A close friend (not on LJ) sent me an article about games from the London Review of Books entitled, "Is It Art?". The conclusion seems to be "well, certainly not even as much as film, but someday, perhaps." However, the author John Lanchester put the article together pretty well. He raises points I've seen elsewhere but not together, and which I haven't seen discussed outside "the industry". He's 90% of the way there, but I want desperately to fill in that last 10%. So I wrote a lengthy response email, and while it's not ready for prime-time as a freestanding piece, it's a good first response. I want to post more about the cool, critical side of my work, so here it is.


(Read the original piece.)

I think that he covers a lot of bases well, but he's also got some quandaries that I think are more easily explained than he seems ready for.

For instance, he notes with some surprise that video games currently embody a strange schism in our society, where there are people who discuss them and people for whom they "just don't exist". I'm not surprised by that at all, and he implies the reason for it without following up: those who play games don't participate in more 'standard' media like newspapers and mainstream television, and the more standard media take a while to adopt a new technology anyway. I'd take both points further to note that it has taken newspapers, television, and film almost 20 years to really get computers, and they're still struggling with internet culture. Video games have even more recently become culturally mature on any sort of scale, so it's natural that mainstream media haven't caught up. In the other direction, people turn to video games for a very different sort of engagement than "mainstream media". My college friends don't gather for Halo with the same part of our brains that read these articles, or watch the news. I don't watch many movies, but I read a lot of physical books, because they are different media that do different things for me. Also, games take a lot of time! Gamers aren't, for good or for ill, engaging in the media that Lanchester is, not yet.

I also think that he's just flat wrong that video games don't have a public ready to discuss them artistically. He just hasn't been able to find those discussion in 'the blogosphere' and the industry mags yet. Period. There's a fair bit of discussion out there, fueled in part by the early critical contributions of one of the founders of my company.

One inherent obstacle that does contribute to a paucity of good work of game criticism is the flexibility of the experience. Many games, in order to ensure that players "get through the game" allow you to complete the main narrative without completing any number of sidestories, or allow you to experience events in different sequences or in different ways. It's very difficult for me to talk about, for instance, the emotional impact of my Fable character having fallen from grace during the game and then returning to his hometown in disgrace. Another player could quite reasonably have played the game and returned to the hometown, but not have fallen from grace, and come back to cheers and applause and pleas for help. To express the impact of that moment for me, I've got to couch my discussion with a sort of walkthrough of how to recreate that sequence of events with your own character (a process which could take many hours of gameplay)... or I've got to step back and talk about the moral alignment system more abstractly, which is a different sort of criticism altogether (see below).

His initial example of the difficulties in engaging games critically, focused on BioShock, is a good one but in a somewhat superficial way. He discusses the parts of the story that engage objectivism and play it out in the world; well done and definitely worthy of discussion. He nails that on the head ... but then notes that the mechanics of the first person shooter get in the way, as a set of fairly arcane and arbitrary conventions and challenges that prevent the uninitiated from 'reading' the text. He's spot on, but missing the forest for its trees: BioShock is a standard FPS, a genre whose conventions have been refined by time for the hardcore gamer, and isn't intended for a novice player.

He dances around this point which the industry has already discussed a couple of times in some detail: there is a schism in video games between 'hardcore' games and 'casual' games. The term "casual games" is overloaded, because it has gained meanings for marketing and genre; what I mean with it is "games for a player less experienced in and facile with the conventions of the genre"-- "Not-hardcore." You can see that schism, as Lanchester does, between Sony & Microsoft and Nintendo-- Nintendo makes games that are 'playful' and easy to pick up, and one way that they do that is by not demanding or rewarding close reading of their content. They seem shallower. Sony and Microsoft put out games like BioShock that can be visually subtle, offer rich dramatic moments and engaging storylines, but in which you must wade through hours of difficult gameplay and complex control schemes.

Lanchester doesn't seem to trace that trend out, though, and I'm a bit surprised. I think that it's fairly analogous to "literary fiction" vs. "mass-market" or "pulp". For readers who have steeped themselves in modernism, who are "hardcore" about the early 20th century, Joyce is fantastic and Ulysses says things that no one else can... but his prose style is the literary equivalent of the XBox 360 controller in an FPS! Meanwhile, nearly anyone can pick up Harry Potter or The DaVinci Code, but what those books can express about the human condition is correspondingly limited by the relative bluntness of the tools that they can expect the reader to bring to the reading.

The thing that bothers me about how he describes that very real trend is that he hasn't seen any of the outliers, the 'experimental fiction' being often self-published. Many of these games are made by individuals or very small teams. Many of them are accessible even to an inexperienced player, or put a hardcore video gamer back in the position of a new player with an unfamiliar but simple control scheme. And some of them are powerful and arresting.

Jason Rohrer has done two brilliant examples, both of which can be played in 5-10 minutes by someone new to games with full effect.
Passage: http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/passage
Gravitation: http://hcsoftware.sourceforge.net/gravitation

To trace the analogy to books, again, these are the the brilliant short fiction, the Twilight Zone-ready sci-fi short stories, the Brokeback Mountains. Rohrer even calls his 'company' "Arthouse Games". I think that they're really promising, and show a way out of the industrial and mercantile trend that Lanchester laments.

There's a larger point that I think Lanchester gets but doesn't articulate late in the article-- that games qualify as a new medium because they work differently. The place that you need to look within them for the rich experience and the potential power of the medium is different from books or movies. He says:

The medium doesn't have, and probably never will have, a sense of character to match other forms of narrative; however much it develops, it can't match the inwardness of the novel or the sweep of film.

It's hard to argue with this, though I want to, because whether it's right or wrong it's missing the point. He's got a point that by giving the player agency, games lose some of the potential to portray some characters. They can't force you, the player, to be as emotionally constipated as Hamlet, though they can (and have) come close. And he might be right that they can't match the sweep of film without becoming film (cutscenes) because they need to pull you out of the scene to let you interact with it, to give you interface. (Though, again, I think great strides on this are currently visible in embryonic form.)

But the end of the article almost gets it without actually going back to correct that gross generalization. The power of games lie in their interactivity: in the conversation, unprecedented in traditional media, between the player and the work. A powerful game will, like the Sims or Spore, let the player repeatedly try different activities and will show them how their activities function. They will let you fire different weapons until you get how the weapon works. Or they'll let you interact with characters in ways ranging from hostile to helpful in various contexts or cultures and show you what hostility means to that culture or what is helpful in that context. Or they'll let you try different kinds of teamwork with your friends until you stop getting beat by homophobic 13-year-olds because you get the process of tactical teamwork. The original power of games is not the content, not the interior view of the characters, nor even the visual beauty... it's the procedures.

Alternatively, another sort of procedure that games can express is seeing the world in a particular way. Because they can respond to your actions, because playing is a conversation in the sense of input-process-output on both your part and the game's, a powerful game can diagnose certain ways of thinking and interactively 'retrain' you to think differently. Lanchester mentions this with Fallout at the very end of the article, but seems to stumble over traditional-media terminology-- and he misses a somewhat ironic point about the history of the Fallout series.



I'm ranting, here, in that I haven't revised this much, and I hope I haven't become incoherent. I think it's important to realize this different thing about games, and so when someone outside the field like Lanchester is so close to getting it, but is still missing it, I want to make that last step.