Jonathan Drain (staticsails.tumblr.com) requested an essay on:

“The advancement of video games and their correlation to Michael Bay philosophies. […] Explosions. Eric, I think you’ve touched base on violence in video games already, but recently I’ve noticed video games are completely different from the games of yesteryear. I can only think of a handful of games on these next gen games th…at I really like. With NES It was pretty much every other game. Maybe modern development teams are squandering the technology. Yep, explosions.”

At his request, I am writing up a few of my thoughts on the inter-relatedness of video games and film, especially in relation to the over-the-top mise en scene of Michael Bay. I find this an immediately challenging task in that I’ve never seen actually seen a Michael Bay movie, but I think I understand the aesthetic enough to comment, at least briefly, on the subject.

Now, to try and make some tenuous assertion about the nature of how video games influence film or how film influences video games seems to be a fruitless line of investigation. In truth, the relationship between video games and film is a sort of feed-back mechanism or symbiosis: they both influence each other, back and forth. The drop in quality of video games isn’t due to the influence of directors like Michael Bay but due to the fact that video games are now easier to make, and that there are more of them (meaning: there is more crap). The fact that we remember most video games of our childhood as “better” than those of adulthood is an indicator of our nostalgia, not the quality of the games we play.

That being said, the aesthetics of both mediums, especially the ones we see as detrimental to other mediums, are worth investigating. More so than an obsession with explosions, contemporary video games have a fondness for a few things: gritty “realism”, a desaturated color palette, post-apocalyptic settings, over use of lens flare effects, and space marines as main characters. Examples include: Halo, Call of Duty, Medal of Honor, Dead Space. The hyper-militaristic and hyper-masculine nature of these games are immediately enticing to a particular niche audience, in the same way that a JRPG attracts a certain crowd. I find these games slightly more pernicious, however, in their presentation and aestheticizing of “real” combat (obviously, less so with the Space Opera games) and their presentation (or lack of) female characters. The aestheticizing of politics, or of war in general, as Walter Benjamin is quick to note, results in an inherently nefarious art-form, culminating in actual violence. The issue of females in this game is obviously a topic for another essay: but the hyper-masculinity, which can be seen as a through-line in Bay’s work (I think?!) is paired with an over use of explosions.

The link between masculinity and explosions is an obvious one in pop culture, but the explanation of such a trope are a little more problematic. To get psychoanalytic about it, could we say that the explosions of these games represent (by way of metaphor) a successful discharge of sexual energy, a blazing ejaculation over the celluloid of the silver screen? Freud was willing to assert the sexual nature of fire in Civilization and Its Discontents:

“It is as though primal man had the habit, when he came in contact with fire, of satisfying an infantile desire connected with it, by putting it out with a stream of his urine. The legends that we possess leave no doubt about the originally phallic view taken of tongues of flame as they shoot upwards. Putting out fire by micturating […] was therefore a kind of sexual act with a male, an enjoyment of sexual potency in a homosexual competition. The first person to renounce this desire and spare the fire was able to carry it off with him and subdue it to his own use. By damping down the fire of his own sexual excitation, he had tamed the natural force of fire. This great cultural conquest was thus the reward for his renunciation of instinct.”

Is the over-usage of explosions in hyper-masculine film and video games a way of quelling our homosexual competitions by way of sublimating the imagery of fire into a safe medium? In a world where we deal with actual fire so little, must we, by proxy, assert our dominance over the element?

If this is the case, then the prevalence of the imagery of explosions in video games makes sense, in that the video game is an inherently more participatory medium than film: when we make or quell a fire in a video game, it is more satisfying than watching it happen in a movie because we are more directly involved in the action.

Michael Bay, again, is not to blame for this aesthetic, but is a good emblem of the aesthetic itself. The tradition of hyper-masculinity and explosions in action movies probably traces back to 70s exploitation films, and even further back to film noire. As video games continue to advance in their ability to create convincing narrative arcs (this advancement often achieved by technical progress and innovation) we can expect the medium to follow suite. Perhaps this is stretching the concepts of grammatology and electricality too far but: old video games more closely resembled poems, and now they resemble novels. (I understand this metaphor is not fully worked out, because most video games resemble epic poetry much more than they resemble novels, but lets just keep this theoretical structure standing, for now it is boranj).

Anyway, these are only a few scattered thoughts I have on the subject. I don’t necessarily think it is fair to say that film or video games are better or worse now than they were whenever ago: most are crap and always have been. The influence of film on the video game is not, necessarily, a deleterious one, however when the video game recapitulates the obsessions and tropes of the film industry, I too find myself frustrated. The original question is a strange one, and I would like to deal with it in more detail at some point or another, but for now we can conclude with the thought that, unlike film, video games are still in their infancy, and it will be exciting to see how the imagery of things like explosions, masculinity, and other filmic gestures and tropes are dealt with as the medium advances.