The Missing Monoculture

Television used to thrive on spectacle. Or, at least that’s what I remember from my days of growing up in the 90s (and that one episode of 30 Rock). People would huddle around their glowing boxes full of entertainment and news but, more importantly, major entertainment events: one-time milestones in the history of pop culture. Look at the finale of Seinfeld where ad time was valued at $1 million for a 30-second spot (consider that in 2012, the average Super Bowl commercial cost $3.5 million) and how the birth of Little Ricky on I Love Lucy pulled in even more viewers than Dwight Eisenhower’s inauguration the following morning. Who shot J.R.?

But that has mostly faded away. Spectacle is still important, sure, but it’s no longer synchronized around a single timetable like it used to be. With the advent of on-demand and the Internet, broadcast schedules have meant less now than they ever have before. Radio serials, television programming, all that now subsist on audience demand rather than network scheduling. What remains now are New Year’s Rockin’ Eve and the Super Bowl. And the Olympics, but come on, who isn’t going to watch that. It’s basically international sports war. But once again: an event. A moment.

That synchronicity is commonly referred to as the monoculture. We, as a society, basically agree upon for a set amount of time what is popular and what everyone will enjoy at any given moment. It’s a little like a hive mind, but it’s also just consensus and quality assurance. Feel free to follow the popular opinion or not, but when 98% of the world’s population finds something to be enjoyable, it’s hard to argue.

For instance, look at music. The monoculture still happens, just not as often. Recently, we’ve all seen the meteoric rise of Gangnam Style, but when was the last time the world managed to agree on across the board love, ironically enjoy, and on some level loathe the same song? Smells Like Teen Spirit? Thriller? As Salon writer Touré notes, we haven’t even managed to hate something in unison since disco in the 70s.

Part of the monoculture is that you feel like you’ve consumed something when you actually haven’t. You didn’t have to listen to those songs or see people in bell-bottoms to take part in those movements. You didn’t have to see Star Wars to feel the shift in cinema. Watching Seinfeld was not a prerequisite to talking about shrinkage. These weren’t just things happening around you; they were your daily life, whether you wanted it or not.

It’s a loss that is happening in video games, though, and for the same reasons. It’s not necessarily single-handedly the fault of technology and the Internet, but they certainly exacerbated things. You can be knee-deep in any segment of gaming (or music or movies or television) and still not have any idea what’s going on with the other end of the industry. The people that bought a Wii U and haven’t stopped playing Nintendo Land or ZombiU have probably never even heard of To The Moon or Proteus, two titles that were (and sometimes still are) all the people in my Twitter feed talk about.

It’s because things are no longer as finely delineated as they used to be. Just like how music is no longer just classical, jazz, and rock, gaming is no longer just FPS, platforming, and puzzles. Genres have blended in an infinite number ways, and each utterly unique result has found its own audience. Much as how YouTube has proven that no matter your interests, there will be people out there that share your passions. The walls between massive categorizations have shattered, and like under a spent piñata, people are scurrying about picking up their choice candies—and not necessarily every piece.

What would you call, for instance, Dear Esther? How would you describe that game to a crowd of industry folk even 10 years ago? Not only could you not explain it, but it wouldn’t even exist. The breadth of games available nowadays has expanded to such a degree that tapping into both ends of it would be like trying to bear hug the entire god damn universe. The Internet (and the subsequent avenues of Steam, Kickstarter, and even other, more independent and esoteric channels) has made every conceivable notion that falls far from the realm of sci-fi shooters and fantasy RPGs viable because the audience has expanded commensurately. As the fire hose gets bigger, so does the fire. The variety of people’s interests can never be quenched.

Is it for the better? I guess that’s the important question. Was it better when people had to huddle around cocktail and arcade cabinets at pizza parlors and bars? Is that loss of the grand monoculture worth the indie endeavors of these singular microcosms of phenomena? Who knows. It’s certainly an interesting question, but I’m not sure it’s a necessary one. The mere existence of such variety is proof that pop culture is not a zero-sum game; there is plenty of room in the pool for everybody.

So then maybe it’s not about how the monoculture is dead but rather finding out where it’s hiding. Niche interests have certainly made it less necessary for success in mainstream, triple-A products, but necessity isn’t needed for existence. Those niches certainly aren’t required for the moon to go around the sun, seeing as how they weren’t around so much when the monoculture reigned, and the diminished role of that social unity has proven the same for that. Maybe it’s just a dip into anarchy or it’s now an evolutionary step in pop tastes. Either way, it’s here, and I’m gonna go play some video games.

What Video Games Do

I wake up each day knowing that a certain portion of my time will go to just reading. Well, that may not be accurate. Consuming is more like it as sometimes it’s a video or a song or an infographic, but the point is that doing so is pretty much a guarantee. Each day, my Twitter feed will overflow with links and pictures and YouTube clips of things I never knew existed. My Facebook feed with become inundated with photos from the previous night’s outing and videos of an embarrassingly drunk karaoke night. It’s pretty easy to just glaze over with the incessant deluge of information and stimuli.

At this point, I usually only perk up when I see links from particular people or, more often, when I see the same link multiple times. As was the case yesterday, this Tumblr post made the rounds on multiple tweets and Facebook updates (yes, despite being over a month old in its original Tumblr form). It’s a series of GIFs that depict a bit from Irish stand-up comedian Dara Ó Briain‘s 2010 This is the Show DVD. Here’s the text if you’re clicking-averse (and here’s an extended clip from his Live at the Apollo set):

Video games do a thing that no other industry does. You cannot be bad at watching a movie. You cannot be bad at listening to an album. But you can be bad at playing a video game, and the video game will punish you and deny you access to the rest of the video game. No other art form does this! You’ve never been reading a book and three chapters in the book has gone, “what are the major themes of the book so far?” And you’ve gone, “well…I don’t know…,” and boom. “Oh, for fuck’s sake!” You’ve never been listening to an album and after four songs, the album has gone, “dance! Dance! Show me your dancing is good enough to merit this!” And you go, “is this good enough?” And the album goes, “no,” and stops.

Perhaps a bit overly dramatic, but he certainly gets the point across. Video games is one of the few (perhaps the only) art form where you can actually be bad at it and be commensurately punished for it. Regardless of your ability to critically analyze a song or dissect the scenes of a film, you can experience the product in its entirety on your first go-round. Even art in the form of paintings and statues and whatnot can be seen without lapse even if you have zero knowledge of abstract or modern styles. You may not be able to appreciate any of these things on a deeper level and wring meaning from where there may be none, but being a shoddy art critic never stops you from looking at the whole of the Mona Lisa.

Playing a video game, however, is a wholly gated experience. Each nugget of pleasure and pain must be forcibly mined with your own hands. Even exploratory titles which push the boundaries of the definition of “interactive” (such as Dear Esther and Datura) are dependent on your ability to navigate an open environment. Stumble on that block and you might as well not even play.

And that is necessarily true. Anything less in the realm of player-game response and you no longer have a video game; you have an animated movie. Video games are an interactive art form, and failing to interact with it is a failing as a player. This doesn’t make you bad at video games because you can’t complete it but instead makes you bad at it because you can’t do the one thing intrinsic to the art form. Watching a movie requires you to watch and listening to a song requires you to listen, so it’s not much of a stretch to say playing a game requires you to actually play.

Which, I guess, invites the question: do you need to play the entire game to appreciate it? Or, perhaps, what parts of a game are appreciable?

A game is made up of many different elements and is perhaps most similar to movies in this regard. A song is a song and a painting is a painting, but films—just like games—are comprised of songs and art and actors. Games, however, go beyond that and include gameplay mechanics, implements of computer science and artificial intelligence, and so much more. Each piece can be praised and derided separately (this is a good song, this voice actor is terrible, etc.), but only their gestalt can be the final product. The sum total is paramount.

It’s an interesting thought, to be sure, because then not only is tangible progress within the game restricted but also appreciation outside of the game. Your failing as a player extends to your failing as someone who can apply critical thought to the product and the art form as a whole. So video games are not just unique in that you can be bad at playing them but also bad at appraising their overall worth. Whether you understand a Terrence Malick film or can see past the swirling colors of a Pablo Picasso, your evaluation of either are comprehensive in your current state. Given guidance or some choice literature on the topics, you can expand your understanding, but that adds to your worth as a film and art critic.

There is no such shortcut in video games. You cannot intuit the overall value of a game from reading about it or from watching it. The interactivity—the literal motion of you pressing a button or moving a joystick—is integral to your understanding of it. It’s how the choices you are forced to make and actions you have to take in The Walking Dead shape up the story, predetermined or otherwise, in your hands that personalizes your experience. It’s how having the tangible execution of story beats in Spec Ops: The Line makes the hard turns in the late story hit all that much harder in the end.

It’s what makes games so difficult to penetrate, but also makes it so worthwhile.