The first rule of video games is you don’t talk about video games.

I recently played Indigo Prophecy for a review for The Onion’s AV Club. Sometimes I jumped, sometimes I laughed, but every so often I just cringed. Why? Forget the suspense, this game is littered with tacky video game self-references. Tyler smugly informs his witness, “It’s like a video game. Have you ever played a video game?” Yes, I tell my screen, but I might never again. Then there’s the article on Lucas’ computer about in-game violence inspiring real-life crime. This hard on the heels of a bloody, demonic bathroom murder. Taste, people. Please.

Maybe this isn’t exactly what Tyler Durden had in mind when he told us to keep our mouths closed, but the wisdom is pretty much the same. Blatant self-referencing in games isn’t fun. It’s hokey. Especially in a more-or-less serious title. Instead of hooking you in by identifying with your interests, it forces you out of the experience. It reminds you you’re a gamer, and not an unwitting murdered. It leaves you shaking your head. It makes you feel, well, yucky.

The question, I suppose, is “Why?”

Part of the appeal of video games, and one of the main ways in which they stand out from other mediums of entertainment, is the extent to which, through interactivity, they allow you to become someone else. Perhaps self-reference makes us uncomfortable because it messes with that experience, forcing us simultaneously to think of ourselves as our characters and our real, game-playing selves. In short, it confuses our boundaries.

Or, maybe the reason we enjoy gaming in general is because, for whatever reason, we don’t want to be ourselves for a while - whether because we’re not satisfied with who we are, or because there’s something gratifying in stepping outside the self. Either way, self-reference pushes us back, momentarily, into our real personhoods, which might just be the last place we want to be.

Beyond all the intellectual whatnot, the whole thing is just kind of campy.

Meaning what exactly? It’s complicated; ask Susan Sontag.* Let’s suffice to say that camp is characterized by self-aware self-reference, by conscious burlesque, played with a level of dead-pan sincerity. Something so bad it’s good. It’s about performing. Performing self, performing gender. Playing a role. Which is something, when you think about it, that video gamers should be able to identify easily, since, as players, that’s really all we do. That seems to imply that not just self-reference in games, but games themselves innately fall in the realm of camp.

Which isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Camp is rarely considered high art, but it has a world to say about culture. Mostly, it’s just interesting to think of a concept that’s so closely linked with travesty, with queering the norm, that has such close ties to video games, which are often taken so seriously, and which are surrounded by a mostly straight culture.

Even good camp requires cleverness and thought. Indigo Prophecy’s slapdash references don’t fit that mold, but they do let us see how seriously we’ve come to take our games. Maybe, for a little bit, we should lighten up. There’s a lot we can learn from parodies of ourselves, and from acknowledging the parody of life we perform each and every time we pick up a controller.

*Who’s lovely essay “Notes on Camp” has thought the issue through with far more precision than I have.