Let’s say we wanted to found a critical discipline around video games. Sure, there exist plenty of studies of games as digital mingling grounds and youth-corrupting influences, and there’s always game theory, but for our purposes we’d need to figure out a way of analyzing games as art. How would we do it?
We could come at it like literary scholars and focus on narrative, and it’s true that many games tout stories explicit or implied, but we’d be missing the forest for the trees. Video games are visual, aural, tactile, even kinetic. Some take the act of experience and make it collaborative. Upon finishing a novel, one doesn’t come away knowing what it’s like to hammer the F2 button while chastising one’s guildmates on TeamSpeak for pulling aggro when they shouldn’t. The sense of accomplishment inherent in a three-man, hour-long Onyxia kill can’t be found in, say, the works of Jane Austen (though you might feel similarly upon reading that final “Yes” of the behemoth Ulysses).
We could approach games from a film studies perspective, adding audio and visuals to our sphere of consideration, and we’d be closer to where we needed to be as video game critics. But we’d still be failing to consider one rather confounding, rather important element. As 2K developer Steve Gaynor explains, “The player is an agent of chaos, making the medium ill-equipped to convey a pre-authored narrative with anywhere near the effectiveness of books or film. Rather, a video game is a box of possibilities, and the best stories told are those that arise from the player expressing his own agency within a functional, believable gameworld.”
Well damn. How are we supposed to take the uncountable, self-determined stories of gamers into critical consideration? How can we account for video games even operating in such a way? The solutions we seek can only arise from discourse, so let’s talk about it.
Ah, but wait. Early in our quest for video game academia (the rewards of which surely include 8,000 experience points, 75 silver coins, and an Elder Robe of Pretense), we run into a problem. Gaynor’s thoughts, as begun above, continue as such:
These are player stories, not author stories, and hence they belong to the player himself. Unlike a great film or piece of literature, they don’t give the audience an admiration for the genius in someone else’s work; they instead supply the potential for genuine personal experience, acts attempted and accomplished by the player as an individual, unique memories that are the player’s to own and to pass on. This property is demonstrated when comparing play notes, book club style, with friends– “what did you do?” versus “here’s what I did.” While discussing a film or piece of literature runs towards individual interpretation of an identical media artifact, the core experience of playing a video game is itself unique to each player– an act of realtime media interpretation– and the most powerful stories told are the ones the player is responsible for. To the player, video games are the most personally meaningful entertainment medium of them all. It is not about the other– the author, the director. It is about you.
Let me remind you that Gaynor works on games for a major company. Of course “it is about [the player]” for him. I’m not implying here that Gaynor’s motives aren’t pure, that he wouldn’t want to make fun games if not for his salary; in fact, he has a history of designing levels on his own time. The fact remains, though, that his prime directive as a designer is to make fun games. If a game isn’t fun for the player, not many people will play it. His is the role of the author: he wants to create a product that’s entertaining on the surface level, the reader-response level, so people will bother with it in the first place (or so his authorial role would have me believe).
The discourse I’m seeking to advance (or isolate, or jump-start, whatever the case may be) is presently dominated by authors, by the game designers themselves, and the impetus of the author is not that of the critic. The author wants to produce something enjoyable, which the critic will then make meaningful. Generally speaking, the critic isn’t concerned with fun, insofar as we can define “fun” as an enjoyable reading experience; to the critic, fun and art very often don’t mean the same thing. I’ve said before, I think, that artistic value and enjoyment are conjoined at the frontal lobe in my mind, that I feel most inclined to do that critical thing upon the art I most enjoy experiencing (Manabi Straight!), but I’ll readily admit that I don’t have to enjoy the experience of something to accept it as valid art (Lucky Star). The problem, then, is one of motive: while a game designer might read Gaynor’s insistence that “the most powerful stories told are the ones the player is responsible for” and nod at the screen in agreement, a critic could bounce back with “well yeah, Roland Barthes said that forty years ago.” Gaynor doesn’t engage with Barthes because, honestly, why the hell should he care what Barthes had to say? His concern is architectural; he just wants to build fun games. To Gaynor, “Death of the Author” isn’t one rung in an ever-growing critical ladder. From where he stands, it’s simply obvious.
I’m not saying game designers can’t be critical. That’d subvert my own goals; I fully intend to be both a narrative critic and a fiction writer someday, and I wouldn’t intend as much if I didn’t think it possible. But the authorial and critical mindsets differ in intention, and most available literature on games as narrative texts seems to come from game designers approaching the topic as a design problem, attempting to figure out how to build a better gaming experience. “If you know why people enjoy the games they do,” Gaynor explains, “you have a good idea of how to draw them into your project.” We can read these designers with a critical eye, and can almost certainly learn quite a bit from them, but it’s hard to call their writing truly critical. As a critic (albeit one in training), it’s my job to explore what video games say, do, and mean independent of what they are designed to say, do, and mean, and to do so free of the pressing need for games to be fun.
But how? Author-types though they may be, we can glean a few critical guidelines from Gaynor and others, such as the members of game design think tank Project Horseshoe, who, upon studying storytelling (or, rather, the construction of “mediated experiences”) in games, concluded:
We believe that game designers are in the business of experience creation rather than that of storytelling. The story that is generated through gameplay is the player’s personal story that has been mediated by the game systems.
This is a rather substantial shift from the concept of the auteur sitting down and penning a tale of love and despair. Instead of writing about passion, our goal is to help the user experience passion. Instead of describing fear, our goal as game designers to is cause fear. We construct systems, whirling social and mechanical environments that lead, poke, prod, react, connect and encourage the player to reach, out of their own free will, a peak physiological and mental state.
Out of this experience, the player constructs their own very personal story. They digest the experience. They link the pieces together with their past life lessons. In the end, if the gelled memories of the game were rich with meaning, they’ll share their narrative with others. Hearing our players’ stories burst forth from our game is the clearest possible signal that we created a great experience. And yet, we must never lose sight that these stories are secondary effect. Story is the tail of what we do as designers, where the mediated experience is the dog.
First and foremost, we must consider the players, as without them there is no story. On the whole, even the most cut scene-driven games do not function as typical novels or films, laying out a plot and detailing characters for readers or viewers to interpret as they will; games are by their very nature complex toolsets, collections of story elements players will not interpret as-is, but will pick and choose in the construction of complete stories that they may then interpret on the whole. Game narratives consist of the same building blocks as the written and performance narratives we readily call art; they differ primarily in that they are written and rewritten as seen fit by uncountable players. We cannot, of course, even begin to account for the actions of individual players in shaping the game experience, for what we’re discussing here is a medium in which something as simple and trivial as carving one’s name into a wall with digital bullets can contribute to the final shape not only of the experience, but of the story itself. But we can account for the fact that a game gives players the option of spelling their names in bullets. How does this allowance of self-identification via deadly weapon fit into what we know about the world? It’s the job of the game critic to postulate upon this, among a great many other things. The traditional narrative critic supports hypotheses with hard evidence, malleable only in interpretation; the game critic further supports hypotheses with possibility itself, particularly in situations where the player can choose to experience (or perhaps author) a certain story element or not. Can a player write on a wall with bullets in some or another game? Does the game’s control scheme and provision of narrative building blocks make this easy or difficult? Why?
I’ve said we can’t take the specific actions of individual gamers into consideration simply because they would be impossible to know, in most cases — there are just too many gamers. We could perform case studies upon willing gamers, I suppose, but I’m not sure doing so would contribute to a critical approach to games any more than considering offered or denied possibilities, as explained above. Besides, case studies are the domain of the social sciences, and while it’s true that game criticism would require a certain degree of social awareness, I’m not sure that we need to go so far as case studies.
Thanks in large part to the internet, however, we can observe certain trends among the body of gamers. Who among gamers are most vocal, and on what topics, and why? Consider the sandbox MMO — to be technical, the sandbox-style massively multiplayer online role-playing game — of which EVE Online is an example. In contrast to, say, World of Warcraft or Warhammer Online, sandbox MMOs provide players with open worlds in which to author their tales as they see fit, offering only a bare minimum of artificial guidance. EVE’s galaxy is one in which NPC quests were added only fairly recently, in which players can be slain anywhere by more advanced players and have all their worldly possessions looted from the wreckage of their spacecraft, provided they’re foolish enough to carry all their worldly possessions with them. It’s a galaxy in which one must toil in terms of time and social interaction to succeed — a very realistic galaxy, in other words. It’s a galaxy that breeds fear, corruption, and economic connivance, that threatens to bring the worst of human nature out of its players — and EVE’s small but loyal player base wouldn’t give it up if demanded to do so at gunpoint. Some of them, though it’s impossible to say how many, are quite vocal on this point, in fact. Others are quite vocal against the EVE design philosophy. And when I say vocal here, I mean argumentative to the point of belligerence.
We can, perhaps, use the trends of discourse among gamers to pinpoint topics in need of criticism. And indeed, when you dig into it, EVE’s sandbox quality is complex indeed. On paper, it doesn’t sound fun at all; in fact, it sounds quite a bit like genuine work. Real-life work. As a gamer, I’m not a fan of EVE and all it entails; as a critic, I don’t bother myself much with fun, which allows me to take a step back and examine how much we as human beings can learn about ourselves from a model that so closely emulates the tribulations of our existence. Where Ulysses is Dublin in miniature, EVE is a scaled-down model of capitalism. In the very choices it offers players, EVE engages with the concerns of our time. It’s every bit as relevant as a novel could be, and perhaps far more poignant in that it involves the player in its story-building (and meaning-building) processes directly. When I see pages upon pages of forum posts going back and forth on EVE’s economy, its rich-versus-poor politics, I begin to suspect that the possible artistic meaning of the thing has at least some catalyzing influence upon the unending debate.
At the very least, we can safely assume that games incite a great deal of emotion in their players, and quite logically so. For example, rather than reading on to see whether a character in which you’ve invested yourself lives or dies, you might be invited to make that decision yourself through your actions. Even in games where the narrative is largely handed to the player, such choices as these mark the gulf between games and traditional narrative media that necessitates the establishment of a distinct but related field of criticism.
While its narrative course was charted primarily by its developers, Final Fantasy VI represented the mid- to late-1990s trend toward greater self-determination in role-playing games. What freedom of choice it did allow often resulted in emotionally-charged situations with repercussions that lingered until the endgame. Consider, for example, the matter of the floating continent’s fall, during which you could choose to await consummate ninja Shadow, thereby saving him, or leap to safety without him and doom him to a vague but practically inevitable death. The game isn’t clear on how to save Shadow, exactly, and you’re left wondering what you’re supposed to be doing as a visible timer slowly runs out, counting the seconds to your own demise. It’s not at all unlikely that first-time players will lose their nerve prior to Shadow’s appearance during the last possible seconds and save themselves, forsaking their sporadic ally to an ignoble fall to his doom.
Of course, this decision would color the terminal feel of the game’s narrative. It’s quite tragic, really, that impatience and fear would cause a man’s comrades to forsake him thus. And as players complete the game, wondering how Shadow might have been able to aid them in this cave or that ancient ruin, the knowledge of having doomed him will linger just beneath these musings, like as not — it’s obvious enough that he can be saved, anyhow, even for first-time players. Conversely, Shadow is kind of a bastard, a mercenary and assassin who never seems to be there when you need him, and another kind of player might feel satisfied in having rid the world of him. Thus, in video games, emotions themselves become determining elements of story. Were Shadow a character in a novel, readers would be free to lament or celebrate his death (or his life) depending on how they felt about him; as it stands, players can choose whether he lives or dies at all depending on how they feel about him. Narrative criticism being as concerned with hard fact and the search for some kind of objectivity as it is, the great influence of emotion and personal whim — of many emotions and many personal whims, in fact — upon the narrative structure of a video game muddles the critical process considerably. Until we determine a way to discuss the outcomes of possibility (if we even can), it seems most prudent to focus upon possibility itself. Thus, we might ask why Shadow, of all characters, is singled out among a cast of fourteen for permanent death, why the choice of his living or dying is placed in the hands of the player, and what all this entails.
It’s possible that I’m doing nothing more here than stating the obvious. As you can see, I do tend to ramble when I get on a subject that interests me. Perhaps someone else has reached the same conclusions I have and more, and if that’s the case, I’d like to know. Either way, I want to make it perfectly clear that I don’t intend to provide answers on the subject of video game criticism; I wish only to raise questions. After all, we’ll need a good bit more discourse on the matter before we can claim the existence of a true critical sphere founded around video games. And besides, I’m not the most qualified person to be doing this.
Maybe you think you’re more qualified than I am, or that you have better ideas. Good. I hope you’re right. Now let’s discuss.
Well you know, I do intend to comment more properly and thoroughly later but I have to go to sleep soon, but straight off first-hand generated thoughts, I’d say that video games – to be more precise, RPG’s like FF (namely my experience with FFX) – are about the author and the notion that players have agency in what is more or less a linear microcosm (we are restricted to a start and finish) is only indicative of the hegemony established by stories etched in video games over their players.
Gaynor asks “what did you do?” instead of “here’s what I did!” – but this is extremely similar, though perhaps not completely parallel, to saying “how did you interpret that novel?” instead of “here’s how I interpret this novel!” I think all systems of narration – by default of our modern sapient and cognitive reliance on time as a linear thing – create experience then as such a linear thing, even if you take into account such unchronological things like Cowboy Bebop, Hidamari Sketch, Suzumiya Haruhi no Yuutsu, or hell, even Faulker? It would be extremely hard to say that we can tap into our experiences as archaeological objects; to say that, while episode 35 of anime X is the chronological successor to episode 1, we are able to completely disregard to experiential development that proceeded for those “intransient” 33 episodes and watch 35 as if it were really 2 – consciousness and perception are linear (I’m not a psychologist…), thus allegedly autonomous experiences cannot be extracted as if we were playing Jinga in zero-gravity.
Sleep…ah, i should do that every once in a while, I guess.
I mean, compared to the power one would have over, say, a Word document, what authorial control players have over games is infinitesimal, but it’s still there, especially when you compare games and novels. There’s a spectrum, though, and FFX would be on the end with all the games in which the player is more or less stowing away for the ride. I guess I called for a “distinct but related field of criticism” for games, and I just meant it’s worth looking at them a bit differently — it’s distinct in that what happens in a novel happens every time you read that novel, open to interpretation though it may be, while this isn’t so in quite a few games, and I think there probably exist ways of taking that into critical consideration.
I was reaching for this point, or trying to, while I was writing the first section. I’d agree that the two aren’t so different, or at the very least aren’t nearly as different as Gaynor suggests, but then you’ve got people who play Oblivion for twenty hours and do no storyline quests, and those who skip all the side content in favor of the story, and in that case the experience probably differs more than two people’s reading experiences with the same novel in that the stories they witnessed were fundamentally different. Maybe it’s comparable to one person reading a third of a novel, or one book in a trilogy, and the other reading the whole thing, but I’m not sure; in the case of Oblivion, both players get a “complete” story as long as they both reach the designated end of the game.
As far as chronology and linearity of experience…hm, I don’t really know. I’m fairly certain you’ve thought more on that subject than I have. In those terms, I suppose what I’m suggesting (well, what I’m appropriating from the designers who have discussed it) is that each person’s linear experience is composed of different building blocks in potentially different orders. As for attempting to examine those experiences out of their context, I’d agree that we probably can’t, or that it’d be very difficult, if even it was at all worth doing. This would mean we’d have to take the potential for quite a few different contexts into consideration, and that’d be a conundrum, but I think we can still get something out of looking at the possibility of context A versus the possibility of context B, and the decision that would result in one being chosen over the other.
So from a critical perspective you’d presumably be measuring the ability of the designers to manage the players’ experience? Presumably this means a criticism which focuses on the emotional aspect of the play even by preferring it to fun?
I like the idea, but there’s a difficulty in that (presumably) you’d intend this approach to measuring games to change the industry – a better way of rating games which encourages the companies to fund a particular sort of product. That is, praising anybody who primarily attempts to create an experience. To be honest I think that love of experience really does play a big part in game marketing and discussion.
As I see it, that desire for an experience is behind praise and enjoyment of heavy-handed-narrative games (not just RPGs, stuff like Metal Gear too). The product of making such a system of valuation explicit is an odd distinction between games seen as pure “fun” and games marketed and enjoyed as “experiences”. Only the result of this idea seems to be that the “experience” game risks becoming a limited genre of its own – a stable provider of uninspired products.
I’m not sure how much sense I’m making here. But basically I think that if you create a critical framework it will have to coexist with existing frameworks. In practise you can end up restricting the things you want to encourage into niche markets which aren’t really progressive. Of course that’s still better than giving in and letting innovation go by as if nothing had happened, I’m just not sure how far you can promote accelerated invention via a discourse. I guess you’d be accepting a role fighting an impossible battle for the sake of a minority of readers – those who both prefer experience and feel the missionary optimism for the medium.
As you can tell I’m not very optimistic about the immediate prospects for invention in the games industry, which is one of the reasons I’ve increasingly fallen out of the vanguard of the hobby. I think games have the potential to be more without having a clear path to getting there.
(Incidentally, back when I was in with all the latest news and games I used to read the UK magazine EDGE – which was bloody brilliant at taking games on according to their merits, and fearless in dishing out harsh assessments.)
I thought I’d comment and say that, recently, I’ve developed my own personal theory of “art” and “criticism.” People look at me funny when I tell them. Here it is:
critical “readings” of texts — anything, not just books — are simply forms of fun. The uplifting experience supposedly offered by traditional tragedy, the know-it-all pleasure of a modern literary novel that references literary tradition, and the act of academically critiquing something, they’re all forms of entertainment. As such, they can’t be any higher or lower than the entertainment implicit in watching people blow things up — they’re just different forms of entertainment.
Also, Wolfgang Iser describes what he called “gaps” in texts — the minuscule missing bits that the reader/viewer fills in, thus creating meaning. With no gaps, there can be no meaning. Scott McCloud describes virtually the same thing when he talks about the “gutters” of comics. I would argue that the reader has nearly as much agency in the reading of a novel as a player does in the playing of a game. I would say you can listen to two people who read all of a book, or watched all of a movie, and if you didn’t know what they were talking about, it could sound like two different things. If X likes a movie and Y hates it, they had completely different experiences.
I can’t remember if it was John Scalzi or Henry Jenkins who wrote about this recently, but video games aren’t that old. Movies didn’t really get critical frameworks of their own until longer than games have been around. It will likely be soon, however — I’m not saying you shouldn’t be doing this, just remarking that it’s not necessary to create a criticism out of whole cloth, but rather to rely on our affinity with games. We’ve all probably been playing games all our lives, and that, along with critical training of some sort, is all that’s required to begin (or continue) a criticism.
@coburn
Maybe this is what it boils down to, given that what decisive junctures exist in games are put there by the designers, but I don’t know that player experience is wholly manageable on the part of designers.
I tend to think that, once critics reach a point where they’re determining what is and isn’t published, they’ve overstepped their bounds. I don’t mean to suggest that intentionally open games are any better than more straightforward games; all games provide a distinct kind of experience simply in that they’re games at all.
A stable provider of uninspired products…ah, kind of like the postmodern literary establishment. I really don’t mean to value one kind of game over another with this approach. That’s why I picked an MMORPG and an oldschool Final Fantasy game as examples; one is open and the other linear, but they’re both valuable in that they’re games to begin with, and games people enjoy. FF6 is one of my favorites, actually; my preference in games tends more toward the linear.
I definitely agree.
That would be the worst case scenario, as far as I’m concerned.
I don’t really want to promote invention; I don’t think that’s the job of the critic. If, when game criticism finally comes into its own, the majority of game critics refuse to make value judgments from a critical perspective, that’d be ideal.
I haven’t been very optimistic about games lately, either, but a few interesting things seem to be happening in the industry. One of these days I’ll probably write a post about Portal, and I really need to get around to playing this Braid everyone’s going on about.
@Cuchlann
I like your theory; I’m not sure I’d be wasting my time with this sort of thing if I didn’t enjoy it, and I’m always very reluctant to establish value hierarchies. I’ve linked to one of your posts on the subject once or twice now, I think.
I’m not familiar with Iser, but this is a good point. I’m interested in exploring just how different the experiences of reading a novel and playing a game are. I’m convinced that there is a difference; moviegoers X and Y might’ve had vastly different experiences with the same film narrative, but if they played the same game, they would, to some degree, experience different narratives entirely. The question of how different this renders games from other narrative media, or if the narrative-building process of a game is even any different from the way narrative works elsewhere, is worth considering, I think, and it’s a question I’m not prepared to take much of a stance on just yet.
Insofar as the birth and development of a critical field based on a particular medium is an organic process, I like to think that my having any desire at all to write something like this is one small corner of said process running its course. Hopefully I haven’t given the impression that I want to disregard critical tradition and make something out of nothing. Shit, I’m hardly versed enough in critical tradition to call upon it at all, much less strategically set it aside.
Yeah, I’m not even necessarily disagreeing with you. I believe games are in some way different than books as well, I’m just not sure how to talk about it either. I guess I always bring up Iser and the reader-response crowd (the ones I don’t hate, anyway) because that seems to me to be a great place to start, with people who described books as an interactive process. It seems like that would be a good first building block in a theory of a form that is defined by its interactivity. I’ll see if I can get you the title of that essay (that is, I’ll see if I can get my book back from my ex-girlfriend), if you’re interested in reading it.
I was just talking with my roommate, sorry for double-commenting, but we just reached an interesting question — what constitutes having played the game? I used your Oblivion example with him. One couldn’t reasonably expect to do critical work on a book or movie without having read or seen the whole thing. So, can a critic who played the storyline of Morrowind (the one I’m more familiar with, sorry for switching) and some of the sidequests, but who didn’t become guild master of all the guilds talk about the game? My knee-jerk response is yes, because they completed the story, but that’s not necessarily the most important thing here. I don’t have an answer, but I think the question, and our solution, whatever it is, will shape the discourse on games from here on out. What do you have to do in a game to have “played” it? I’ve never beaten Sonic 2, but I think I can talk about it seriously.
A random question: what about video games that aren’t story-based at all? Tetris? Pong? Nanostrife, Space Invaders et. al? Maybe video games, while being interactive things that create meaning through use, also serve as conduits for the generation of solidarity and human narratives…or something like that?
@Cuchlann
Like you, I’d say that completion of a game requires only that the player start at the beginning and go through to the end, regardless of what they do (or don’t do) in the middle. I’m inclined to defer to the habits of gamers, the vast majority of whom won’t take the time to, say, get every character’s most powerful weapon in a Final Fantasy game, but will still believe themselves to have experienced a complete narrative without any gaping logical holes in its center (or so I’d assume, given that the “hardcore” set is smaller now, percentage-wise, than ever…I think). If it is a logical requirement that players explore every nook and cranny, though, that’d make game experience much more similar to the literary in that all critical players would by necessity experience the same narrative — though perhaps in a different order. Under that condition, critiquing MMOs would be damn near impossible.
@lelangir
I intended to talk about that here, actually, which is why the first picture is of Audiosurf, but I realized I needed to give it more thought. Your “generation of solidarity and human narratives” idea, though, is essentially the conclusion I’m dancing around.
@Pontifus
Yeah, I wouldn’t go so far as to say one must do every single thing ever. In fact, like I (tried) to say, I’m not even convinced one would have to finish the game, depending on what sort of game it is. lelangir mentioned Tetris, I mentioned the old Sonic games (which even have a story, but not much of one), and the old Mario games seem to work this way, where a story exists, but the gameplay is separate from it. That’s contrasted from a game like Final Fantasy, or even God of War, wherein the gameplay (and I picked God of War because the gameplay is much more engrossing, in itself, than FF’s) basically moves the story forward. These games one must finish to talk about.
It might be useful to think of a game like Tolkien’s conception of a fairy story — that it creates a secondary world. Tetris creates a secondary world, even though there’s no story at all. It’s a world of pattern and variation (which, as Ellen Voigt just said today, is the warp and woof of Art).
[maybe random -- in the middle of class]