How to Do Things with Videogames

12. Kitsch

12 Kitsch Thomas Kinkade paints cottages, gardens, chapels, lighthouses, and small-town street scenes. He paints such subjects by the dozens each year, but he sells thousands of them for at least a thousand dollars each, all “originals” manufactured using a complex print process that involves both machine automation and assembly line–like human craftsmanship. The result has made Kinkade the most collected painter in history. Unlike most working painters, Kinkade’s work doesn’t go out to exhibition or collection, his most “important” works later being mass-produced on prints or mugs ordatebooks for thegeneral public. No, Kinkade’s work is mass-market from the get-go. Every subject, every canvas becomes an immediate widget to be marketed in every channel. The artist himself put it this way in a 60 Minutes interview: “There’s been million-seller books and million-seller CDs. But there hasn’t been, until now, million-seller art. We have found a way to bring to millions of people, an art that they can understand.”1 For Kinkade, “an art they can understand ” means tropes of nostalgia and idealism. He paints perfect small-town Main Streets with friendly neighbors and milkmen. He paints patriotic portraits of flapping flags. He paints white Christmases with serenading carolers. He paints glowing gardens basked in filtered beams of sunlight. There’s a name for this sort of art, an art urging overt sentimentality , focused on the overt application of convention, without particular originality: we call it kitsch. Kitsch has acomplicated history. A centuryand a half ago, fine art became a personal plaything of the cultural elite at the same kItsch time as the middle classes proliferated thanks to industrialism. Then much as now, once a lower class catches a glimpse of the group just above it, it tends to mimic those styles and tastes in an effort to climb the social ladder. In nineteenth-century Europe, one way such longing for status took form was to acquire consumer -grade copies of art created in the style of the fine arts of the cultural elite. Eventually a marketplace grew around art for the masses, just as one exists today for Kinkade’s paintings and trinkets and calendars and textiles and the like. Are there kitschgames? Suchgameswould have toaccomplish the operation of kitsch as much as its appearance. To start, they might have to draw on borrowed conventions, repurposing them for popular appeal. Lots of games do this, and it might be tempting to point to the glut of selfsame casual puzzle games and social games as likely candidates. But those games don’t adopt another necessary property of kitsch: trite sentimentalism . Nor do they exhibit the necessary level of quality. While nineteenth-century kitsch painting was sometimes accused of having been thrown together, modern kitsch can have quite high production values—Kinkade’s paintings are technically competent examples of a particular style of realism. FerryHalim’sonlinewebgames,publishedonhisOrisinal.com site since 2001, are perfect candidates for videogame kitsch. They borrowconventionsfromcasualgames, usingsimplemouse movement and button pressing as their sole controls. Thematically, the Orisinal games depict idyllic scenes of natural beauty and wholesomeness, riddled with cutecritters and schmaltzy musical scores. And from the perspective of production, Halim’s games are well executed, with high-quality illustration-style graphics, smooth animation, and fitting sound effects. Take the first game published on the site, Apple Season. In the game, a hundred shiny, red apples fall from the top of the screen, accelerating as they spin. The player moves a small basket side to side at screen bottom, attempting to catch the apples. The source of the apples isn’t shown, allowing the player to fill in the details: kItsch perhaps they’re falling from an unseen, noble orchard tree, waiting to be reaped by ruddy-faced families. The score display at the bottom adds the final packet of saccharine sweetness: apples are not caught but “saved.” The noble player basks in this virtuous, if corny, victory. Or consider It Takes Two, a game about helping a dog and cat help one another. Adorable, illustrated animals (a Halim trademark ) stand at opposite sides of a seesaw. When the player clicks, the animal at the top jumps down, vaulting the other up to the platform at the top. The player attempts to time these jumps such that each animal captures treats that pass across the middle of the screen. It Takes Two capitalizes on...