I long ago pointed out that one obvious problem for videogames’ pretensions to deliver a kind of ‘interactive narrative’ was that novels and films do not require readers or spectators to solve a logic problem, or to press an arbitrary sequence of buttons, in order to see what happens next. Yet the fourth part of 2666 is in a way analogous to that kind of challenge, erecting an obstacle in the reader’s path, and mercilessly withholding the usual bookish pleasures. “You want to see how the story turns out?” the novel seems to be saying. “Very well then; but first you’re going to have to read this.” In fact, it resembles not so much a videogame puzzle or a boss encounter as a sadistically extended RPG-style grind. In the classic videogame grind, you set out deliberately to provoke random battles in order to gain more currency or power. In The Part About The Crimes, you are subjected to a brutally repetitive sequence of murder reports, and challenged to find any reason for or in it.
This is something only a very long book can get away with, and only in the middle: the foregoing must have instilled sufficient confidence in the reader that the author knows what he is doing, and there must be sufficient payoff afterwards. Videogames, too, tend to employ this kind of sandwich motivational structure: the promise of new weapons or abilities, and then the satisfaction of employing them, will make, or so it is hoped, the grind seem worthwhile. But the suspicion may remain that the videogame grind is a hermeneutically empty thing when set beside Bolaño’s brutal experiment: rather than heaping episode on episode to cumulative effect, a game merely orders you to do more or less the same thing innumerable times until some precalibrated counter ticks over. Both kinds of grind are about despair – but whereas The Part About The Crimes reeks of existential, civilisational despair, the videogame grind’s despair is irredeemably suburban, of the kind that may occur to anyone on a commuter train.
And then along comes Half-Minute Hero, a game that is an extraordinarily savage satire of this long-accepted paradigm. A lot of the pleasure of the game, of course, lies in its loving aesthetic pastiche and sheer silliness (I was particularly happy when I was wearing a ‘charisma wig’ and ‘comfy sandals’); a lot of its parody, meanwhile, consists of good-humoured in-jokes (“Who heals major injuries just by taking meds?”). Yet the way in which it compresses the standard RPG grind – as well as the initial briefing, the fetch missions, and the climactic boss battle – all into some delirious small multiple of 30 seconds is not only a brilliant gimmick but a devastating challenge to an entire genre – and games beyond the strict RPG genre proper that employ analogous mechanics. After all, if the essence of so many games’ periodic challenge-grind-reward structure can be boiled down into mere seconds – and Half-Minute Hero shows that it can – the uncomfortable question is unavoidable: what exactly are most games doing to justify their enormously greater length?
You could argue that, in its very dreariness, the standard videogame grind at least has the structural function of separating moments of excitement, as well as cynically exploiting the psychological truth that if you have worked for something, you value it more. But Bolaño’s literary grind, in 2666, is also doing something else: it demands that the reader scrutinise his own relationship to fictional violence and interrogate his own disappointment that in this novel, by contrast with so many others, the work of a serial killer is not rendered entertaining. In comparison, the requirement to grind in most videogames is mere padding (even if MMORPGs, at least, provide an exoludic justification for the levelling treadmill, in the element of social competition). Which is why Half-Minute Hero is not only a joyous celebration of our 16bit heritage, but also constitutes some of the most devastating peer criticism yet witnessed of formal gaming traditions that we too often take for granted.
Steven Poole is the author of Trigger Happy: The Inner Life Of Videogames. Visit him online at stevenpoole.net.