I think you’ve made a couple of mistakes here. First of all, even the most open-ended narrative video game is still very tightly scripted. In terms of craftsmanship (if not artistry) video games can be harder to write than a novel by an order of difficulty. If act one can end in five different ways, you’ve got to make sure that act two starts in a way that makes sense with each of those endings. I don’t think this takes anything away from the game as a work of art, though. The novel A Clockwork Orange was published with two different endings: this divergence of plot obviously does not effect the value of the novel. Games simply incorporate this multiplicity of narrative choices as an integral portion of the work. The idea that a work of art that changes depending on who is viewing it has been an integral part of the post-modern art movement since its inception: video games are the most perfect realization of this concept, although not always the most sublime execution of it.
More generally, though, you’re discussing video games as if they are by nature a narrative art form. They are not, although they often disguise themselves as one. What I’m arguing is that the “art” in video games is not in the story, or the characters. The art is in the game itself: there is some point where the combination of game mechanics, control scheme, level design, and player input fuse into something larger than the sum of its parts. That’s where the art happens in video games. The plot is merely something to hang those elements on. Think of it like opera: operas have a definite plot, but it’s usually a pretty dopey one. The plot in opera is merely an excuse for the music, and it is on the strength of the music that an opera succeeds or fails. Similarly, in video games, the plot is an excuse for the gameplay, and not usually held to be the standard by which you judge the success of the game.
You’re half right here. It’s not the next generation of video games we need to wait for, it’s the next generation of video game designers. It’s been thirty-five years since Pong. It’s been twenty since the first Nintendo console brought video games firmly into the home, and cemented their role in modern culture. The people coming into the gaming industry now are the kids who grew up with video games. These are not people for whom games are some shiny new gimmick. They’re people for whom video games have been a cornerstone of their lives, and they’re going to be more invested in examining video games from that perspective, both externally as critics, and internally as artists looking to use the medium to make a statement.
I’m hardly qualified to take part in this gaming discussion, but I do enjoy the Game Dork’s columns on occasion. He puts little things in about his family and relationships – am thinking of getting a Wii after his column on throwing a game system party (apparently, all the women loved the Wii).
Chuck Klosterman wrote an article in Esquire wondering the same thing: why is there no Lester Bangs of video games? I’m not that much into video games, but I still thought it was an interesting read.
I’ve seen this argument before. The name for this perspective is ludology, right?
I don’t agree with the proponents of ludology because they’re too quick to dismiss a large part of the art of video games.
You say that story isn’t the art in games, and sometimes this is true. But there are action movies where the plot is merely there to explain why things are exploding and people are shooting each other. Story in video games deserves to be looked at as much as anything else.
And why can’t the gameplay merely be something to hang the story on?
I remember one of the things I liked most about Morrowind was telling someone about what happened when I played that day: freeing slaves, finding new places, etc. It felt like I was telling a story.
The problem with the narratology perspective is that it overlooks what’s unique about videogames. To continue with Miller’s metaphor, it would be as though an opera critic focused all his attention on the costume design and completely ignored the music. Sure, an opera can have great costumes, and a good critic won’t ignore them entirely, but they’re secondary to the music – just like the story in virtually every game is secondary to the gameplay.
The problem is that it’s very easy to talk about narrative because we have 2500 years of critical theory to fall back on. When we want to talk about gameplay we have to construct our critical tools from scratch. It’s a big problem.
This spring at the Game Developers Conference I gave a talk on level design. Most design talks at GDC are either super-high-level theory talks (which can be fun, but pretty useless for a working designer) or case studies describing the development of a particular game (which are very practical, but hard to apply unless you’re making something similar.)
My talk was about borrowing a critical language that has been developed for urban planning and applying it to level design, and then using that system of abstraction to build levels to produce certain emotional effects in the player. The goal was to create a set of critical terms for the working designer in this particular domain, so someone could look at a level and say something like: “We need a harder edge on the approach to this node so we get a stronger reveal of the wienie.”
Almost every aspect of game design lacks the sort of critical terminology that could allow us to talk about gameplay in the abstract. Imagine trying to discuss music without terms like “syncopation” or “harmony”. Or literature without “catharsis” or “protagonist”. That’s why we don’t have serious game critics.
I agree, he or she isn’t writing yet. The world’s first Lester Bangs of video games (hereinafter “WFLBoVG”) will have to be a talented writer and an incisive, visionary critic, and at the same time be willing to sacrifice any hope of having a real life because E3 is the pinnacle of his sad existence. The WFLBoVG is a fanboi beyond reason, he’s a horror show. He’s the most Cheetos-stained of creatures, a total lamer who at the same time manages to develop an innovative linguistic cool that stands in direct opposition to his shut-in existence. He’s one of the hippest cats on the planet and he has zero friends because he stays inside on his couch playing Halo 8 all day and writing about it all night. Nine point nine out of the rare ten people who are actually like that are too smart to become the WFLBoVG. Who would want to be that guy? At least you can get half the rest of your life back by skipping the writing part.
At least the real Bangs presumably went out to concerts. When I think of the WFLBoVG, I think of that enormously fat librarian vampire from the first Blade movie. That shit is not going to be pretty.
All a very fascinating discussion, and a worthy topic for debate. I remain unconvinced, however, that the videogame as we know it has reached its artistic peak; I think it has a long way to go before it’s produced its Lester Bangs, let alone its Andre Bazin.
I was sort of thinking the same thing about what you said, Grossbottom. Except instead of E3, you can say that he got to create his own expo (PAX) the way he wanted it.
I wouldn’t say that Tycho is quite who we’re waiting for yet. He may be one of the few people to really treat the topic with respect, and to be so far into it that he can speak naturally. He’s not reviewing the game in the usual sense so much as talking about the experience - what it’s like to play the game. And not always in the banal sense of merely describing what happened, either. There are flashes of something; he knows there’s something more serious going on but he hasn’t quite grasped it. If anything, he may be pointing toward it, perhaps showing the future Lester Bangs where to start.
Slightly off-topic : Ars Technica recently featured a series arguing Why writing in games matters which may be of some interest.
There are some great video game thinkers and theorists out there. My favourite is Lost Garden. The Genre Lifecycle theory series in particular.
Video Games are so diverse though. Some are highly artistic endeavours including beautiful visual art and breathtaking music (and usually very sloppy plots), and these are the closest to the other popular arts. Others are an entirely visceral experience where speed and excitement are the key, whose real life equivalent is more akin to a rollercoaster than to a film or song. Yet others are just variations on the board game theme, whether puzzles or games of chance. You could hardly lump these three genres together and compare them to films.
A reviewer may emerge who only addresses artistic games, and talks about them on their artistic merits and significance. The video game market needs to expand further before that happens I think. There’s evidence of the Wii and DS driving that, but it’s early days yet. If that happens, a good well known reviewer may well be a necessity, because more than half of the games on store shelves are total dreck and it’s crazy that they still get away with it.
I like your insights above Miller, particularly in regards to Tetris.
Are there many games that do this well? The games I’ve played (not many recently) seem to ensure that Act One ends in the same way regardless of the game play. Just before you are going to kill the demon lord, the game switches to a cut-scene where the demon escapes through a portal. Sure some choices are carried over between acts, but they tend to be cosmetic.
Well, it’s a fabulous way of getting into a state of flow, which can be really desirable (see some of the works from Mihalyi Csikszentmihalyi for more info).
Actually now that I’ve slept on it I’m not sure I approached this question from the same angle everyone else did. Bangs was this junkie obsessive in whose writing could be found this unabashed intimacy, and his sincerity lent improbable credence to the idea that we as a society could find something profound in rock n’ roll. So I saw the question as: why doesn’t gaming have some strung out dude who writes amazing articles about games when he isn’t stalking Warren Spector and asking why Deus Ex 2 sucked so badly.
But I guess if people look at Bangs as just another interchangeably witty critic, then I guess we do sort of have them. Steeped in pop culture irony and wearing thick cloaks of geek snark, they lack any semblence of what made Bangs so mesmerizing, but we do have them.
Ah. In that case, I do vote for Penny Arcade. They’re meaningful in ways simple text can’t be. Not just in the strips or news, but in PAX and their other projects.