Disclaimer: I’m not a gamer. My gaming days ended with Super Mario Brothers 2. I realize that makes me a luddite amongst my peers who at least know how to play Playstation, Wii, or Xbox 360. I know how to use an Xbox as a DVD player.
So I can relate to Nicholson Baker’s recent New Yorker article, “Painkiller Deathstreak,” where he relays the frustration and absolute ridiculousness of being a video game novice. Baker is a great writer and funny, too, which means he’s a really great writer. I love breezily inserted lines like “I wish so many foreigners didn’t have to be shot, so many historical sites damaged without comment, but evidently they do,” or in explaining the portrayal of his death in one game, “the image desaturates to black-and-white and there’s a tactful moment of funereal bagpipery.” When the hero of another game finds a precious, ancient green lamp, Baker empathizes that “being an American action hero, [he] immediately breaks it like a piggy bank on the floor.”
In On Writing Well, (one of my favorite books on the craft), William Zinsser describes humor as a “special angle of vision granted to certain writers who already write good English.” Baker’s account is fantastic humor, and it’s the writing that makes it so – that delicate combination of syntax, phrasing, and wit. Humorists do serious work, as any fan of satire knows, but the presentation sets it apart from other opinion pieces as something accessible if no less controversial.
A novice’s reflections on gaming may not draw great controversy, but gamers’ tolerance to depictions of violence is one of the underlying themes of the article. E.B. White believed, “Humor is a by-product that occurs in the serious work of some and not others.” The product of disparate ideas brought together to shed light on some truth however seemingly small, humor represents the quintessential creative act.
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