel's illustrations of Alice look nothing like Alice Liddel (Apocryphally she's supposedly based on Mary Babcock, another friend of Carroll's, but this has yet to be fully confirmed). Indeed, an oft-overlooked fact about Through the Looking-Glass is that many of its core themes and motifs, most notably those of mirrors, opposites and inverses, was inspired not by Alice Liddel at all, but by discussions Carroll had with another Alice: His distant cousin Alice Raikes.

No, the Alice in Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass is something far more subtle and fascinating. She is, as often described by Carroll himself, the “dream-child”: She represents the idealized pinnacle of Carroll's worldview and embodies the purest form of the ideals he saw in his friends and wished to cultivate in all of us. As Carroll himself said, in the dramatis personae for Alice on the Stage:

"What wert thou, dream-Alice in thy foster-father's eyes? How shall he picture thee? Loving first, loving and gentle: loving as a dog (forgive the prosaic simile, but I know no earthly love so pure and perfect) and gentle as a fawn: then courteous—courteous to all, high or low, grand or grotesque, King or Caterpillar, even as though she were herself a King's daughter, and her clothing wrought of gold: then trustful, ready to accept the wildest impossibilities with all that utter trust that only dreamers know; and lastly, curious—wildly curious, and with the eager enjoyment of Life that comes only in the happy hours of childhood, when all is new and fair, and when Sin and Sorrow are but names — empty words signifying nothing!"

Alice is the dream-child. The dream-child, through an open mind, strength of character, curiosity, love and retention of the wide-eyed inspiration of a child, becomes privy to the myriad worlds and possibilities that exist alongside and around ours, but that are conceivable only to the mind of a dreamer. As she states in a famous (and often misinterpreted) quote from Through the Looking-Glass, Alice “ca'n't believe impossible things”. Logically, however, this means what she sees around her are possibilities. She might not always accept them at face value (Carroll once said that trying too hard to believe things that couldn't be true wore one's mind out), but she won't write them off as “impossible” either because impossible things can never be true and are therefore not worthy of consideration. As Alice is considerate to and of everyone and everything, she naturally has no room in her intellectual toolbox for impossibilities: The ultimate declaration and fusion of both childlike trust and mature open-mindedness.

The dream-child is, by necessity, liminal. Because Alice can conceive of and accept the possibility of anything, if not believe the utter certainty of anything, she is the only character in any of the Wonderland works to be able to freely travel between worlds. The most obvious example of this is in the beginning and end of the books themselves where Alice enters and leaves Wonderland. The famous “all just a dream” reading of the climax of Adventures in Wonderland is in fact loaded and has the potential to be dangerously misleading: Alice wakes up at the end of her adventure, yes, but what's overlooked about the scene is that it seems to be meant as a telling bit of role reversal-After retelling her escapades in Wonderland, Alice happily scampers off thinking of them all the way and her older sister falls asleep and begins dreaming herself. However, her sister dreams of Alice's dream and, critically, remains conscious all throughout. She “half-imagines” herself in Wonderland and can appreciate the beauty and magic of this Otherworld, but only on a theoretical level because she remains grounded in pragmatism and knows as soon as she opens her eyes it will all be revealed for the make-believe is truly is. The implication, meanwhile is that Alice is off having more adventures even awake, while her sister can only conceive of the lands she visits with her eyes closed. This is the difference between Alice and her sister: As the dream-child, Alice can effortlessly transgress the boundaries between worlds at will, an ability her sister has lost, having used maturity as an excuse to allow herself to be subsumed by the mundane.

"Remember, remember..."

Alice's liminality, and her ultimate destiny as the dream-child, are major plot points in Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There. Once she crosses the boundary into the mirror world, the story soon becomes (put most basically) about a chess game played out with all the characters representing specific chess pieces and Alice's desire to become a Queen. This is most commonly read as Carroll's way of dealing with his estrangement from Alice Liddel and the inevitability of her growing up and losing her innocence, especially when taken in the context of the rather dark and funereal poems he placed at the beginning and end of the book. However, if we take that Alice in Carroll's story is the dream-child and not simply a rote stand-in for Alice Liddel (not to mention the recorded fact part of the book's impetus came from a different Alice entirely), we can approach this part of the narrative from a fresh perspective: I posit that the reason Alice is trying to become Queen is not because she wants to grow up and leave her wandering days behind, but because she knows the rules of chess. Alice explicitly starts the game as a White Pawn (she's told inasmuch by the Red Queen) and knows, just as the clever mathematician and chess expert Carroll knew, that there is a rule where a Pawn can become any piece the player chooses if it reaches the last square of the board. Naturally, the obvious (dare I say logical) choice would be the Queen: The piece with most freedom and range of movement, and thus the most powerful. This, I argue, is what Alice desires: Not the stuff and fussiness of mundane adulthood (it's telling once she returns to her house at the end she resumes, and with abandon, the curious self-addressing nonsense logic that's been creeping into her vocabulary over the course of both books), but the freedom to control her own destiny, to transgress against and explore both worlds (thus also mastering them both) and to keep her mind open to possibilities.

It may also be worth noting that Through the Looking-Glass takes place on November 4, the day before Guy Fawkes Night in England. This date, commemorating a failed anaracho-terrorist plot to destroy the House of Lords (while it was in session), seems of particular interest to Alice, who asks her cat if she knows “what to-morrow is”. It would seem unusual to me that someone who is drawn to that kind of history and who has, in the course of two short stories, overthrown two major monarchies (for one of which she essentially spearheaded a revolutionary coup d'etat), is gravely concerned and interested in the plight of a working-class wasp, has frequent discussions with herself about ego death, carries on stimulating two-way conversations with herself and her cats, worries about breaking rules she just invented and enjoys pretending to be a hyaena and that her nanny is a fresh kill would be particularly concerned about emulating royalty and fitting in with social convention of the time. It would seem, if anything, that dream-Alice is an almost willfully marginal, anarchic character. She's surely not going to grow up to fit in with Victorian elite, and she doesn't seem to completely fit in with the denizens of Wonderland either as she is in frequent conflict with them (although this becomes more tempered and academic as of Through the Looking-Glass). She is truly liminal then; someone who can transgress and explore both worlds and, by remaining marginal, master them both as well.

This would most likely please her foster-father because, whether it be owing to his dualistic life as simultaneous childrens' book writer, friend to young girls, esteemed mathematician and college dean or the somewhat awkward way he apparently carried himself Lewis Carroll was most certainly a marginal figure himself who didn't quite fit in with the world of Victorian elite he surrounded himself with. This becomes most clear knowing a great deal of both Alice books is actually little more than thinly veiled political satire skewering Victorian cultural norms and the elite and that John Tenniel, whom he hired to illustrate them, was famous as a political cartoonist at the time. More evidence can be found in the fact Carroll found the courage to troll Queen Victoria herself: After reading a fan letter of hers in which she praised Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and requested a signed copy of his next book, Carroll proudly sent her majesty a special print of a mathematical proof. This becomes arguably textually overt during the infamous Mad Tea Party chapter where, in one scene, The Mad Hatter criticizes Alice for wearing her hair too long. This is a critique that would never be leveled against a young girl like Alice Liddel, but it is most certainly one that would be leveled against a man of status like Lewis Carroll, who was known to keep his hair longer and shaggier than was customary. Knowing all this, it becomes becomes even more difficult for me to read dream-Alice as a straight representation of Alice Liddel and much easier in fact for me to read her as the liminal, anarcho-feminist dream-child who bears as much influence from early postmodern ideals and Carroll himself as she does from Carroll's most famous friend.

Liminality, transition, change and upheaval. These are all themes and motifs the Celts believed surrounded the time of Mí Bhealtain and seem to have been the trend of history. They are also ideals Lewis Carroll's dream-Alice seems to embody enthusiastically and triumphantly. For him and her, as them, summer was a magical time indeed. The most important festival for the Celts also took place during the summer: During Midsummer, the summer solstice, it was almost a guarantee the boundaries between our world and the Otherworld would finally dissolve and the aos sí were free to roam uninhibited, their celebrations being plainly visible from atop the hills and barrows. In Forteana, it is said an unusual uptick in sightings of mysterious or unexplained phenomena coalesce around this date. For Lewis Carroll, everything that makes life worth living is on display this time of year.

It is perhaps very appropriate that the liminal, anarchic Alice is intrinsically linked to Beltane; the summer's spirited and emotionally charged beginning. Her birthday is May 4, the same as Alice Liddel's to be sure, but also a day of extreme significance to both history and the texts at hand. May 4 is also the date on which Adventures in Wonderland takes place, as we can discern from Alice's dialog with the Mad Hatter. That same Adventures in Wonderland that begins by Alice entering a doorway in a hillside and falling out of this world into another one. That same Adventures in Wonderland that ends with Alice maintaining the ability to walk between realms. That same Adventures in Wonderland that was originally titled, among other things, Alice's Adventures Under Ground, Alice Among the Elves and Alice's Doings in Elf-Land. A remarkable coincidence, to be sure, or perhaps not, depending on one's perspective. Deeper and deeper still goes the rabbit hole of Twilight Language.

The dream-child's influence on subsequent fiction has been substantial, but perhaps nowhere does it seem to have had the most dramatic effect then on the medium of video games. The easiest example to cite would be American McGee's 2011 offering Alice: Madness Returns. McGee, a veteran designer on such groundbreaking works as the Doom and Quake series for id Software, set about to reboot Carroll's oeuvre drawing in elements of Gothic psychological horror. The result was the cult favourite American McGee's Alice in 2000, which reconceptualizes Alice as a young mental patient institutionalized after her family burned alive in a house fire when she was a child. The game centres around Alice's attempts to rebuild Wonderland, here cast as her mental “happy place”, and thus cure her illness. Madness Returns is a further reboot, adding in the twist that [spoilers to follow] Alice is not mentally ill at all, but is being treated that way and manipulated into believing it by opportunistic forces in Victorian society who have it in their best interests to keep her marginal.

While not necessarily my favourite interpretation of the character, Madness Returns does echo a few themes and concepts I feel are intrinsic to her: McGee casts Alice as explicitly liminal here, a number of times having his supporting cast point out she's easy to silence because she is an orphan, a loner, an outspoken rebel, a woman and someone who has been labeled insane. A major plot point in the game involves Alice coming to terms with this fact and learning how to take decisive action to use this liminality to her advantage and turn it around against her oppressors. In the end, she overthrows an authoritarian, controlling power and takes charge of her destiny, much as she did in Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass.

Perhaps more relevantly to our purposes though, are the following: Firstly, Alice: Madness Returns launched on June 14, 16 and 17, 2011, depending on the region. While none of these dates are Beltane or Midsummer, the season and month of June are perhaps worth noting (June having previously been mentioned in Walt Disney's 1951 film adaptation)-Lewis Carroll would certainly approve, at least. Secondly is Madness Returns' curious focus on eastern spirituality: An entire chapter of the game takes place in a surrealistic world based on Buddhist parables and dynastic Chinese history. Buddhism in fact becomes a major theme in the plot, as the Caterpillar takes on the role of a Tibetan monk who sets Alice on a path to a kind of Nirvana: Literally, freedom from her mental suffering brought on by her subservience to Victoriana. Recalling Alice's interesting fixation on identity and ego-death in the original books (she in turn forgets and renounces her name and famously says “I'm not myself, you see?”) it seems obvious McGee is taking this thread to its logical conclusion.

While the actual level contains elements from Indian and Japanese culture as well (most likely as a comment on and indictment of the crass Orientalism of the time in which the story is set, or perhaps that McGee still observes in our society today; it's literally titled “Mysterious East”) the underlying spiritualist metaphors remain fairly clear to me. This becomes especially noteworthy when taken in the context of Alice's previous flirtation with Chinese culture and philosophy: Recall both Alice Liddel and the dream-child have May 4 as their birthday, the date that is famously associated with the New Culture Movement. The very movement that sought to re-examine or tear down the existing dynastic order and replace it with an emphasis on cosmopolitanism, material social progress and gender equality. Most deliciously of all, one of the leading lights of the New Culture Movement was Liang Shuming, who was a Buddhist scholar (and also noted critic of Marxism and Westernism, believing them limiting and misguided and doomed to failure, respectively) and another, Cai Yuanpei, was an anarchist. I can't think of synchronicity more beautifully elegant than this: American McGee using the language of Buddhism to tell a story casting dream-Alice as an anarchist revolutionary that invokes the New Culture Movement and is seeped in a linguistic, intellectual and historical tradition of upheaval, change and transgression.

As intriguing as all this metatextual synchronicity might be, I feel the single most important thing Alice: Madness Returns contributes to the discussion is actually by virtue of its in-jokes. Peppered throughout are subtle references and shout-outs to other groundbreaking games: There are three levels in which Alice enters a two-dimensional world on a canvas by leaping into it and must jump from platform to platform, at once invoking the original platforming adventure game Super Mario Bros. in its gameplay and its sequel Yoshi's Island in its visual style, evocative of hand-painted tapestries. Additionally, the act of Alice leaping into a painting is clearly reminiscent of Super Mario 64, in which it is a core game mechanic. Alice has a dodge move which involves her turning into a flock of butterflies and traversing great distances very quickly, much as protagonist Amaterasu does in Ōkami. Certain bonus stages involving manoevering a spheroid through a twisting, multi-tiered maze evoke both the arcade classic Marble Madness and certain parts of Sonic the Hedgehog, as well as SEGA's own ball-rolling puzzler Super Monkey Ball. Finally, in the bottom depths of Queensland, the ruins of the Queen of Hearts' domain in Madness Returns, Alice can find a skeletal effigy of a small figure wearing large goggles and apparently poised as if he were focusing his mind on something. Fans of the game Psychonauts, by former LucasArts visionary Tim Schafer and his team Double Fine, will immediately recognize this as Razputin, that game's protagonist. What makes this especially clever is that Psychonauts itself features a scene where Raz follows a rabbit down a hole into a universe his mind creates.

What makes these endearing asides interesting, aside from them being affectionate nods to games and designers American McGee likes and was inspired by? I think a very compelling case could be made that acknowledging these specific works, and with such clear focus and intent, is actually part of a larger phenomenon that reinforces the legacy of the dream-child in modern fiction, particularly video games. In pulling together this reference pool of beloved and hugely influential games, what McGee has essentially done is to firmly place dream-Alice, via his own personal interpretation of her, into a tradition of writing and game design expressly drawn from the raw creative energy of liminality, imagination and dreams. There is a sense that not only are we bettered by our visions, but that our visions and worldviews are what gives us strength and allow us to interact with all planes in a healthy and engaging manner. And furthermore, that despite the physical, emotional and psychological battering she takes in McGee's games, dream-Alice is still a role model to strive for because only by channeling her can we unlock the true potential of ourselves, our minds, and the worlds around us. Layers and layers of Twilight Language take us back to the New Culture Movement, to Lewis Carroll and that sacred Celtic summer, to eternally revolutionary ideals such as feminism, equality, liminality, cosmopolitanism, open-mindedness and the desire and power to bring down corrupt institutions and power structures through logic, sense, love and dreams.

It makes a great deal of sense, and is very fitting, that American McGee should reference Shigeru Miyamoto's games to the extent he does and cite him as a major influence. For in regards to video games, he is perhaps the earliest, and certainly the most appropriate, luminary to trace this particular intellectual lineage back to. I've mentioned it before in passing and it's a matter of public knowledge, but now it's time to seriously analyse it: Miyamoto was strongly inspired by Lewis Carroll, and in particular, Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking-Glass. Knowing this, it's easy to spot its influences everywhere in his games-The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time, for example, deals overtly with Link travelling between two worlds; one the domain of childhood and one of adulthood. The climactic scene, after all, involves Link being sent back in time to experience childhood as it is something Zelda feels has been robbed from him by his obligations as Hero of Time. This is very reminiscent of at least a common reading of Through the Looking-Glass, but more overtly of Carroll's admiration for the strength and wisdom he found in youth. Many Zelda games also begin with Link “falling out” of one world and into another-This is not as overt as in Alice as for him it usually involves leaving his isolated, insular village and discovering the expanse of Hyrule (evidence of Miyamoto's adoration of exploration and discovery), but the metaphor can still be read I argue.

Despite some clear Carrollian influences in Zelda, it's still Super Mario Bros. that for me most vividly reflects Miyamoto's debt to the dream-child. The homages are everywhere: From the obvious (mushrooms making one shrink or grow depending on which one is eaten) to the slightly more subtle (Mario and Luigi travel underground and overthrow a tyrannical despot). What's more, the basic plot is almost a complete reiteration, as Mario and Luigi enter a strange new world and traverse its length as part of their quest. In fact, Super Mario Bros. can be argued to have a double invocation of the dream-child: Mario and Luigi to be sure, but more importantly the *players themselves*, who Miyamoto is trying to reach and share his experience with. It's only logical-it makes perfect sense for someone whose most treasured memories involve exploring the forests and tunnels in and around his house and imagining them as epic adventures would be drawn to dream-Alice and her planewalking powers. It's clear that Miyamoto believes, just as Carroll did, that a childlike zeal and enthusiasm for the world, tempered with travel, wisdom and above all else a healthy respect for the power of dreams and visions, is the key to unlocking the secrets and mysteries of life and attaining enlightenment. A kind of Nirvana, if you will.

The influence Shigeru Miyamoto and Super Mario Bros. had on the development of video games as an artistic medium has been incalculable, and the motifs and concepts introduced with it have become so ingrained in the nature of what games mean to us that we oftentimes take them for granted. But if we pick up the ball American McGee seems to have started rolling and take this in the context of a larger metafictional ontological force, it becomes clear that it most certainly does not end with Miyamoto as Genesis because he, just like McGee, has positioned himself on a wondrous, branching path that stretches out from them both in all directions. The dream-child walks this path because everyone else on it invokes her in some form or another, but it doesn't even truly end with Alice either. Lewis Carroll gives us the language and the intellectual framework to have this discussion, but only because his dreams and experiences gave him the inspiration to codify them. A warm, mystical haze surrounds this path reminding us that there is magic all around if we know where to look: Over the hills, across the sea and within the barrows, perhaps, but dreamy summer mornings, Golden Afternoons and Twilight Language may forever allow us to visit them, so long as there is life left in the virtues and ideals they embody.

For me, it's times like this that cause me to reflect upon my own happy summer memories, where each day was filled with the warmth and freedom that seemed to assure anything was possible. Many a day did I spend doing my best to channel the spirit of dream-Alice, effortlessly immersed in the worlds to be discovered and the ones I could create on my own. Perhaps my very early exposure to Carroll's words has coloured the way my worldview has developed. The estimable Phil Sandifer uses “rabbit hole” as a metaphor for the transfixing hold certain works can have over us and how they can draw us in, seemingly forever. If that's the case, I've no shame in being a “rabbit hole” hipster and claiming the original as my own. As a child during those treasured summers, whenever I admired an especially sunny day or observed the magic in the wind rustling in the trees, I thought of Alice. Whenever I travelled far and away by myself to be alone with my thoughts and imaginations, which, as an only child living in the rural countryside I frequently did, I was Alice. Whenever I looked up and everything I saw was more than what I saw, it was through Alice's eyes I saw and to I still promise myself to make the time to think of her and keep her in my heart and soul. After all, one ca'n't remain a child forever, but the moment one loses a sense of wonder and hope, there's really not much use going on living at all. That the lesson I choose to take away from the dream-child of summer: Fairies are real, magic is everywhere, love is for everything, change will happen and believe possibilities. And, should darkness and pain find you, a brighter day then this will dawn on you someday.

Still she haunts me, phantomwise

Alice moving under skies

Never seen by waking eyes

"How do you get to Wonderland?/Over the hills and here at hand..."