Les Jeux Video Sont Les Belles Fleurs

Similarly, this was in the Garg in late January.

When I was 12, I was convinced that the Playstation game Final Fantasy VII was a storytelling masterpiece, every bit as brilliant as Shakespeare or Milton. I was an idiot, of course, but looking back I can't help but wonder whether the medium was intrinsically limited, or if it was simply the infantile nature of the material itself. Hypothetically, why couldn't a videogame be just as effective or moving as a book or film? Going further, why couldn't interactivity open up new means of expressing, effecting, and commenting upon our humanity?

In mainstream gaming culture, it simply doesn't. Games almost homogeneously concern male power fantasies - blowing shit up, saving the day, getting the babe. The videogame "adaptation" of the Inferno, released next month, turns Dante's sombre meditation on sin into a blood 'n tits-filled exercise in demon-baby impalement. The very existence of the term 'gamer' signifies that you have to be of a certain disposition to put up with this shit. I haven't considered myself a member of this unfortunate legion in several years, but I can't help but be frustrated by the current state of affairs.

Salvation comes in the form of the independent games movement, a diverse collection of game developers and enthusiasts who predominantly congregate and distribute their works online at websites like TIGSource or indiegames.com. Their games range from the hallucinogenic - like cactus' Clean Asia! or messhof's Randy Balma: Municipal Abortionist - to the tender and emotional, like Daniel Benmergui's I Wish I Were The Moon, inspired by novelist Paulo Coelho. Some are experimental non-games seeking to explore the limits of the medium, much as the structuralist filmmakers of the 60s did for their own, and others are loving throwbacks to simpler times in gaming - like the stylish, insanely addictive Canabalt. Together, the scene is frothy with a sense of excitement and innovation, desperately seeking an escape from the repetitive, grim unpleasantness of modern mainstream gaming.

It's also slowly breaking through. Take Braid, one of the poster children for independent games. Braid is a self-financed production from a two-man team of programmer Johnathan Blow and artist David Hellman (responsible for the brilliant online comic "A Lesson is Learned But The Damage Is Irreversible"). After winning acclaim at various industry events (most notably the 2006 Independent Games Festival) and establishing significant buzz, Microsoft helped distribute the game for the XBox 360, and it's now also available for Playstation 3s, PCs, and Macs. Braid is the story of a man trying to untangle the memories of a love affair destroyed by his own ambition and egotism - it's sort of like the videogame analogue of 500 Days of Summer. The narrative and the actual mechanics dovetail ingeniously - the protagonist can manipulate the flow of time in various ways as he reassembles the past, while the game muses philosophical on the emotional toll time takes on our relationships.

There are dozens of other, lesser-known people and games I could mention: the outspoken "dot-matrix dominatrix" Anna Anthropy, a trans- game maker whose retro-styled works like Mighty Jill Off and Calamity Annie subvert the heteronormative assumptions of gaming culture; or Jesse Venbrux, whose series of Karoshi games (Japanese for "death by overwork") places you in the shoes of a Japanese salaryman seeking to kill himself in dozens of absurd, insane ways; or Jason Rohrer, who makes games about "consciousness and isolation" or "mania, meloncholia, and the creative process", has been featured in Esquire magazine and The Wall Street Journal, and who has reportedly made people cry with his simple little creations.

I've dipped my toes in as well. Last summer, a friend enlisted me in his team for TOJam, The Toronto Independent Games Jam. The premise: sit in a warehouse out on Queen East for a weekend and crank out a game from scratch. The grind was exhausting and the results were raw and unpolished, but the sheer creative experience was joyous. Our game was even featured on the TORONTOTRON arcade machine and installed at the Gladstone Hotel for the Canzine independent arts fair, which was probably the coolest thing I've ever been involved with. Since then, I've also participated in the Ludum Dare 48 hour game making competition, and I'm becoming a true believer in the message of the DIY scene: don't accept the culture force-fed down your throat, make your own. Freed from the design-by-committee approach and worries about profits margins, interactive media can be legitimate art - and really fucking fun, too.

Yo La Tengo 03.10.09

Originally published in The Gargoyle, October 20, 2009. It's not a great write-up, but it's not terrible, and since The Garg doesn't publish online, I figured I'd put it here for posterity's sake.

Yo La Tengo are like indie rock's official journeymen. Guitarist Ira Kaplan, drummer Georgia Hubley - also his wife - and their buddy James McNew have been doing their thing for something like 25 years now, and while they've never been huge, they're dearly beloved by their core contingency of music geeks - if the audience at The Opera House on October 3rd is any indication, there appears to be a correlation between poor eyesight and loving YLT. My guess is that YLT lets us indulge in a sort of fantasy life - Ira's just like you! Awkward, pretty much styleless, and totally obsessed with pop music. Except that he's the world's greatest noise rock guitarist and gets to live a blissful, bohemian life playing in a band with the girl of his dreams. We should all be so lucky.

The truth is, Yo La Tengo have been kind of boring for the past decade; since 2000's romantic And Then Nothing Turned Itself Inside-Out, their output has mostly been insincere pastiche. Pleasant and likable, but Ira used to wear his heart on his sleeve like no one else. Painful and Electr-O-Pura might have been a bit abrasive, but that noise served to take Ira's awkward-Jewish-nerd emotions and give it muscle and soul. The way that fuzzy noise riff running through "From a Motel 6" pounds at your ears is basically the very feeling of romantic desperation, and "I Heard You Looking" is the sound of longing at its sweetest.

Of course they didn't play either of those songs. Sadly but expectedly, their setlist was too heavily weighted towards recent material. Sure, at this point they've more than earned their creative freedom to do whatever the hell they want, but funky as it was, did anyone really come out to see the band run through "Mr. Tough"? On the other hand, the unquestionable show highlight was from their newest album, Popular Songs: the simultaniously towering and swooning "More Stars Than There Are In Heaven", where Ira mumbles about walking hand in hand as the glittering noise swells and swells for something like fifteen minutes until it envelops everything with love and hearing loss. It was magical.

So there's the dilemma. Endure yet another middling funk imitation like "Periodically Double or Triple" for the sake of a beautiful rendition of "Stockholm Syndrome", complete with un-freakin-believable Ira skronk solo? It's probably worth it. For individuals of the right temperament, Yo La Tengo become a particular way of seeing the world. Sometimes things are dull, sure, and your music is just old stuff on the radio...but then Ira freaks out, does unimaginable things to his guitar with his back to the audience, his heart is broken, the feedback just about reaches the breaking point, and just when it's all about to get unbearable, Georgia slides over to Ira and coos, "You can have it all," and true love is real and there really are happy endings after all. Cynics need not apply, Yo La Tengo are for lovers.