The quote from The Big Lebowski sums it up pretty well: “Sometimes you eat the bar, and sometimes…the bar eats you.” A friendly reminder that life is full of ups and downs, strikes and gutters, and you’ve just got to take them as they come, and maintain your sense of chill and calm no matter what may occur.


Some people choose the alternative; see what works for you

As I finish up gushing about the glory that be the Facility, there is a bitter sweetness to what seems like a whirlwind romance of design, powerfully imbued with care and concernment, yet so fleeting all the same. There remain elements yet discussed involving majesty unmatched in the realm of design in reference to the Facility, but these qualities apply very broadly to the rest of GoldenEye 64 itself, so instead of belaboring the inevitable, the charges must be set, 006 must take the fall, and Bond must make his daring escape just in time.

As matters wrap up in an explosive climactic finale to punctuate our tour through this Cold War colossus, there is a moment of pause, as I realize this may be the ideal time to bring up an idea that came to me on a bike ride while considering a fresh premise in which a renewed revitalization of interest merits a revisit of such a classic title like GoldenEye, and that’s through the imbuement of philosophy, blended with the ideological machinations of the gaming industry. To reappropriate the famous existential idiom-Existence Preceeds Essence, and apply it to the reason GoldenEye accomplished what so many other movie games had failed to do up to this point, I reconfigure aforementioned philosophical idiom, with the purpose of application to help create clarity in the realm of gaming. With this in mind, I propose this distillation of deconstructionism to you in that regard; Content Exceeds Commerce.

A very brief and extremely abridged tl;dr for you to help flesh out this idea; Jean-Paul Sartre was a french existentialist philosopher who made his name as a philosopher circa WWII, one of his most famous books entitled Being and Nothingness. Among his many espousements, one of his most famous, which he would go on to further address in a lecture turned into book entitled Existentialism is a Humanism, was the phrase Existence Precedes Essence. The value of the phrase comes from the idea of contrast, in that instead of an object having a preordained purpose, like conceiving of the purpose of a hammer first, with which to pound nails, and then “making” (or more realistically) acquiring said hammer with which to pound the nails, there remains at least one entity where the essence of the object does not precede its existence, and that is humans.

In this way, humans do not have defined “purpose” like a hammer does, as in a sense, humans can decide to be who they want to be; this a hammer cannot do. Consciousness helps to separate humans into a unique category, they can decide purpose for themselves, and then thusly become that thing. This is suppose to be an empowering reminder that we ourselves are cursed by the freedom of choice, and that it is up to us to determine what to make of ourselves, a unique moment of anxiety as we grapple with individuation, identity, and meaning, all through the power of self-awareness.

To reiterate; all of this is a ridiculously condensed version of…err, Sartre, existentialism, and the metaphysics involved. This relates to my reappropriation of the phrase Existence Precedes Essence, into the transformed version of Content Exceeds Commerce, cause I propose that the reason GoldenEye is so beloved, is that unlike other movie games that had come before it, the dev team at Rare didn’t ask the question like so many other studios did when making a video game tie-in for a movie as a way of advertising “How do we sell this movie?”, they simply focused on what mattered most and asked “How do we make this game great?”, which should help to begin unpacking the phrase Content Exceeds Commerce.

Now don’t get me wrong, in no way, shape or form do I want to come off as throwing other well meaning devs under the bus in this defense, nor am I implying any other dev teams who had similar tasks of adapting movies into video game format, and only cared about turning a buck, or making something as fast as possible with no concern of quality, nor happily acted as surrogate advertisers more than game developers. Certainly not, and there are a number of movie games even up to the N64, including a handful of Star Wars games, Indiana Jones, Batman, Goonies, Gremlins etc that turned out really well. What I am saying, however, is that with a lot of adaptations, you get the feeling that in a Trojan horse move of brand recognition, many of those properties began as an idea to help sell a product, that happened to become fun video games. With GoldenEye, you ended up having an amazing game that also ended up doubling as a great advertisement for a movie.

This is of course is where Content Exceeds Commerce comes in, as there seems to be a paradigmatic shift in priorities, when considering the final product. As it has been noted in the past, the best way to judge a system is to assess its given output, and given the amazing level of polish and refinement in the finalized version of GoldenyEye, it’s clear that Rare cared more about making an excellently designed game first, that ended up doing credit to the license; the priorities clearly being develop the fantastic first, thereafter, the advertisement value follows, hence Content Exceeds Commerce.

That mantra helps to not only define the essence of how great games get made, but where bad games go wrong, and I think this extends well beyond movie adaptations, and perhaps leads into a whole other (possibly slew) of articles involving where so many developers do no embody the Content Exceeds Commerce affirmation, and whether it be the toxicity of included microtrasactions, GaaS gaming gone greasy, or “extra content” and DLC being unnecessarily held back, greedily separated, or disproportionate in breadth of quality to the initially launched bare bones title to get it out the door faster.

Content Exceeds Commerce should be the ironclad idealism that defines the gaming landscape, but when developers get it backwards, it becomes the phantom that haunts our contemporary virtual commercialistic wasteland, because when game developers have their priorities perverted and out of whack, the phrase inverts, and thusly becomes Commerce Exceeds Content, and it is at this point cogent reality gets warped, rationale becomes metaphorically privatized and sold to the highest bidder, and anyone responsible for the commitment to this twisted sense of monetized madness has lost the good faith of enthusiasts the world over.

To wrap up, though I think this current proposal has a lot of legs that I will revisit for a long time to come, I’ve often made the joke that pinpoints the moment the “magic is gone” from the entertainment, whatever medium, not just gaming, and the money means more than the message, the “Drink your Ovaltine” moment. I’m of course referencing A Christmas Story, when Ralphie excitedly uses a decoder pin to find out what the secret message is he’s been wondering about all this time, just to realize the message “Drink your Ovaltine”, is just some “crummy commercial”, totally negating any sense of joy in the interaction with the medium in question.

We are drowning in Ovaltine, these days.

~Pashford