Article Discussed:
A Review of Peter Jackson’s King Kong
Zolani Stewart
https://medium.com/mammon-machine-zeal/a-review-of-peter-jackson-s-king-kong-the-videogame-ff2f71d940ce

Music:
“Yarn Ball” from Love ZZZV.
Support Zan-zan-zawa-veia at https://www.patreon.com/zzzv. Find more of Zan’s work at https://zan-zan-zawa-veia.bandcamp.com, http://aanaaanaaanaaana.net/ & https://twitter.com/zanzanzawa

Other Links:
ZEAL https://medium.com/mammon-machine-zeal
Reading Games episode 2 https://islanddemeter.com/podcast/rg02/
Robin James on Laura Mulvey “without all the psychoanalytic theory” https://www.its-her-factory.com/2016/10/mulveys-visual-pleasure-narrative-cinema-without-all-the-psychoanalytic-theory/
Kitty Horrorshow’s work https://kittyhorrorshow.itch.io/
Connor Sherlock’s work https://connor-sherlock.itch.io/
The Ape’s Wife by Caitlín R. Kiernan http://clarkesworldmagazine.com/kiernan_09_07/
The Arcade Review archives https://archive.org/search.php?query=creator%3A%22Arcade+Review%22
Some examples of Sonic Studies
The full list of 44 pieces being discussed https://twitter.com/Benladen/status/854180037251129345
The patreon that made this episode possible https://patreon.com/benladen

Rough Script:

For episode 7 of Reading Games: A Personal Critical Canon, we will be discussing A Review of Peter Jackson’s King Kong, which is about the videogame adaptation of Jackson’s film, written by Zolani Stewart and originally published in ZEAL. Links to the article and other relevant materials are available in the episode description below.

In episode 2 of Reading Games, I quoted Liz Ryerson as saying:

“one of the things i’ve always enjoyed about first person games is that you’re stuck with tunnel vision. it’s pretty damn cruel, being forced to move forward without ever really knowing what might be coming to hurt you.”

In that episode I used it as a way to frame how level design is a way of mitigating that cruelty. But it’s a fascination I don’t share. I would be surprised if I couldn’t count on one hand the first person games that truly mattered to me. I can recognize that there is an artistry to the choice and a question of craft. Which is one of the reasons why I appreciate this essay so much: it puts into context a style I don’t have any great fondness for, and argues for its importance in a way very different from Ryerson’s series.

Stewart does this by breaking up King Kong into five sections. First, he talks about the character of Jack Driscoll, the screenwriter and protagonist played by Adrien Brody in the film. Then he goes through the opening sequence, contextualizing it alongside other first person games and explaining what it establishes. He follows this with a section on Skull Island, exploring how it is presented in a filmic manner and what it does to create a sense of space. Stewart then interrogates the user interface, placing it in the lineage of other Ubisoft games that focalize the player and talking about how these non-diegetic elements tend to convey a lot about a game. And finally he focuses on the character of Ann, played by Naomi Watts in the film, which allows him space to talk about the game’s fraught relationship with the racial history of King Kong, games’ fraught relationship with women characters, and the question of how to end games.

Instead of organizing this episode in such a way as to replicate the original essay’s structure, I want to pluck at certain threads. So we’ll begin with this:

“Despite the positive reception it had on release, it hasn’t really found a place in the shrinking collective memory of mainstream videogame discourse. But I think the game a crucial text for thinking about first person games, and what an alternative history of the form really means.”

On the one hand, this is a simple answer to the question: why revisit a licensed videogame a decade after its release? We all have a vague idea of the lineage of these sorts of games. Wolfenstein and Doom inaugurated the first person shooter in 1992 & 1993. Half-Life reinvented it as a storytelling medium in 1998. Halo brought it to consoles in 2001. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare brought RPG mechanics in successfully in 2007. Playerunkown’s Battlegrounds brought the Battle Royale genre to prominence in 2017.

Then again, you might trace the lineage from Quake in 1996 to GoldenEye 007 in 1997, Counter-Strike in 1999 and Team Fortress 2 in 2007. Or maybe from Unreal in 1998 to System Shock 2 in 1999, BioShock in 2007 and Wolfenstein 2: The New Colossus in 2017. The former list prioritizes multiplayer experiences; the latter narrative. There are other options as well. Canonization is a process that is shaped by arguments and material needs.

Canons are in flux. Which is a complicated statement to make in relation to this quote, because I think it both serves and repudiates, to some degree, the argument Stewart is making. Because the other hand is that this isn’t a simple statement. It’s an argument that simultaneously wants to propose the inclusion of this decade-old licensed game in the canon discussion, and one that refuses the impulse of those discussions in the first place.

I tend to think of canons, first, as political. Which is to say that they are documents or general understandings produced by politics and productive of them. Secondarily, they are pedagogical tools. They say ‘these texts are the most exemplary of the thing. Studying them will give you both a broad and nuanced picture of your object of study. You won’t be taken down any dead ends.’ They’ll say, for instance, here are four of Shakespeare’s sonnets. One demonstrates the ideal form, one the Bard’s facility with language, and two are selected because they will help you understand a broad range of references in future poetry. The pedagogical intent is to save you time while providing the most valuable information. The political reality is that it is an argument for a typicality of form, a way to construct normative ideas of good writing, and the foreclosure of new moods by forcing cross-reference to the old.

Before this balloons out any farther, we can reach back to Stewart’s esssay. In another bit about the importance of King Kong, he says:

“So what to make of Peter Jackson’s King Kong: The Official Game of The Movie? It’s probably one of the most important first person games of the 2000s, definitely a title that I would confidently place in lineage to games like Metroid Prime, or Mirror’s Edge, or Killer7 and other works that came out in that period.”

Even earlier he says, in a full quote which we will get to later, that he would:

“place King Kong in lineage to Mirror’s Edge, a game that would release three years later, but [also] to the walking sims and first person narrative artgames of 2012 [and on] that would remove metrical context, and push you closer to the setting, forc[ing] you to exist in space in a more conscientious way.”

All of these establish the stakes of this essay. It wants to grapple with both the first person game as a genre and specifically with the emergence of a specific kind of first person game, probably most well-known at this point as a walking simulator, around 2012. It wants to do so by critically reevaluating an unacknowledged forebear, and placing it in the context of similar forebears. The canon question, then, is a fairly straightforward one. It isn’t “does this game merit inclusion as shedding light on the truth of games in general, or on some specific aspect, such that it is a pedagogical imperative to include it.” The question is “are there enough things in the videogame adaptation of Peter Jackson’s King Kong to productively position it in relation to the current moment of altgames, queer games, walking simulators, and so on; and if so, what do we learn by doing so?”

One of Stewart’s answers to this is the question of the body. First person games deal with bodies in a variety of ways, but Stewart argues that King Kong is one archetypical example. Two quotes shed light on this. The first:

“[The] opening clip is the first and only time we see any representation of what Jack is supposed to look like, how we as players are meant to view him as a human, before we turn him into an object. On page 10 of the game’s manual, where all of the main characters are accompanied by their respective in-game models, Jack is only shown to be a pair of first person hands holding a Tommy gun. “This is you,” the manual claims. “You have been taken on by Carl Denham as a scriptwriter for his next film. You are a fairly well-known playwright in New York, but on Skull Island you will have to prove yourself.” In many ways, Jack is the essential first person character. Where we look onto the faces, expressions, and attire of the other characters, and assess them as people, Jack is only to be understood as parts of A Body.”

It’s worth saying, first off, that this is bonkers. The game’s manual goes out of it’s way to acknowledge Jack as a character, rather than just an avatar, in a way that makes his lack of a body (or lack of a character model, more specifically) as obtrusive as possible. And also that it echoes part of Laura Mulvey’s conceptualization of the male gaze; as Robin James summarizes it,

”Mulvey notes that many ‘classic’ Hollywood films show women’s body parts (a leg, a declotage, etc.), but not women as whole beings – the camera literally butchers women into their most tasty, delectable cuts.”

Which transitions oddly smoothly into the second of Stewart’s.

“One of the game’s constants is that we’re almost always hearing Jack’s loud, heavy breathing; not just when he’s moving, but often when he’s standing still. Sometimes it seems as if he’s catching his breath after a run, but it mostly comes from nowhere […] His breathing is how King Kong is constantly reminding us of Jack’s body, and the struggle it undertakes. And King Kong needs to remind us of Jack’s body, because it’s the only way for us to remember that Jack is human, in a context where we never see anything but a pair of arms.”

The pornographic parallels here are important. Jack is all useful flesh and heavy breathing. He’s the counterpart to every woman character in games whose every exhalation or vocalization sounds straight out of a porn shoot.
The importance of this parallel isn’t to score some cheap point about how games are porn. It’s to underscore that many of our media staples about how bodies are presented, especially in moving images, share a language with and are exemplified by porn. The way bodies are represented, whether in masculine arms and heavy breathing or hourglass figures and suspiciously sexual yelps, are shorthanded, by way of classical Hollywood cinema, to the male gaze. Which isn’t an ethical statement. It’s a functional one. Think back to those lineages; there isn’t a game among them that doesn’t abstract a masculine body to forearms, guns, and grunting. The genre, no matter which track you prefer – privileging multiplayer, narrative, or citation – needs this kind of shorthand in order to convey its Doom Guys, its Master Chiefs, its Gordon Freemans and BJ Blaskowicz’ and James Bonds and Jack Driscolls.

Stewart doesn’t simply end here, of course. Most of these characters have elements of characterization, but are largely empty vessels around which plot and action happens. Stewart sees important elements in jack’s relation to the people around him, as well:

“It’s clear throughout King Kong that Jack isn’t merely a vessel, or a means, but a character in whom you invest a genuine faith. He isn’t the loudest in the room, or the most experienced, but when any character is being attacked […] they will all yell Jack’s name in desperation. Jack is the reliable one, he is the relatable one, he [is] both a man and a white man.”

We will get to that last bit shortly. But the important thing here is the lesson drawn out; that the portrayal of Jack Driscoll is both too-obviously positioned within the lineage of the kinds of games that precede it and which it precedes, and sometimes subtly reinforced by elements those same games utterly ignore or otherwise get wrong. Learning from King Kong in this respect means understanding the ways in which a variety of specific character choices, from labored breaths to allies’ barks to the content of a manual, influence our perception by way of other media as well as within the context of the text itself.

Stewart’s highest praise of King Kong, at least from my perspective, is that it,

“[…] is sort of about movies, and what makes videogames movie-like. But unlike every AAA game that is “movie-like” nowadays, King Kong isn’t actually trying to emulate movies, or late 20th Century blockbuster film. What it does emulate, through its own devices is the grace of film, the attention to image and placement, backed by strong melodramatic orchestral pieces, and the continuous flow and movement of a form that is almost by definition not continuous.”

This is a somewhat complicated sentiment to unpack. At its base, I interpret it as saying that King Kong is not content to take a cutscene-and-setpiece approach to being cinematic, instead weaving in attention to detail in elements like lighting and score that gives it a genuinely filmic quality without abstracting away the ludic elements. He also says that King Kong is, “the definition of AA if there ever was one, but the game makes use of its small scope to give its setting power and focus.” Some mixture of the developers goals, the close collaboration with the filmmaker, and the material constraints of the budget, then, allowed this game to excel at a thing many games have attempted unsuccessfully.

Throughout the review, Stewart writes convincingly of small elements or choices made in the game. One such example, when discussing the lighting, its filmic qualities, and the presentation of Skull Island:

“Skull Island is eerie and darkly lit, it’s tight and intimidating, and it’s often very quiet. It has few light sources to draw from — the central source is the sun itself, lighting the outer walls and creating rays of light that penetrate cracks inside the inner caves. The cave texturing itself is bland and desaturated; it carries a blueish colour temperature that complements its cloudy atmosphere, and makes its rock geometry cold and alienating, gives it weight. Light penetration is a big part of King Kong’s visual composition, and it’s juxtaposed onto mushy texturing and cavernous, concaved architecture.”

If there is one specific heart of this essay, I think this is it. It is the answer to the canonization question: yes, there is one thing this game does well enough that it might well be pedagogically imperative to include it. It creates a world in a first person game using diegetic lighting and color temperatures, and does so in the context of “the definition of AA,” meaning it isn’t being obscured by a billion other unimportant art assets and systems. It positions itself productively within the current moment, giving a useful example of how smaller-budget games can use available tools to create unified atmospheres, even with things like “mushy texturing.” And we learn from this how to communicate space effectively in an aesthetic sense, and how to translate that to other work we have and will experience.

By focusing on King Kong’s settings and its bodies, including the way that those bodies are abstracted, Stewart is also placing the game in relation to the walking sim, games which are often nothing but an abstracted body existing in, and moving through, a particular space. Most games of that genre are built on no budget whatsoever, and so don’t have resources for things like “other 3D models,” much less extensive dialogue and AI routines. The work of folks like Kitty Horrorshow and Connor Sherlock are almost exclusively told by way of inference and environment, with occasional text or voiceover largely done by themselves or other amateur voice actors. Seeing them in relation to something with a bit more of a budget can help clarify what aspects are related to budget, which are technical, which promote or detract from the overall aesthetic experience, and more.

There is one more major thread through the essay on King Kong that we have to contend with before wrapping up. Earlier, we tabled a bit of a quote about Jack describing him as, quote: “the reliable one, […] the relatable one, […] both a man and a white man.”

Stewart primarily addresses this in the section about Ann. Take, for instance, this fairly long passage:

“If you know the story of King Kong, first realized in the 1933 feature film by Merian C. Cooper, and endlessly re-adapted and referenced throughout western pop culture, it doesn’t take a social theorist to posture that it’s a story informed by a fear of black masculinity. About a third way through the game, Ann is captured by the “Skull Islanders,” a term Carl uses to reference the island’s human inhabitants. While Jack and Carl are tied up, Ann, tied to some levered stick construction, is raised into the air and offered to Kong as sacrifice, and we spend a large chunk of the game searching for Kong to save her. It’s a really powerful scene, just remarkably put together, but what’s important to understand is that Kong doesn’t come to Ann to take her until Ann starts to scream. It’s the scream of Ann that brings ‘Kong’ to her. It’s her innocence, her performed victimhood that attracts Kong, an innocence that can only be embodied in white womanhood.”

He goes on to both periodize the source text in the race riots of the ’30s and by way of Reconstruction, and to talk about the ways the game continues its “neo-colonial anxieties” in the guise of the “Skull Islanders.” One of the important things to recognize here is just how central this fear of black masculinity is to the story of King Kong; this is one of the, if not failings, then we might say more complicated aspects of Caitlín R. Kiernan’s The Ape’s Wife, a 2007 short story published in Clarkesworld Magazine that imagines Ann Darrow as a time-unstuck Golden Mother in the aftermath of the Kong affair. That story ends with Ann back on the Island, the foundation of a new mythology, and is written such that the fact that “[t]he men and woman decorate their bodies with yellow paint in an effort to emulate Ann’s blonde hair” isn’t clearly morally demarcated in any way.

This question of whiteness and its constitutive fear of blackness, and of white womanhood and its constitutive fear of black masculinity specifically, is integral to the two things about this game that matter most, at least as far as Stewart’s review goes. Bodies, for obvious reasons; these categories of race and gender are emergent from and socially reified in order to be projected back onto bodies. This is done in large part as a measure of social control, solidarity inhibition, and a number of other things. But it is also true of space. Because the technologies of policing that race enable are largely spatial – think ghettoization, property ownership, nationalism and patriotism, redlining and gerrymandering, and on and on. It is no accident that King Kong was hidden away on a remote island only otherwise occupied by facsimiles of Native Africans.

In trying to construct a relatively coherent argument around Stewart’s piece, I’ve touched on canons and legitimization, the gaze, bodies, spaces, lineages, and race. In doing so, I’ve left out an entire section of the essay, on the user interface. In closing, instead of attempting to wrap this all up, I’d like to simply say two things. The first is that I don’t think this is all wrapped up; one of the things I most appreciate about Stewart’s criticism is his ability to juggle enormous ideas in a way that feels as enormous as they are. I worry that I would not do justice to the reason I was drawn to this piece in the first place – or to his essays on Sonic, or to his work as an editor of The Arcade Review – were I to attempt a pat conclusion. And the second is to say that I think the essay speaks for itself, and would like to let it go out on its own words.

“Jack’s sobering exchange with Ann is where I feel the game really ends for me. Everything else is franchise filler. Skull Island was a concept, a spatial essay and an experience introduced to us, and here the book is closed and we sit in the after-effect of its final page.”

This has been a discussion of “A Review of Peter Jackson’s King Kong,” written by Zolani Stewart. Next up on Reading Games: A Personal Critical Canon is “Plural Protagonism Part 2: Wild Arms 3” by Mark Filipowich, an entry in a series about collective embodiment in roleplaying games. I would also like to thank Zan-zan-zawa-veia for our intro and outro music, which comes from the song “Yarn Ball.” You can find out more and support Zan at patreon.com/zzzv or on twitter @zanzanzawa. I’ve been your host Bee, and I look forward to talking with you again soon.

Next Time:
Plural Protagonism Part 2: Wild Arms 3
Mark Filipowich
https://bigtallwords.com/2013/04/11/plural-protagonism-part-2/