F*cking Meat Boy

(what follows is an ode to my own frustration and sense of helplessness, and it was writen mostly for coping purposes. Read at your own risk)

I hate Super Meat Boy, I hate Edmund McMillen’s games, and I hate this entire ill-defined genre of hyper-difficult platformers that swarm the internet like traps for obsessives. I don’t think it’s anything specific about the game, although the bastard lends itself to being hated, with its ironic and detached tone, its pounding, loud music, its ProGamer© rhetoric and its childish devotion to the platforms of yesteryear. It’s undeniable that the bastard has earned its classical status among the type of player who views games as a series of increasingly precise and closed challenges, like a brakeless race towards increasingly ridiculous instances of kinetic sublimity. It just so happens that I identify much more with those players than I like to admit.

My method is usually motivated by two compulsions or drives that I have to deal with from the moment I grab the controls until the time I stop. The first is the need to complete everything. When I start a game, I can’t quit it unless I am absolutely certain that there’s nothing else to watch. Sometimes I like enough of what I’ve seen to want to see the rest, and others because I have the crazy hope that the part that I haven’t is the one that I will like. But the fact is that I always end up staying and I never learn. At the year of my thesis’ defense, It happened with Dragon Age and Super Hexagon. Shortly after, it happened with Hollow Knight. And now it’s happening with Super Meat Boy. When a game is designed from the ground up to lock you into a dynamic of continuous refinement, it usually carries me over any other task. When playing it, I stalled my writing on This Too, Shall Pass for for Nivel Oculto as soon as possible. I felt like I had to reach completion at Super Meat Boy first, and I knew that if I followed my instincts, I wouldn’t touch anything else for months.

My second drive feeds a lot on the first one, and it’s rage at my own incapacity. I can’t stand the idea of ​​a game resisting me. This is the strongest connection I have with Progamer© things, and it’s the one I hate the most. I don’t know if I’ve said it elsewhere, but I hate Hollow Knight for what it forced me to do to see everything it wanted to show me. It didn’t happen with Demon’s Souls because with that game I always have the feeling that I find some way to bypass them and feel smarter than them. Nice try, From Soft, but you didn’t count on physics giving me the advantage every time I thrust. I can go through everything you throw me no problem, except when you find out about my trick and I’m finished. Meanwhile, I have no choice but to do exactly what Hollow Knight and Super Meat Boy want me to do.

I feel like when I play these games for a while, I start getting into a really dark place. I start forgetting my tasks, neglecting my loved ones, and getting lost on my own frustration. Maybe this is not the fault of the game and I just needed an excuse to isolate myself. After all, I haven’t been in touch with friends in a while, I haven’t planned anything for this Sunday with my wife, and I haven’t been focusing on anything besides my job, except when cleaning the house or keeping up with a couple of podcasts. I’m locked in an eternal cycle of saving and spenditure that only stops during the day’s off, and even then I seldom dare going out. I see myself as the perfect mascot of capital, the automaton that only moves when commutting and never objects to a change of schedules. Like the main character from Agrettsuko, I have my own ways to vent, and where she uses music I use video games. I suppose you could consider this some kind of rebellious procrastination, as it seems to be happening in China, but nothing about that rebelling is really worth much if I’m the only one affected.

I hate Super Meat Boy, and it’s no one’s fault but mine. it’s just that it has a front seat in the pantheon of difficult games that exhaust me. When McMillen was granted with Relevance in that oh so celebrated, so valuable and so irresponsible documentary, Team Meat stood out as the team that put the most effort and sacrifice. As if coming out of the pages of Horatio Alger, McMillen and Refenes spent hours and hours of work, preaching for good fortune and visibility on Xbox Live. Compared to Fish’s nervousness and Blow’s petulant detatchment, those of Team Meat stand out as the most humane, and no doubt this is the reason the film spends so much time with them. The game they left behind is a somewhat truthful testament to that sacrifice, and while I can’t deny the effort and dedication, I can tell that their priorities differ from mine. Where they saw a carefully arranged work of challenges, I see an cruel succession of increasingly exhausting torture.

The first worlds are deceptive in their presentation. Forest and Hospital are fun: you die a few times, attempt to get the band-aids and have fun experimenting with secondary characters. Then you discover their dark version and confront them as good challenges, difficult but manageable to some extent. Then comes Salt Factory, and Hell, and levels become increasingly demanding. It’s no longer about them fast and gracefully, it’s about making them accurately. By the time you make the same mistake five, six, ten, twenty times, you start to wonder if you’re the one having problems, wether it’s you that cannot do it ’cause you’re over thirty years old and too old for this stuff. The game thankfully doesn’t show me other player’s record breaks, as it happened with Super Hexagon, for I would have surely melted.

I’m sure if it hadn’t been Meat Boy, I would have chosen Karoshi or some similar difficult Flash game. They are games that entertain me to some degree, that make me feel good when I beat, that make me think I still have the “touch” when it comes to impossible challenges. But more and more, they are leaving me with an increasing feeling of emptiness. And that is because my irritability and desire to experiment everything in a game are taking precedence over my actual enjoyment of them. Like some relapsing alcoholic who resumes their drinking habits after a bad hangover, or keeps chewing the same gum long after it lost any trace of flavor. And so it happens that these games have been elevated as germinal masterpieces or the videogame form by some very vocal (from academia and enthusiasts alike) writers. Much like Super Mario led the way towards a new era of gaming through sheer charismas, Super Meat Boy sproutted an entire genre of purposefully difficult games that have adept followings to this day. We are far past the times when we would see one every two weeks, but with everything that has happened since it’s easy to forget how successful this way of understanding games as intense haptic exercises actually is. We can still hear it from a certain sector of the audience, the one that reject the exploratorional premises of Fez and passes over the metaphorical applications of Braid but exhausts every possible venue that Meat Boy provides. Or that Dark Souls and Sekiro provides, for that matter. It’s the last bastion of that design philosophy that makes Flow patron and saint of gaming, the one that Kunzelman and Lutz put into question in their podcast not long ago.

It is also a way of making games that, when used in conjunction with other elements, can lead to strange and seemingly contradictory narratives. In God of War (2018), the finesse of Kratos’ movement is used to justify our time with the Spartan warrior and ease us into his eventual redemption, which in the long run prevented the game from examining the bigger implications of his behavior since the beginning of his saga. In Super Meat Boy, the intrinsic elegance of our skinned avatar acts as container as living embodiment of the experiences and wisdom that has been accumulated about platform games since the beginning of the medium. It’s a legacy composed by many works and referecences, most of them made explicit by the text itself. However, the gap that separates this game from titles like A Boy and his Blob, Castlevania or Megaman 2 isn’t just temporal but artistic as well. While those games were willing (sometimes more darely than we want to acknowledge) to experiment wit a fixed mechanics in order generate unique instances of ludic sublimity, Super Meat Boy comes by as if every experiment has already been tested before. On a strict “enjoyment appreciation” level, you only need to follow the paths if you want to have fun. Although it’s possible to admire the engineering that went by for some of these challenges, woe to you if you are searching for that boundless exploration that characterised the games that Meat Boy is so fond of mentioning.

I hate Super Meat Boy because it reminds me of my own twisted approach to gaming. If I were a more relaxed, less obsessive person, I’d probably be able to enjoy just fine. If I wasn’t so hell bent on seeing everything with such sheepish conviction I’d probably be able to write about it in a more coherent and productive way. I’m writing this now in part (as I’m going through the last level of Cotton Alley) so that I can somehow break the curse of my own obsession. Either that, or to make sure I avoid similar games in the future. Wathever works for me, I guess.