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.

“That’s the end of the story-There’s no more to it than that!”: Mass Effect 3 and Narrative Ownership

I don't usually like covering current events on this blog. Those who want my Gonzo take on the gaming news of the day are encouraged to follow me on Twitter, where I do this obsessively. For Forest of Illusions I usually prefer looking at more abstract concepts or profiling specific games (or characters) that struck a chord with me. In the time it would take me to come up with a thoughtful erudition about some hot-button issue, translate it from ethereal thoughts into a textual form, edit and publish it it'd already be out of date and my thoughts would most likely already have been echoed by someone faster than me and with a bigger podium (hence my somewhat harried attempts to do just that in Summer 2011). However, if you followed the industry this past month as of this writing in any capacity, it's been damn near impossible for you to avoid hearing about Mass Effect 3 and, more specifically, the furor over its ending. I'll give you a minute to peruse that article in case, for some bizarre reason, you were unaware of what this hullabaloo was all about.

Back? OK good.

The discourse in the mainstream gaming media has been cacophonous and holds severe repercussions for how we as video game aficionados interpret a game's meaning. Since I've already written a great deal about this very subject and thinking critically about games is the primary reason I started this site, I guess I'd better toss in my two cents worth.

First of all I have to make the disclaimer that I am not a Mass Effect fan. I appreciate what the series was trying to do (...to a point), but I took one look at the wonky vehicle sections and convoluted combat in the first game and immediately went back to Super Mario Galaxy. I gave Mass Effect 2 a shot due to the reverence it received upon release in 2010 and while I appreciated the refinements to things like combat and travel, I wasn't a fan of the dialogue and morality system, reading through reams and reams of lore to figure out what the heck was going on reminded me of the worst parts of The Lord of the Rings and put me to sleep and the whole suicide mission thing made me a nervous wreck. In my opinion, the series feels like a choose-your-own-adventure book except with more nonsensical quicktime events, a puzzling fixation on softcore titillation and is on the whole indicative of a trend in games I find, to be blunt, patently stupid. However, my thoughts on cinematic and otherwise conventional approaches to narrative in video games are discussion fodder for another day: Basically I decided that Mass Effect was too complicated and too much work for my tastes and just something I wasn't ever going to completely get.

One thing I will praise the trilogy for though is its really progressive approach to feminism and gender roles (regardless of whether or not BioWare intended it to turn out that way), but even there it'll have to be something I applaud on a theoretical level rather than love because of what I experienced. So, needless to say I have zero emotional investment in whatever the ending of Mass Effect 3 turned out to be. However, I do have a very big investment in the way the game is being talked about and that EuroGamer article I linked to is actually is a terrific metaphor for why: The game's ending has touched such a nerve that it's raised issues about meaning and intent and it's actually really justified to ask if Mass Effect 3 as a finished product truly belongs to BioWare and is reflective of the themes they were trying to convey. In other words, the controversy over Mass Effect 3 is the biggest test of the post-structuralist approach to reading and interpretation I outlined back in my Super Mario Bros. series I've yet seen on the mainstream video game stage. In order to fully explain why though, we should take the time to look carefully at what the Mass Effect fans and their detractors are actually saying.

Let's take the self-professed “Retake Mass Effect” people first. These are people who have a significant emotional investment in the game's story and universe and who, for one reason or another, feel the trilogy-closing curtain call at the end of Mass Effect 3 either did not live up to their expectations for an epic finale, did not do enough to tie up loose ends or simply did not make logical coherent narrative sense. Maybe these concerns are valid, maybe not: As a non-fan I can't critique the work or their reading of it and thus am not in a position to make any judgment calls in this regard. That said, the actual demands the Retake Mass Effect camp are making to BioWare are...bold, to put it kindly. They are in turn requesting additional material via ether downloadable content or expanded universe lore to “better explain” the events of the ending, calling for the ending to be retconned outright and launching initiatives to rewrite the whole game themselves to better suit their interpretation of how they feel it “should” have ended. In addition to submitting their list of grievances, they have taken it upon themselves to, in a seriously surreal turn of events, mail hundreds of cupcakes to BioWare's offices because reasons.

As easy as it is to point and laugh at the Retake Mass Effect campaigners for acting “spoiled”, “demanding” or “entitled” (as indeed the vast majority of the counterarguments leveled at them in the mainstream press seem to) it's equally easy to see how they could have come to the conclusion that this was a reasonable course of action and perfectly within their rights. Mass Effect as a series has always claimed to stress individual choice, proudly touting that every little action the player makes will make a difference and have consequences and that each playthrough can be radically different depending on the choices made. In other words, BioWare seems to have been selling the series as a kind of traditional RPG in the original tabletop sense of the term: The player has complete autonomy to exude a level of authorial control over the events of the game and craft it to suit his or her own needs, values, opinions and whims. At least, this is how the discourse from BioWare and the games' trademark playstyle has been interpreted by this group of fans. In sum then, the Retake Mass Effect fans feel, rightly or wrongly, that BioWare's focus on choice and branching narratives in their games means that the whole narrative belongs to them, the playersXreaders, and that they are entitled to deciding how it ends. To invoke the tri-sphere model for reading I proposed back in my Super Mario Bros. essay, they want all the power in determining textual meaning to fall to the Personal Experience sphere.

On the other side we have the opponents of Retake Mass Effect: The many and varied game journalists and pundits who have added their voices to the din of the past month to criticize these fans and rebuke their claims of ownership. I hesitate to reduce a wide and disparate group of people and opinions down to a few bullet points, but as many of them seem to carry the same flavour I at least feel somewhat justified in summarising what I see as the major arguments they're employing. The anti-Retake bunch, put most generally, seem to feel the claims made by the Retake crowd are completely and totally invalid because, bluntly, the fans aren't BioWare. Because the fans didn't write the game's story (though the fans would actually probably disagree at this fundamental level) they don't get a say in deciding how the trilogy ends and should accept whatever BioWare threw out at them because BioWare are the authors and are trying to make an aesthetic and thematic point with their work. Sometimes this is dressed up in the language of art, and that art shouldn't always be about pleasing people (which is a true statement, but not in the way these people are using it in my opinion) but the sentiment remains the same: BioWare are the authors, the fans are not, and only the authors get to decide what a work says and what it's about. This group also militantly opposes any attempt to elaborate on or alter the ending of Mass Effect 3 in any way because they feel it would compromise artistic integrity in favour of pandering to the series' whiny, childish and demanding fanbase.

Just as it's easy to see where the Retake Mass Effect fans are coming from, I argue it's easy to see how their detractors have come to their conclusions. Emboldened by a love of video games as a creative medium and armed with the language of art, they've spent a big part of their careers trying to in some sense “validate” games as a medium, perhaps against those on the outside who would criticize its legitimacy as an art form. Probably more accurately and relevantly though, they've also spent a great deal of their careers trying to corral ravenous, immature fans and defend themselves from the vile hate speech that is leveled at them with disturbing regularity and frequency. It's not difficult to imagine game journalists would have a knee-jerk reaction to a situation like this and immediately write off the actions of a group like Retake Mass Effect as the usual theatrics and not feel they're worthy of any attention. And, to be honest, the Retake crowd doesn't make a good case for itself when it pulls dumb stunts like filing a formal FTC complaint against BioWare and EA and unleashing their own army of cyberbullies. And cupcakes.

Now that we've defended the integrity of the anti-Retake people though, let's step back and look at what their core arguments are actually implying. By claiming that the fans have no say in deciding how Mass Effect 3's story plays out, they're essentially saying two things: Firstly, they are, in the eyes of the fans, completely flying in the face of what they perceive the series' entire set of core values to be. To them, Mass Effect has always been about their choice, from the first character creation screen to the last fork in the road in the climax of the third game (yeah, I did enough cursory research to have a basic idea about what happens). To hear from their opponents that their choice doesn't matter is completely incongruous and will only serve to make them angrier and more passionately dedicated to their cause. Secondly, and more importantly and relevantly to us, what the anti-Retake side is really saying with this impassioned appeal to sanctity of fiction and authorial vision is that, in post-structuralist terms, they want to give all the power in deciding what a text means to the author. This is, frankly, no better and no more satisfying a concluding argument than what the Retake side is offering from a Lacanian perspective.

Most curiously, neither side seems to be paying much attention to the actual text itself. What actually happens at the end of Mass Effect 3, or in the various possible endings? Not just a rote summary of events (like, say, the one I totally didn't read on Giant Bomb and Wikipedia), but what literally transpires in the ending cutscene that has provoked such powerful emotions on both sides? More importantly than even that though, how does this connect with the themes BioWare claim to be exploring with the Mass Effect Trilogy? Has anyone from BioWare come out to explain what the core themes and motifs of the series are and how they relate to the finale? Has anyone bothered to ask? Or have you all been too busy screaming at one another about who has the better claim of ownership over the narrative? Almost the first rule of doing a serious upper-level critical reading of a text is taking these kinds of questions into consideration.

For the sake of argument, let's say BioWare did indeed have specific things they wanted to address with Mass Effect 3. Even then though, it's entirely possible the finished product doesn't adequately reflect this intent: Whenever you write something, there is by necessity a translation taking place from the hazy ideas you had in your head to physical, textual reality and maybe some of them didn't properly make the transition all that effectively (I had actually planned on doing a whole article going into more detail along these lines before this nonsense came up). Likewise, it's equally plausible for an author to neglect a certain aspect of the finished product causing the readers to interpret it in a way completely contrary to the one that was intended.

Look at the famous example of Bruce Springsteen's “Born in the U.S.A.”, a deeply cynical song about a returning Vietnam veteran horribly mistreated and abandoned by his community upon returning home from the war jarringly and purposefully incongruously set to a towering, anthemic melody. It was infamously misinterpreted by the kinds of people who don't pay attention to lyrics in songs and only focus on catchy hooks and pretty noises to be a flag-waving patriotic anthem. The problem was so widespread it was amusingly picked by Ronald Reagan as the theme song for his re-election campaign before being told in no uncertain terms by Springsteen he missed the point entirely. In Mass Effect terms, think again about that Eurogamer article and Commander Shepard herself: BioWare wrote the character to be male by default and didn't pay any attention to how the story would play out if fans chose to play a woman. This resulted in Shepard becoming heralded as a near-perfect example of post-feminist progressive thinking even though later events proved that had BioWare taken into account the fact people might actually care about her when they initially designed the game she most certainly would not have been.

Were Springsteen's lazier fans right to claim “Born in the U.S.A.” as a patriotic anthem even though the lyrics and Springsteen's intent argue it's not? Not really, because the lyrical content of the work and Springsteen's own quick response made it clear they were blatantly and obviously reading the song incorrectly and being intellectually irresponsible. Are BioWare's fans right to claim Commander Shepard is a feminist icon despite BioWare not intending her to be such? Absolutely, because she displays all the trappings of such in the finished product and that's solely a result of BioWare not taking the time and effort to make their far-less-progressive politics clear in the text that got passed on to the readers. The thing about the triple-pronged Lacanian approach is that it relies on balance: In order to read a text thoroughly, as I've argued in the past, the three spheres must be weighed against one another and sometimes two of the three cancel out the third.

Which brings us back to the subject at hand. The thing about the Commander Shepard example is that a lot of the fodder for the argument in favour of reading her as a feminist icon comes from the games themselves, the actual texts. Even though this wasn't BioWare's intent, what they actually wrote that made it into the finished product lends itself very nicely to being interpreted as such. In other words, the text seemingly pretty clearly contradicts the word of the author. This is nontrivial: A finished text is going to live on far past its author and as long as people are alive and able to experience it, a text will always lend itself to new interpretations. That's why there are about a billion different readings of something like, say Lewis Carroll's diptych tour-de-force Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through The Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There: It's longevity and endless versatility as a work lends itself to countless questions and points of discussion and Carroll wanted to make sure his books would stimulate people's imaginations for generations to come. If BioWare and its fans want Mass Effect to last and stand as one of the great works of the video game medium (as many are already claiming it is) this is absolutely something all sides are going to have to take into consideration.

If we're going to civilise this discourse, the obvious first step is to sit everyone down and take a good, long hard look at what Mass Effect 3 actually is: Does the finished product adequately reflect the themes its authors attempted to imbue it with? If not, what does it say to readers instead? Unfortunately for the journalists, the simple fact Mass Effect 3 exists as a text, not to mention the fact BioWare have already shown their work can take on a life of its own apart from their intentionality means fans really do have a say in interpreting its meaning. However, the Retake crowd shouldn't celebrate victory either because they need to come to terms with the notion that theirs' is not the only reading possible. Perhaps their complaints do indeed have merit and deserve to be heard (again, I'm not in a position to say), but if they're going to make any kind of legitimate case for themselves they need draw on actual textual evidence to back up their arguments, not histrionic language of entitlement.

There. That's done and out of my system. Can we go back to talking about more enjoyable things now please?

“But What Does It All Mean?”: Lacanian Reading and Video Games (Part II)

OK, let's back up and take a look at what I just did. In brief, I wrote a basic little analytical essay about Super Mario Bros., drawing conclusions about it based upon what I could glean about Shigeru Miyamoto's inspirations and worldviews and the actual text of the game. I started off talking about how Dave Sheff recounts elements of Miyamoto's biography, and then I took that information and dovetailed it into an essay in which I essentially argue that Super Mario Bros. is a piece of radical deconstructivist commentary on the video game medium and player's expectations circa 1985 and, furthermore, serves as an outlet for Shigeru Miyamoto to share experiences and emotions with an audience. What I've done is constructed an argument consciously and explicitly out of the first two layers of a Lacanian reading: The actual text and authorial intent. There is, however, a bit more work to be done because there is, of course, a third level to this analysis.

The third level is perhaps the most difficult to come to terms with as it is fluid and defies easy explanatory devices: It is the way in which the text resonated with its audience. Put another way, it's what the text means to the individual reader. This is the part that probably isn't taught in most English classes (though talented ones can implicitly foster it) as it cannot be quantitatively measured or tested: It directly calls upon the reader's positionality, that is the unique set of preconceptions, associations and experiences that any given reader, and only that given reader, brings to the discussion table. What does the text mean to you? What did you, personally, take away from it? This to me is the most revelatory part of the theory Felman, via Lacan, outlines and when joined to the other sides creates a powerful dynamic reaction that yields practically limitless explanatory power. Because then, and only then, can we finally tease out what any given text actually means: By looking at it in the context of these three dynamically interacting spheres. Meaning isn't one thing that a text inherently has: It's not something that the author “hid” under layers of irritating, obfuscating metaphors and symbols and is cruelly making you “dig up” and “unearth”. No, meaning is an intangible and ever-changing thing that is generated by the act of reading itself through the dynamic interaction of these three core principles.

I've already touched upon this third sphere to an extent already: Much of the leverage I have to claim Super Mario Bros. is a work of radical deconstructive game design in the previous essay is because that's what it plays like to me. This isn't something Miyamoto has expressly confirmed, but it's present and noticeable to me when I put it in the cultural context of the time. It's also something other critics have picked up on, so I'm not the only one to notice it. To continue my argument, I should logically now explain to you what the game says to me as a playerXreader. I could now rattle off a few comfortable paragraphs about how I interpret Miyamoto's vision within the context of the game, but there's an additional wrinkle here: This is Super Mario Bros. In many ways, this is the game that single-handedly made me fall in love with the medium and showed off its full potential for creative and artistic expression. It is impossible for me to disentangle it from my own childhood memories of staring with rapture at a hazy 1980s television set and having my life changed forever. So, for me to do this properly, I have to do a bit of reminiscing and autobiography.

...

This story begins, as many of my formative ones do, with my cousins. They lived about six hours away so we didn't see them very often, but whenever we did it was an occasion. This was my first time visiting them at their newer house (I hesitate to say "new" because they had lived there for quite some time and we'd just never visited). Not long after arriving and settling in, my oldest cousin (who had first exposed me to video games in the first place via the Game Boy he always had on him when he travelled and brought whenever he visited us, but that's another story) urged me to come upstairs to his game room so he could show me something cool. It was his Nintendo Entertainment System, the original one with the wonky side-loading cartridge system that broke down when you looked at it funny. The first game he wanted to show me was Super Mario Bros./Duck Hunt, a special pack combining the game we've been spending a great deal of time talking about with the surprisingly excellent and accurate (for the time) skeet shooting simulator Duck Hunt.

That single event is permanently etched into my mind it was so important to me. To this day I can remember the exact look and layout of that house to the tiniest detail: The sprawling suburb in which it was situated, the diminutive front yard, the big open first floor, the deck leading out to the pool and the backyard, the spiral staircase, the long corridor upstairs and the bright games room (made even brighter by the vibrant summer sunshine pouring in through the large window to the right) with the fuzzy 1980s television sitting on top of the entertainment centre with the NES beneath it and the stack of games in the long file beneath the bed.

Super Mario Bros. was by no means the first video game I'd ever played, but it had an effect on me unlike almost any I'd played up to that point. Super Mario Bros. was literally unlike anything I'd ever played before and for very subtle and specific reasons. I'd played sidescrollers and platformers before and I certainly knew who Mario was (I'd played a few of his earliest games beforehand) so the actual gameplay was nothing particularly revelatory. What Super Mario Bros. did that I'd never seen a video game do before was exude an atmosphere, a sense of place and of emotion from every single detail. The first thing that struck me was how vibrant, warm and inviting the game's colour palette was, full of striking blues, greens, reds, pinks and oranges. There was literally no other game that looked like it: Every other game I was familiar with was in black and white, grey-scale or that classic arcade dark psychedelic vector neon that's a vibe unto itself. Super Mario Bros., helped in no small part by the lush summer sun pouring in through the open window and reflecting off the trees and grass outside, felt young, fresh and full of life.

Whole articles could, and have, been written about Super Mario Bros.'s theme song alone. It's a positively enchanting and infectious Calypso/Latin fusion piece that was surprisingly musically complex for its time. Like the colour palette, it was like nothing else at the time, coming into a world of 8-bit techno beats, brief little jingles and games that were silent save for scratchy laser blasts, explosions and bleeps. The Super Mario Bros. theme, like all good songs, sets a mood and uses music to paint a picture in the mind. Combined with the games already bright visual style, the song melds with the other aspects of the game to build a mood with magnificent nuance and elegance. The Mushroom Kingdom is not overtly tropical in climate, but Super Mario Bros. is simply made of dazzling, summery emotions and a sense of wonder and youthful joy. Despite its nigh-infinite number of remixes, covers, adaptations and samples, not to mention copious usage in other games, the best possible way to listen to the song outside Super Mario Bros. proper is to find a steel pan trio playing it: It simply feels right.

But perhaps the most remarkable thing about the world of Super Mario Bros. that struck me is that it *changed*: After the initial level sets you up for a pseudo-tropical romp, Level 2 dumps you in what amounts to a sewer. Level 3 returns you to the surface, but makes you clamber over soaring cliffs. The fourth level of every world (and the fact that Super Mario Bros. has eight “worlds” made up of four “Levels” each made it seem indescribably large and sprawling for the time) is a dank castle with fire sticks, lava pits and giant fire-breathing monsters. Some levels even take place at night, which was something I'd also never seen done before. As the game progress into its later levels, the overworld itself changes seeming to get paler and harsher the further you get (trees turn from green to white, for example) as if Mario and Luigi are steadfastly moving north. This culminated in one level set in what seemed to be a frozen tundra at night where everything has a sleek, white sheen. It even snowed onscreen! The fact that this gorgeous snow effect was, as my cousin later informed me, a result of his hand-me-down television going on the fritz instead of some genius design decision by Miyamoto did little to take away from the magic of playing through that level the first time. Temperamental television or no, the fact remains that all of this came together to make Super Mario Bros. the first game I played that felt like it took place in a cohesive, living, breathing world, which made exploring its various secrets all the more substantial and enjoyable.

Super Mario Bros. for me than is an absolute triumph of game design and playing it was one of the most important moments of my life. Because of it, I really started to see what video games had to offer as a medium. With Super Mario Bros., Miyamoto gives us his first, and arguably still best, master stroke: Using brilliantly nuanced game design to put the joy of exploring, of living in wonder and just plain living front and centre and allowing someone like me to experience it in the bright, naturally lit games room at my cousin's house the same way he himself experienced it so many years ago as a child in the city streets or the forests behind his Kyoto home.

Because that's what he's done, of course. He's created a work that is a reflection of his personal feelings and viewpoints that has successfully recreated for countless people around the world the very sensations and experiences that helped make him into the person he became. In other words, Miyamoto, through Super Mario Bros., has actually literalized the Lacanian concept of reading as a fundamental tenant of his game design philosophy: The authorial intent is obvious, but the fact that the text of the game allows players to actually discover and feel such things on their own through the agency the medium provides indicates Miyamoto is aware of positionality and how to exploit it to share experiences with his audience. This is the true potential of video games as a medium of artistic expression in my view: It's one thing to tell a story with heroic characters you relate to about themes you care about, but to actually be able to share an experience, share an emotion, and have the reader be able to not just witness it but experience it themselves, that's something else altogether, and something almost unique to video games in my opinion.

...

What I've done here is use my experiences with Super Mario Bros. to make another argument-In this case that video games are inherently, literally Lacanian (at least ones with skilled designers. There are exceptions, but I'm not ready to discuss those yet) The reason I spent so much time talking about my personal relationship with the game is not just for me to indulge in misty-eyed nostalgia: My history with the game, and crucially my history of experiences dating from before the point at which I picked it up for the first time, is essential to understanding the positionality I inhabited as I played it, how my positionality shifted after I played it and crucially, how that affected the way I read it.

Positionality is key to utilising the third sphere of Lacanian reading as Felman describes it, because it's only through getting ahold of one's associations, relations and preconceptions that we are able to understand how any given reader will respond to a text. In my case, Super Mario Bros. dramatically shifted my conception of what video games were capable of, and is probably why I'm sitting here writing this now. So, if you're looking for someone to blame for my incoherent academic gobbledygook blame Shigeru Miyamoto. Well, and Jacques Lacan. And Shoshana Felman. And my philosophy teacher who introduced me to both. And my Anthropology professor who set me on the path to joining this field. And...

Which brings us to the real delicious irony of this whole thing: Reading is not just one act, but the chaotic interaction of many and varied acts, individuals and texts. I just spent a series of essays writing about Shigeru Miyamoto (whom I understand primarily through what Dave Sheff wrote about him in a book I read) through tools I learned from Shoshana Felman who learned them from Jacques Lacan, who was resolute in his claim that he was doing nothing more than reading Sigmund Freud, which I read because my professor read them and thought I should as well. Not to mention the fact large portions of this series have been dedicated to me reading and analysing myself, and you reading me as I do that. Somewhere in this grand, beautiful symphonic cacophony and language and discourse is meaning. But meaning is, as I've claimed, not one thing, but a mutable, ethereal series of concepts dynamically generated by the interaction of three forces and countless subjects whenever anyone reads anything.

This then is finally how we can judge whether any given reading is “valid”: The addition of the third sphere would, at cursory glance, seem to render all analyses into exercises in futile relativism, but rather what it does instead is give us a more nuanced way to practise it. All we need to do to determine whether a reading is valid or not is to weigh how it utilises the three spheres against itself. For example, I can claim Super Mario Bros. is a work of radical deconstructive game design that literalizes the concept of Lacanian meaning to recreate for players the experiences of exploration and discovery treasured by Shigeru Miyamoto. I can do this because I've (hopefully) provided enough evidence from both what is on record about Miyamoto's intent, my personal experiences with reading it and the actual text itself to back up my claim. I couldn't, however, claim Super Mario Bros. is about a magical flying hamster who soars through Candy Land turning clouds into doughnuts to fight Communism because there is absolutely nothing in the game or what Miyamoto said about it that could remotely be used to support such an assertion, no matter what my personal experiences might be. One is a valid interpretation, the other isn't. One constitutes a legitimate reading of the text, the other is me reading the text wrong.

On the other hand, this is also why no-one can claim I am "reading too much" into a simple video game from 1985 or "picking up on things that aren't there", because the very act of ever reading anything is inherently bound by these forces and interactions. These are the conclusions to which I have arrived at via my history of reading things, and not just video games, as texts from a particular positionality. This then is the core of analysis for me, and the tool set by which I'm going to approach anything else I do on this blog.

“But What Does It All Mean?”: Lacanian Reading and Video Games (Part I)

It's-a-me...

At the risk of dredging up the tired “Are Games Art?” debate, I think it's safe to say that anyone taking the time to read this weblog has probably felt some kind of emotional connection with a game at some point during their lives. Whether they cause us to see things a different way, force us to ask provocative questions, immerse us in an engaging fantasy world or give us vivid characters and stories to relate to, video games, like all forms of creative expression, have the power to resonate with us on a personal level and leave a lasting impression. Taking the time to unpack this truism, however, is an altogether different project and one that is uniquely rewarding. If it is safe to claim that games *can* affect us and that *why* they affect us differs from person to person, what about asking a third question? That is, *how* do they affect us as human players? Well, perhaps I ought to call us “readers”, because for this piece I'm going to try and subtly move us away from the language of pure game journalism and into the language of philosophy, media studies and, to be blunt, artistry.

The reason I make that fine redefinition of terms is that I believe video games can be read and understood as what we call “texts” in the world of theoretical humanities and social sciences. The word “text” carries an implied connection to books (which is typically what we talk about in philosophy), but really it can be applied to any creative work that has textual, subtextual and meta-textual elements to it, like a movie, a piece of music or, yes, a video game. I think the world of philosophy, media studies, qualitative social science and radical psychoanalysis offers a wide array of tools that we can use to look at games and read them better, and part of the reason I started this site was so I could highlight them and hopefully contribute something to a new level of discourse for our medium. That said, one of the simplest, most profound and most important tools we now have available to us is the concept of textual meaning, and, more to the point, where it comes from and how we read it.

There have been many theories and many debates about how we communicate, discuss and read one another, but the one I think is most appropriate to us is the one embodied by the work of one Jacques Lacan. Lacan was a controversial mid-20th Century French psychiatrist and psychoanalyst who nevertheless wound up making a sizeable number of important contributions to a bunch of different fields apart from clinical psychiatry, like philosophy, sociology, feminist theory, literary and film studies. Although, truth be known, we're actually going to be drawing more from Yale University professor Shoshana Felman’s contemporary reading of Lacan put forth in her truly excellent book Jacques Lacan and the Adventure of Insight. In it, Felman argues that Lacan’s work can be read as a kind of metaphor or subject, through which we can re-evaluate what it means to be a reader and what it means to be contemporary. In other words, Felman thinks that psychoanalysis, particularly the kind done by Lacan, has made possible a unique new way of reading that allows us to get a closer look at the actual act of reading itself and the significance that has for discourse.

I'm going to extrapolate Felman’s analysis further, using her conception of reading and the reader gleaned from Lacan as a starting point. For you see in this piece I am going to make the claim that not only can video games be read in exactly the same manner as any other kind of text, but that talented game designers can actually literalize this way of reading works as a key part of the final product. This is actually an underlying principle of the way I approach games and gaming, and I'll be returning to this thesis many times in subsequent articles for this site because I think it can be applied to any number of different titles and situations. For the meantime, however, I am going to concentrate on one game I feel is a perfect microcosm of my theory but of which, in a deliciously paradoxical manner, this might not be apparent at first: Shigeru Miyamoto’s groundbreaking 1985 classic, Super Mario Bros.

And yes, for those of you keeping score at home, I am reading Felman’s reading of Lacan (who more often than not was reading Freud in his work), and then appropriating those concepts so that I can read Super Mario Bros. I'm also going to be basing the conclusions of my case study somewhat on what Dave Sheff wrote about what Miyamoto said to him in the 1998 book Game Over: Press Start to Continue, but I'll touch more on that later. And, by the way, you're reading me as I'm doing all this, so that's another layer in of itself. Isn't deconstructive philosophy fun? Of course it is, so lets get started. But first, let's learn a little more about Lacanian thought and how we can even know what anything ever means.

Felman has quite a lot of different applications for Lacan’s work in contemporary philosophy and literature studies, but the one most relevant to us is the idea of how meaning is generated. Essentially, what a text “means”, what it's “about” and how it acquires any level of significance other than words on paper (or in our case binary bits in an NES cartridge). If you think back to your High School English days (and I knew as soon as I wrote those words some of you weren't going to want to, but bear with me-it wont be long) you'll probably remember your teachers once told you how great works of literature have a “deeper meaning” inherent in the text and how to look for symbolism and metaphors within it that explicitly related to those overarching themes and concepts. Some walk away from those classes thinking authors spend months and months toiling away at works to load it up with as many obscure symbols and hidden concepts designed to create for the reader a nasty web of ideas forcing them to analyse each and every last little thing. While I'm not denying some authors might do this (I can think of a few right now) this is, at heart an overly-simplified, reductive and narrow-minded way of approaching texts. In fact, I feel perhaps the most important thing to take away from this discussion is that textual meaning does not derive solely from the author (the author is certainly important, and that's a point I'm going to return to, but there's more to it than that). Here's what I think Felman, and by extension Lacan, is saying:

When we read a text, there are actually three very specific things happening in tandem that work together in order to generate meaning. Therefore, if we're ever going to figure out what our works mean, we have to pick apart each one of them and keep them in mind, because this is not only where we're going to figure out what the meaning is according to this specific reading (and yes, it will change depending on the reader), but it's also going to help us decide what constitutes a valid reading (more on that a little later). Let's look at these three concepts then: Firstly and probably most importantly, is what does the text actually, literally say? In a book, this is the first and easiest step: Pick it up and read those words. What are the actual words printed on the page (or represented by pixels on your iPad)? It boils down to a very simple binary (though I usually dislike them immensely): Did you or did you not actually read this book?

In my Super Mario Bros. example this is a little trickier because the game has next to no dialogue, but we can discern a lot from things like the onscreen prompts and the sumptuous instruction manual Nintendo kindly provided, which, for the purposes of this exercise I'm going to count as part of the game, mostly because without it Super Mario Bros. essentially has no story seeing as how the technology wasn't capable of fully conveying one yet. This isn't even taking into account the somewhat obvious fact that if you picked up the game when it first came out without reading the manual you probably would have absolutely no idea what you were looking at. In more recent games there are other ways of reading this level like in-game cutscenes, acted dialogue or pantomime sequences.

Returning to my case study, however, what we can discern about Super Mario Bros. on a superficial level is that it's a video game where you move a sprite left to right, jumping over obstacles and looking for passageways. The manual elaborates on this further, telling us that we “are” one Mario (a very important and loaded phrase that demands deeper later examination), a humble plumber who vows to help repel a band of wizard turtles who have invaded the Mushroom Kingdom and kidnapped Princess Toadstool, who is the only one versed in magic enough to defeat the invaders. The “Bros.” comes from the fact that Mario’s brother Luigi joins him on the adventure and can be controlled by a second player. Right away we can ascertain a basic yet fairly functional idea of what this game is, however we're far from done.

The second key needed in creating a claim to meaning is the obvious: Authorial intent. That is, what did the authors of the work intend when they sat down to write it? Now, this is a very complex issue and I actually fear the words I have laid out are not fully capable of conveying the thorniness of it. In brief, the whole notion of intentionality is a contentious one and one certainly worthy of full examination at a later date (I can already think of at least two philosophers who would like a word or two with me after saying this). For the moment though, let's simplify things and say that yes, the author had a specific intention to create a work and a specific idea of what the work is supposed to mean. How then can readers know what the author explicitly intended the work to be about?

Well, the easy answer is to read it, but this isn't actually as easy as it might appear at first glance due to another concept I'll address soon. No, the only way to truly get a firm idea of what the literal authorial intent of a piece is would be to ask the author straight up. This is admittedly difficult when the author has been dead for several centuries, so in those cases we are often reliant on other places where the authors wrote about their works for the record or, barring that, having endless discussions with other reader-philosophers in comfortable seminar rooms about what we feel Kant was really thinking when he wrote Kritik der reinen Vernunft.

With video games we have a slight advantage on this level because the medium is so young so many of its foundational artists and creators are still alive to talk about what inspired them to make their works, often at great length, and much has been written quiet extensively about it. Super Mario Bros. was, as stated above, the brainchild of Shigeru Miyamoto: Nintendo’s very own “staff cartoonist” and creator of many of its biggest hit titles. Much of Miyamoto’s biography and his thoughts on his own oeuvre is well-documented public knowledge, and the reason it is so is due to the work of journalist Dave Sheff compiled in his comprehensive history of Nintendo’s early years as a game publisher, Game Over: Press Start To Continue. Taking a look at how Sheff profiles Miyamoto, we can gain some insight on what his games mean:

...

Sheff details how Miyamoto's childhood growing up in Kyoto shaped how he came to view the world. Miyamoto loved cartoons, and would travel with his family great distances to see animated movies and spend countless hours drawing, making puppets, putting on shows and reading different kinds of fantasy books. A particular favourite of his were stories like Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. His love of fantasy belies Miyamoto's greatest love however: Exploring.

To Miyamoto, his neighbourhood, the maze-like corridors inside his house and the forest behind it may as well have been mythical fantasy lands full of adventure. Getting past his neighbour's angry guard dog was like a valiant fight to the death and a trip to the basement could be a grand adventure to find secret treasure hidden in the old chests stored there. Perhaps the most special moments for Miyamoto, however, were when he would take long walks into the forest to see what he could find. He would rejoice at finding a lake he didn't know about, or a cave leading to a network of underground tunnels.

For Miyamoto, the world is far, far more than it appears to the naked eye: Even when he moved to the city, he would always look around and find ways to let his imagination flourish. He would look at a manhole cover on a wall and wonder what it was doing there or, more to the point, what would happen if you opened it and crawled inside-Where would you end up? Miyamoto's childhood adventuring instilled in him a sense of breathless wonder at the world and a desire to explore it and broaden his horizons, and that profoundly shaped how he looked at it and how he would approach his works later in life.

After getting a job with Nintendo and asked to help out in the creation of some new games, Miyamoto felt it was a perfect opportunity to share his emotions and experiences with children all over the world. He really wanted players of his games to feel the same sense of wonder, magic and discovery he felt as a child, and that was a guiding tenant that went into all of his early games. His first masterpiece then undoubtedly has to be Super Mario Bros., which was consciously, explicitly designed around these very principles. Mario and Luigi are plumbers, a profession chosen because Miyamoto wanted a humble, working-class profession that a lot of people could relate to, thus hopefully broadening his potential audience. Fitting with the plumbing theme, many of the obstacles Mario and Luigi must jump over are large green pipes. However, these pipes hold secrets: Should players choose to stop and play around for a while instead of racing through the level at full tilt, they might choose to find out what happens if they try and go through a pipe. Occasionally, they would find themselves in a hidden area with a stash of gold coins as a reward for their curiosity.

Warp pipes are not the only way in which Super Mario Bros. encourages exploration and lateral thinking, however: From the very outset of the game Mario and Luigi will be confronted with mysterious hovering bricks. These can be used as platforms to navigate the level, but they can also be broken from underneath if players jump into them. Sometimes, these bricks would conceal a mushroom, flower or star which, when grabbed would grant a power-up (a conceit taken, of course, from Alice) a coin, or even a magic beanstalk which, if climbed, leads players to a secret world high above the clouds full of treasures. Other times, the bricks are invisible and only activated if Mario or Luigi make a lucky guess and jump into thin air. In other words, what would appear at first glance to be empty space is in fact something altogether more wondrous and strange to the careful eye.

One of the cleverest things players can do in Super Mario Bros., however, is a trick in the underground areas. In some levels players manoeuvre through an underground cavern, just like the ones Miyamoto was so fond of as a child. These levels are surrounded on all sides by bricks, the same kind that can be broken from beneath. By clearing a few blocks, players might be shocked to find Mario and Luigi can actually end up above the level walking on the ceiling. Follow this new-found path all the way to the end, and Mario and Luigi might stumble upon a secret room with three warp pipes, allowing them to bypass whole swaths of the game entirely. It's an incredibly charming trick, and it's only accessible if players think outside the box and actively want to satisfy their curiosity.

This touches on another major aspect of Super Mario Bros.: It's difficult to tell in hindsight, especially as its gameplay has become the core of almost every platformer made after it, but Super Mario Bros. was, in its day, an incredibly revolutionary and unorthodox game built essentially around challenging and deconstructing player's expectations about what video games should be about. Released into an era where arcades and arcade-style games were still the default, or at least an extremely prominent and important genre (albeit in the waning days of that era), Mario seemed to do everything differently. In an age where it really still wasn't uncommon to see games with one screen at a time about shooting things, Miyamoto gave us a side-scrolling platformer about a plumber trying to save a fantasy kingdom from a marauding band of magic turtles. Every single aspect of the game, from the side-scrolling core to the entire concept of warp pipes, warp zones and secret power-ups, is designed to fly in the face of what gamers would expect from a game at the time. In a way this only makes sense: If Super Mario Bros. is inspired by imagination, creativity, unconventional thinking and curiosity, it's only logical that it should be designed around forcing players to shed their preconceptions and think creatively. I can't think of a better showcase for Shigeru Miyamoto's worldview than that.

...