Partly in the absence of real surprises, and partly because the auditorium bass notes were making me feel queasy and dissociative, I spent a lot of this year’s Summer Games Fest showcase transfixed by Geoff Keighley’s balls. I am, of course, referring to the show’s animated backdrops, in which glutinous, gleaming orbs floated like nitrogen bubbles in a cosmic brain – sometimes tossed upon a tide of marbled petro-vomit, sometimes drifting over a scree of lava lamp effluence, sometimes hovering against sherbety silver Bermudas of arches and plinths. Immersive!
After a while – perhaps roundabouts the time Deadpool hacked the stage only to swiftly stunlock the crowd’s enthusiasm by turning out to be a VR game – I realised that the graphics were vaguely mapping the passage of a day. The colours of the orbs deepened as the show neared its end, from vapourwave pink and blue into a roiling purple sunset. Gloomy milquetoast mystifier of big business that I am, it was hard not to interpret this as fin de siecle symbology for the existential troubles of the industry Summer Game Fest wants to celebrate.
These coruscating astrobollocks Geoff has shored against our ruins. We have lost the first of the ebb. Here is Mads Mikkelsen, facing almost desperately away from Io Interactive’s cadaverously youthful adaptation of his portrayal of a terrorist poker player from 2006, two years before the US housing market caved in. Here are a dozen Soulslike variations on the deep sorrow of a magnificent beast doomed to a slow and possibly endless descent into ruin. HURRY UP PLEASE IT’S TIME.
Amidst the thunder, the Summer Games Fest show loosely framed three, familiar ways out of the capitalist crisis that has claimed so many jobs and projects over the past few years. Firstly, smaller (but not quite that small) productions like Clair Obscur: Expedition 33, a great game that has found fortune in a universe of other, great games from smaller teams that don’t break even. Secondly, good old-fashioned hyperviolence and Unreal grotesquery, albeit with a larger garnish of boobs and ass than we are accustomed to in these times of multiple female co-hosts. And thirdly, nostalgia and the repeat spectacle of a famous face returning from the abyss, care of a sequel or a crossover game.
Here is Scott Pilgrim. Here is the Raccoon City Police Department sign. Here is Mindseye, a 360-ass shooter perceptibly scraped together from incomplete efforts to out-do Roblox and GTA Online simultaneously, pilfering the Donnie Darko “Mad World” track from Gears Of War. And here is a Slipgate developer armed with a glowing baseball bat and wearing a “Make FPS Great Again” hat, promising to revive the heyday of Halo 3 – a useful encapsulation of the overlap between the willed and resentful childishness of much gaming culture and the embittered longings for a hypothetical golden era that get people like Donald Trump elected. And also, a useful encapsulation of the pathological backward-glancing that makes the games industry so vulnerable to generative AI daydreams, which operate by recombining what exists. I don’t know if any of the games they screened had generative AI elements, but there was certainly a lot of regurgitation.
The fans in the audience – perhaps more fans of being fans, than fans of anything specific – kept up a steady chorus of shrieks and roars. I found the whooping terrifying, in that it corresponded so cleanly to the show choreography. Even the moments of uncertainty or dismay at some relatively novel production, such as Felt That, seemed expertly coordinated, triggered to heighten the relief of a subsequent sequel announcement or franchise rebirth. The useful thing about a “whoop!” is that it can be modified into a “what?!” without decrease of volume or loss of gusto. Even the swamp of free-to-play update announcements appeared calibrated to let people recover their breath and maybe post a cheeky TikTok, before joining the next hosanna.
As the crescendos washed past, it occurred to me that an auditorium is a radial structure – that we were all seated around the outside of a sphere. We were all part of one bigger orb, a bubble blooming outward from the Youtube Theater, reaching across the oceans to encase the silicon valleys of Russia, China and Korea. What colour is that orb? Only the gods know. Only they can see it from the outside.
I alone of my row did not clap or cheer, for these are the valiant sacrifices heroic games journalists must make in order to be slightly less Part Of The Problem than everybody else, but my body yielded to the Dionysian beat of each trailer headshot or impalement or smash cut to black. My heart wobbled, striving to maintain its rhythm in the grip of such a vast countersignal, and my stomach foamed like a cauldron – thankfully, I’d eaten nothing since breakfast, because I was stressing about getting to the venue on time. The bile and phlegm pulsed in my gorge. My flesh had become a resonating chamber for the Geoffalypse.
I feared a final transformation into one of the Soulslike creatures on display, at which point the Make FPS Great Again guy would surely heft his stupid baseball bat and QTE me to death, in Cortana’s name. But then it ended, and we severed our wristbands and stepped out once more into that bigger orb, the world. The bruising of the colours on-stage had lied to us. It was still day out here. Endless summer.