Can Play Save Us?

Postscript is Cameron Kunzelman’s weekly column about endings, apocalypses, deaths, bosses, and all sorts of other finalities. 

China Miéville’s The Last Days of New Paris is an alternate history of the second World War. It tells the story of a Paris transformed by an “S-Bomb,” an explosion of Surrealist aesthetics that transformed a large chunk of the city into a zone where manifestations of various Surrealist paintings, sculptures, and poems appear to terrorize freedom fighters, Nazis, and the French nationalists who have all claimed parts of the city. The manifestations, or “manifs,” run amok, rending people apart or simply deleting them from existence. It’s a chaotic and terrifying place, and it all started with games.

About halfway through the novel we learn that Jack Parsons, a magician trained by Aleister Crowley, is making a weapon. It’s a kind of reality-writing machine, and he hopes to take it into the heart of Nazi territory to rewrite the world in an antifascist way.

He doesn’t make it, though. Parsons ends up meeting the French Surrealists on the way. He’s disgusted by their frivolity: A few miles away the Nazis are subjugating their country and punching holes and treadmarks across Europe, yet the artists gather in small parlors playing weird games.  Still, though, Parsons is enamored by what they produce. Andre Breton and Ithell Colquhoun are drawing “Exquisite Corpses” and writing automatic poetry in order to find the gaps between the bars; they’re finding the freedom between the iron rule of fascism.

Take the Exquisite Corpse game as an example.  I hold a sheet of paper, and I fold it into thirds. I unfold the paper, and I draw something resembling a head in the top third. The lines of my drawing just barely extend into the middle third of the paper. I fold the top so that no one can see it, and I pass it. The next person draws a torso in the middle of the paper, continuing my lines and creating their own drawing out of the remainder. They hide their own drawing, and they pass it to the next person, who repeats the process.

Exquisite Corpse video by Latitude 53.

We unfold it at the end, and we have a monstrous thing connected by the smallest lines and ideas. You didn’t know what I was drawing, and I didn’t know what you were drawing, but the game created an implicit trust that something was going to be produced that was greater than the artistic ideas of either of us. The Exquisite Corpse game creates genius between people, and it turns our capacity to think communally into an actual, physical product.

The Surrealist games take us down into the sub-basement of play; we’re close to the skeleton of what makes games with others so interesting and intriguing. They’re about rough rules and general guidelines. They’re about laughing together, and they’re about understanding what draws us close to each other. They’re about finding shared humanity—playing a Surrealist game makes me feel like a dog at a dog park, merely being a member of my species, finding collaborations where they might not have been before.

Miéville puts all these Surrealists in a room to play games because he sees creativity as its own force. It opens up the world, and it allows us to think outside of the conditions that are given to us by history. Games, like novels, films, or plays, can help us think outside of what we think is possible.

“The impulse to control games is strong.”

There’s another side of the coin, though. In the novel, Miéville’s manifestations of Surrealism maim and kill indiscriminately. They are creative, and they are generative, but they are also unbounded. They can be seized, and they can be controlled. The Parisian Nazis, through alliances with devils and demons, chain and hack at the manifs. They take Surrealism and warp it, change it, and weaponize it. Play goes bad.

The impulse to control games is strong. The ability to imagine strange worlds is frozen by the impulse to make sure that games fit specific rules and bounds: Strong genre boundaries, specific visual art guidelines, and the constant attempt to induce a “flow state” in the player are all overriding concerns that make sure that the connections aren’t are being made between the player and abstract systems rather than between people. There’s a strain of thinking in games that only wants specific kinds of Exquisite Corpses made out particular parts and lacking the freedom of imagination.

Europe After The Rain by Max Ernst

While it would be easy to align the politics of these systems up on some kind of “indie versus blockbuster games” chart, or maybe alternative aesthetics versus normalized ones, it certainly isn’t that simple. Minecraft mods and Bloodborne lore threads on Reddit are both places of intense collaboration where you get the sense that it is more about giving players an excuse to talk to one another than it is to play a game. Grand Theft Auto Online, for all the trolling and vitriol that screams its way through that world, is also a place of intense creativity and collaboration where people can generate their way into weird, beautiful situations.

Finding the gaps where play and creativity can make a new kind of world is something the Surrealists knew well. They had to scatter across the globe as political exiles in the face of the war, but they were already meditating on that possibility with their collages and piecemeal art pieces. You look at Max Ernst’s Europe After The Rain, and you can see a reflection of the world paired with the creation of one. You can see and ending and a beginning, a hopeful architecture sculpted from ruins. You can see an Exquisite Corpse of experiences cohering into ways of making life livable.

“Can play resist in the face of power?”

We’re living in the wake of one of the most momentous political upheavals of my lifetime. Between calls for monitoring speech on campuses and a registry for a religious group that composes a quarter of the planet, we’re seeing a tight constraint on life appearing around us. We need ways of imagining survival and prosperity for those who are caught under the treads of the contemporary era. And, like the Surrealists, we have to use that imagination together. Can play resist in the face of power? 

Maybe, maybe not. But it’s a tool in a toolbox, and we need as many as we get our hands on. I’m ambivalent about the ability for games to resist, but the slim glimmer of hope keeps me going. That’s what this column is about: Seeing what games can do for us when we’re faced with oblivion. We’ll find out how far they can go.