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]

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.

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?

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 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.

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.

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.

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 think that if you create a critical framework it will have to coexist with existing frameworks.

I definitely agree.

In practise you can end up restricting the things you want to encourage into niche markets which aren’t really progressive.

That would be the worst case scenario, as far as I’m concerned.

…I’m just not sure how far you can promote accelerated invention via a discourse.

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.

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.

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 thought I’d comment and say that, recently, I’ve developed my own personal theory of “art” and “criticism.”

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.

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’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.

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.

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.

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.

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’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.

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.

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 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.

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.