Seven months after its release, a familiar, chilling, Tweet comes through my feed: “Doki Doki Literature Club / Don’t do it. / Fuck.” This response, and the myriad of similar epithets, neatly sum up the strong reactions elicited by the unsettling cult-hit visual novel. Even the venerable BBC, fueled by another perennial moral panic about video games, aired a similarly sensationalist broadcast about Doki Doki Literature Club, grimly quoting an unnamed coroner that it has suicide “as a main feature.” Beyond the churn of social media and news cycles, other passionate op-eds and essays have tugged and clawed at the gnarled knot of this video game’s artistic tactics. Some proclaim success while others chide failure, but these articles tend to circle around familiar themes: an examination of its representation of mental illness; its use of shock value; the connections of ero garu (“erotic grotesque”) and anime/hentai subcultural fetishes; the lineage of horror breaking the narrative fourth wall; and the game’s alleged subversion (or disrespect) of the visual novel genre conventions.
“Doki Doki Literature Club / Don’t do it. / Fuck.”
While all of these are all certainly important components of the effect produced by Doki Doki Literature Club (DDLC), there is a massive topic missing from the conversation around how it crafts such a uncanny impact on its players. Perhaps DDLC’s most radical maneuver is treating the whole screen as a site for the construction of compelling images. As the game progresses, the facade of reality increasingly breaks down with user interface (UI) elements fracturing and repeating, character assets zooming off the edges of the screen to near-abstraction, washes of pixelated static, fractured image assets mixing together, and garbled dialog that spilling beyond its frames. These visual breakages work together to imply an unsteady world, one in which every pixel on the screen has the potential to be active in ways that are very rare in other video games.
As DDLC reaches its crescendo, the most immediately visceral response from many players derives from the juxtapositions of graphic depictions of violence that traipse across the erstwhile anime-cute facade. But at its peak intensity the game transgresses an even more rigidly defined social boundary than kawaii/horror by asking the player to engage with the underlying game data in the operating system. Manipulating text files in conjunction with the game’s fractured all-over aesthetics, DDLC moves beyond treating game imagery as a magic window through which we suspend our disbelief of representational simulations. This implication of the screen, and by proxy, the whole system of computer and user as a physical site within architectural space—our space—violates an unstated boundary for where we locate artistic imagery. This foregrounding of the naked sculptural quality of the computer and screen is the artistic engine that compounds and melds all of the video game’s story and assets into an unsettling and memorable whole.
Coincidentally, one of my favorite essays on videogame imagery in recent years was published around the same time as DDLC. Despite the way the fan and industry communities treat such direct confrontations as gauche, “Are Video Games Bad At Images?” asks again and again its titular question to highlight the often-impoverished value of potent images in video games. The primary example of ‘good images’ that Zolani Stewart deploys interspersed throughout the essay are a bevy of fine art photographs. In one extended passage, Stewart even goes as far as imagining the nigh-impossible difficulty and cost of reconstructing a video game environment version of a Joel Meyerowitz photograph of shadowed and raucous New York. Despite gestures toward more general and abstracted design principles throughout, the selection of photographs used to illustrate examples of good images, belies an underlying pining for the immersive simulated reality of a great photograph: for the sumptuous light of Shore, the lilting geometric composition of Bresson, Klein’s super-close-up of his subjects’ twining gun-blur and scowl.
A great image contains a mystery, a question, a complexity which ultimately can not be reduced
By this metric, it seems ludicrous that a few glitched and lurid-colored anime-style drawings and some chunky black and white text wandering off the screen would make for a compelling, let alone good image. Yet as photo critic Teju Cole quotes in his book Known and Strange Things, when asked to define a what makes a successful image, Robert Frank, creator of The Americans (widely regarded as the greatest photo book of all-time) had a curiously oblique and self-reflective answer: “When people look at my pictures, I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.”
Unlike Stewart’s photography-tinged suggestions for improving the visual impact of video games’ 3D simulations, despite being one of the world’s great photographers, Frank’s definition of a good image entirely ignores composition, framing, focus, lighting, contrast, gesture, and environmental detail. Frank doesn’t even name a specific kind of poetic line or aesthetic theory as aspirational, but instead highlights that a great image is recognizable first and foremost by our allurement to return to it. This simple statement reveals an incredibly potent corollary: that to entice us so, a great image contains a mystery, a question, a complexity which ultimately can not be reduced.
I really believe the core observation of “Are Video Games Bad At Images?” is exquisite, but in light of the deeper implications of Frank’s statement, I think the essay ultimately doesn’t go nearly far enough. Too often games treat meaning, visual or narrative, as a simple code, as a formal equation, as though they were a certain key that will decode everything you need to know. But instead of upholding beautiful images, or even powerful images, what is more fundamentally important to creating memorable art is for it to produce irreducible images—images that hold complexity that can’t be solved like a sudoku puzzle.
While it might seem odd from behind the artistic firewall of videogame fandom, treating a work of art, even an erstwhile 2D painting or drawing, as a site for artistic exploration—not merely an ever-higher fidelity representational window—has been one of the primary paths for making these kind of irreducible images throughout most of the preceding century. Art theorist Boris Groys put this succinctly in Flow, his new book on digital culture and art: “Modern art has not merely produced things and images but has also analyzed the thingness of things and the structure of images. The art museum not only stages events, but also is a medium for investigating the eventfulness of the event, of its boundaries and its structure.” In this formulation, you can start to glimpse why DDLC has such potency—it isn’t content to simply luxuriate in producing art assets and applying them to events (that is, video games), but investigates structures we use to derive meaning from those art assets and the boundaries of the video game playing event.
More than “Are Video Games Good At Images?” DDLC seems to be asking ‘What even constitutes ‘images’ in video games? Could a flashing cursor be visually compelling? Can an screen devoid of anything but text box move you? Can a screen projecting digital noise and flickering lights convey an emotion that a realistic art asset cannot? Can the full icon of a trash can on your desktop be powerful, even if it isn’t ‘in’ the game in a traditional way? If so, why? If we’re no longer looking at defining good and bad in imagery as simply a function of its adherence to photography and realism, what then makes for a compelling image?’
What even constitutes ‘images’ in video games? Could a flashing cursor be visually compelling? Can an screen devoid of anything but text box move you?
There is a wonderful hint in another essay equally bent on confronting the unstated assumptions of the video game world. Leaving aside the main argument of the essay, in Brie Code’s 2016 “Video Games Are Boring”, she recounts an anecdote that is quite telling of how images affect us. During her incredibly fraught decision to leave a corporate job in favor of pursuing a career in her passion of video games, she notes that she “couldn’t get John Baldessari’s 1971 piece I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art out of my head.” Rather than dreams of Mario level 1-1 or Ansel Adams moonrise, she turns around this boring-seeming image, which is simply a large canvas with its title text written out over and over, like Bart’s punishment sentences on the chalkboard during the intro to The Simpsons.
This Baldessari piece is particularly potent in situ, inevitably hanging in a room full of other art in a museum. Its repeated lines, probably considered “boring” in most context, activates a dreamlike self-awareness that asks us to question with why we value art, why this particular piece is present in front of us, and what other hidden forces lead to us standing in a room with all of these other images. It is more an incantation that lets us peek at the invisible relationships and value systems we usually take for granted than anything else; more of a poem line to return to than a photograph that nicely exemplifies the golden ratio or spectacular painterly VFX such as chiaroscuro or foreshortening. I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art is not an image to retreat into, but instead an image that illuminates and activates the culture and space it inhabits.
These repetitions of text are a common visual strategy in DDLC as well. In one infamous section the player is forced to dig into the game’s menus to turn the autoplay and text scrolling speed up to maximum as the game spams untold thousands of lines of garbled ASCII text cascading in and out of the dialog box, sometimes off the edge of the screen. Accessing the menus again and switching over the dialog history the player can then see the context of this damaged text: it is mostly a repeated overt phrase bluntly stating the obsessive desire latent in many of visual novels and dating games: “Will you promise to spend the most time with me?” Moments before this immense macro-textual traverse, the player is presented with an image of utter game design simplicity: a haunting empty text box on a generic gray screen, the illusion of choice laid bare in a minimal but potent image built of the same assets as the game, but now clearly freed from the fictive space, and glowing in HD under the plastic coating of the LCD screen.
Even though she primarily leads with an alternative selection of illustrative photographs, in “Bad Images”, Emilie Reed’s rebuttal to Stewart (though I tend to think of it, and this piece, more as addendum) eventually touches on a reason that the repetition of these images speaks so potently: “Mainstream perspectives on video games seem to feel self-conscious about their origins as simple pattern-making machines, even when it’s obvious that this is what holds a lot of their appeal and aesthetic uniqueness.” The haunting empty menu and dreary gray screen, or the spammed text that is rendered so differently in the dialog box and the system menu, along with the many other text-as-image elements of DDLC, create potent images because, like the Baldessari, their repeated intonation forces us to confront our assumptions about the “thingness” of digital assets and think more broadly about how we make meaning from these digital patterns.
“Will you promise to spend the most time with me?”
If DDLC is making potent images through reimagining our spatial relationship to video game text as incantation, the other striking images it contains comes from a corollary to Reed’s observation that pattern-making systems have their own aesthetic uniqueness. In visual art, especially after the collapse of the rigidly individualistic New York-based abstract expressionist program, patterns and other process-based systems of abstract image creation have taken on increasing importance as a way to confront and fill the seeming void that came from dethroning outmoded, macho, ideas of artistic ego, soul, and/or divine madness, as being the source of an image’s power.
Far from a retreat into simple questions of design, which is the superficial way that videogames tends to understand abstract and non-representational art, artists such as Frank Stella, Agnes Martin, and Jack Whitten have made potent images that pry at the edges of our ways of knowing, creating, and being with artistic experiences. Whitten’s famous “slab” paintings, such as the 1974 piece “April’s Shark”, are particularly is interesting in comparison with DDLC’s glitch aesthetic. Though Gerhard Richter is perhaps better known for the technique, Whitten was the first to eschew the expressiveness of the brush in favor of large squeegees to scrape and drag layers of colored paint across the whole surface of a painting. The resulting images are a byproduct of the breakdown of the painting system—analog glitched canvases—with unique patterns of textures and color dragged up through the process.
Like the static washes and colored glitch bars of DDLC, Whitten’s paintings hover in an uncanny place between revealing and obscuring, between the culturally coded history of painting and its breakdown, between being a sculptural object and a 2D window. Even though we know the ‘trick’ to their making, the odd collusion of specificity and ambiguity resulting from the way the slab/drag process is both an act of creation and destruction at the same time that gives these traditionally formless paintings their mysterious impact. As Donald Judd put it in his seminal essay on post-abstract expressionist art, “The thing as a whole, its quality as a whole, is what is interesting [in object-oriented art].” These are irreducible images.
In context of this understanding of the role of images in object oriented art, we must turn to that moment of operating system truth at the end of DDLC. The room is boring, the textures grainy, the seated young woman across from you in screen-space is a trope. But like the ultimate negation of digital-self that you can encounter at the end of Nier Automata, the act of deletion in DDLC, in this case the empty folder, the icon of crumpled paper lumps signifying that there is a file residing in a the computer’s recycle bin icon ready to be removed forever, is the most potent image. In this moment of staring at a few windows, a few bits of text, your computer comes back into focus. You, your lone self, sitting at the computer, the light of the monitor splashing on your hands manipulating the mouse and keyboard like any other office day, suddenly snap into a crystalline reality. The ero-garu assets, the melodramatic narrative tropes, the digital objects in-game and out-of-game, the cursor, the shortcuts, the Steam interface littered with toxic reviews are all gathered into a chorus. Ultimately, the image of the hitting delete to dissolve the oppressive history of window-images and re-substantiate our relationship to video games, in a much more precise but malleable constellation of pixels and information technology, is what drives the luminescence and color levels of your monitor. The best images, “good” be damned, are those that ask us to question our presumptions about the role of the arts and expand our imagination of the world.
Reimagining our spatial relationship to video game text as incantation
The damaged visual vocabulary of DDLC is but one example of many other kinds and lineages of good images for videogames to deploy instead of realistic or photographic images. Light and color, gesture and texture, line and form, plane and negative space, glitch and collage, time and blur, flatness and illusion, flicker and glow, trace and impression, absence and object, these are all the language of the last 100 years of experimental painting and art, and provide a rich influence that can make compelling images beyond realism. In this way, I reiterate one of the core takeaways from Code’s article: video games should be so much more broadly relevant, but have slouched into a predictably narrow subculture—have become more of a genre than a medium—and we need to develop and utilized a wider vocabulary of artistic tools and values if we are going to make games that aren’t boring to people who aren’t self-identified as video game fans.
Throughout the rise of video games, companies, reviewers and fans seem to have erected a visual firewall that only lets through a narrowly pre-modernist impulse toward spectacular realism. Below the shock-and-cringe surface, a significant part of the intense response to DDLC, whatever its other shortcomings as an artwork, comes from its willingness to explore beyond this self-limiting graphics-race of mainstream games. It’s pushes us to see new criteria for good, irreducible, images in a similar way to Baldessari’s textual paintings and Whitten’s ambiguous glitching of painting. Alongside DDLC, in the exploratory writing of Stewart, Reed, Code, and others’ (such as Yang’s recent invective against mistaking “photorealism” for “realism”), as well other innovative self-questioning games like Problem Attic, Everything is going to be OK, and Nier: Automata, we’re seeing radical new ideas of ‘good’ images that speak to us about our nascent digital age—images that gain their power from what they can teach us about our increasingly complex, mutable, but ultimately real relationships to the hardware interfaces, digital assets, screen worlds, and hidden software systems we have traditionally ignored in favor of the simulated real.
The Heterotopias Summer Sale is now on, offering all four issues bundled together for 30% off and 15% off on individual issues. Get over 400 pages of photo essays, criticism and mappings of game spaces and architecture here.
Thank you for your support!
Seven months after its release, a familiar, chilling, Tweet comes through my feed: “Doki Doki Literature Club / Don’t do it. / Fuck.” This response, and the myriad of similar epithets, neatly sum up the strong reactions elicited by the unsettling cult-hit visual novel. Even the venerable BBC, fueled by another perennial moral panic about video games, aired a similarly sensationalist broadcast about Doki Doki Literature Club, grimly quoting an unnamed coroner that it has suicide “as a main feature.” Beyond the churn of social media and news cycles, other passionate op-eds and essays have tugged and clawed at the gnarled knot of this video game’s artistic tactics. Some proclaim success while others chide failure, but these articles tend to circle around familiar themes: an examination of its representation of mental illness; its use of shock value; the connections of ero garu (“erotic grotesque”) and anime/hentai subcultural fetishes; the lineage of horror breaking the narrative fourth wall; and the game’s alleged subversion (or disrespect) of the visual novel genre conventions.
While all of these are all certainly important components of the effect produced by Doki Doki Literature Club (DDLC), there is a massive topic missing from the conversation around how it crafts such a uncanny impact on its players. Perhaps DDLC’s most radical maneuver is treating the whole screen as a site for the construction of compelling images. As the game progresses, the facade of reality increasingly breaks down with user interface (UI) elements fracturing and repeating, character assets zooming off the edges of the screen to near-abstraction, washes of pixelated static, fractured image assets mixing together, and garbled dialog that spilling beyond its frames. These visual breakages work together to imply an unsteady world, one in which every pixel on the screen has the potential to be active in ways that are very rare in other video games.
As DDLC reaches its crescendo, the most immediately visceral response from many players derives from the juxtapositions of graphic depictions of violence that traipse across the erstwhile anime-cute facade. But at its peak intensity the game transgresses an even more rigidly defined social boundary than kawaii/horror by asking the player to engage with the underlying game data in the operating system. Manipulating text files in conjunction with the game’s fractured all-over aesthetics, DDLC moves beyond treating game imagery as a magic window through which we suspend our disbelief of representational simulations. This implication of the screen, and by proxy, the whole system of computer and user as a physical site within architectural space—our space—violates an unstated boundary for where we locate artistic imagery. This foregrounding of the naked sculptural quality of the computer and screen is the artistic engine that compounds and melds all of the video game’s story and assets into an unsettling and memorable whole.
Coincidentally, one of my favorite essays on videogame imagery in recent years was published around the same time as DDLC. Despite the way the fan and industry communities treat such direct confrontations as gauche, “Are Video Games Bad At Images?” asks again and again its titular question to highlight the often-impoverished value of potent images in video games. The primary example of ‘good images’ that Zolani Stewart deploys interspersed throughout the essay are a bevy of fine art photographs. In one extended passage, Stewart even goes as far as imagining the nigh-impossible difficulty and cost of reconstructing a video game environment version of a Joel Meyerowitz photograph of shadowed and raucous New York. Despite gestures toward more general and abstracted design principles throughout, the selection of photographs used to illustrate examples of good images, belies an underlying pining for the immersive simulated reality of a great photograph: for the sumptuous light of Shore, the lilting geometric composition of Bresson, Klein’s super-close-up of his subjects’ twining gun-blur and scowl.
By this metric, it seems ludicrous that a few glitched and lurid-colored anime-style drawings and some chunky black and white text wandering off the screen would make for a compelling, let alone good image. Yet as photo critic Teju Cole quotes in his book Known and Strange Things, when asked to define a what makes a successful image, Robert Frank, creator of The Americans (widely regarded as the greatest photo book of all-time) had a curiously oblique and self-reflective answer: “When people look at my pictures, I want them to feel the way they do when they want to read a line of a poem twice.”
Unlike Stewart’s photography-tinged suggestions for improving the visual impact of video games’ 3D simulations, despite being one of the world’s great photographers, Frank’s definition of a good image entirely ignores composition, framing, focus, lighting, contrast, gesture, and environmental detail. Frank doesn’t even name a specific kind of poetic line or aesthetic theory as aspirational, but instead highlights that a great image is recognizable first and foremost by our allurement to return to it. This simple statement reveals an incredibly potent corollary: that to entice us so, a great image contains a mystery, a question, a complexity which ultimately can not be reduced.
I really believe the core observation of “Are Video Games Bad At Images?” is exquisite, but in light of the deeper implications of Frank’s statement, I think the essay ultimately doesn’t go nearly far enough. Too often games treat meaning, visual or narrative, as a simple code, as a formal equation, as though they were a certain key that will decode everything you need to know. But instead of upholding beautiful images, or even powerful images, what is more fundamentally important to creating memorable art is for it to produce irreducible images—images that hold complexity that can’t be solved like a sudoku puzzle.
While it might seem odd from behind the artistic firewall of videogame fandom, treating a work of art, even an erstwhile 2D painting or drawing, as a site for artistic exploration—not merely an ever-higher fidelity representational window—has been one of the primary paths for making these kind of irreducible images throughout most of the preceding century. Art theorist Boris Groys put this succinctly in Flow, his new book on digital culture and art: “Modern art has not merely produced things and images but has also analyzed the thingness of things and the structure of images. The art museum not only stages events, but also is a medium for investigating the eventfulness of the event, of its boundaries and its structure.” In this formulation, you can start to glimpse why DDLC has such potency—it isn’t content to simply luxuriate in producing art assets and applying them to events (that is, video games), but investigates structures we use to derive meaning from those art assets and the boundaries of the video game playing event.
More than “Are Video Games Good At Images?” DDLC seems to be asking ‘What even constitutes ‘images’ in video games? Could a flashing cursor be visually compelling? Can an screen devoid of anything but text box move you? Can a screen projecting digital noise and flickering lights convey an emotion that a realistic art asset cannot? Can the full icon of a trash can on your desktop be powerful, even if it isn’t ‘in’ the game in a traditional way? If so, why? If we’re no longer looking at defining good and bad in imagery as simply a function of its adherence to photography and realism, what then makes for a compelling image?’
There is a wonderful hint in another essay equally bent on confronting the unstated assumptions of the video game world. Leaving aside the main argument of the essay, in Brie Code’s 2016 “Video Games Are Boring”, she recounts an anecdote that is quite telling of how images affect us. During her incredibly fraught decision to leave a corporate job in favor of pursuing a career in her passion of video games, she notes that she “couldn’t get John Baldessari’s 1971 piece I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art out of my head.” Rather than dreams of Mario level 1-1 or Ansel Adams moonrise, she turns around this boring-seeming image, which is simply a large canvas with its title text written out over and over, like Bart’s punishment sentences on the chalkboard during the intro to The Simpsons.
This Baldessari piece is particularly potent in situ, inevitably hanging in a room full of other art in a museum. Its repeated lines, probably considered “boring” in most context, activates a dreamlike self-awareness that asks us to question with why we value art, why this particular piece is present in front of us, and what other hidden forces lead to us standing in a room with all of these other images. It is more an incantation that lets us peek at the invisible relationships and value systems we usually take for granted than anything else; more of a poem line to return to than a photograph that nicely exemplifies the golden ratio or spectacular painterly VFX such as chiaroscuro or foreshortening. I Will Not Make Any More Boring Art is not an image to retreat into, but instead an image that illuminates and activates the culture and space it inhabits.
These repetitions of text are a common visual strategy in DDLC as well. In one infamous section the player is forced to dig into the game’s menus to turn the autoplay and text scrolling speed up to maximum as the game spams untold thousands of lines of garbled ASCII text cascading in and out of the dialog box, sometimes off the edge of the screen. Accessing the menus again and switching over the dialog history the player can then see the context of this damaged text: it is mostly a repeated overt phrase bluntly stating the obsessive desire latent in many of visual novels and dating games: “Will you promise to spend the most time with me?” Moments before this immense macro-textual traverse, the player is presented with an image of utter game design simplicity: a haunting empty text box on a generic gray screen, the illusion of choice laid bare in a minimal but potent image built of the same assets as the game, but now clearly freed from the fictive space, and glowing in HD under the plastic coating of the LCD screen.
Even though she primarily leads with an alternative selection of illustrative photographs, in “Bad Images”, Emilie Reed’s rebuttal to Stewart (though I tend to think of it, and this piece, more as addendum) eventually touches on a reason that the repetition of these images speaks so potently: “Mainstream perspectives on video games seem to feel self-conscious about their origins as simple pattern-making machines, even when it’s obvious that this is what holds a lot of their appeal and aesthetic uniqueness.” The haunting empty menu and dreary gray screen, or the spammed text that is rendered so differently in the dialog box and the system menu, along with the many other text-as-image elements of DDLC, create potent images because, like the Baldessari, their repeated intonation forces us to confront our assumptions about the “thingness” of digital assets and think more broadly about how we make meaning from these digital patterns.
If DDLC is making potent images through reimagining our spatial relationship to video game text as incantation, the other striking images it contains comes from a corollary to Reed’s observation that pattern-making systems have their own aesthetic uniqueness. In visual art, especially after the collapse of the rigidly individualistic New York-based abstract expressionist program, patterns and other process-based systems of abstract image creation have taken on increasing importance as a way to confront and fill the seeming void that came from dethroning outmoded, macho, ideas of artistic ego, soul, and/or divine madness, as being the source of an image’s power.
Far from a retreat into simple questions of design, which is the superficial way that videogames tends to understand abstract and non-representational art, artists such as Frank Stella, Agnes Martin, and Jack Whitten have made potent images that pry at the edges of our ways of knowing, creating, and being with artistic experiences. Whitten’s famous “slab” paintings, such as the 1974 piece “April’s Shark”, are particularly is interesting in comparison with DDLC’s glitch aesthetic. Though Gerhard Richter is perhaps better known for the technique, Whitten was the first to eschew the expressiveness of the brush in favor of large squeegees to scrape and drag layers of colored paint across the whole surface of a painting. The resulting images are a byproduct of the breakdown of the painting system—analog glitched canvases—with unique patterns of textures and color dragged up through the process.
Like the static washes and colored glitch bars of DDLC, Whitten’s paintings hover in an uncanny place between revealing and obscuring, between the culturally coded history of painting and its breakdown, between being a sculptural object and a 2D window. Even though we know the ‘trick’ to their making, the odd collusion of specificity and ambiguity resulting from the way the slab/drag process is both an act of creation and destruction at the same time that gives these traditionally formless paintings their mysterious impact. As Donald Judd put it in his seminal essay on post-abstract expressionist art, “The thing as a whole, its quality as a whole, is what is interesting [in object-oriented art].” These are irreducible images.
In context of this understanding of the role of images in object oriented art, we must turn to that moment of operating system truth at the end of DDLC. The room is boring, the textures grainy, the seated young woman across from you in screen-space is a trope. But like the ultimate negation of digital-self that you can encounter at the end of Nier Automata, the act of deletion in DDLC, in this case the empty folder, the icon of crumpled paper lumps signifying that there is a file residing in a the computer’s recycle bin icon ready to be removed forever, is the most potent image. In this moment of staring at a few windows, a few bits of text, your computer comes back into focus. You, your lone self, sitting at the computer, the light of the monitor splashing on your hands manipulating the mouse and keyboard like any other office day, suddenly snap into a crystalline reality. The ero-garu assets, the melodramatic narrative tropes, the digital objects in-game and out-of-game, the cursor, the shortcuts, the Steam interface littered with toxic reviews are all gathered into a chorus. Ultimately, the image of the hitting delete to dissolve the oppressive history of window-images and re-substantiate our relationship to video games, in a much more precise but malleable constellation of pixels and information technology, is what drives the luminescence and color levels of your monitor. The best images, “good” be damned, are those that ask us to question our presumptions about the role of the arts and expand our imagination of the world.
The damaged visual vocabulary of DDLC is but one example of many other kinds and lineages of good images for videogames to deploy instead of realistic or photographic images. Light and color, gesture and texture, line and form, plane and negative space, glitch and collage, time and blur, flatness and illusion, flicker and glow, trace and impression, absence and object, these are all the language of the last 100 years of experimental painting and art, and provide a rich influence that can make compelling images beyond realism. In this way, I reiterate one of the core takeaways from Code’s article: video games should be so much more broadly relevant, but have slouched into a predictably narrow subculture—have become more of a genre than a medium—and we need to develop and utilized a wider vocabulary of artistic tools and values if we are going to make games that aren’t boring to people who aren’t self-identified as video game fans.
Throughout the rise of video games, companies, reviewers and fans seem to have erected a visual firewall that only lets through a narrowly pre-modernist impulse toward spectacular realism. Below the shock-and-cringe surface, a significant part of the intense response to DDLC, whatever its other shortcomings as an artwork, comes from its willingness to explore beyond this self-limiting graphics-race of mainstream games. It’s pushes us to see new criteria for good, irreducible, images in a similar way to Baldessari’s textual paintings and Whitten’s ambiguous glitching of painting. Alongside DDLC, in the exploratory writing of Stewart, Reed, Code, and others’ (such as Yang’s recent invective against mistaking “photorealism” for “realism”), as well other innovative self-questioning games like Problem Attic, Everything is going to be OK, and Nier: Automata, we’re seeing radical new ideas of ‘good’ images that speak to us about our nascent digital age—images that gain their power from what they can teach us about our increasingly complex, mutable, but ultimately real relationships to the hardware interfaces, digital assets, screen worlds, and hidden software systems we have traditionally ignored in favor of the simulated real.
The Heterotopias Summer Sale is now on, offering all four issues bundled together for 30% off and 15% off on individual issues. Get over 400 pages of photo essays, criticism and mappings of game spaces and architecture here.
Thank you for your support!
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