Silliness is gaming's best feature and one of its big limitations

"I have just smashed a dragon in the face with a church. In ⛎space"

That was how I responded a couple of years ago when a friend e-mailed to ask if Bayonetta was as good as it looked. She immediately understood what I meant. Because in gaming we can have conversations like that. We can matter-of-factly throw out such abstract descriptions of ludicrous events and know that, if our audience is savvy enough with game genr🍌e, the🐓y’ll immediately recognise it as naught but the highest plaudit. See also instances of chainsawing through the guts of a giant worm in Gears of War 2, or kicking a rocket-powered masonry drill up a boss’ arse in Bulletstorm.

I love that about games. They’re a medium utterly unique in the way that they can be flagrantly silly on the most extravagant levels while also remaining utterly cohesiv൩e as narrative experiences and mechanical structures. I think it stems from their origin as context-free playthings. Back in the days when the average game looked (and sounded) like the nappy contents of an unattended baby eating Lego, story was just there to add basic context to the act of manipulating the graphics. The blue blob? He’s a space ranger. The red blob? An alien. And that was fine. Games were formed of the basic interactions that developers could create. Everything else came afterwards.

this year, journalist and games advocate Charlie Brooker hit the problem on t꧙heಌ head.

"My theory is that video games are like speaking Esperanto. Video game players are like people who learnt Esperanto years ago. We all learnt Esp🎶eranto. And there’s all these brilliant Esperanto-language films available, to use a metaphor. They only make sense if you know Esperanto, they don’t have subtitles – 🥀but they’re brilliant. And we keep telling people how good they are. But there’s this learning curve which is that you have to learn fucking Esperanto. Because you only have to sit down with someone who doesn’t play video games to understand how high the bar to entry still is"

Brooker was ostensibly talking about the internal rules of gameplay mechanics, but I think his sentiments can also be applied to the rules of game worlds and their narratives. While I’ve spent the first part of this article espousing the delights of gaming’s silliness and the openness with which we can discuss it, the key part of that second paragraph at the top of the page is the phrase "if our audience is savvy enough with game genre". Because I feel that games have becomes so much a product of their own unique workings that those workinꦡgs are perhaps a little impenetrable to those who are becoming intrigued by games as an increasingly prominent medium.

After all, with the mechanical interactions of games still the highest barrier of entry to non-gamers, story is the most powerful tool we have for hooking in newcomers. Narrative is a completely universal language. All human beings understand it. Storytelling is how people comprehend and make sense of the very world around us🦹. Without applying an implicit narrative structure to things, the world is just a collection of stuff happening all over the place.

Some games have caught major mainstream interest and respect by leveraging that universality over the last year or so. The Walking Dead was a massive hit as a result of its focus on gritty, human interactions. Gone Home has been picking up accolades all over the place due to its grounded ꦆexploration of family drama. But ask more hardcore gaming advocates about the games that show our medium at its mature, creative best and they’ll throw out suggestions like Metal Gear Solid, Assassin’s Creed, and the recent work of David Cage.

For all of their aspirations in the fields of story and world building, the above games are also--intentionally or not--very silly indeed. Metal Gear blends heavy political discourse with poop jokes and scenes of the protagonist uncontrollably wanking. Assassin’s Creꦓed tempers smart, oh-so-earnest alternative histories with ludicrously contrived, disjointed sci-fi conspiracies and apocalypse-touting holograms. Heavy Rain is tonally great, but has more plot holes than a justification for government spying processes, and a seriously juvenile attitude towards character nudity.

Maybe I’m worrying over nothing. Maybe the mass adoption of consoles over the course of this passing generation is going to see the game aesthetic understood and accepted in large enough numbers for a much diminished loss in translation over the next few years. In a generation or so, maybe the general populace will be game-literate enough that the confused dissenters will become a marginalised fringe 🦩group. But I’d rather they didn’t have to. The last thing I want is for games to lose their lunatic brilliance, but I also that hope next-gen developments bring more stories that aren’t flat-out bamboozling to the ‘normals’. I think that’s pretty important, and something we’ll all benefit from.

Long-time GR+ writer Dave has been gaming with immense dedication ever since he failed dismally at some '80s arcade racer on a childhood day at the seaside (due to being too small to reach the controls without help). These days he's an enigmatic blend of beard-stroking narrative discussion and hard-hitting Psycho Crushers.