(Preface Part 1: Before we begin, we would direct you all toward this piece published earlier in the week. Upon the author’s untimely death, we intend to memorialize him by publishing a collection of his works. That article as well as this one will be included in a chapter titled, “Your opinions are different from mine, thus you’re a stupid jerk.”)
(Preface Part 2: For the purposes of what you are about to read, the author requests that you imagine him wearing an incredibly smug scarf.)
Big news in the world of gaming this week, boys and girls. Gears of War 3, the latest sequel in Epic Games’ Xbox 360 tentpole shooter series, hits store shelves next week, and a few days back the professional gaming journalists of the world got the legal go-ahead to publish their official opinions.
Overall, the reaction has been very positive. Good for Epic. Good for Cliff Bleszinski. Good for the Axe Body Spray retailers of Cary, North Carolina.
This is not an article about Gears of War 3. This is an article about the backlash against Gears of War 3 — or more specifically, the backlash against that backlash. If my scarf were any more smug, I’d dub it “nested meta-commentary.”
Following the aforementioned critical outpouring of support, some internet denizens attacked these published opinions, decrying Gears as “too mainstream.” Apparently, in the eyes of many, it lacks the kind of artistic creativity inherent in any game that could feasibly be described as “indie.”
Incensed by this, Ben “Ars Technica Gaming Editor” Kuchera :
Gears of War haters: sometimes things don’t suck because they’re popular. Sometimes things are popular because they’re really, really fun
And now, after 283 words of build up, I can finally get to the point: Sorry Ben, but popularity, almost by definition, is the key indicator of anything’s propensity for suck.
Whoa whoa whoa, chief. Don’t be so quick to jump to the comments section and call me a “fucktard” or whatever blue conjunction is popular with the kids these days. Sit on your hands for a sec and I’ll explain.
Imagine for a moment that you work in advertising. Your firm is tasked with selling a new light beer. Honestly, it’s not a very good beer. It’s kind of an off shade of yellow, and its aftertaste is equal parts bitter hops and loneliness. Still, they pay you the big bucks to move bottles of this swill, and you’re very good at it.
You’ve lined up a few hundred billboards across the country, and now all you need is an ad. It has to be something that speaks directly to as many people as possible. Something that grabs their attention, and says “hey you, I don’t know you, but I got some booze and I bet you’d like it!” People have to see this image and immediately make a mental connection between this brew and existential glee.
Y’know what? Fuck it. We’ll slap some titties on that bitch and hit up happy hour.
Much to the chagrin of flapper-era Prohibitionists, the beer becomes an overnight success, surpassing Budweiser, Coors and any other drink not directly linked to perky boobs.
Do you grasp what just happened here? Humanity as a whole has a handful of motivators common to (almost) all of us. Sex, food, shelter; Abraham Maslow drew a neat picture of the whole thing if you have a free moment. These motivators (or, more accurately, their chemical analogues) are the only reason why any of us like anything, and it’s not incredibly difficult for professionals to exploit them for monetary gain.
Unfortunately, not everyone responds to these motivators in the exact same way. You might see a picture of a nubile twentysomething lady in a bikini and immediately fork over a wad of cash for whatever product she’s pimping, while I would turn up my nose, haughtily mumble something about “post-feminist ideals,” and nurse a baby kitten back to health. It’s not that I don’t like breasts — seriously, what’s not to like? — it’s just that the theoretical you who I mentioned above, seems more directly motivated by them than I.
Plus, I’m kind of a pretentious jerk. Chicks dig it.
Since we live in a world populated by all sorts of jerks like me, these professionals, whether they be in advertising or Hollywood or the videogame biz, have to work to ensure that their products appeal to as many people as possible. Black, white, Jewish, space alien; a truly successful product will appeal to all these groups in one way or another.
For the purposes of this increasingly demon-touting argument, we will define these successful products as “mainstream.”
The dark side of creating products this way, is that one also has to take into account the various failings of the audience. If your customer loves naked ladies, but dropped out of middle school to work as a chimney sweep in a London that no longer exists, you can’t exactly lift ad copy from Tolstoy. The message would be lost on the soot-stained idiot, and half your effort would be for naught.
The same goes for movies. You don’t see Michael Bay adapating Jane Eyre into a summer blockbuster, do you? Not because he couldn’t find a way to add explosions to Charlotte Brontë’s histrionic Britishisms — never ever doubt Michael Bay’s ability to ‘splode stuff — but because the summer blockbuster audience, the people who will gladly fork over billions of dollars in cash, don’t have the capacity to appreciate the subtle nuances of the work that English professors have been pleasuring themselves over for the last century.
This is the inherent problem with the “mainstream:” by definition, it has to appeal to the lowest common denominator. There is no room for anything truly creative, experimental, or even intelligent. Blood and guts, tits and asses, maybe an overt reference to Jesus; that’s the kind of thing the average person wants to see, and if you want to have any hope of your product reaching “popular” status, you do not have the freedom to go far beyond that holy trinity.
Now, before any of you get your hackles up at my perceived slight toward Gears of War 3, I should say that I haven’t played the game, nor do I directly intend any of what I’ve written here to be applied to Epic’s latest shooter. Honestly, I had a lot of fun of with the prior two Gears games and, for pure, visceral violence, I don’t think there are many developers who even come close to the series’ level of gleeful destruction.
In sum, this is mostly just a retort to Mr. Kuchera’s Twitter message. Admittedly, it’s an overlong, pretentious, hyper-verbose retort, but that’s only because I’m physically unable to grab the world by the shoulders and shake it around until someone calls Child Protective Services. Yes world, “popular” is a bad thing. It means that it appeals to the stupid, unwashed, gibbering masses, crouching in their own filth and laughing at Seth MacFarlane animated sitcoms while our whole damn planet is overrun by teenaged mothers and greasy Italian stereotypes.
I wish popular was a good thing. I wish we could all come together, right now, over me, and agree on which creative endeavors are awesome, but the truth is that humanity is a disparate group of animals. Some of us spend our free time reading in a quaint café just off the Avenue des Champs-Élysées, while others prefer to eat ribs in a strip club. I’m not judging these ambulatory wastes of flesh, but I am saying that any product that might appeal to their refined palates likely isn’t a paragon of human creativity.
Now, I hear you villagers hoisting your torches and pitchforks, and preparing to storm my ivory tower, but before you publicly eviscerate me, allow me to say the following: You are all jerks, and your stupid faces smell like butt.
[Propers to these fine folks for the attractive, bewildering imagery.]
I don’t disagree with most of the body of the post, but I disagree with the conflation of creation/marketing to the, “Mainstream,” and, “Popular,” (much like, “Normal,” I think the term exists as a hypothetical holy grail. There is no normal, there is no mainstream, there is only average and an average demographic.)
Things can become popular independent of the marketing, things can fail regardless of the marketing. Popularity and quality are measures that also exist independently of each other.
I get the point, and I do agree with the idea that as long as entertainment as a corporate proposition is treated as pure business rather than a creative business, quality suffers. Creativity suffers. We as an audience suffer while we’re inundated with endless iterations of increasingly dumbed-down film, television, (gaming isn’t immune, but is more resilient in the face of dumb,) music and even books. A little more nuance in the argument, wouldn’t come amiss. It’s exactly what’s lacking in the, “Mainstream.”
That may or may not have been intentional. I still haven’t quite decided.
I DO know that the pictures of the hipster girls with moustaches were added purposefully however. Does that help?
I’m the founder of the Portland Fake Mustache Club (I am not making this up) and I approve the imagery in this article.
Nerd Puddle has been a proud supporter of snoutbrooms since 1992.