You already read Pontifus’ entry, “The Video Game as Text,” right? Well, go do that if you haven’t, I’ll wait.
I’ve been thinking of that whole can of worms since he made that post, and I’ve had a few thoughts that might interest you, the Super Fanicom reader. These are likely to be more disjointed than usual, and not as substantial, but if you’re interested, click through.
First, my major contribution. A few weeks ago a poet, Ellen Voigt, came to my campus and I went to her interview. She mentioned, in response to something comparing poetry and music, that art is pattern and variance (maybe not her exact words). This might explain why I don’t play well with abstract art: I can’t find the pattern. It seems to me this provides a starting point, no matter how vague and unrealized, for me to get at a baseline for video games. That, I suspect, is one of the major problems with constructing a video game theory: we don’t really have a baseline. True, Henry James did say critics can’t judge a work by what it doesn’t try to do, but only by what it attempts, but all books (for example) have methods and goals in common. Video games seem to have a harder time with this idea. Aside from “user enjoyment,” a nebulous thing at the best of times, what do The Sims and God of War have in common? They use different forms of interaction, with different time management skillsets required (that is, you can pause your sims and plan whatever you need, fixing the house, buying stuff, so on, while Kratos sits very still during pauses — you can upgrade his weapons, but those soldier-demon-things will be exactly where you left them). So on, so forth.
Every game ever, at least any game that made sense and entertained anyone, set up a pattern and then proceeded to vary it. Some, like Half-Life and Final Fantasy, do it in a way similar to books (especially FF), with plot and character development providing the variance. Tetris, on the other hand, provides the player with a simple pattern: a complete horizontal line will disappear; a complete vertical line ends the game. Then it varies things wildly, dropping blocks of different shapes at increasing speeds.
Certain games are famous for their pattern — I can pick up any standard FF game (aside from the Tactics titles and the like) and expect certain things, both major and minor, to always be true. Others are known for the variance — Katamari Damacy got the word out by being fucking weird. Sometimes these things converge. The Resident Evil series had an entrenched pattern of survival horror, and broke that pattern wildly and well with Resident Evil 4.
It might behoove the unsure video game critic — like me — to begin with this pattern, like a game of Mad Libs. ”The pattern of [game x] is [A], and the variation is [B].” A single game may have many — I mentioned Half-Life earlier, but its positioning was a little unfair, since it has gameplay patterns as well as storyline patterns (I just really like the storytelling in HL).
I apologize for the random, and the truncated post. I’ll try to make it up to you by posting tomorrow about the new Gundam. Which means I have to watch it first, of course. Hm.
“The pattern of [game x] is [A], and the variation is [B]” strikes me as a good place to start. It always helps to nail down the form of the thing you’re trying to look at. Toward the end, though, you mention gameplay patterns and storyline patterns existing separately in the same place (I also like the storytelling in Half-life), so let me throw this out there, as it might be a similar kind of disparity. The way I see it (and I think lelangir mentioned this in a comment to my post), playing a game results in the creation of two narratives: the narrative within the game itself — the game’s story, in other words — and the human narrative surrounding the playing of the game. The playing of certain games results in more of one kind of narrative than the other; for example, when I get a high score in Tetris, it’s more about the human narrative of my having played my thumbs off until I nailed the high score than about any kind of inherent story in Tetris. Let’s say we wanted to take those human narratives into consideration (and, I mean, some games don’t give us much else to work with in the way of story); would that be akin to reader-response criticism in literature, or would it work considerably differently? And do we have to study the two narratives in isolation, or can we look at them together? That’s what I’ve been thinking about on this topic lately.
I think that would be like reader-response. Hold on, I have that essay around here somewhere (my ex-girlfriend finally returned my book)…
A few salient quotations from the beginning of Iser’s essay, “Interaction between Text and Reader”:
“Central to the reading of every literary work is the interaction between its structure and its recipient.” “We may conclude that the literary work has two poles, which we might call the artistic and the aesthetic: the artistic pole is the author’s text, and the aesthetic is the realization accomplished by the reader. In view of this polarity, it is clear that the work itself cannot be identical with the text or with its actualization but must be situated somewhere between the two.”
Something that strikes me, also, is that the things gamers as a group take away from games that heavily rely on story is how they completed each plot point. That is, we all see the same story, but we usually enjoy that privately. What we talk about together is *how* we did it. I might have used the sniper rifle, while you might have preferred the shotgun — so on. I think if a typical plot-narrative is present, to look at the video game as a whole, we do have to examine both narratives together. Even one of my hobby horses — storytelling in video games — relies on the way in which the game makes the story happen for the individual player. Call of Cthulhu: Dark Corners of the Earth is usually one of my examples, as it has a great insanity system in a first-person game. I avoid incidental things that add to my sanity, while I have friends who go out of their way to make the character as crazy as possible, to get more and more insanity effects.