I was trying to explain computer game culture to somebody today. I mean, in particular, the culture of people who make computer games.
When you visit a leading computer game production company, be it Valve Software or Bungie Games, you find a very specific aesthetic at work. One part of it is a gung-ho spirit, very much like the idea behind the 1939 MGM film Babes in Arms, in which the intrepid young Judy Garland and Mickey Rooney put on a show in a barn, pulling it off on a shoe-string through sheer guts and talent, improvising their way to immortality.
Except that it’s all mixed with an aesthetic out of Aliens (or, to be more precise, out of Id Software’s Doom). In the land of game production, the barn has already been overrun and firebombed by alien fiends from another dimension, the world itself now lies in sad smoking ruins, and creative genius thrives in the gutted warehouses, abandoned factories and broken detritus of a lost civilization.
Game studios are carefully dressed up to look like Dresden after the bombing, all burnt out and stripped down to bare concrete and rough steel beams, huge hollowed out cavernous spaces where game designers cluster their little cubicles like lone outposts bravely defending humanity’s last hope against the encroaching zombie horde.
The net effect is an eerie combination of gung-ho post-WWII optimism and surreal post-apocalyptic alienation. “Hey kids, my dad has a barn … let’s put on a show! Except we can’t ask for permission ’cause, um, my dad’s now a flesh eating zombie.”
Who could ask for a more inspiring work environment?