Some diehard Moore fans have tried to defend this line, taken verbatim from the book, as a reflection of Rorschach’s twisted character, but that doesn’t fly for me. It’s just spectacularly bad writing. That the city screams “like an abattoir” – maybe (although it’s not abattoirs that scream, but the beings in them). “Like an abattoir full of children” – at a pinch (although it’s too crudely obvious a contrast). But “like an abattoir full of retarded children”? Now the sentence has definitively jumped the shark. It’s the kind of thing a 13-year-old might think sounded cool in an apocalyptic, ‘dark’ kind of way. And then I realised that Watchmen was in no way extraordinary but perfectly symptomatic: we are, after all, living through an age in which the fabulous ingenuity of craft is being lavished upon the realisation of a pathologically adolescent imagination.
Examples of this truth in videogames are, of course, too numerous to cite, because the overwhelming majority of videogames represent this fantastically juvenile application of incredible creativity and imagination; a gamer’s enjoying Bayonetta, and then his girlfriend wonders why the lead character’s clothes periodically fall off. Mumble, mumble. And that’s just one of the more tasteful examples. The ludicrous geopolitics of Modern Warfare 2, meanwhile, resemble something that could only have been dreamed up by someone whose teen reading consisted solely of those Tom Clancy novels not actually written by Tom Clancy.
And what of World Of Warcraft and its elvish grind? A journalist recently insisted in The Guardian that WOW was the contemporary equivalent of the great medieval cathedrals. Say what? Well, the argument went, cathedrals were built by hundreds of craftsmen (just like WOW), and they were social spaces (just like WOW). Well, yes, as far as that goes. But isn’t it rather a crucial difference that cathedrals were beautiful and WOW is a lurid, sub-Tolkien ‘fantasy’ world, daubed in the aesthetics of arrested adolescence? Cathedrals were free to enter, and were the only places where the vast majority of people could see art and hear cutting-edge music; WOW charges a monthly subscription, and you don’t go there for the painting or the choral polyphony. No: WOW is not like a cathedral. It is like a global amateur-dramatics society with a wardrobe full of elf costumes – and there’s nothing wrong with that. So why seek to claim instead, absurdly, that it’s on a par with one of the pinnacles of western culture?
Works in what used to be (wrongly) derided as merely trash culture are often overpraised when they show the first promise of what outsiders can recognise as intelligence and complexity. Watchmen was overpraised for its supposed political sophistication, but it was politically sophisticated only in comparison with most comic books. It pales when set beside something truly revolutionary, such as Art Spiegelman’s Maus. (I don’t even find Watchmen particularly interesting as drawing: give me Carlos Ezquerra’s Dredd any day of the week.) The danger in such overpraise is that it can entice others to take a closer look, only to walk away with their generic prejudices confirmed. You can imagine an intelligent non-gamer thinking: well, if World Of Warcraft is what counts as videogames’ equivalent of a ‘cathedral’, then videogames must be as childish and disposable as I had always assumed.
The frustrating fact is, of course, that other videogames exist that could be more justly compared (in a modest, limited way) with certain aspects of cathedral-building, in their aesthetic use of awe-inspiring space: but they aren’t in general the games that feature elves or women in buttock-baring fighting dress. Forget World Of Warcraft; I have been showing non-gamers the trailer for The Last Guardian, and it takes their breath away.
One could speculate as to whether the general cultural problem of adolescent imagination arises from too hermetically narrow a set of influences on the artists involved. The conceptual universe of many graphic novels, fantasy-themed videogames and geek-service movies suffers an inevitable watering-down of quality through constant self-reference and regurgitation. The genres are denied the creative oxygen of interpollination with the wider cultural ecology. The result isn’t so much a cathedral as a mausoleum. The acoustic is deadening, and soon the oxygen will run out.
Steven Poole is the author of Trigger Happy: The Inner Life Of Videogames. Visit him online at stevenpoole.net.