Hello and welcome to Dominik’s Little Old Purple Column the 21st of its kind. Coming to you from the path of a hurricane. Seriously. Nova Scotia, Canada currently lies in the path of Hurricane Fiona. Friday, Saturday, and Sunday could be biblical, so let’s get this podcast column colcast done while civilization still stands. Roll the theme tune!
(You will have to click the audio version for this. Tis well worth it though…)
Some smart funny guy called Jared Russo wrote a thing on digg.com where he compiled a list of the 200 most cliched words to use in videogame titles.
The list starts off with the top 9 being battle, legacy, born/reborn, remaster/remastered, Warrior /Warriors, Legend/Legends, World/Worlds, Champions/Championship and Kingdom.
But then at Number 10 he has Sonic or Hedgehog and that’s when I realised old Jared Russo was taking the piss. Especially when you get down to numbers 197-200 in his list which are Metal, Gear, Solid, Monkey and Katamari. Fair play.
He also proposed that the sheer mind-numbing awfulness of videogame titles is one thing that stops them being considered as legitimate forms of art. Again, I suspect these was a degree of peepee being pisspassed, but it got me thinking of videogames that have titles that DO sound like works of art:
Resident Evil sounds like it could be a painting, Red Dead Redemption likewise – I can see them as big angry canvasses while Terraria sounds like the one painting of lilacs Monet didn’t get round to. Metal Gear Solid sounds like the kind of thing Salvador Dali would paint, with the metal gears of the title being all floppy and hanging off of trees which would make you question the solidity of metal gears and by doing so question the solidity of life itself.
Minecraft would be a shit painting but could be an essential work of literature: a grim novel set in the industrial revolution. The Elder Scrolls could be like Beowulf, an ancient work discovered in an old box in the ruins of a castle and heralded as the first true great work of literature.
Fable? Too obvious. It’s trying too hard. Likewise, Dragon Quest and The Legend of Zelda, although part of me feels that Zelda (single word) could be the name of one of those gigantic public art installations that hundreds of thousands of taxes gets spent on and it’s just a big hoop or an obelisk and it’s all anybody talks about on local radio phone ins for decades.
While The Brothers Mario could be a novel by Tolstoy? Mario Brothers and especially Super Mario Brothers is not something you are ever going to study for your English A Level. And finally? Final Fantasy is a terrible title for a work of literature but could maybe be a highly regarded experimental rock masterwork by Pink Floyd or Genesis.
So, there ARE videogame titles of great artistic merit, for sure.
But art doesn’t have to have a clever title. Jackson Pollock’s No 5 is s shit title. Sounds more like a perfume. Beethoven’s Fifth likewise. Sounds like he screwed up the first four. Sometimes they can’t even be arsed giving paintings names and they will still say “oh look at that Untitled, there, isn’t it fantastic. They should ban any work of art that is untitled. That’s the best part about art, in the same way as the best part of having a rock and roll band is giving it a name.
The work of art some regard as the greatest ever also has the worst title: The Sistine Chapel Ceiling is named after what Michelangelo painted it on. It’s basically “that thing Michelangelo painted up there.” In another time it could have been called “toilet wall”, “bit underneath the railway bridge”, or “A4 jotter pad.”
(PIC Not as well titled a piece of art as Red Dead Redemption. By Antoine Taveneaux - File:Sistine_Chapel_ceiling_02.jpg, CC BY-SA 3.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=117824241)
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Dominik's Little Old Purple Column #21 FREE VERSION