Patreon Letter - 5th May, 2018

Hi everyone! I'm so glad to be back to a biweekly schedule with these, I can't begin to tell you. I still feel not particularly recovered from the past month or so of running things mostly solo, but this is at least a bit of a load off. Let's get right to it. 

I have finished building the entire Variety Kit Nintendo Labo set, and I'm here to report back my findings to you all if you'd like to pick it up. There have been some deals on it already, and I'm sure there'll be more, so let me start with my tl;dr take: if you have any interest in low-risk building, absolutely pick up Labo at the price point that makes sense for you. It's very good at that. Don't pick it up if you want a video game. It's not that.

(source: kotaku)

I think a lot about the Miyamoto quote above, which once upon a time caused much consternation among Nintendo fans. This was during the casual game explosion on Wii, and the true gamers felt they weren't being catered to. A big internet strop ensued. There is nothing new under the sun. 

My experience with Labo confirms this. There is something uniquely satisfying about the folding and constructing of sheets of cardboard. It is immediate, it is tangible, it suggests to you ways in which you could extrapolate and create something on your own while you are learning. I can't think of the last time a video game made me stop and consider what I could possibly do with the things it is giving me once I step away from it.

Part of this is that video games barely resemble toys anymore. Sure, there are your Everythings and Noby Noby Boys, digital ephemera that some of us pick at when we get a chance. But most video games exist in the inexplicable ground between slot machine and summer blockbuster. They're a noisy machine meant to give you the satisfaction of a loot drop while you enjoy some flashy characters doing big but meaningless things. 

It will try very hard to convince you that it is not these thing by being very expensive and full of self-importance, and the culture will agree, but that doesn't mean you have to fall for this bullshit.

Building with Labo is more interesting than a video game, because after you're done you've learned something about the functions of the world. You take flat sheets and turn them into cranks and springs and noise-makers and learn how to reinforce handles or visualize cubes of many shapes and sizes. These are fundamental building blocks of the way the everyday world works. It's nice to gain something of an understanding of how and why you would put those ideas together to create simple machines or assemble structures. You're learning! Learning is good, especially in an educational toy.

But maybe even more importantly, Labo remembers that the act of doing is an end in and of itself and should provide its own rewards. I cannot count how many times I saw games journalists joke about being told to fold the cardboard for the 70th time when building something, though I've never seen any of them complain about holding up on a joystick or pulling the right trigger despite the fact they might do such a thing thousands of times in any single game. 

Games want you to forget the physical act of playing them, abstracting your bodily self because it's boring to sit on a couch and fiddle with some buttons. To remember that's what your doing would break the spell of the compulsion of games, lay bare the lie they tell that they are greater than the sum of their parts.

By contrast, Labo asks you to reflect on folding each time. It will remind you, tease you, sympathize with you, laugh along with you, and sit happy with you as you fold and fold and fold. It is the care of small action made big, a repeatable easy task that builds upon itself to create something wonderful. The entire history of humanity is built upon such acts, now delegated culturally to the dustbin of 'crafts': chopping vegetables, sewing a stitch, drawing a line, whittling a block. 

These are the physical realities of being alive. They can be tedious, but they can also be affirming and joyous if we view them as such, and retrain our hearts and minds to view such things as a potential for care both expressed and reflected back onto us. If we make the time to take the time to make things, that time will not be poorly spent, no matter what the pressures of late capitalism might drive into our spirits like a poisoned knife.

Which is not to say that video games don't have value. We have a whole podcast about the good we see in the medium, and we try to express that every month. Standing on the edge of the ocean of The Culture, however, it's impossible to avoid the stench of video game exceptionalism. Video games aren't just good, it argues, they are special, and they offer you things you can't get anywhere else. 

The older I get, the less I believe that. In fact, increasingly I believe the opposite is true. 

Video games exist to smash together disparate actions and mediums together in new ways, even though it invariably does so at the cost of the unique appeal of those mediums. Video games are just barely able to visually tell the stories of mediocre movies. They can shove prose and poetry into their frameworks but rarely have any idea how to integrate them past leaving you to read them. They can replicate complex systems but only within the framework of what the designer saw as the optimal way (or few ways) to utilize the tools. 

Games, for all their interactivity, are nearly immune to the kinds of casual, referential, remix-able relationships we have to music and art and movies unless you have a computer science background and a hell of an editing suite. 

Meanwhile, modest old Labo is over here telling you how to use its simple scripting language to make whatever else you might want out of cardboard, after showing you for 10 hours how to construct whatever shell or mechanics you might need to do such a thing. Even if you don't want to do this, it suggests how you might go about it and asks you to consider the possibility that by engaging with this one object you might grow past it and onto bigger and better things under your own agency. 

$70 is probably too much money for a box of cardboard and some software, and I'm not going to say Labo is inherently an anti-capitalist product (that would be stupid). But, but! the reality is that the devaluing of crafts and creation is a function of consumerist capitalism. Buy, don't make. This is the ethos of the last 100 years. It is killing us.

And if you can take away from this product you bought that next time you can just go put together something cool with the tools available to you in the world? I consider that a worthy take-away. I think it is good if you build Labo, enjoy it, and then let it languish as you move on to other horizons and other possibilities for making and doing. I think we can and should go beyond the prescribed actions of a piece of software telling you to to through the actions to consume its content. I think that's at the heart of toys, and I think toys are more interesting than video games.

Until next time,

Em