neorealism

The Process Genre in Videogames: Sunset

Ian Bryce JonesLeave a comment
sunset_screenshot_header_image
In all seriousness, call your elected representatives and tell them to oppose defunding the NEA and NEH.

Ian here—

This post is part of a series that borrows the term process genre from Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky’s work in cinema studies, and explores its utility for videogame analysis. A quick definition: “process genre” films are films about labor, films that focus on processes of doing and making, that are fascinated with seeing tasks through to their completion. They are deliberately paced, meditative, and often political, in that they cast a penetrating eye on labor conditions. Are there games that the same chords? Posts in the series so far can be seen here.

I reserve the right to sporadically post future entries in this series, but with Sunset (Tale of Tales, 2015), it really does feel as if things have come full circle. As I laid out in the first post in this series, the process genre finds its most archetypal manifestation in Belgian filmmaker Chantal Akerman’s Jeanne Dielman, 23 Commerce Quay, 1080 Brussels (1975), and Skvirsky has been tracking its development in contemporary Latin American cinema. Sunset was created by Belgian artist duo Auriea Harvey and Michaël Samyn, and is about the daily life of a housekeeper in a (fictional) Latin American country. The parallels are easily drawn, but there’s also more going on here than this brief description suggests.

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The Process Genre in Videogames: Cart Life

Ian Bryce JonesLeave a comment

cart_life-screenshot_header_image

Ian here—

This post is part of a series that borrows the term process genre from Salomé Aguilera Skvirsky’s work in cinema studies, and explores its utility for videogame analysis. A quick definition: “process genre” films are films about labor, films that focus on processes of doing and making, that are fascinated with seeing tasks through to their completion. They are deliberately paced, meditative, and often political, in that they cast a penetrating eye on labor conditions. Are there games that the same chords? Posts in the series so far can be seen here.

Cart Life (Richard Hofmeier, 2011) was part of the opening volley of what would eventually be termed “personal games.” Although some of the best known games slotted under this designation told stories of queer lives—for instance Dys4ia (Anna Anthropy, 2012), Consensual Torture Simulator (merritt kopas, 2013), and Gone Home (The Fullbright Company, 2013)—this is far from a requirement. Hofmeier’s game pursues an alternate tactic, telling the personal stories of characters whose lives might normally be overlooked, considered too humdrum for the purposes of mass entertainment. If you squint, you can see Hofmeier importing aspects of cinema’s neorealist tradition to the medium of videogames, in the game’s focus on the working class lives, on the effects of financially precarity on family relations, and even its use of black-and-white imagery. There is one major difference, though: The neorealist tradition in the Cesare Zavattini mold was often devoted to slow pacing, using empty moments to model the often-incident-free rhythm of everyday life. (Contemporary films in the process genre continue this tradition, hyperbolizing it beyond anything found in 1940s-era neoralist cinema.) Hofmeier, by contrast, enforces a frantic pace. In Cart Life‘s version of working class life, there is no time for idleness. When you’re trying to prove to a judge that you’re financially stable enough to have custody of your daughter, or trying to save up enough for a security deposit on an apartment so that you can move out of a hotel, every minute counts.

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