Some games imply a world rather than showing one. When I play the popular mobile game Dots, I envision a smooth, futuristic world where the game is solemnly played all day by sprightly and tanned pensioners dressed in tailored white linen, stroking their Dots-running phablets while padding around barefoot in spacepod homes built entirely of brushed aluminium.
While we await this utopia, Dots stands as an impressive demonstration of how minimalism, if executed with a heretofore unimaginable smugness, can generate an existential weather of mental vacancy and terrifying futility. At first it looks as though what Dots has done, with relentless mastery, is void the videogame of any mimetic content whatsoever. It is one of the most abstract videogames yet made. The dots, in their tasteful reds, cyans and purples, are not supposed to be anything else. The dots of Pac-Man’s maze were obviously something: Pac-Man ate them, so they were food of some physical or at least symbolic kind.
Even in an apparently abstract puzzler such as Tetris, the geometric figures are commonly referred to as bricks and it’s hard not to read what takes shape at the base of the screen as a wall. (Tetris is a game about tidying up, yes, but it’s also a game about building a wall: you just need to build it perfectly, with no gaps, to be allowed to forget what you have already constructed.)
In Dots, the dots are not supposed to be anything except what they are: dots. But this itself is an aesthetic statement, and a snide two-pronged reference. First, Dots is announcing that it is not like those trashy puzzle games featuring skeuomorphic jewels or balloons. Dots is tasteful; those other games are for chavs. Second, Dots is adroitly recreating the smirking hipster minimalism of Damien Hirst’s spot paintings, which the celebrity artist (or perhaps his minion-people) churns out by the hundreds.
So it would also be fitting to play the game in a Shoreditch café, with your mustard corduroy trousers carefully rolled up to show off your crépe-soled brogues, and your precisely combed, brilliantined hair forming a rigorous contrast with your bushy beard, a beard that reaches almost all the way down to the iPad on which you’re playing Dots.
Dots is the videogame it’s OK to be seen playing if you would be embarrassed to be seen playing a videogame. Ian Bogost has previously said something similar about Hundreds, but Hundreds, with its numbers and gears, looks potentially dorky, if you care about being mistaken for a dork. Dots, by contrast, is pure high art (or at least haute art-industry). It gives precisely nothing away, while strenuously calling attention to itself, and you.
Dots is a brilliantly smarmy videogame. The smarminess of the way the dots pulse when you touch them; the smarmy way they bounce several times when dropping down a line; the smarminess of the sonic feedback (bloopy arpeggio fragments rather than anything so crass as music); the smarminess, even, of the thin typography, adroitly jumping on the design-fashion bandwagon before iOS7 was beamed to the masses. Playing Dots makes my hands feel greasy from the saturated smarminess it embodies. I’m surprised I can still see the screen through the viscous smarm exuded from every pixel of Dots.
In its singleminded ambition to be the smarmiest videogame ever made, Dots even betrays its own governing aesthetic of non-meaning with a subtitle – Dots: A Game About Connecting. This works on so many levels that one wants to go to sleep in despair, having first set fire to the ground floor of your house and making sure that the resulting inferno will leave nothing standing. Yes, Dots is a game about ‘connecting’ the dots (cue smarmy arpeggios and smarmy dot-bouncing).
What you get after connecting the dots is a score. And then you can ‘connect’ with other people by, for example, tweeting your score. This is instructive insofar as it is another example of how the techno-industrial complex cloaks its imperial ambition in the touchy-feely language of psychotherapeutic virtue. Dots wants to persuade you that, through Dots, you are ‘connecting’ with other people. In fact what you are doing, when you do that, is advertising Dots.
In children’s activity books, connecting the dots comes with artistic reward: you see what the picture is supposed to be. It is beneath Dots to offer such pleasure in return for submitting to the ineffably, mind-numbingly tedious work of its play system. I suspect that the purpose of Dots is nothing but to numb the mind in a tasteful way.
Dots is, of course, wildly successful. And this makes me nervous. Because if you were told to design a ludoweapon – a brain-anaesthetising game that sucked literally millions of people into its antiseptic universe of cleanly minimal sensory tickling and repetitive nonsensical labour – what else would you come up with but Dots?
The post Minimalist, high-art Dots is smug, snide, smirking and has a viscous smarm that exudes from every pixel appeared first on Edge Online.
Source http://www.edge-online.com/features/minimalist-high-art-dots-is-smug-snide-smirking-and-has-a-viscous-smarm-that-exudes-from-every-pixel/
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