The Happy Medium

Handmade mallets

Paolo Pedercini is a teacher at Carnegie Mellon University and an urban bike polo enthusiast. You probably know him as the man behind Molleindustria, maker of some of the most politically and socially scathing independent games around, including the Mcdonald’s Videogame, Oiligarchy, Faith Fighter, and Operation: Pedopriest. He’s also behind one of my favourite games, Every Day The Same, a Prufrock-esque contemplation on the monotony of life.

Though his games and sporting pursuits might reveal a man in love with chaos and confrontation, Pedercini speaks like a teacher—collected, confident, but most of all thoughtful.

THM: What were the games that made you realize games could be social commentary—or were there any?
 
Pedercini: I remember playing Postal 2 after several years of gaming abstinence. I played, like, an hour but I was impressed by its loaded depiction of “deep” America. I loved the fact that the satirical commentary about guns, violence, and community desegregation was implemented on a gameplay level, in the behavior of the horrid people you came across.
 
I often cite Theme Park by Bullfrog as an inspiration for the McDonald’s Videogame and Oiligarchy. The game didn’t actually make any clear statements but by putting the player in a position of power and control over unassuming park visitors, it sort of demystified some aspects of industrial entertainment. For example, you could increase the quantity of salt in the french fries at the fast-food stand, making your customer thirsty, and then put a soda stand right next to it.
 
Do you play “mainstream” games at all?
 
Unfortunately I have to, otherwise my students will think I’m not entitled to teach a game design class (which is the case anyway). I think there are a couple of AAA-titles every year that are worth my time. I enjoyed helping my character brushing his teeth in Heavy Rain, I loved Little Big Planet in two-player mode. 

My girlfriend is playing God of War III so I have to hear screams and grunts and gut ripping and swishing swords every night. I sometimes enjoy the animations while she does all the button-mashing work.

Back to the question: I think some of the “indie spirit” will be gradually absorbed in big-budget games and we’ll see more innovation and risk-taking in the future. But right now being at GameStop is to me is as interesting as being in a gynecologist’s waiting room.

I’d be interested in knowing your thoughts on Heavy Rain. It has absolutely confounded me as a game.

I found the assemblage of thriller cliches very amusing. Heavy Rain is the most complete essay on movie tropes ever made.

As I said, what I enjoyed most are the pointless, mundane sequences of the first chapters. I was really engrossed by being forcefully put in the shoes of an unlikable suburbanite with a flat screen TV and annoying children. And it’s great how it manages to give you the illusion of agency while still maintaining a fundamentally linear plot.
Did the little brat throw himself under a car because I didn’t play enough with him the day before? Was saving the hooker going to change the course of the story? Did my choices turn the hot girl into a completely superfluous character?

The answer for all these questions is: NO. But still, I was thinking about it and that made Heavy Rain an interesting and unique experience for me.

Do you think it’s the responsibility of critics to look for the meaning in mainstream games, even if it means finding meaning that the designer didn’t intend? One might argue that God of War says a lot about the abuse of power for personal gain, or the attraction of violence, for example.

Yes, as long as they resist the temptation to glorify pop-culture. I’ve seen too many gamers-turned-to-scholars who spend their time trying to make the point that videogames are smarter and deeper than we think.

Critics should approach these texts… critically. That might require looking for meanings beyond the intention of the authors, but also to put these cultural products in context. God of War seems to me more like a series of pretexts for fighting badass monsters and smashing pottery rather than a meditation of power and violence. It’s a way shallower than the Greek mythology tales which it is based upon. It’s even shallower than the macho-porn movie/comic 300 that basically defines its aesthetics.

Can you tell me a bit more about how you came to teach game design?

Quite straightforward, actually. Got a BFA in the Old World, taught for a while, got an MFA in the U.S., applied for an open position at the School of Art at Carnegie Mellon. It’s a fairly traditional art school but with very open-minded people. They happened to look for somebody who could potentially bridge art with the rest of the school, which notoriously excels in computer science among other things.

Did urban bike polo teach you anything about game design?

That’s an interesting question. I’d say two things.

First: context is important in games as in every other cultural form. I recently realized I hate soccer and pretty much all the sports because of the asphyxiating fan culture I grew up with. Hardcourt bike polo is a fairly new, rogue sport, without established organizations and structures, without any real following or tension toward professionalization. It’s pervaded by an open, non-competitive, non-jocky, DIY-oriented culture. And that’s also what makes it attractive to me.

To draw a parallel with video-games, I believe this thing commonly referred to as “game culture” is preventing many people from becoming gamers beyond the Wii and Farmville. I’m talking about this revenge-of-the-geek shit, like space invaders cupcakes, Mario fridge magnets, nostalgic chiptune music (disclosure: I made music with a hacked gameboy since 2005) and—above everything—the tyranny of the testosteronic adolescent hardcore gamer, with his teenage fantasies that fuel the whole industry. I believe there is a way of conceiving and enjoying games that is somehow different from my mother playing bejeweled and my little brother playing the Halo crap.

Second: messy is good. The best thing about a bike polo game is that it looks like an awkward, clanging wreck. You know, hitting a ball with a handmade mallet while riding a bike is just… wrong. Plus, the ball gets stuck at the borders of the court, the mallets get into the wheels, you often miss the round thing. Off course there are spectacular moments and it’s fun as hell but overall it’s not that elegant.

We often do the equation: good game design is elegant game design. Elegant as well balanced, self consistent, easy to learn but hard to master. Elegant as the platonic worlds of German boardgames. But I dare to say there is a beauty in wobbly systems, in unnecessary elements, unbalanced gameplays, glitches and noise.

What’s the game design scene like in Milan?

I had never met any game developers before moving to the US. The industry there is almost non-existent, and very provincial. The Scandinavian indie scenes are demonstrating that you can make terrific games even without being in the center of the Empire. But Italy is another story, it’s in the midst of a generational civil war, young creatives can barely make a living, and most of them simply leave the country.

Have you considered designing a game commenting on Milan?

Well, I wish they were more universal, but Tuboflex, Tamatipico and the MayDay Netparade are basically about Northern Italy.

As a movement that’s predominantly online, the indie games scene seems de-centralized. I wonder if designers like yourself feel like a part of a movement.

Hard to say, I mostly hang out with non-game artists. I think the indie games scene(s), like all the geographically dispersed communities in the Internet age, are cemented by occasional convergences, like the various festivals, conferences, and online and offline jams. I often stay away from festivals, competitions, prizes, and everything that involves some kind of evaluation and reward. On the other hand, non-competitive game jams look more like simulations of “crunch time”, a sort of preview of your overworked future in the industry. Me, I can’t really develop for more than twenty minutes a day. I like to sleep.

Do your non-game artist friends see what you do as art?

I won’t go too much into the ridiculous art-vs-games debate.
Here’s how I frame the thing: I make games that are meant to be games, to be played by people who play games in the gaming distribution channels, surrounded by porn and ringtone banners. They often end up in galleries and art venues, but that’s secondary.

Molleindustria, as a whole, is primarily an art project that deals with the reappropriation of electronic entertainment in continuity with the tactical media, net.art, and software-art traditions. It deals with the relationship between ideology and entertainment, and with the viral diffusion of content on the Internet.
Are people playing my games aware of this stated goal? I don’t really care. There are different levels of engagement.

Now you have a lot of people arguing for an “artistic” legitimization of the medium as a whole, which is like saying that all forms of video are art because there is video-art at the MoMA. Then you have some people trying to establish the idea of art-game, which is a legit labeling operation. After all, games have been part of the artistic practice for about 15 years now. Finally you have people (mostly gamers) that have no clue about what’s going on in contemporary art and that are, for some obscure reasons, horrified by the idea of games as art (I could name names, but it wouldn’t be polite).

The sad truth is that making art is not that cool and fancy. It doesn’t give you money or immortality. It rarely helps you getting laid. We are just a bunch of practitioners with our jargon, our self-referential circles, our market, our institutions, and our miserable subsides.

Why do people working with a cool, popular medium want to be artists? That defies my imagination. It’s us, the artists, that have to learn to get out of our white boxes and engage with a broader public.