Games and the Mundane

Yesterday I had a Twitter back and forth with Rob Fearon, that started from this tweet where he implied that "the mundane" is less represented in games than it was in the past.

 Feel free to have a read of the conversation but the summary is that I suggested that there are a fair number of games that deal in mundane things and we then swapped Spectrum game references in an effort to hash out what boundaries are being drawn around "mundane". It's probably a deathly dull conversation to most but for Twitter it's not bad. Anyway, Rob used the conversation to gather fuel for a subsequent blog post, which you can find here.

To be honest the initial tweet is the sort of thing that I can't leave alone. Firstly, pretty much any claim that games don't do something or include something is usually hard to defend. There are so many games out there that the claim is generally coming from a place of ignorance about what exists or is excluding categories of games for some unspoken reason. Secondly, it smelled a bit of the kind of snobbery that you often hear from people who eschew genre fiction because only writing about normality is literature (unless its "magical realism"). I doubted that Rob meant the second thing but the button was pressed anyway.

Having read the post I'm further convinced that any disagreement was primarily around what Rob meant by mundane in the first place. I took it to mean games that put the player in unexceptional roles/jobs/circumstances, which the casual game market has many examples of. Rob appears to to dismiss games like Diner Dash because they offer aspirational fantasies of achieving great success in these roles. However, leaving that aside, Rob's post really seems to be talking about several different themes that involve mundanity but aren't just about representing the mundane.

So, because I'm a bit like that, I've broken down the mundane elements that Rob fondly remembers from the 80s and blathered at length about each one below.

Street-level Politics

Rob uses the word politics on its own but I think he's specifically referring to the space where policy meets the man in the street and not politics from the perspective of the powerful. Presumably it's obvious that high-level geopolitics remains a fascination in games of war, conquest and competition for resources and games like SimCity let people scratch their top-down urban planning and social-engineering itches in ways that exceed what the 80s could offer.

Taking the "politics in the small" reading I can see why it might seem true that there was more of it in games back then. A game like Hampstead, where you play an unemployed person attempting to climb the social ladder, seems overtly political in a way that's rare now. Indeed if the benchmark is that sort of spotlighted social commentary then I'd probably agree, but for fairly specific environmental reasons.

The enticing intro to Hampstead

I think a big part of it isn't about games but about a general shift in the political climate. Current domestic politics are low-contrast compared to the UK in the early 80s. Back then the class divides were more sharply felt, the left/right political divide was far wider and mass unemployment was a shocking new development rather than just part of the scenery. (Also both Rob and I were considerably younger and stuff just feels more vivid in your youth anyway). As such it was a more attractive and tractable target than we have now. The political references in games of the time mirrored the knockabout anti-establishment wave of alternative comedy and the likes of Spitting Image. This stuff was in mainstream games because it was in mainstream culture and games could at least emulate the broad-stroke cartoonish veneer of that output.

Spitting Image from 1984. Completely impenetrable if you weren't there.

In the round though I'm not sure I agree that current games feature a relative lack of that sort of politics. For a start, politics is implicit in any game that purports to represent social environments and that's something that games continue to try to do with increasing fidelity. When GTA includes homeless NPCs that beg for money, that's politics right there. Of course, the idea that it's a deep commentary on the homeless problem is silly, but I would argue that GTA with its satirical talk radio stations and narratives on crime, race relations, corruption etc. can lay claim to carrying more political weight than Monty Mole or Hampstead even if its scope means that the politics isn't front and centre.

The Everyman Character.

With politics out of the way so is much of my disagreement with what Rob says in his post. When he talks about the loss of the mundane player character I think he's broadly right. Rob's examples of Trashman and Technician Ted and the ones I mentioned in the Twitter conversation: Tapper, Paperboy, Pedro, Wally Week, are just the tip of the iceberg. The early 80s game scene featured a mad explosion of character IP and a huge number of those were working class/average blokes (Yes, pretty much all blokes I'm afraid. Let's deal with one axis of representation at a time.).

Maybe we can thank Mario (not that Mario's character stuck with "just a plumber") for popularising this character theme in games or maybe Mario's success was a result of pre-existing cultural desire that the others were also trying to tap into. Looking at popular culture outside of games I tend to think the latter is true. From Charlie Chaplin through George Formby and Coronation Street to Boys from the Blackstuff (forgive the UK-centric examples, but we are talking about the UK games scene primarily), Joe and Jemima Ordinary had characters to connect with. They were commercially successful ventures too, particularly in post WWII cinema and TV. There's no reason why someone designing a game character wouldn't try to target the same market.

George Formby, singing about real work.

It's not an argument without wrinkles though. Average people are in modern commercial games. The ubiquitous modern realistic military combat games that get so much stick often feature soldiers that are average, working class guys. I'm sure Rob would counter that a soldier in a combat situation is outside of "mundane" but then how is he wrapping that same concept around the surreal craziness of Technician Ted's factory? Another criticism might be that such games tend to exaggerate the influence of the player (you won WWII!) and imbue them with super-powers such as the ability to absorb multiple bullet wounds. I'd accept that but I think several games have made efforts to portray the limited agency of a soldier in an overall conflict and their mortality within the bounds of creating a playable game.

But I said I'd stopped disagreeing with Rob, right? Well, to disentangle this I think we have to put soldiers (and cops, secret service etc.) to one side as characters. They're average people in mundane jobs but the situations they're trained to deal with aren't what we deal with every day (hopefully). I'd still argue that games can treat them in ways that embrace their mundane nature but can't deny that it is more often abandoned in favour of allowing players to raise the character's inherent combat agency to the point of situational mastery.

Just an average guy doing my job.

We also have to separate mundane themes and characters from mundane representations and scenarios. As Rob says, you can put Tapper in space with aliens at the tables but he's still just serving drinks. To coin an example from fiction: Arthur Dent doesn't become extraordinary by being beamed into space -- he remains resolutely ordinary while the universe does extraordinary things to him.

So what we're talking about is not just an ordinariness of character that makes them empathetic but an ordinariness of skills, goals and possible rewards. I still baulk at Rob including the goal/ability of saving a small business in the realm of hyper-agency but I understand the line even if I disagree about where it should be drawn. I also agree that it's a line that modern games mostly don't recognise at all.

Unfortunately it's not difficult to see why that's the case. There are huge trade-offs with this sort of ordinary. There's a big audience that enjoys the power fantasies and escapism available in games. From a marketing perspective it's more attractive to insert little touches of romance or an emotional backstory to excuse or soften an escapist fantasy character than it is to abandon the fantasy. I doubt that Max Payne started with a desire to make a game about losing a child and had the slow-mo gun-fighting added after. We shouldn't confuse which part is decoration and which part is the game.

It seems unlikely to me that we'll see a resurgence of games about mechanics, postmen, plasterers and shelf-stackers struggling to achieve little more than getting to the end of another day. For the most part I don't think it's much of a loss either. A good 70+% of those games in the 80s were just Jet Set Willy remixes, including Technician Ted. I'd certainly like to see more ordinariness in games but I can't pretend that much of the 80s output could be used as an example of how to do it.

Skool Daze - better than Rob's examples.

Just as an aside, my pick for the 1984 example of how great a game can be made out of this viewpoint would be Skool Daze. It puts the player in the shoes of an ordinary character (Eric, a schoolboy),  a very ordinary but punishing environment over which they have little control (a school), gives them a very small goal (steal your report card) and then gives them just enough agency to have fun and play out minor fantasies of bad behaviour.

Un-Mundaning

Final bit, honest.

Rob brings up Frankie Goes To Hollywood. With this one I think he's off on another tangent. Now we're not talking about games including mundane reflections of reality, we're talking about games taking the mundane and making it not mundane.

When other forms do this sort of thing it can run towards escapist fantasy or towards a kind of celebratory metaphor. I imagine that Rob's really on about the celebratory end, taking the weirdness and magic of ordinary human life and expressing it as "real" magic in the game world. To be honest, I don't much care either way, I just like the idea of mixing humdrum reality with fantasy and think games are very well placed to do it. Fantasy, magical realism and dream logic are all workable within games.

So I'd like more of that, definitely. Do I think there was more of it in the 80s? Yep. However, much as with the other facets of mundane, I don't think it was really done with any great artistic intent or merit for the most part. When Matthew Smith put man-sized perambulating toilets and hovering telephones into Manic Miner the scene was kind of set for normal things to behave in very abnormal ways. FGTH was a standout game in its use of the banal mixed with surreal imagery but it stood out because nearly everything else in that vein consisted of toothbrushes bouncing around in yet another arcade adventure platformer.

Pyjamarama - Self-Inception

Besides FGTH I have to put forward Pyjamarama as an example of un-mundaning done well and in a way that could be relevant today. In it you play Wally Week's disembodied dream spirit in his nightmare. You have to explore a house and work out how to get your body to wake up so you can get to your job on time, which you hate.


*I'm not ignoring the fact that plenty of us live unable to achieve such aspirations. I'm just saying that being the owner-operator of a coffee shop isn't a life beyond the realms of everyday reality.