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.