mr gimmick

my feeling around videogames is that interactivity is a gimmick. i don't necessarily mean that dismissively - i'm a big fan of the 3d friday the 13th, where every few minutes the movie stops abruptly so that someone can poke something into the camera, reach into the 3d plane for a lightswitch or to hand the audience a joint, etc. as flaubert sez, a feast on every page. delightful as this is, i guess what i mean by gimmick is, the feeling of a closed off artistic device, an effect that means the same thing every time. the context of reaching into the frame changes through the movie but the effect is always "makes you laugh and go waoh."

and videogames, reliant on the gimmick of pushing a button and seeing something happen deep within the alienated blackness of a computer screen, sometimes seem condemned to the same hell as "non-gimmicky 3d". well-integrated 3d or gameplay or smell-o-vision or whatever, immersive, unnoticeable, subtle etc... like a tasteful version of the william castle prop skeleton... who wants that?

the great power of a gimmick is that it comes as a remit to explore surfaces. you can do anything you want in a 3d movie as long as someone pokes something into the screen every two minutes. the immediacy of certain effects can be a license to omit other ones entirely. and an "effect" is not quite an "emotion", can be something more on the ambiguous realm of sensation, that network of sensations that underlie and support our habitual emotional life. you can follow a stupid gimmick and find yourself somewhere surprising, wallpaper you don't recognize, not sure how you got here or why it made sense at the time.

eternity is in love with the productions of time, videogames are always seeking depth but depth itself seeks surface, seeks the gimmick. i prescribe a return to traditional values: pushing the button to make the clown disappear.