Most of my essays focus on an obsession, an attempt to
justify. I am looking for a deeper meaning to prove that my favorite pasttimes
are not a waste of time or creative energy. I suppose that's what is happening
here, as well.
In terms of audience, I believe one of the biggest
challenges facing the essay is that of premise, occasion. Oftentimes, the genre
itself works against us: what risk is there to a story of disaster if the
writer has survived to write, reflect? Why would a casual reader decide to engage with writing like
Montaigne's "Of Thumbs"
or "Of the Resemblance of Children to their Fathers:" what interest
is there in these idle thoughts?
That isn't to say that that stakes come entirely from
premise, nor should they. I find that most of my own favorite essays take on the
small, the seemingly inconsequential, and through language or juxtaposition or
imagery, give value to what we otherwise find valueless.
Perhaps I'm more interested in the way in which the
opposite is also true: how we as writers and readers will sometimes
dismiss larger, broader subjects based on subject matter. I attempt to steer my
students away from writing about the state finals for
football/basketball/track/quiz-bowl, and they in turn challenge me when I make
them read essays describing the aesthetic value of dust. Which one of us is
right? Are we all misguided?
I write this because I worry I am becoming too narrow
minded, that I am missing out on a lot of great work due to my biases against
entire subjects, genres, mediums. And from conversations I've had with other
writers, I fear a lot of us are missing out on challenging, surprising, and
deeply intimate work.
Back to videogames. The value of the medium is that of
control: it involves "you," the player, forcing you to make choices
and actions of consequence. You are given control of a fictional world, can
control the arc in ways you cannot in a movie or novel, and as games become
more involved (games like Skyrim
give you the option of robbing a shop or murdering a clerk instead of
paying for merchandise, facing the consequences of your actions if you are
caught), these choices and decisions become increasingly complicated. There are
games that either reinforce your own set of morals, or allow/force you to
compromise them depending on in-game or personal decisions.
I am thinking of games like Bioshock that make you decide if it's worth it to sacrifice others
if it gives your player increased strength; I am thinking of A Dark Room—a text adventure game
available for the Iphone—that forces you to murder and enslave in the hopes of
creating a better civilization. I am thinking that most games now go beyond the simple
"Reach the castle, save the princess" storyline and actually make you
think about the consequences of your actions.
Of course the literature on games and gaming has already turned into
it's own sub-genre of the essay. There's a certain uncertainty to this writing, an awareness of the typical response to video games as art, that gives this writing a unique sense of urgency as it attempts to validate itself. Tom Bissel's collection Extra Lives gives its subjects a
critical as well as personal weight that shows how form and content can be
mimetic (a point that seems equally valid to the essay in all its different
shapes). Sundog Lit
recently put out a games issue that highlights writing on the genre (the issue
was guest-edited by Brian Oliu, whose
own lyric essay collection on boss battles, Level
End, is a must-read) This is not to mention Kill Screen Magazine
or Cartridge Lit or countless other publications/websites/journals that I am certainly missing,
the whole genre exploding with so much work that I cannot begin to keep track.
Though I have often looked to these games as a way of tuning
out the world, I find that the really great ones tend to do the opposite, and Boss
Fight Books, a new press specializing in books written about individual
games (and admittedly, the inspiration for this post to begin with), is expanding the world of the game through interviews
with game creators, history as it relates to the in-game story lines, as well as
personal (and character) narrative. Narratives within the games become intertwined with personal histories, and the
games are merely simulations for the ways our lives play out. Earthbound, a game that was marketed with scratch-and-sniff
stickers, has a final enemy that is defeated through prayer—not in the game, mind you, but asks for you in your living
room to offer that up. Chrono Trigger,
a game playing with the consequences of time travel, kills off its main
character who you can decide to save, or not. ZZT, a game represented by ASCII art, lets users create new worlds that can help explain our own. Each of these games plays off
their writers—in the case of life-threatening surgery, or discussing the challenges of
game-language translation put up against a job teaching English in Japan,
against successful television careers and the 2011
Fukushima disaster. These books are fragmented, complicated, and showing the
meaning that comes out of a hobby that my parents always told me was a waste of time.
I think the power of the essay comes
from the examination of choices and consequences, how we cannot control our
world, yet have a choice in our response to it. I think the gaming world fits
so well within the essay because it is a world that we can control, that we help to shape. Unlike any other medium, it
allows us to interact with a fictional story in a way that makes it true.
David LeGault's recent work appears in The Seneca Review, Wake, and Pithead Chapel. He lives and writes from Minneapolis, where he is currently competing in Revolver Magazine's Write Fight: a single elimination tournament involving typewriters, physical distractions, and exactly one hour to create new work. He can be reached at legaultd@gmail.com
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