It almost has nothing to do with today’s topic, but c’mon – you know I can’t use the adjective “campy” without going back to old school Adam West Batman. Sure, the connection to geek is pretty tenuous (thank you, comic books) but you have to admit, it definitely established the genre of the “camp cult classic”.
Anyway, today’s rather late post is sort of about the campy and cheesy in games. Part of this is inspired by the fact that recently I’ve gotten my hands on the Command and Conquer series’ latest bunch of games, and am busy happily trundling my way through B-actor cutscenes and barely authentic accents in an effort to prove I can still play an RTS with the best of them. No AI opponent stands a chance, I say!
But as I was playing, I started wondering about the appeal of having such campy nonsense like terrible puns, awful stereotypes, and over the top craziness in games. Normally, were we to have something like that elsewhere, we’d be the subject of ridicule, not of respect. If you don’t believe me, try ordering at your next restaurant using nothing but bad movie quotes, wearing an insanely loud-colored outfit, and speaking in a voice that would make Solid Snake proud. I think you’d probably get more funny looks than nods of respect. The funny thing is that the camp and cheese of some of the worst video game tropes are the things that people remember, whether it is Snake in a Box, the punny and sometimes sarcastic humor of clicking a unit too many times in Warcraft, or God of War’s Kratos and his ridiculously violent methods of murder.
Some of the most iconic characters in games are filled with so much camp-age that you could pitch a tent or ten around them. Mario (who made stereotypical fat plumbers famous), Leisure Suit Larry (giving hope to skinny geekery everywhere), even a serious business character like legendary ninja and lackey-decapitating Ryu Hayabusa has some level of campy that makes them memorable. Sure, some of us gamers want to deride and make fun of the camp in games, but to be perfectly honest, campy is only really – well – actually campy in the bad sense if it’s trying too hard. Rare is the game that does that, I’d say.
I think maybe some people are afraid that if they’re known to like something that is cheesy or campy in games that it somehow makes them lame. To that, I say that I think people don’t have to worry too much when so many folks find the camp to be not that bad at all. When thousands of people don’t mind the fact that the cake is a lie, or that the Master Chief has a voice like an amalgamation of all the action heroes you grew up with, it’s actually not that hard to accept the fact that campy is not only a part of the appeal of gaming, it’s part of some of the most popular bits of it. I suppose that’s why I can look at an actor in a Command and Conquer cutscene, listen as they very seriously explain about new battlefield units that could never exist in the real world, and grin impishly, because I know that out there there are a plethora more people who love it just as much as I do.
