I had an interesting thought the other day and I’m going to try my best to turn it into a blog post, although I make no guarantees on my success.
Anyways, think back to the 8-bit and 16-bit generation of games. These games offered a form of “art” that you wouldn’t find anywhere else. Where were you going to find pixel art? Just video games. Where were you going to find chiptune music? Just video games. Sure, you had an emerging demoscene that was beginning to play with this stuff outside of gaming, but this particular minimalism– this style of visuals, this style of music, and this style of art— was what one thought of when one thought of video games.
We’ve reached a point now, though, where the art that video games offer can be found somewhere else. The music is orchestral and symphonic, or rock, or electronica. The visuals have stepped right out of a computer-animated film. We have cutscenes, we have storylines, we have characterization. We have art that we can find not just in games, but in movies, or books, or iTunes, or orchestral concerts.
Is this necessarily bad? Oh no, of course not. I love when games have a good storyline or good music or what-have-you. But it speaks of a paradigm shift in gaming that occurred relatively recently.
But if gaming is coming closer to other forms of art… what, then, do games have to offer that is truly unique?
I imagine it’s the gameplay itself, and various aspects of it. The micromanagement. The options. The user interface. All those comforting elements and building blocks that have been in games since the beginning. This is what is unique about games today and this is what they offer that other forms of entertainment do not.
A normal day for Pinkie Pie
Now at this point I imagine you’re thinking “What the heck, Pike, where are you going with this?” And truthfully, I’m not 100% sure myself. It’s something that’s been floating around in my brain for a few days and I’ve been trying to mold it into a blog post and I’m not sure how much success I’m having. And so I leave this post open-ended. Maybe people look back fondly on pixels and synthesized music because there was a point where those things, combined with gameplay, formed a trinity that epitomized what video games were, and we don’t really have that today? Or maybe I’m overthinking it and it’s just nostalgia goggles?
The world may never know, but if you have any thoughts, toss ’em at me. I’m all ears!
Here’s a thing we’ve all experience! Something that shows just how wonderful games can be, as rare with games as a real pageturner with books, and the mark of a classic. One More Turn!
A couple of nights ago my co-host Pike had gone to bed early and I found myself not yet tired enough to do the same. “I know” I thought “I shall play a little Hearts of Iron for half an hour or so.” Two and a half hours later I noticed the same, and also the sunrise, and finally crawled into bed. The thing with a lot of games which have this appeal is that they have some really tangible sense of progression. I think that’s why we generally it call “One more turn” – it came from playing Civ until the wee hours.
Twilight just can't decide. Operation Sealion, or Operation Barbarossa?
With strategy games, good ones at least, you’ve always got something really tangible dangling in front of you. You’re always about to build a wonder, or conquer a city, or research a technology, or otherwise get some sort of reward. (Incidentally I think this is the major area where Civ V falls down; you get punished for many things, compared to Civ IV’s model where at worst you’ve lost due to opportunity cost. You might build unwisely but you still get something from it.) For me on Tuesday it was the conquest of Ethiopia, then of Egypt, then I had to fight Hashemite Arabia and Persia. After that I took on the Ottomans and their allies in Libya, Armenia, and Crete. Then I was ready to grab the remains of National French Africa. Throughout this I was researching new units and building new units and factories to improve my industry. See how it always cascades and there’s always something new to look towards? It’s admittedly a real-time game, but it functions similarly enough to turn-based for this to still work.
Compare to other games with more discrete levels. You do a level, great! Maybe you got a new toy in it. But now the level is over, there’s little that keeps you immediately hooked, the game might be superb but the immediacy matters a great deal in hooking you and keeping you hooked. I was playing some Skyrim and had a great time in this little dungeon, it was fun to explore, lots of fights, all that stuff. But once it was done, it was, well, done. I still want to play Skyrim but there was nothing keeping me there right at that moment.
Which games have the strongest One More Turn effect for you guys? We all know that Pike’s answer is SMAC, but what about our dear readers?
So Pike found an article online with the amusing and attention-getting title The Fascist Politics of the Infinite Respawn and, because I am not doing anything better with my copious qualifications, I thought I would take a look at it and provide a critique. I shall forewarn you, this is certain to be a long post and liable to be nothing more than masturbatory self-importance and a bunch of political jargon that has little use outside demonstrating that I know what political jargon is.
Maybe some Latin, too!
Fiat equus, et pereat mundus
Now, the article isn’t without some merit. Indeed for a medium to be considered an art, saying meaningful things is part and parcel of the deal. If we look at, say, movies, it’s very easy to find a very wide range of movies that have commented very seriously on a very wide range of political and social issues, from all kinds of angles. And we can find plenty of writing about what movies which don’t avowedly take a political torch up are saying as well; whether that be a feminist perspective on why strong women always get killed or a political examination of what hyper-macho 80’s action movies are all about.
I should state that I tend to shy away from overly analyzing every single movie/book/game etc. that comes along. Yes lots have things to say, and many more betray prejudice (conscious or simply not cared about) on the parts of their creators, but sometimes a big dumb action movie is just a big dumb action movie and trying to read more into it is silly. Still, the article I linked to is one which talks about an entire swathe of game mechanics and their implications, rather than any particular game, so I feel it’s worth engaging with. The argument, essentially, is that the mechanics of your typical modern FPS are ultimately “fascist” in nature, because they simultaneously represent A) The immovable and perfect State, in the form of the player character, and B) The numberless and overwhelming Enemies, in the form of… well, the numberless and overwhelming enemies.
A word about fascism itself. Fascism is a political philosophy with a single concept at its core: That the People and Polity should be the same thing, indeed must be, and that any other scenario is quite literally against the natural order of things and will by definition lead to the destruction of “Us”. It is important to note that Fascism does not consider this the consequence of living in a chaotic world or a lack of understanding on anyone’s part – it is a deliberate and concerted effort on the part of “Them” to destroy “Us”. “We” is fairly easy to define; “We” as a Nation (the only legitimate political unit for Fascism) are the natural owners of This Land who speak This Language and have This Culture. We have existed in this form since the mythical time immemorial (cf. just about any national origin myth you care to mention) and only in recent years, usually due to internal treason, are we being undone by alien influences of some nature. I reiterate that these aliens are acting very deliberately, with full knowledge of what they are doing and it’s consequences.
This leads itself to a whole host of interesting issues for the Fascist. We can see one of the most relevant if we take a look at Eco’s writings on the matter (You will generally find yourself enlightened if you ready Eco’s writings on any matter), most specifically the following quote:
When I was a boy I was taught to think of Englishmen as the five-meal people. They ate more frequently than the poor but sober Italians. Jews are rich and help each other through a secret web of mutual assistance. However, the followers of Ur-Fascism must also be convinced that they can overwhelm the enemies. Thus, by a continuous shifting of rhetorical focus, the enemies are at the same time too strong and too weak. Fascist governments are condemned to lose wars because they are constitutionally incapable of objectively evaluating the force of the enemy.
Eco goes to one of Fascism’s absolute core contradictions here; the Enemy (and Fascism MUST have an Enemy because it is defined entirely in terms of “Us” and “Them” and cannot exist without both) are both cockroaches and masterminds; we are both superhumanly glorious as a people and fundamentally threatened by the enemies. Both parties are simultaneously incredibly strong and completely vulnerable. This is necessary for the Fascist; the Enemy must be strong enough to necessitate the Fascist’s proposed solutions (Obviously if They were actually a bunch of feckless layabouts with barely the mental ability to read, We would never be in any danger from Them), but We must be strong because the foundation on which Fascism is built shows and requires this to be fact. We are at risk of being overwhelmed despite the fact that we are almost divine in our nature and the greatest of all nations, and the fact that our enemies are “rats” and “cockroaches” and – a perennial favorite of the Fascist – “germs”.
The Fascist narrative is a clever one however; they shift the rhetorical focus, but they can do so damned well by simultaneously appealing to an actual or imagined historical Golden Age and current actual or perceived difficulties, or usually a mix of both in both cases, coupled with identifying an Enemy. The Enemy which is identified is only one part of the true foe of the Fascist, which is essentially anything that dilutes the power of the Race and Nation. This is why they object to homosexuality. Homosexuals do not reproduce and they do not fulfill the ‘natural’ roles of men and women in their roles as breadwinners and reproducers. Here we see how Fascism uses the mythologized past as well; the past was an agricultural idyll where men did honest work on the land and women did honest work creating and raising the young. Enemies are conflated in part due to this. To use a classic example, Jews not only must own the media because they are insidious and have influence everywhere, but the media must be owned by Jews because the media is a fancy, “not real” entity which does little honest work. The contradiction of using the media for propaganda purposes need not be addressed. There is a good reason Orwell’s 1984 has Doublethink as a central conceit.
So how does all this tie into the article linked, and into videogames? The article apprehends a lot of things quite well, in my eyes, but there are a handful of fundamental issues that it overlooks, or at least fails to properly address.
Yes, games do tend to provide an endless stream of undifferentiated enemies for the player to destroy and, yes, they do tend to do so in a fashion which gives little to no insight into them as people. But this is a necessity. First, games are fast-paced and involve large numbers. It would be very impractical to give every single person you kill in your average CoD a background and some characteristics, and I sorely doubt that it would be remotely enjoyable to play. Second, and similarly, games are made on a timeline and a budget. I dearly wish there were more games which offered the player more options with greatly diverging consequences, but that’s simply not the path that was taken, a failure of the art and medium certainly but far from inherently political in any way except, perhaps, love of the dollar.
Still, whilst I feel there is merit in criticizing how games present the enemies, I find the argument that the Player represents the Fascist State/Nation to be a rather shaky one. Indeed the player’s avatar is generally a superhuman force who performs impossible feats of endurance at the very least, but what is the alternative? There are games out there where the player is a very vulnerable figure, even manshooters (ARMA II being the obvious example), and they certainly have their place but I sincerely doubt that “realism” would serve CoD very well (No matter how much they might want to proclaim themselves a realistic military shooter).
It’s my opinion that the article has things backwards. Games use an arguably fascistic attitude in order to serve their ends, and thus they must have elements of fascism in them. My interpretation approaches it from the other direction – games make use of “fascistic” elements not because they are fascistic, but because they happen to share propagandistic tools. We see exactly the same tools employed by all manner of people, from state ideologues in fascist dictatorships to comic book writers in countries where free speech is sacrosanct. That the fascists happen to make use of such rhetorical tools does not ipso facto mean that using such tools makes one a fascist, nor that the tools themselves are fascist. We can use another example brought up by the article, that of zombies, to expand on this point.
The article states,
The zombie genre, in its various media incarnations, has been using the unstoppable mindlessness of its enemies as a justification for brutality for years. There’s a definite streak of fascist thought in the vanilla concept of zombies, although it’s usually complicated and subverted by the now-cliché “We Are The Real Monsters” subtext.
Now, despite the caveat, I take considerable issue with this assessment. The zombie genre is not a pro-fascist one (Overtly or subconsciously or otherwise), but one which generally opposes the “mass” against the “individual”. The enemies are by their nature a mindless undifferentiated mass of bodies; the survivors are by their nature the ones we can identify with, if only by virtue of the fact that they can, you know, speak and otherwise emote. But again we are seeing things conflated when they shouldn’t be. The survivors in any zombie fiction are by definition individuals when measured against their foes. This is often read as a critique of unthinking capitalism, as indeed it very much was in such movies as Dawn of the Dead, but could just as easily be read as a caution of communism (A horde of creatures acting in instinctive unison to exterminate the handful of individuals still alive by either devouring or infecting them). The critiques provided by zombies are thus not inherently fascist, but rather they are inherently individualist. It is true that the Fascist at times has recourse to utilize such imagery, especially in the Anglo world with our extremely strong emphasis on individualism. For the American demographic even more so the zombie doesn’t have a fascist narrative but a survivalist, libertarian one, which emphases self-reliance, individuality, and generally a rejection of whatever structures may exist to help. There are those on the American right who have a very similar set of talking points to this, but it’s due to a similarity of perceived past and as a means of capitalization on current discontent, not necessarily an actual confluence of either goals or attitudes.
Similarly all polities utilize a mythologized past and concoct a present and national identity to some degree. These things are not natural, they hinge on collective agreed-upon beliefs about the past. Individuals may differ and disagree but the overarching narrative of any body politic has to be held to be generally true by a fair proportion of the population if said politic is to be effective. This does not necessarily have to be fictional, but human history is an ugly business and few, if any, can lay claim to a bloodless history. Still the fact that fascists utilize something everyone else utilizes does not make everyone fascist, any more than David Duke drinking milk makes all milk-drinkers Grand Wizards of the KKK.
The same thing applies, then, in their assessment of games as vehicles of fascist ideology or rhetoric. We have things that we might identify as Fascist in nature but only if we take the attitude that “Fascists do X, games do X, games = fascist”. We see in the article that the case is very clearly laid out; “I don’t mean to imply that the developers of these games are full-on fascists. In my opinion, however, their design decisions are a clear demonstration of fascist ideology expressed through the video game form.” This statement only works if my above one is held to be true, for if the game makers are not fascist, and the games don’t share fascist characteristics, the point has nothing to stand on.
None of this is to suggest that games should not strive to have more nuanced, deeper narratives, that they should not seek to humanize the other (Sometimes – but as I said, sometimes a big dumb action movie is just that and I don’t WANT Saints Row Goes Forth to have some huge thing about everyone you run over). These are very valuable things that games absolutely should be pursuing in order to grow and to begin saying more. I just think that the article in question is ascribing rather more to the current situation than it can justifiably be saddled with. Games may lack imagination and depth at the moment, but that is due to risk-aversion on the part of publishers long before it is due to fascist ideology, consciously implemented or otherwise.
When Saints Row came out, me and my vidya bro Barry Manilow weren’t tremendously interested. It looked like a fairly run-of-the-mill GTA clone with some juvenile humor. Eventually one of us picked it up used for cheap and… we were pretty much correct in that assessment.
So we weren’t jumping up and down in our seats over Saints Row 2. This proved to be a mistake, because when I did eventually get it at the behest of other friends, it turned out to be seriously awesome. I’m replaying it now to get in the mood for The Third and it’s just so absolutely mental, massive, and not-giving-any-shits about the whole thing. It’s not a perfect game by any means but it’s one of those all-too-rare ones which really puts stupid fun first and everything else second. My current Boss looks like Jesus dressed in a cheap 70’s plaid suit. I cannot begin to emphasize how hilarious this is, especially when something goes down and the camera is up in his face as he’s about to tell Maero hard or something.
They might be led by an Internet Tough Guy but the Deckers seem to be a gang straight out of Jet Set Radio. Which is nice.
And in a few weeks Saints Row The Third is out. This is a big deal, because it looks like Volition have finally just gone over the edge, said “Fuck it”, and decided that even the remotest semblance of realism has no place in their game. I’m pretty sure some of the art assets have been pulled from Red Faction: Armageddon and there is all kinds of crazy stuff like lasers and a hoverbike and I don’t even know. Annoying punk kids? Luchadores? Classy Belgians? An anime game show thing with a truck that sucks up pedestrians and fires them and a gun that fires squid that attach to people’s heads, turn them into allies, then explode? It’s got it all! The level of both customization and sheer insanity in this game looks to be pretty much peerless and I am okay with this. (I just hope there are Summoner references as well how cool would it be for Joseph of Ciran to burst into the middle of a gang fight and summon a Blood Elemental)
I’ve said things before about videogames being art and deep and meaningful and how they are things to be engaged with and all that. And sometimes that’s true. But sometimes you just need to jack a sweet ride, pimp it up, and be totally ballin’.
Something interesting has occurred to me. I was thinking about how other creative/entertainment sectors will very often have people who do things because they want to, rather than because it’s what the market demands. Now this may seem like a senseless statement but I can assure you, even if you’re trying to stick to your guns on every last syllable, when you’re writing a book you still have “Who will this appeal to?” “Will this drive people away from future books?” and the like in the back of your mind. Well, I do at least. Even with something I can completely control like that, there are such concerns. Even so there are always people out there who are happy to use their success to make something they really want to make, be it a movie or a TV show or whatever, even if it’s not going to be a major blockbuster. Similarly, we have all kinds of patrons for the more revered older arts, donations to save a statue or to support a poet or the like. But do we have the same for games?
Well I suppose the short answer is “Yes.” but that wouldn’t make for very satisfactory analysis, tempting as it is to leave it here and abscond to New Antioch where I am trying to craft a brutal urban wasteland from which the poors and minorities have no escape.
Okay, blog's over. Job well done! Time for donuts.
We do have, for instance, the indie game scene, where things like Dwarf Fortress and Aurora are superb examples – the former is funded by donations alone and the latter doesn’t even accept those because Walmsley’s independently wealthy. Toady has pretty explicitly said that while he takes player thoughts into consideration he’s making a game that he and Threetoe want to make, and if other people want to play it and support it that’s great, but if they don’t they’re not going to make radical changes to the game in order to appeal.
Similarly there are people of particular renown who have some leeway even in major companies. I imagine that if, say, Shiggy says “Making a game.”, Nintendo will pretty much let him do that. And we know there are people like Sid Meier, Will Wright, and Peter Molyneux who have had in the past a huge amount of discretion in what they make. But these times seem to be lost now.
In essence I’m just wondering – what if some really rich dude comes along, gathers up a bunch of programmers, and says “We’re making the best space 4X game ever. It’s going to be compared positively to MOO2. We will do what we think is best for the gameplay, not for sales. Profits and sales are secondary to the main objective.” Not indie, but real big-budget, triple-A stuff. I tell you what, when I am mega rich and rule large tracts of the universe, I’m going to make sure some great vidya gets made. But in the meantime I wonder if we might not benefit from a greater spirit of philanthropy towards games in this manner, and help spur new innovations and experimentation.
Edit: Unrelated, but something everyone should read. I think this is one of the most important articles currently on the Internet regarding gaming, it touches a lot of points about a vital game and company.
As you may have noticed if you’ve followed us for a little bit of time, we here at the Android’s Closet Incorporated subscribe to the theory that video games are a valid form of artistic expression. Not everyone agrees with us, of course, and that’s fine– but Mister Adequate and I are pretty heavily biased in that direction. We’re both writers, and we’d both like to think that we can recognize and appreciate a genuinely good narrative in any form. Hence why we’re big, big fans of Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri. Because not only was the gameplay solid, but the story– worthy of placement along side the best of science fiction novels– blew us away.
As it turns out, our initial assessment of the quality of the game’s story was accurate. Too accurate. SMAC’s story, you see, was a Herbert novel long before it was a game.
This one, specifically.
I didn’t know this until yesterday when I randomly ran across a reference article somewhere pointing out the game’s inspiration. At first, I thought it was an interesting little tidbit– lots of media homages other media, of course, not a big deal– but the more I read, the more I was shocked and then the more I was genuinely bothered. The game pretty much pilfered the book’s plot wholesale, even down to borrowing a couple of names. Oh, and those amazing tech quotes you get as the game progresses? Guess what book had similar quotes before every chapter? Yup. Suddenly, the game that I’d felt I could hold up as a paragon for originality and storytelling in video games was actually just taking it all from an existing novel.
My face, most of last night.
The Five Stages of Grief promptly followed:
Denial: “But… but… it was just an homage, right? They aren’t really that similar… right?”
Anger: “WHAT? How could you guys do this to me, Brian and Sid? Why didn’t you tell me!”
Bargaining: “Oh Gaming Gods, can’t I please just go back to my blissful ignorant existence beforehand? Back when SMAC’s story was the best original story in video games?”
Depression: Mostly in the form of unintelligible IMs that I sent to Mister Adequate for about an hour. And that brings us to…
Acceptance:
See, I’ve been thinking, and I’ve realized three things. Firstly, despite the many, many similarities– the game did make a few fairly notable changes to the plot, most obviously in the ending, which diverges wildly from that of the book, at least as far as I can tell (I haven’t read the book; I’m going off of Wikipedia here).
Secondly, the whole discovery did not change how captivating the game’s story was to me the first time I played.
And lastly, the more I thought about it, the more I realized that the very fact that the game is so very heavily inspired by an existing work of art merely cements its status as art. I have long been a proponent of the theory that the best artists are not just the people who invent tropes, but also the ones who take existing tropes and rearrange them or retell them in a new and interesting manner. Everyone’s done it, the best authors and filmmakers have done it (note how this book also inspired the movie Avatar), and heck, I’ve done it– the book I’m currently working on pilfered so much from 20,000 Leagues Under the Sea that it’s silly– so who am I to talk?
So in the end, I can live with this. What Alpha Centauri did was take the deck of cards that was an existing story, shuffle those cards around a bit, and present them to the audience through the unique prism that is video games. By doing so, they were able to bring the audience into the story in a way that a book alone couldn’t do. Shakespeare did something similar when he breathed life into old legends and had the resulting plays performed for the masses. I’m okay with that analogy.
Also, SMAC is still a damn fine game, and you guys can all expect a Let’s Play on it soon.
As you may have caught wind of by now, if you follow gaming news at all, the US Supreme Court has ruled 7-2 that a California law which prohibited the sale of violent videogames to minors was in violation of the First Amendment. You can read the full opinion here, if you are so inclined, but I’d recommend checking out the first couple of pages of it at least.
This is pretty cool in and of itself, because it will hopefully put an end to the ridiculous laws that spring up in the US every now and then which try and stamp on videogames in one way or another. More importantly however, this is a ruling from the highest court in the land that videogames are as meritorious in the eyes of the law, and as deserving of protection, as older forms of art. This is hugely significant, not just because it lets us go “Nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah-nyah” at Ebert, but because between this and the recent decision by the National Endowment for the Arts (i.e. the Federal Government) that games are art, we’ve finally, finally reached a stage where the legal opinions have reached a point where they have caught up with reality.
This is significant even if you’re not in America, by the way. Because so many companies are American and because so much of the gaming market is in America, whatever rulings the US makes on a subject like this are going to have global ramifications. This kind of recognition and protection is not only precedent, but will have a tangible effect, as it will encourage other countries to follow suit, and will embolden the games markets in other countries to press for similar recognition and protection if it is not already forthcoming.
The debate about whether or not video games count as art is one that has been raging for quite some time among not just players themselves, but in certain academic and professional circles as well. Well, I’m pleased to announce that the Games-as-Art folk have now got a pretty big trump card in the way of a new change in the guidelines of the National Endowment of the Arts. Namely, the NEA now considers video games and other interactive games to be artistic projects eligible to receive federal funding.
In other words, the U.S. Government just said that video games can be art.
Pretty awesome if you ask me. I’ve always been in the art camp of this particular debate– maybe it’s because I consider myself to be a creative person and tend to see “art” in pretty much anything, but I honestly can’t quite grok how a medium that combines storytelling, visual art, architecture/graphic design, music, animation, and frequently scriptwriting and cinematography (in the form of cutscenes) to be anything but art of the highest order. But then, I suppose it’s all subjective, isn’t it? That’s how art works. It’s why you have people mounting broken toilet seats on a canvas and selling the result for millions of dollars (true story).
Perhaps, then, all the proof we needed about video games being art is the fact that people have been debating it for years.
Regardless, it does feel good to say “suck it Ebert” right about now.
There is a lot of talk in gaming, and has been for many years now, about realism. Realism is a holy grail, or at least a magical totem, something which developers are expected to strive for and gamers expected to appreciate.
But this reflexive attitude needs examination, because we actually don’t want realism at all. Or to be more precise, realism is only one path the getting what we really want, which is immersion. Realism has a couple of benefits compared to unrealism (Or perhaps more properly, non-realism), and I will come to those in a moment, but in my experience ‘realism’ is not in and of itself a recipe for a good game, and it may indeed be harmful to pursue it too far.
Let’s start with the benefits of realism though:
A) We have an unarguable, universal blueprint, in the form of… well, of reality. Realism, if pursued, is easier in at least the conceptual sense because we only have to look at the real world to see how things work. As an author I can confidently say that using reality as the basis for a novel is a lot easier than keeping track of all the unique rules you have invented for your universe! And moreover, because it is universal, everyone can see that something is realistic and doesn’t need to learn any new rules. (I know that Reality is Unrealistic but that’s not the point right now!)
B) Closely linked with the above, realism (If we assume it’s executed well) is very consistent and coherent. Cause and effect, relationships between objects and actions, all that stuff – reality is ultimately immersive.
That is what we’re really after – immersion.
This is the most immersive game ever. Fact.
But we don’t need realism for immersion, not by any stretch of the imagination. That’s why we have the term ‘suspension of disbelief’. We need coherence and consistency to be immersed – we need it to be realistic with reference to itself, not to our reality. To a large extent we are also talking about atmosphere, which is something occasionally ineffable. It’s a combination of mechanics, art (as opposed to graphics), sounds, music or its absence, and so forth. It does not require any particular degree of technical fidelity; Pike is plenty immersed in X-Com despite it being 20 years old and having pixels you can individually count. Immersion is not limited to games based in history, or to first-person shooters or any other given genre. Some of my most immersive games are sci-fi, like Deus Ex and X-Com, and tactical or strategy games, like Sid Meier’s Alpha Centauri.
Now, there are times when realism is desired. If you’re making a game about the Roman Empire, you should probably do some research, and I will simply refer you back to my post about why mods are great rather than go on a long rant about Rome: Total War, fantastic as it is. The more knowledgeable someone is about a topic the harder it is to suspend their disbelief – so the concessions made to playability over realism and accuracy can end up harming a game. Realistic games have their place – ArmA II is a great example of a game which takes a fairly realistic approach; in that video he scrambles around in the dark for five minutes before getting shot and killed by an enemy he hasn’t even seen. Fun? Absolutely! But I sure as hell wouldn’t want TimeSplitters to play like that! Plenty of immersive games aren’t realistic, but remain hugely engaging to the player.
Then again, that's a strikingly realistic rendition of excellent fashion.
And then again, immersion isn’t always what people want. Earth Defense Force 2017 is a shockingly lacking game in almost every sense – except for raw fun, which it is almost unmatched in. It is the quintessential B-game; bad graphics, voice acting that would make Barry Burton blush, questionable physics, and absolutely rollicking great fun from start to finish. Though I propound the capacity for games to be art, and encourage things in such a direction, not every game needs to be art. Not every movie needs to be Citizen Kane. Sometimes, Transformers is just more fun.
So in short, we have put the idea of realism up on a pedestal, when what we really want is immersion, which is a factor of coherence and consistency. Realism has a couple of benefits in that sense but any break from it will be easily noticed by the knowledgeable, making their disbelief even harder to suspend!
So, to turn this over to you, what games have you found most immersive and why? To what extent do you care about realism, if at all?
Right then, now that we’ve warmed up let’s launch straight into the pretentious overestimation of my own abilities and talk about videogame reviews and analyses, shall we?
There’s plenty to say about the business of reviews, but something I’ve been thinking about lately is how shallow they are. I don’t mean this in the most critical sense per se, but rather that they are oriented towards only the typical gameplay issues, graphics, that sort of thing. Rarely do they delve into the more complex things such as tracing a lineage of a genre and understanding the influences of things, or really picking apart what a game is saying, except in the examples where it cannot be avoided.
This is not difficult to understand. At the cynical end, it’s because reviews are about getting sales for the reviewing body (Or in this day and age, online advertising revenue) and keeping publishers happy. I think this is a factor but it does seem rather overstated. At the more generous end of the scale, it’s because reviewers are simply talking about whether a game is worth your money and time, which is a perfectly reasonable stance to take, and pursuing this concept means that criticism isn’t fair because different kinds of analyses are not within the reviewer’s mandate.
Are these things contradictory, though? Can you provide a review of a game as fun and at the same time consider its place within gaming, and impartially assess what the game is doing in a more abstract sense? After all, if we are thinking about games as a form of creative expression beyond simple entertainment, or at least with the potential to be, surely we need to investigate the bad and the mediocre with as much depth and critical thought as the greats? For my own part I don’t think these are contradictory goals. I do however think they diverge somewhat, and to expect a review to take both angles is to ask a reviewer to cover a very broad subject. In terms of games themselves, not everything has to try to be Casablanca. There’s nothing inherently wrong with a dumb shooter which exists solely for ridiculous fun; despite this, there are plenty of efforts at making the things more emotionally engaging, more narrative-oriented, &c. And some games are starting to make use of their unique possibilities to make points that cannot be made in other mediums (BioShock springs to mind here).
Games also present a relatively unique problem for this kind of thought. Unlike other mediums, which see very occasional shifts in their presentation and, with the exception of sound for movies, don’t generally endure particularly revolutionary advancements, gaming (like computing as a whole) is part of a very rapidly advancing field in purely technical terms. We’ve all seen it on consoles; games towards the end of the console’s life are much more impressive than those at the beginning. But then the next generation comes along and we’re so worked up (understandably so) over what the new tech can do that we don’t play such close attention to other factors. The new tech opens up new possibilities, of course. You simply couldn’t do Dead Rising on a pre-current tech and have it do the concept justice. I do suspect that it serves as a distraction both on the part of designers and on the part of those who think about games.
So there seems to be a dearth of the more analytical review, or perhaps essay, outside of a few select places. What I’m thinking of is really more an analysis of what a given game or series or genre is, how it has evolved, where it got its ideas from, that sort of thing. On there narrative side of things there are obvious parallels to other mediums; you can find more than a few things discussing what The Road means and symbolizes and so on. And games have plenty of scope for things like that; consider how much mileage you’d get out of thinking about the messages of the Metal Gear Solid series. But what is there about the clever use of things like game mechanics, outside of simply noting that there is a clever use of game mechanics?
I should say, I know there are people out there talking about that stuff, and I don’t want to diminish what they are saying by acting like it doesn’t exist. It absolutely does and is very much worth finding and reading. Nonetheless it seems to be quite plain that there is a lack of a coherent body of thought on game criticism, in comparison to the thoughts on film or literature. And I think that ultimately, this harms the whole medium. As entertainment, games have things figured out pretty well. As vessels for communication, they’re still falling rather short. Games are expensive to make, especially compared to a lone alcoholic takking out The Old Man and the Sea on a typewriter. It is understandable and forgivable that many are made with profit uppermost in mind. Nonetheless many of us in the gaming sphere are all too ready to dismiss things as “just games” – which they might be in some contexts, but it makes it hard for them to develop into anything more if we don’t credit them as something more and start thinking about how to evolve them.
Hopefully as time passes this will change. The best way to ensure change is, of course, to bring it about.
