Friday Pragmatism | Art as a mirror | Halo 3: ODST

This weekend I’ll be spending time with my sister’s family including the newest of the newborns, Ethan. As such, I won’t be able to progress any farther than the first flashback mission of ODST until Monday at the earliest. On the evening of launch day, Rok and I did get to co-op three or four missions though, so I have seen a fair bit of the game.

I’m not quite sure what people were expecting from the game, or how they allowed themselves to be over-hyped by the marketing. Halo 3: ODST is exactly what I expected it would be, and I’m thoroughly enjoying it. Some mention has been made of the live-action promo but I saw the short-film as having two main objectives;

– Reward fans of the franchise with a cinematic short that honours the perceived quality and passion for the product.

– As with the Halo 3: Believe campaign for the full third game, get non-gamers interested in and talking about the product.

In fairness, I never felt that Microsoft were trying to convince anyone that the game would look, feel and play like the short-film promo. Established fans should know implicitly that the two products will not resemble each-other directly, and it was an exercise in bolstering passion while also engaging in the age-old mechanic of brand-association. You have a great experience with the promo-product, you seek to have a different but just as good experience with the software-product. If at any point anyone had any illusions that the two products would resemble each-other, I believe that those consumers simply didn’t have their thinking caps on, and are too eager to jump on a company for standard marketing practices.

It brings me to the issue of reviews and responses to games, films and art general. From a personal perspective, I will often say that I didn’t like a particular work, but I will not openly say that it is by virtue of my opinion or response actually a bad work, simply one not suited to my tastes. Perhaps it’s about maturity, but I find it easy to examine an artwork and say simply that it’s not my thing and I really don’t like whatever it is, but that I can easily understand that people do. Other people’s responses and perceptions have nothing to do with my own and vice-versa.

The interesting part is where reviewers or would-be bloggers post responses about their negative reaction to something, and then seek out to justify this by attempting to report in a factual manner. At this point, I realise that art is a mirror, and that often a person’s response to a work says little about the work itself, and much more about the person. This isn’t anything new I guess, just something I have come to learn about in a very direct way, and the practical observation of this mechanic is much more engaging than the theoretical research of it. Often a person will say a film is self-indulgent for example, but isn’t that what art is? Don’t we create expressions of our own experiences and emotions? No-one demands that you share the emotion, but if you don’t, you accuse the creator of indulging the self… because you yourself could not self-indulge. It seems a little juvenile. Can’t we just acknowledge the fact that because of the very complex histories and workings of personal, individual taste, we simply did not connect with the work?

There are genres/works of games, films and literature that I do not like. I might say I strongly don’t like them, but I do not believe that any who do somehow suffer from some kind of inferiority to the artistic elite. Teen slasher films, stoner films, whatever easy fodder there is for the high-brow crowd, all have their place and I see nothing wrong with them even if I don’t like them. The perceived moral high-ground also doesn’t exist because as we’re so eager to say about violence and sex, simply viewing a film about being a lax stoner does not supernaturally cause the viewer to adapt behavioural patterns. As I’m so so fond of saying, as discerning adults, we will always be accountable for our actions, regardless of perceived influences.

Rok and I are in the habit of reading reviews for slightly different reasons than most. Often it’s by the very things that the reviewer decries as being bad that we discern the possibility for us to find something good. Many reviews are quite revealing of people’s failure to reconcile their own insecurities, irrational expectations, misplaced assumptions, ignorance and immaturity.

There seems to be this trend towards everyone needing to out-smart the art and products they’re supplied. We simply can’t get into or not get into something, we need to have a grand justification for it and always attempt to out-‘clever’ the last commentator. I’m not quite sure which part of challenging or popular art makes the observer feel socially and intellectually vulnerable, but apparently the emotion is rife. I don’t care if a work is popular, niche, strange, old-hat, tried and true, repetitive, fractured, etc. if I enjoy it, I enjoy it, and if I don’t, may others freely gain gratification from it.

Regarding ODST and indeed other games of late including the up and coming Borderlands that I’m keen for; I seem to be comfortable to treat promo and product as two entirely different things, with one having little to do with the other. I’ve loved plenty of examples of great promo without ever purchasing the product, and in turn purchased many products while disliking the promo. It’s the 21st century; I thought we’d be over the whole spin-mechanic where we actually believe or infer that a product will revolutionalise our lives simply because the manufacturer says it will. This is the main reason why I so openly admire the ‘We are ODST’ promo. It doesn’t come with a disclaimer (that I noticed) that images shown do not resemble the product because it isn’t a promo for the mechanics of the product, it’s a promo for the established culture and the shared passion for it. Regardless of individual personal opinions on the Halo franchise, the fans simply love it so much that an expensive live-action/CG promo for it is a worthy exercise in rewarding them; their passion matches the expenditure on and the quality of the promo.

I know there was talk of a noir-like investigation element to the game, but I pay little attention to how developers and marketers discuss the atmospheres of their games. In this particular case all I ever indulged in were the various gameplay clips for ODST and the live-action promo, but even if I had read about the investigation element earlier, this is the fourth FPS in the franchise and the fifth game overall including Halo Wars… we should well and truly know what to expect from Halo. A tiny bit of research and a working memory are all that are required to be able to discern spin from potential fact.

People are putting too much blind-faith in both marketing and reviews/responses both, and it’s almost wilfully. I suspect people do it so that they can leverage group-opinions to bolster their own sense of dissatisfaction when they make their snap-judgements on a work, or worse still, in order to be part of the cool crowd who are just ‘too sexy for this art’.

I have a confession to make;
My favourite film ever is Tokyo.Sora, two hours long with no soundtrack and probably about 15 minutes total of dialogue.
My other favourites include David Lynch’s Mulholland Dr., Solaris, Ghost in the Shell/Innocence and Babel.
In the last 12 months I’ve seen Transformers 2, G.I. Joe and Terminator Salvation and thoroughly enjoyed them for what they were; simply, silly fun. I don’t care if you can’t reconcile that – you should be asking yourself why you prevent yourself from genuinely enjoying anything at all regardless of how other people perceive them.

Trust me; living by committee is in no way rewarding. All you get is acceptance… and it’s fragile and pretentious at that.