Barely Interactive
An Unlikely Appraisal of an Ungame
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In September 1977 Atari released Surround for the 2600, one of the first “snake”-style videogames. Surround boasted 14 gameplay modes in all, including two free-form drawing modes dubbed “Video Graffiti” by the game’s instruction manual. Seven years later Atari would release I, Robot, an unsuccessful arcade game that is nonetheless remembered for being the first videogame to feature flat-shaded polygonal 3D graphics. Like Surround, I, Robot featured a secondary mode called “Doodle City”, in which the player can manipulate and insert 3D models into a blank scene, reminiscent of later graphics editing programs like PhotoShop or Kid Pix (however, unlike in Video Graffiti there is a three minute time limit imposed). Interestingly, where Surround’s manual explicitly refers to Video Graffiti as a game, I, Robot uses the term “ungame” — potentially borrowed from the 1973 Talicor board game of the same name — for Doodle City. In both cases however we can see a clear taxonomic divide between games, with their points systems, levels and win/loss conditions, and art.
This essay seeks to trouble this clean divide, and is itself divided into three sections. The first section “Interactivity” looks at The Flowers of Robert Mapplethorpe (TFoRM), released in 1992 for the Phillips CD-i, and its subsequent reception. The second section “Imagery” continues this discussion alongside a detour into Pokémon Snap. Finally, “Immediacy” is an exploration of the concept of lag. In all these sections I pursue queer readings of the object or experience in question.
INTERACTIVITY
The Flowers of Robert Mapplethorpe was made most famous by its appearance in Cinemassacre’s Angry Video Game Nerd (AVGN) episode 96 from November 2010, which reviews the 1994 SNES platformer Lester the Unlikely. In the episode James Rolfe’s eponymous nerd character becomes so frustrated by Lester the Unlikely that he resorts to booting up TFoRM, stating “I’d rather play a CD-i game”. The video then cuts between Mapplethorpe’s photographs and Rolfe’s stunned expression while classical music plays in the background, until he finally retorts “No, I wouldn’t”. Years later Rolfe would revisit TFoRM in a short video alongside longtime collaborator Mike Matei. Here it is Matei who takes on the disdain of the nerd, giving an eye-roll to the voiceover of TFoRM’s curator describing a photograph of a calla lily and asking “Who the fuck is Robert Mapplethorpe?” (the section of TFoRM that directly answers this biographical question is conspicuously cut from the video). Matei critiques TFoRM along gendered lines, speculating its potential audience of “older women” throwing “shower part[ies]”. Rolfe concludes that “there’s nothing to say about it”.
Despite Rolfe’s final word, in 2021 the blog Imperfect Glass published a post entitled “What We Can Learn From ‘The Flowers of Robert Mapplethorpe’”. While utterly redundant if you’ve seen the AVGN video, I think this post is useful in that it surfaces and makes explicit some of the implicit sentiments of Rolfe’s work. The recurring gag of Imperfect Glass’ post is hurling insults in a strikethrough font, and replacing them with overexaggerated praise, calling TFoRM “a boring, barely-interactive wondrous experience”. This charge of “barely interactive” can also be seen in the description of TFoRM’s IMDb page. This phrase, barely interactive, can be read in a few ways. We might see “barely” as a synonym for hardly, marginally, narrowly, scarcely, only just or almost not. Yet having that qualifier present admits that TFoRM actually is interactive, in fact we may read “barely interactive” as nakedly interactive, its catalog mode being nothing but interactive; no cutscenes, no microtransactions, just a cursor and a database of photographs to peruse. As Imperfect Glass sarcastically puts it, “it’s a streamlined story that’s easy to understand follow [sic] with no fat or unnecessary subplots that need to be trimmed.” On the other hand TFoRM is arguably less interactive than a gallery experience, where one’s view of a photograph is mediated by physical space, or even an art book, which allows the reader to flip to a page at random and read any present text at their own leisure.
I could not find any review of TFoRM from the time of its release, aside from a description from a magazine listing that reads: “Browse through 60 floral images with Photo CD zoom capability. Each photograph is matched with a chamber music selection.” Here we can see two aspects of TFoRM that are downplayed in Rolfe’s videos: the zoom functionality and the music. In the AVGN video the music is crossfaded to suggest one continuous piece of music. While we can certainly debate the perceived pretentiousness of classical music (and its appropriateness, given that Mapplethorpe was involved with punk legend Patti Smith), it is undeniable that the comedic effect of Rolfe’s edit undermines the artistic effort in producing 60 unique pieces of music for TFoRM.
The reception of TFoRM also speaks to a deep-seated inadequacy of games culture and the perennial question of whether games can be art. In response Rolfe, Matei and Imperfect Glass perform a role-reversal, where photography is inadequate because it does not meet the threshold of game. However, this strategy backfires, revealing an inability to appreciate images, still or moving, on their own terms. If fine art is “absurd”, “incomprehensible” and “ludicrous” in Imperfect Glass’ words (note that ludicrous has the same etymological root as ludology), then their vision of what videogames ought to be about is simply stupid, consisting of “battle[s] against giant robots, or something” or “a highly-trained operative traveling the world to rescue the stolen photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe from North Korea, Al-Qaeda, escaped Nazis, and other nefarious forces”.
In Video Games Have Always Been Queer Bo Ruberg defines videogames as “any designed, interactive experience that operates primarily through a digital interface and understands itself as a video game”. While I have some issues with this definition, I believe it productively leads us to ask, does TFoRM “understand itself” as a game? Despite the Phillips CD-i ostensibly being a game console, I don’t think that it does. In fact, in the realm of 1990s CD-ROM multimedia TFoRM is frankly unremarkable, by which I mean not that there is nothing to say about it as Rolfe suggests but that it was not uncommon in its time (See Trant and Large). Yet to say that TFoRM is not a videogame would be giving up ground to a reactionary impulse in games culture. Instead I would say that TFoRM is an ungame, in that it undoes the distinctions between games and non-games, interactivity and stasis, videogames and art.
IMAGERY
Another criticism I have of Imperfect Glass’ post is its indifference to contents. For them a flower has no symbolic meaning or aesthetic quality, it is merely an everyday item that is easily replaceable with any other. They ask the reader to “[c]onsider the sequels we never got: The mops of Robert Mapplethorpe, The toilet plungers of Robert Mapplethorpe, The flaming oil drums of Robert Mapplethorpe” as if 1) these were all somehow the same and 2) that they could not make compelling photographic subjects in their own right (the oddly janitorial theme of the first two hypotheticals brings to mind Duchamp’s Fountain). What is latent in TFoRM’s reception then is the idea that a flower is just a flower.
Yet rarely in art history have flowers been banal subjects, a theme explored in Derek Conrad Murray’s Mapplethorpe and the Flower. Building on the work of French philosopher Georges Bataille and others, Murray unpacks the contradictions of the flower and its allusions to death, sex, disease, desire, the exotic and the abject. He argues that “the issues of power and repression conveyed in Mapplethorpe’s S&M and race pictures are equally present in his flower images.” Such erotic valences avail themselves to even the most innocuous of videogame flowers. The Fire Flower, for instance, grants Mario the ability to ejaculate flames from his fists, the implication being not that Mario consumes the flower, but that he takes on the properties of the flower. Pollination becomes a venereal oxidation, calling to mind Murray’s statement that “the flower is an incendiary formalism”.
Murray also cites art critic John Ashbery, who provides insight into why something like TFoRM came to exist:
“Of course the flower photographs are not what made [Mapplethorpe] simultaneously famous and unacceptable. They are, in the words of one of his dealers, “the tip of the iceberg.” But because he is fashionable, because there is tremendous demand for his work, and because so much of it cannot be shown in public, these presumably innocent photographs have been summoned to stand in for the others. It is impossible to look at them and ignore their context, and so they have taken on a further ambiguity: They are, in effect, calling attention to the pictures that are hidden from view. Like fig leaves for absent genitalia, they point to the scandal of what is not there.”
Matei unwittingly makes such a connection between the floral and the sexual when he observes that one of Mapplethorpe’s flowers “looks like a limp dick”; an ironic statement given the BDSM undertones of the AVGN series. However, to read Mapplethorpe’s floral work as mere euphemism would be an error, as Murray says “his subject was not bodies, race, or even sex (as is often fixated upon), but the complex ideological value systems that subtend our fragile sense of self.”
While all this is lost on Imperfect Glass, they do acknowledge Mapplethorpe’s other works, albeit in demeaning manner:
“For obvious reasons, The Flowers of Robert Mapplethorpe doesn’t mention [BDSM], but it makes the whole game funnier when you think that the photographer spent most of his time photographing gay men wearing bondage gear. The contrast between such different subjects (with classical music, no less) is hilarious. Too bad the Phillips CD-i was never blessed with The BDSM photographs of Robert Mapplethorpe.”
Here the figurative pointing and laughing of Rolfe’s videos becomes literal. TFoRM is seen as insufficient both because it is not a game (even though it is called one) and because it is queer. It is not a non-game because it is queer, rather its non-game status is what makes it queer. In this way TFoRM can be put alongside other queer games like Dys4ia and Gone Home which received ire along similar argumentative lines. The difference however is that TFoRM predates those games by two decades, yet its status as a queer game has hitherto been unacknowledged by e.g. the LGBTQ Game Archive.
So what exactly would these commentators have rather TFoRM taken the form of? While videogames have always coexisted with photography, the genre of photography game was nascent at the time of TFoRM’s release, with 1984’s Nessie for the Commodore 64 and 1992’s Japan-exclusive Gekibo: Gekisha Boy for the PC Engine being the two lone examples I’m aware of. Around the turn of the millennium two landmark photography games were released: Fatal Frame, which put photographic practice in a survival horror setting, and, of course, Nintendo’s Pokémon Snap.
But when I play Pokémon Snap, I do not really play as a photographer. Dia Lacina argues that Snap’s appeal lies in its limitations; that there are a finite number of photos one can take with their roll of film, and that only one photo may represent any given Pokémon in the Pokédex. Thus for her the game encouraged sorting, comparison and curation as much as it did pointing and shooting. However, because Professor Oak’s points tabulation that concludes each level reduces the basic principles of composition to an algorithm, there is a calculably “correct” answer to which photograph is the very best. Because of this I have no specific memory of any particular photograph that I had taken in my time with the game, or even if I was the one taking it, as I often played Nintendo 64 games in a social context even if they were ostensibly single-player. And yet I vividly remember the game as a whole.
For myself, Pokémon Snap’s appeal does not lie in its status as a rules-based game or a photography simulator, but in the chimerical fusion of the two. The game’s standout feature, the “Pokémon signs” and their varying degrees of hiddenness, require the player to use Todd Snap’s tiny arsenal of apples and pester balls to affect change in the environment. I wouldn’t call these puzzles or even challenges per se, and yet the sense of dialogue, of poking and prodding at Pokémon Island, making Pikachu ride a surfboard, is perhaps the purest distillation of interactivity in the vulgar sense that I can imagine. Perhaps this is TFoRM’s ultimate sin, that the images displayed are only surfaces to absorb, and I cannot throw a projectile at them to reveal their subtext which, unlike Mew, is not so easily captured.
The point here is not that TFoRM or Mapplethorpe must be celebrated, or even that the “player” of TFoRM must like his work, but that we must value the baseline creative labour put into all artforms, photography and videogames alike, regardless of our personal taste or distaste for the final product. To do otherwise, to pit media against each other and assert that one is superior to another, is deeply anti-art.
IMMEDIACY
The notion of a photography videogame is perhaps one of the clearest illustrations of what Jay David Bolter and Richard Grusin call remediation, or “the representation of one medium in another”. Pokémon Snap and TFoRM in particular appear to correspond to Bolter and Grusin’s dual logics of immediacy (where the medium disappears or becomes transparent) and hypermediacy (where the medium calls attention to itself). Pokémon Snap with its first-person perspective clearly demonstrates immediacy, although the presence of heads-up display elements suggests at least partial mediation. TFoRM on the other hand with its picture-in-picture display is clearly hypermediated, although the use of a stone background texture implies some sort of gallery setting that the viewer occupies. So, while immediacy and hypermediacy are useful poles to think with, Bolter and Grusin would agree that much of new media (and especially videogames) are constantly modulating between the two.
However, there are multiple meanings latent in the term “immediacy”, both the unmediated transparency that Bolter and Grusin speak of and the more common meaning of instantaneity. These two connotations are, of course, self-reinforcing: to be transparent is to be instant and vice versa. Therefore a medium’s speed is directly tied to its status as immediate or hypermediated. For example, Rolfe notes a “delay” in the cursor movement of TFoRM that points to its hypermediacy. This delay is commonly called latency or lag, and can occur in multiple places within the feedback loop of a videogame, such as input lag or output lag. This also includes network lag between multiple systems, however the following discussion will focus chiefly on local lag.
Lag is a complex phenomenon, and my understanding here is limited by technical knowledge (an accessible overview can be found in Snyder). However, the critique I wish to make does not require me to know why lag happens, simply that it does happen and that there is a cultural value ascribed to it, namely that lag is almost universally considered bad. Scientific papers on lag describe its “negative” (Ivkovic et al.) and “adverse effects” (Halbhuber), or describe players’ “suffer[ing]” in a “battle between lag and online gamers” (Tseng et al.). When lag is particularly pronounced it is commonly said that it turns videogames into “slideshows”. Aside from lag’s utility in certain speedruns, I could not find anyone who openly advocates for lag. The idea that lag could be anything but bad, or even a good thing, is thus highly provocative.
Let me illustrate with a scenario. My avatar is driving down a dirt road in the Kalimari Desert track of Mario Kart 64. To the left is a train track, where periodically a train passes by, and when the train is on screen it causes lag. This has no direct consequence on the outcome of the race, but it feels bad, as the objective of the game is to go as fast as possible. But when I say that lag feels bad, that I can in essence feel the lag, what do I mean? In terms of “actions per minute” my gameplay is hardly involved, I am simply holding down the A button and not even using the analog stick to steer because the stretch of road is fairly straight. Surely, if someone was over my shoulder watching me play, they would also respond to the visual stimuli and experience the lag too. And yet, there is something noticeably different about my experience of lag as a player and a second party’s experience of lag; something about the ever-so-slight tension of muscles in my hand and its relationship to the events on screen that borders on synesthesia.
A potential solution to this problem only raises further questions. If I happen to pick up a banana peel item and hold the Z button to keep it behind my avatar, the camera will slightly zoom out to better show any trailing karters, and in Mario Kart 64 this reduces lag because the character sprites are no longer taking up as much screen space. It is then in my best interest to hold out the banana peel while driving past the train to save time (that is real time, not in-game time). Doing so feels pleasurable. However, importantly this series of events does not eliminate the train lag, it merely ameliorates it. I still feel lag, but less of it, and yet it is still pleasurable.
The allusion I am drawing here between lag and BDSM is certainly not one-to-one. Lag, although it limits control, is not physically painful, after all. What both point to however is the potential for ambiguity in the otherwise Manichaean divisions of good and bad, pain and pleasure, immediacy and latency (Ruberg makes a similar argument under the banner of “no fun”). What lag and TFoRM both accomplish is providing an answer to Rolfe’s question prompted by Lester the Unlikely — “Isn’t that the whole point of playing a game, to feel empowered?” — to which I say sometimes, but not always.
CITATIONS
Bolter, Jay David, and Richard Grusin. Remediation: Understanding New Media. MIT Press, 2000.
Halbhuber, David. “To Lag or Not to Lag: Understanding and Compensating Latency in Video Games.” Extended Abstracts of the 2022 Annual Symposium on Computer-Human Interaction in Play. 2022.
Ivkovic, Zenja, et al. “Quantifying and mitigating the negative effects of local latencies on aiming in 3d shooter games.” Proceedings of the 33rd annual acm conference on human factors in computing systems. 2015.
Murray, Derek Conrad. Mapplethorpe and the Flower: Radical Sexuality and the Limits of Control. Bloomsbury Visual Arts, 2020.
Ruberg, Bo. Video Games Have Always Been Queer. New York University Press, 2019.
Snyder, David. Speedrunning: Interviews with the Quickest Gamers. McFarland, 2017.
Trant, Jennifer, and Michael Large. “CD-ROM resources for art and design.” Art Documentation: Journal of the Art Libraries Society of North America 13.3 (1994): 131–138.
Tseng, Po-Han, et al. “On the battle between lag and online gamers.” 2011 IEEE International Workshop Technical Committee on Communications Quality and Reliability (CQR). IEEE, 2011.
