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Converging: An Interview With Henry Jenkins
HJ: That's the wrong way to think about it. I'd love to see a game world that worked like Winsor McCay's Little Nemo, like Einstein's Dreams, like Salvador Dali, like Doctor Seuss, like Matthew Barney, like.. We can make a laundry list of our favorite artists, many of which might inform and inspire the right designer under the right circumstances to create something really incredible. But just as I don't think the best films are adapted from stage plays, I doubt the best games will come from slavishly imitating work from another medium. What I really want to do is see more game designers given the creative freedom to do expressive experiments in this medium, to take it places we never thought it could go and make it do things we never would have imagined possible. What all of the examples that came to me first have in common is that they have nothing in common. They represent radically different ways of representing the world. Well, that's not true - they have in common the fact that none of them represent photorealism. In every other art, realism is an aesthetic choice. In games, it has become a technological imperative. But I would still argue that many of my favorite games - the work of Miyamoto comes to mind - don't look or act like the world we live in. The brilliance of Super Mario Brothers, and the reason it made me fall in love with this medium, was that it represented a fully realized yet totally idiosyncratic microworld. I loved the imagination and whimsy that went into its design. I want to see games find their way back to that place. GS: Lars Svendsen's 'The Philosophy of Boredom' identifies boredom as a peculiarly modern problem. JG Ballard meanwhile predicts that "the future will be boring" and that psychopathological experiments will fill the void. Could it be that in fact video games (themselves often experiments in strange and violent activities) will fill that void, and be a peculiarly modern antidote to the peculiarly modern problem of boredom? HJ: I am the wrong person to ask this question. Boredom isn't part of my day to day experience. Exhaustion is. And unfortunately, real exhaustion is not a problem which can be addressed through games. When I am really exhausted, I just want to collapse on the couch and be entertained. Exhaustion drives me to television far more than it pushes me to games. But games can address fatigue - which is one or two levels before you get to exhaustion. They are a true recreational medium. We've lost a sense of the original meaning of recreation as in to re-create, to re-vitalize, to re-fresh. At the turn of the last century, people were convinced that the drabness of modern life, the repetition of the workplace was going to grind down our sensory apparatus to the point that we would be incapable of responding to new stimuli. Reformers advocated all kinds of crazy ideas - like keeping fabrics of different textures in your desk drawer to fondle during odd moments during the workday - as remedies to this problem and our modern value on recreation grew out of this idea that we needed to recreate ourselves and refresh our senses from time to time. Today, we don't keep bits of fur and silk in our desk drawers. We simply can boot up a casual game during our break times and go off into a fantasy world during our lunch hour. But the function is the same. I suppose I am saying that this is not a peculiarly contemporary problem - there's a long history of this notion of refreshing our perceptual apparatus and today's casual games fit into a much older discourse about how we can gain some personal fulfillment between the demands of our jobs. |
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