Magic and Loss: The Internet as Art - Softcover

Virginia Heffernan writes regularly about digital culture for The New York Times Magazine. In 2005, Heffernan (with cowriter Mike Albo) published the cult comic novel The Underminer (Bloomsbury). In 2002, she received her PhD in English Literature from Harvard.

Magic and Loss 1

DESIGN

Instead of introducing a narrative or a lyric structure, an app game called Hundreds begins with a hazy dynamic: expanding. A player meets no characters; rather she’s put in mind of broadening her horizons, dilating on a subject, swelling with pride. Cued by dreamlike graphics, she feels her neurons inflate.

Next she’s abstractly navigating a crowd in that expansive state. She’s flinching to keep from touching anyone else. Then, on top of all that, she is shot through with the urgent need to get someone alone, to guide him away from the crowd. Finally she’s doing this while trying to avoid the blades of a low ceiling fan.

These obscure neurological half-narrative states and others, far stranger, are cunningly evinced by Hundreds, which is a masterpiece mobile puzzle game by Greg Wohlwend and Semi Secret Software. As in Hundreds (and 1010!, Monument Valley, and the marvelous blockbuster Minecraft), much of the best digital design bypasses language and can only be evoked by it, not denoted precisely.

Superb and sleek digital design like Semi Secret Software’s now live on apps. These apps are not so much intuitive as indulgent, and they put users far from the madding crowd of the World Wide Web. The extreme elegance of app design has surfaced, in fact, in reaction to the extreme inelegance of the Web.

Appreciating the Web’s entrenched inelegance is the key to understanding digital design both on- and offline. Cruise through the gargantuan sites—YouTube, Amazon, Yahoo!—and it’s as though modernism never existed. Twentieth-century print design never existed. European and Japanese design never existed. The Web’s aesthetic might be called late-stage Atlantic City or early-stage Mall of America. Eighties network television. Cacophonous palette, ad hoc everything, unbidden ads forever rampaging through one’s field of vision, to be batted or tweezed away like ticks bearing Lyme disease.
THE ADMIRING BOG

Take Twitter, with its fragmentary communications and design scheme of sky-blue birdies, checkmarks, and homebrew icons for retweets, at-replies, hashtags, and hearts. It’s exemplary of the graphic Web, almost made to be fled. Twitter’s graphics can be crisp and flowy at once, if you’re in the mood to appreciate them, but the whole world of Twitter can rapidly turn malarial and boggy. The me-me-me clamor of tweeters brings to mind Emily Dickinson’s lines about the disgrace of fame: “How public—like a Frog—/To tell one’s name—the livelong June—/To an admiring Bog!”

That boggy quality of the Web—or, in city terms, its ghetto quality—was brought forcefully to light in 2009, in a sly, fuck-you talk by Bruce Sterling, the cyberpunk writer, at South by Southwest in Austin, Texas. The Nietzschean devilishness of this remarkable speech seems to have gone unnoticed, but to a few in attendance it marked a turning point in the Internet’s unqualified celebration of “connectivity” as cultural magic. In fact, Sterling made clear, connectivity might represent a grievous cultural loss.

Connectivity is nothing to be proud of, Sterling ventured. The clearest symbol of poverty—not canniness, not the avant-garde—is dependence on connections like social media, Skype, and WhatsApp. “Poor folk love their cell phones!” he practically sneered. Affecting princely contempt for regular people, he unsettled the room. To a crowd that typically prefers onward-and-upward news about technology, Sterling’s was a sadistically successful rhetorical strategy. “Poor folk love their cell phones!” had the ring of one of those haughty but unforgettable expressions of condescension, like the Middle Eastern treasure “The dog barks; the caravan passes.”

Connectivity is poverty, eh? Only the poor, defined broadly as those without better options, are obsessed with their connections. Anyone with a strong soul or a fat wallet turns his ringer off for good and cultivates private gardens (or mod loft spaces, like Hundreds) that keep the din of the Web far away. The real man of leisure savors solitude or intimacy with friends, presumably surrounded by books and film and paintings and wine and vinyl—original things that stay where they are and cannot be copied and corrupted and shot around the globe with a few clicks of a keyboard.

Sterling’s idea stings. The connections that feel like wealth to many of us—call us the impoverished, we who brave Facebook ads and privacy concerns—are in fact meager, more meager even than inflated dollars. What’s worse, these connections are liabilities that we pretend are assets. We live on the Web in these hideous conditions of overcrowding only because—it suddenly seems so obvious—we can’t afford privacy. And then, lest we confront our horror, we call this cramped ghetto our happy home!

Twitter is ten years old. Early enthusiasts who used it for barhopping bulletins have cooled on it. Corporations, institutions, and public-relations firms now tweet like terrified maniacs. The “ambient awareness” that Clive Thompson recognized in his early writings on social media is still intact. But the emotional force of all this contact may have changed in the context of the economic collapse of 2008.

Where once it was engaging to read about a friend’s fever or a cousin’s job complaints, today the same kind of posts, and from broader and broader audiences, can seem threatening. Encroaching. Suffocating. Our communications, telegraphically phrased so as to take up only our allotted space, are all too close to one another. There’s no place to get a breath in the Twitter interface; all our thoughts live in stacked capsules, crunched up to stay small, as in some dystopic hive of the future. Or maybe not the future. Maybe now. Twitter could already be a jam-packed, polluted city where the ambient awareness we all have of one another’s bodies might seem picturesque to sociologists but has become stifling to those in the middle of it.

In my bolshevik-for-the-Internet days I used to think that writers on the Web who feared Twitter were just being old-fashioned and precious. Now while I brood on the maxim “Connectivity is poverty,” I can’t help wondering if I’ve turned into a banged-up street kid, stuck in a cruel and crowded neighborhood, trying to convince myself that regular beatings give me character. Maybe the truth is that I wish I could get out of this place and live as I imagine some nondigital or predigital writers do: among family and friends, in big, beautiful houses, with precious, irreplaceable objects.

The something lost in the design of the Web may be dignity—maybe my dignity. Michael Pollan wrote that we should refuse to eat anything our grandmothers wouldn’t recognize as food. In the years I spent at Yahoo! News—not content-farming, exactly, but designing something on a continuum with click bait, allowing ads into my bio, and being trained (as a talking head) to deliver corporate propaganda rather than report the news—I realized I was doing something my grandmothers wouldn’t have recognized as journalism. Privately I was glad neither of them had lived long enough to witness my tour of duty in that corner of the Web, doing Go-Gurt journalism.
RESPITE

Which brings me back to Hundreds and the other achingly beautiful apps, many of which could pass for objects of Italian design or French cinema. Shifting mental seas define the experience of these apps, as they do any effective graphic scheme in digital life, in which the best UX doesn’t dictate mental space; it maps it. These apps caress the subconscious. The graphic gameplay on Hundreds seems to take place in amniotic fluid. The palette is neonatal: black, white, and red. The path through is intuition.

And this is strictly graphics. No language. Text here is deep-sixed as the clutter that graphic designers always suspected it was. The new games and devices never offer anything so pedestrian as verbal instructions in numbered chunks of prose. “If they touch when red then you are dead,” flatly states a surreal sign encountered partway through Hundreds’s earliest levels. That’s really the only guideline you get on how Hundreds is played.

Playing Hundreds is a wordless experience. Even that red/dead line of poetry is more music than meaning. There’s an eternity to the graphic swirl there; it’s the alpha and the omega. “Death” would be too human and narrative an event to happen to the fog-toned circle-protagonists. These circles mostly start at zero. You drive up the value of the circles by touching them and holding them down, aiming each time to make the collective value of the circles total 100 before they run into an obstacle, like a circle saw.

Nothing about losing in Hundreds feels like dying. The music continues; the round can be replayed. No pigs (as in Angry Birds) or shirtless terrorists (as in Call of Duty) snort and gloat. You start again. Who says losing is not winning, and the other way around? In Hundreds even gravity is inconstant.
FRISBEE FOREVER

Digital, kaleidoscopic design can serve to undermine language. To deconstruct it. Deconstruct is still a frightening word, bringing to mind auteur architects and Frenchmen in capes. Here I use it to mean that digital design, especially in games, can call attention to the metaphors in language and teasingly demonstrate how those metaphors are at odds with language’s straight-up, logical claims. So life and death are binary opposites? Not on Hundreds, which teaches the sublingual brain that life and death are continuous, world without end. Mixing up life and death in this way is, in fact, the operative principle of video games, as Tom Bissell’s masterful Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter convincingly argues.

Before the Internet, but presciently, Marshall McLuhan credited the world’s new wiredness with dissolving binaries in the way of Buddhism: “Electric circuitry” (which elsewhere he calls “an extension of the human nervous system”) “is Orientalizing the West. The contained, the distinct, the separate—our Western legacy—is being replaced by the flowing, the unified, the fused.”

Where some game design breaks down language and the distinctions that undergird it, other design is tightly structuralist, instantiating boundaries and reminding players that they’re contained, distinct, and separate. Frisbee Forever, a kid’s game I’m choosing almost at random, works this way. A free candy-colored mobile game in which the player steers a Frisbee through a variety of graphic environments that look variously beachy, snowy, and Old-Westy, Frisbee Forever is one of those garish games at which some parents look askance. But the very week I downloaded Frisbee Forever for my then-six-year-old son, Ben, the Supreme Court ruled that video games were entitled to First Amendment protection, just like books, plays, and movies. I decided the game formally had redeeming value when I read Justice Scalia’s words: “Video games communicate ideas—and even social messages—through many familiar literary devices (such as characters, dialogue, plot, and music) and through features distinctive to the medium (such as the player’s interaction with the virtual world).”

So what’s the idea—and even the social message—behind Frisbee Forever? The message is deep in the design: Never give up. Like many successful games, Frisbee Forever is built within a pixel of its life to discourage players from quitting—because if you quit, you can’t get hooked. The game’s graphic mechanics gently but expertly escort players between the shoals of boredom (“Too easy!”) and frustration (“Too hard!”). This Scylla-and-Charybdis logic is thematized in the design of many popular app games (Subway Surfer, the gorgeous Alto’s Adventure, and many of the so-called endless runner games). At PBS’s website, for which educational games are always being designed, this protean experience is called “self-leveling.” Tailored tests and self-leveling games minimize boredom and frustration so that—in theory, anyway—more people see them through.

This is certainly the logic behind Frisbee Forever. Just as a player steers her disc to keep it in the air, so Frisbee Forever steers her mood to keep her in the game. It’s like a model parent. If a kid’s attention wanders and his play becomes lackluster, the game throws him a curve to wake him up. If he keeps crashing and craves some encouragement, the game throws him a bone. Curve, bone, bone, curve. Like life.

And that’s a potential problem. What’s lost is bracing disorder, the spontaneous adaptations that lead to art and adventure and education. Frisbee Forever—and anything else self-leveling—conjures a fantasy world that’s extremely useful when life’s disorderly. But when things settle down in reality, the Frisbee game is too exciting. It does nothing to teach the all-important patience and tolerance for boredom that are central to learning: how to stand in line, how to wait at Baggage Claim, how to concentrate on a draggy passage of text. In fact self-leveling games suggest you never have to be bored. At the same time, Frisbee Forever is not nearly challenging enough. In real life you have to learn to tolerate frustration: how not to storm away when the pitcher is throwing strikes, how to settle for an Italian ice when sundaes are forbidden, how to try the sixth subtraction problem when you’ve gotten the first five wrong.

I find pleasing magic in the design of many digital and digitized games: Angry Birds, WordBrain, Bejeweled, Candy Crush. But I use their graphic worlds to keep myself safe from unstructured experience. To shut out mayhem and calm my mind. Often I find I want to keep the parameters of boredom and frustration narrow. I feel I need to confront rigged cartoonish challenges that, as it happens, you can—with pleasurable effort—perfectly meet. Games, like nothing else, give me a break from the feeling that I’m either too dumb or too smart for this world.

I’m not the only one in my demo. Thanks to the explosion of mobile games that have drawn in the crossword and Sudoku crowd, adult women now make up a bigger proportion of gamers (37 percent) than do boys eighteen and younger (15 percent), according to a study by the Entertainment Software Association. The average age of gamers is now thirty-five.

But of course I wonder what real challenges and stretches of fertile boredom, undesigned landscapes, and surprises I’m denying myself. And maybe denying my children.
SPRAWL

The schism between the almost fascist elegance of the sexiest apps, like Hundreds, and the chaotic-ghetto graphic scheme of the Web may have been inevitable. In the quarter-century since Tim Berners-Lee created the immensely popular system of hyperlinks known as the World Wide Web, the Web has become a teeming, sprawling commercial metropolis, its marquee sites so crammed with links, graphics, ads, and tarty bids for attention that they’re frightening to behold. As a design object, it’s a wreck.

There are two reasons for this. Two laws, even. And complain as we might, these two laws will keep the Web from ever looking like a Ferrari, Vogue, or the Tate Gallery. It will never even look like a Macintosh or an iPad, which is why Apple has taken such pains since the App Store opened to distance itself from the open Web, that populist place that is in every way open-source and to which we all regularly contribute, even if just with a Facebook like or an Etsy review.
1. The Web is commercial space.

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