It was barely 15 minutes into the game, and already I was having a thoroughly wretched time.
I had decided to try out DMZ: North Korea, a recent military shoot-em-up that is easily one of the worst games I've ever played. Where to begin? The environments were so murky and ill-designed I got constantly lost. The physics were tanklike: The "jump" couldn't propel me over a knee-high object, and I regularly became stuck between obstacles.
The artificial intelligence of my enemies was staggeringly dumb -- they'd race around like purposeless, headless chickens, yet nonetheless moved so fast they were still hard to hit. And every so often the antediluvian graphics would malfunction in some surrealistic fashion: After I killed a soldier, his limbs would briefly stretch like taffy before he winked eerily out of existence.
Like I said: Unplayable.
And it wasn't the only bad game I suffered through last week. I actually forced myself to play a dozen other of the most heinous titles released in the last few months. I slogged through the new Fantastic Four (ridiculously unchallenging), Hour of Victory (laden with bugs and loopy A.I.) and one RPG where the camera was so broken I've blocked the game from my memory.
Why precisely was I doing this? Because I wanted to ponder an interesting question: Why isn't there such a thing as "B game" -- a game so bad it's good?
Certainly, the phenomenon exists in every other form of entertainment. Everyone loves B movies -- films that are so atrociously acted and scripted that they become perversely enjoyable. There's also plenty of B television. (For two seasons I religiously followed Pam Anderson's show V.I.P., mostly for the odd joy of tallying up the clichés and acting so wooden it was nearly Brechtian.) The pleasure of B entertainment is pure, narcotic-level irony -- the peculiar joy that comes from seeing something that is trying to be good but failing on every level.
Bad games never produce this pleasure. Gamers never sit around and fondly recall games that were so ludicrous they circled back and arrived at greatness. There is no game analog to, say, Sid and Marty Kroft children's show, or Plan Nine From Outer Space. When a game is bad, it's just ... bad.
I think this tells us a lot about the nature of play. B games don't exist because a game isn't something you watch; it's something you do. It's impossible to distance yourself from the badness. It's not like chuckling while watching an actor screw things up; it's like being forced to screw up yourself.
Or think of it this way: A bad game is like being stuck in traffic. You've got goals, you've got places you're trying to get to, but the system won't let you. So you just sit there grinding your teeth. Lousy art can sometimes cause joy; lousy games can only cause stress.
When I found myself stuck in one of the monotonously identical battle rooms of Fantastic Four, unable to figure out how to escape because the crack-addict designers hadn't put any vaguely intuitive clues in place, I wasn't, you know, giggling over my predicament. I was trying to keep from throwing my controller out the window.
Now, I'm not talking about games that start off fun but become dull after two hours of play. Those are one-trick ponies, but at least they've got one trick; they produce a focused blast of fun, however brief. No, I'm talking about no-trick ponies -- games that mess everything up, that wantonly violate every principle of game design. I'm not bitter. I won't name names. (Oh, hell, yes I will: Whoever developed Pimp My Ride on the PSP, Mini RC Rally on the DS or Over G Fighters on the Xbox 360? You people owe me hours of my life back.)
What I'm getting at, really, is that play is a curiously all-or-nothing affair. You're either having fun or you're not. I think this is why gamers are so viciously Manichean -- why they make such snap judgments, proclaiming, after playing a game for only a few minutes, whether it "sucks" or "rocks". (And those are the only two possible verdicts.) Gamers aren't just being juvenile. Fun really is a digital bit-flip, either fully on or fully off. And a company cannot lie or PR-massage us into believing a game is good when we know it isn't. Like pornography, we know fun when we see it.
B movies exist because it's possible to stand apart from crappy art, to laugh at it ironically. But it's impossible to play ironically. Play is the most earnest form of culture we've got. In the end, it's yet another reason why games, for all their surface resemblances, have very little in common with movies.
Now if you'll excuse me, I've got some trash I need to throw out.
- - -
Clive Thompson is a contributing writer for The New York Times Magazine and a regular contributor to Wired and New York magazines. Look for more of Clive's observations on his blog, collision detection.
