(mashedmarket)

I first encountered the following essay on Jason Kottke’s wonderful “home of fine hypertext products.” Kottke characterized it as an ode, but I saw an altogether different animal. Originally extolling the virtues of the short story, Steven Millhauser’s New York Times piece struck me as a manifesto for independent video game developers.

I’ve reproduced Millhauser’s work below, substituting “independent video game” and “Triple-A game” for ”short story” and “novel,” respectively.

[...]

The independent video game — how modest in bearing! How unassuming in manner! It sits there quietly, eyes lowered, almost as if trying not to be noticed. And if it should somehow attract your attention, it says quickly, in a brave little self-deprecating voice alive to all the possibilities of disappointment: “I’m not a Triple-A game, you know. Not even a short one. If that’s what you’re looking for, you don’t want me.” Rarely has one form so dominated another. And we understand, we nod our heads knowingly: here in America, size is power. The Triple-A game is the Wal-Mart, the Incredible Hulk, the jumbo jet of gaming. The Triple-A game is insatiable — it wants to devour the world. What’s left for the poor independent video game to do? It can cultivate its garden, practice meditation, water the geraniums in the window box. It can take a course in creative nonfiction. It can do whatever it likes, so long as it doesn’t forget its place – so long as it keeps quiet and stays out of the way. “Hoo ha!” cries the Triple-A game. “Here ah come!” The independent video game is always ducking for cover. The Triple-A game buys up the land, cuts down the trees, puts up the condos. The independent video game scampers across a lawn, squeezes under a fence.

Of course there are virtues associated with smallness. Even the Triple-A game will grant as much. Large things tend to be unwieldy, clumsy, crude; smallness is the realm of elegance and grace. It’s also the realm of perfection. The Triple-A game is exhaustive by nature; but the world is inexhaustible; therefore the Triple-A game, that Faustian striver, can never attain its desire. The independent video game by contrast is inherently selective. By excluding almost everything, it can give perfect shape to what remains. And the independent video game can even lay claim to a kind of completeness that eludes the Triple-A game — after the initial act of radical exclusion, it can include all of the little that’s left. The Triple-A game, when it remembers the independent video game at all, is pleased to be generous. “I admire you,” it says, placing its big rough hand over its heart. “No kidding. You’re so – you’re so –” So pretty! So svelte! So high class! And smart, too. The Triple-A game can hardly contain itself. After all, what difference does it make? It’s nothing but talk. What the Triple-A game cares about is vastness, is power. Deep in its heart, it disdains the independent video game, which makes do with so little. It has no use for the independent video game’s austerity, its suppression of appetite, its refusals and renunciations. The Triple-A game wants things. It wants territory. It wants the whole world. Perfection is the consolation of those who have nothing else.

So much for the independent video game. Modest in its pretensions, shyly proud of its petite virtues, a trifle anxious in relation to its brash rival, it contents itself with sitting back and letting the Triple-A game take on the big world. And yet, and yet. That modest pose — am I mistaken, or is it a little overdone? Those glancing-away looks — do they contain a touch of slyness? Can it be that the little independent video game dares to have ambitions of its own? If so, it will never admit them openly, because of a sharp instinct for self-protection, a long habit of secrecy bred by oppression. In a world ruled by swaggering Triple-A games, smallness has learned to make its way cautiously. We will have to intuit its secret. I imagine the independent video game harboring a wish. I imagine the independent video game saying to the Triple-A game: You can have everything – everything – all I ask is a single grain of sand. The Triple-A game, with a careless shrug, a shrug both cheerful and contemptuous, grants the wish.

But that grain of sand is the independent video game’s way out. That grain of sand is the independent video game’s salvation. I take my cue from William Blake: “All the world in a grain of sand.” Think of it: the world in a grain of sand; which is to say, every part of the world, however small, contains the world entirely. Or to put it another way: if you concentrate your attention on some apparently insignificant portion of the world, you will find, deep within it, nothing less than the world itself. In that single grain of sand lies the beach that contains the grain of sand. In that single grain of sand lies the ocean that dashes against the beach, the ship that sails the ocean, the sun that shines down on the ship, the interstellar winds, a teaspoon in Kansas, the structure of the universe. And there you have the ambition of the independent video game, the terrible ambition that lies behind its fraudulent modesty: to body forth the whole world. The independent video game believes in transformation. It believes in hidden powers. The Triple-A game prefers things in plain view. It has no patience with individual grains of sand, which glitter but are difficult to see. The Triple-A game wants to sweep everything into its mighty embrace – shores, mountains, continents. But it can never succeed, because the world is vaster than a Triple-A game, the world rushes away at every point. The Triple-A game leaps restlessly from place to place, always hungry, always dissatisfied, always fearful of coming to an end – because when it stops, exhausted but never at peace, the world will have escaped it. The independent video game concentrates on its grain of sand, in the fierce belief that there – right there, in the palm of its hand – lies the universe. It seeks to know that grain of sand the way a lover seeks to know the face of the beloved. It looks for the moment when the grain of sand reveals its true nature. In that moment of mystic expansion, when the macrocosmic flower bursts from the microcosmic seed, the independent video game feels its power. It becomes bigger than itself. It becomes bigger than the Triple-A game. It becomes as big as the universe. Therein lies the immodesty of the independent video game, its secret aggression. Its method is revelation. Its littleness is the agency of its power. The ponderous mass of the Triple-A game strikes it as the laughable image of weakness. The independent video game apologizes for nothing. It exults in its shortness. It wants to be shorter still. It wants to be a single word. If it could find that word, if it could utter that syllable, the entire universe would blaze up out of it with a roar. That is the outrageous ambition of the independent video game, that is its deepest faith, that is the greatness of its smallness.