Project Obrigado Detour: Should Games Be More?

I’m about to stretch my liberal arts muscles a little bit, so this may be a bit dry and possibly pompous.  Bear with me and I promise to make some kind of lewd comment at the end, possibly followed by a shouty non-sequitur.  Good?  Alright.

This being the internet there is always debate on every topic, and consensus is rarely ever reached.  Further, topics that should be intelligently discussed are degraded by flame wars and troll-baiting.  I don’t think that means anyone should avoid an argument - I’m a lifetime believer in the power of conversational conflict to generate new thoughts.  What follows logically is that gratitude should happen when someone disagrees with you, not resentment and defensiveness.  Why would anyone be upset when presented with the opportunity to think about something?  And since an idea cannot survive without its first principles, I’m descending into the one I believe to be core to my project like Tyrion Lannister into a pile of whores.  Games can and should be more than entertainment without sacrificing their nature, which is art.  This'll be damn long without tackling the problem of gamification and addiction so that'll come later, because I appreciate the danger there.  Lets just say I've had some first-hand experience.  Also, I guess y’all don’t have to wait until the end for the lewdness.

This goes back to the age-old question about whether art exists for its own sake or whether it exists as a tool for another end.  Whether that end is something positive or negative the question remains the same.  I believe, like so many other things, the answer lies somewhere in the middle.  There’s no denying the fact that art can be used as a tool.  Its been used to pose moral questions, force important issues to the consciousness of society, and even to implant beliefs that on the outside appear repellent.  But should it?  I believe so, and further I believe a medium isn’t fully actualized until it is effectively used as such.  Because it’s also a relatively new medium, and because of my job I’m fairly familiar with it, I’ll use the example of television.  It wasn’t so long ago that TV was considered a completely useless pursuit - it was called the boob tube and “Kill Your Television” stickers were considered by some to be the mark of the true intellectual.  Also, television wasn’t “real art”.  But then came Sesame St., Schoolhouse Rock, Mythbusters, and others who were using the medium of television to teach as well as entertain.  In the educational system, finishing third grade with grade level or higher literacy is an important marker in whether or not a child will graduate high school.  In other words, if a child is reading well in third grade their chances of graduating high school increase dramatically.  And one of the biggest contributors to early school literacy?  Sesame St.  Slowly but inevitably people started to recognize television as something more than mindless entertainment, and in the process it has come into its own as a respected artistic medium.  Does that mean it wasn’t art before?  No, television has always been real art.  But once its capacity to inform and spark a sense of wonder was recognized, its power and depth increased.

But let’s think about the art itself for a moment - how exactly does it feel being forced to be useful and inspiring all the time?  In other words, shouldn’t art be able to exist for its own sake?  Beauty doesn’t have to be useful to inspire.  In fact, if utility is the primary focus and beauty - or in the case of games, play - the result is either bad art or no art at all.  I mentioned an article way back in my first blog on Project Obrigado that talked about games that were made to serve as mental health tools, and why they failed.  They failed because they were designed by shrinks with the utility of making someone better the prime focus instead of play.  They weren’t fun, and therefore defeated the purpose they were trying to accomplish.  You can’t twist art around and stuff it into a mold you create for it, you have to let it become what it truly is.  If that is something that only evokes emotion (or entertains), that’s just fine.  Games are art because (to paraphrase Aristotle) they are things that evoke emotion (fun, play, the heroic feeling or whatever) by using a particular medium (hardware and software).  Perhaps we should just leave them as they are.

Shiva the ice summon, right?  Bet those things are cold.  Moving on! Aristotle argues in his Ethics that true virtue lies somewhere in the middle between two extremes.  I happen to agree that finding the truest examples of things is somewhere in this blending, and whether or not you agree with me here depends on that statement.

Games, like any other art, can be taken down the line between emotion and thought to where they are evoking both.  And like any other art, if it goes too far it starts to become bad art (evoking thought more than emotion) and then not art at all.  Its not exact, I don’t think exactly the middle between thought and emotion is where designers should be aiming.  I don’t know where that line is, or even if there’s a line at all.  Like I said, I believe in the blending, and that extends into my views about human nature.  We are a mixture of thoughts and feelings, positives and negatives, material and metaphysical.  So I argue that in all our arts, such as literature and television and even music, this progression is inevitable and happens naturally.  It should be encouraged, not discouraged.

That does not mean that I think games that only entertain are worthless, but I do think games that evoke something beyond entertainment - whether that is thought, learning, a sense of wonder, or better well-being - create a response in us that is more powerful and complex.  Consider, for example, the Sweet Tart.  I frikkin love Sweet Tarts, and those chewy mini Sweet Tarts?  God help me, I have eaten an entire bag of those things in one day.  We’re talking the family sized bags you get from the supermarket here.  They are amazing little morsels of delight and I will never give them up.  But I can’t exactly live on them.  And if I’m really being honest, a plate of black cod with miso, some bok choy and noodles has more value to me than a roll of Sweet Tarts.

Food lust aside, mainly what I would like to say is that good games that are also tools are possible, as long as we let them be art and never forget the importance of play.  Perhaps this is already happening.  The artistry and technology needed to make those games more entertaining is also progressing naturally.  The importance of one doesn’t degrade the necessity of the other.

Right, I did promise random lewdness.  Well, there was the pile of whores up there.  And who doesn’t love a pile of whores?  Especially if there are boy whores because that’s just, you know, thoughtful.  Lip ferret rides for all!!

Storytelling in Games (there may be spoilers)

I've been thinking a lot about stories in videogames for a couple reasons, partially because I still haven't been able to force myself away from Starcraft and Guild Wars 2 and pick up Assassin's Creed 3 finally.  Its the first time in my life that games with a lesser emphasis on story have held me away from other games.  That's not to say those two games don't have a story, but its not the biggest focus.  The single player campaign for Starcraft was really well done and by the end if Jim Raynor hadn't rescued the Queen of Blades I would have raged at the screen like Rush Limbaugh.  But as cool as the story was, its taken a bottom shelf to the multiplayer aspect for me - the story is over and yet I still play.  That hasn't happened before.

Guild Wars 2's story is alright as far as it goes - I can tell its painted in very broad terms to accommodate thousands of players playing several races.  They did a good job with it - giving your character a few options at the beginning to introduce a little variety.  But it didn't really grab me, and honestly I kind of phase out during the dialog parts so I can get to the fighting and figure out what new fancy toy I'm going to get later.  Another first.  For most of my life, once the story was finished in a game (or I was no longer invested) I stopped playing.  There are so many sandbox games that encourage you to play past the endgame but I never did no matter how much I loved the game.  That probably has to do with the addition of other humans in play - playing Guild Wars with someone else is so much more fun than playing by yourself.

But it got me thinking - are mechanics alone enough to carry a game?  For my part, I don't think so.  Here's an example - Jak 2 & 3.  I loved those games.  I loved the mechanics, I loved the art, the character design, and I loved the hoverboard business.  But once the story (which is awesome) was done, the mechanics that I had loved so much no longer held any appeal for me.  It was time to move on.  Without a reason to play such as beating other people or furthering the story, I ceased to be interested.

So what makes a game story good?  This has to do with my complete inability to pick up Assassin's Creed 3 again.  I'm tired of that story.  It feels like Lost to me now, just and endless string of mysteries for the sake of extending its appeal.  I stopped watching Lost in the second season and I don't care how many people tell me it "gets awesome later".  I'm not going to watch it - its too long and hard and I honestly don't care about any of the characters anymore.  Some of them I actively hate.  And that's what happened with Assassin's Creed for me.  I love Ezio, but he's not enough to hold up a whole game for me, and this one doesn't even have Ezio in it.  It has all the future people who are, lets face it, boring and annoying all to hell.  So that's one point; if your series doesn't have good characters to hold the story up, even the most gilded wordsmithing isn't going to save you.

And another thing - I came to this conclusion trying to explain the Mass Effect series to a friend of mine - good stories don't have to be complicated.  I once went to a discussion panel with Jim Butcher and one thing he said that stuck with me is that you can make a good story about anything.  He made a bet with some people on a message board that he could base a story on Pokemon and Ancient Rome and have it be good, and he came out of that bet with the Codex Alera series.  When I was explaining Mass Effect to my friend I put it into these exact words - "There are giant monsters coming to kill everything alive and you have to stop it".  That's been done so many times, but as long as you do it right that formula will keep working until the goddamn end of time.  Same thing with one of my favorite games of all time - Dragon Age: Origins.  Giant monster coming to kill everything, you must stop it.  And yet that shit resonated with me so much that I started writing fan fiction again.  No you can't read it.

So, yeah.  Games don't need a complicated story to be good.  Don't dress up your series in a bunch of mysteries for the sake of being mysterious.  Write compelling characters, flesh out the lore, work on the mechanics.  Make the mechanics part of the story, I don't know.

I guess what I'm saying is don't make me compare your series to Lost.

An Apology to Silent Hill 3

A few years ago, I picked up Silent Hill 3 and started playing. I had never played a survival horror before, so I wasn't sure what to expect. What I did not expect was a main character who had to use her entire torso to swing a crowbar at a monster, and then take a couple seconds to breathe before trying again. Needless to say, I died a lot. Then I found a gun and rejoiced, for I would be able to mete out sweet revenge upon their scary butts. I'm sure you can guess what happened next: I ran out of ammo. Cue the dying. Eventually I got frustrated, gave up, and traded it in for whatever hacky-slashy thing I was excited about at the time. Probably a Devil May Cry knockoff, I don't remember.

And now I own my shame. I missed the point, Silent Hill 3, and I am sorry.

I went into the experience expecting something that was not survival horror. In my own defense, I wasn't at all familiar with the genre. I thought it would be your basic action game, but with some scary monsters and disturbing set pieces. And because my expectations were so off-base, I wrongly decided the game sucked.

What I didn't realize at the time was this: survival horror has nothing to do with being an action game. In Silent Hill 3, the fact that your protagonist is a teenage girl who can barely heft a crowbar adds to the terror. She's not supposed to be able to beat the monsters easily. When I was a kid, sometimes I would lie in bed petrified that one of my limbs would hang off the bed while I was sleeping and whatever was underneath would know I was there. Because the moment it found me, I was well and truly boned. That's what made it so scary - not just the fact that there were monsters, but also that it was completely beyond my power to fight them.

Take Dead Space for example. I admit, there were a few moments where I shrieked like a little girl when a necromorph popped out of a vent at me. But eventually I was conditioned to it and formed this equation: vent, dark corner, etc = monster coming out to chew my face off. Then it was just Isaac Clarke gleefully stomping necromorphs into pudding and finding creative ways to separate them from their limbs. Fun, but not exactly frightening. Yes, Isaac is supposed to be a mechanic with no real combat training, but that plasma cutter has necromorph murdering written all over it. And eventually you get weapons that have even more limb-severing capabilities. So Dead Space is basically what I thought Silent Hill 3 was going to be - an action game with creepy set pieces. And there's nothing wrong with that, I enjoyed it. But it wasn't that scary.

Now, I've heard that Silent Hill 3 is quite scary. So I'm going to see if I can find a copy in a bargain bin somewhere and try it again with the knowledge that comes from maturity. Could be that survival horror isn't my genre, or maybe a couple weeks from now my friends will find me huddled in my closet muttering about how I've run out of beef jerky.

The Poetics of Gaming

In Aristotle's Poetics, he breaks the various artistic works of his time down to one very basic principle - they are all at their core imitations. The only differences are the medium in which they are conveyed, the subject of the imitation, and the mode of presentation. Differences in medium and subject matter are fairly self-explanatory, but I got caught for a minute on the third difference. Here's an example I think works: Bloodsucking Fiends by Christopher Moore and Twilight. Both share the same medium (prose), and the same subject matter (vampires and love). But the former is a comedy, and the latter is not (not intentionally, anyway). If you haven't read Bloodsucking Fiends, you really should. Its a laugh riot. If you haven't read Twilight, well... probably best to keep it that way. Ok ok, enough of the jabs at Twilight, that's not what I came here for.

Aristotle goes on to examine the progression of several art forms, and comes up with what he believed were the necessary steps to make them good. Whether or not you agree with his conclusions, or even if you just think he's a stuffy long dead Greek, he does have a way of simplifying things to their basic roots. Every work of art does need these three elements. But enough with the boring philosophical stuff, lets talk about gaming!

A few weeks ago I had a conversation about video games with my mother. When I told her that eventually I would like to be involved in making them, she came back with the question "Don't you want to do something more meaningful with your life?", which started a discussion about video games as an art form. I know this topic is everywhere and there are lots of opinions on the subject, this being the Internet. But that conversation I had with my mom got me thinking. Eventually I got her to consider the idea that any video game had the three elements of imitation just like the works of famous painters or musicians. The medium is simply computer hardware instead of a canvas, so video games should be treated as an art form. But later I asked myself whether that was actually true. After all, if my mom was more versed in the library of games out there she could bring up 10 shovelware imitations of Nintendogs for ever one of my Shadow of the Colossus or Portal. So maybe games shouldn't be considered art. Unhappy with this conclusion, I kept thinking.

On the other hand, every medium has this problem. Probably the best example is film. There are hundreds of examples of great art in this medium, but there are thousands of bad films to choose from. So does that mean film is not an artistic medium? No. So why not games? I thought about it, and the conclusion I came to is this - its new. When the printing presses started churning out the first novels, I'm sure there were many detractors saying that this wasn't "real art", and yet now I bet no one will argue literature's place as a medium. Same with rock music, jazz music, talking films, and modern dance. They all went through the initial phase where people didn't take them seriously, and now its our turn. Games have to prove themselves to be an art form to the rest of the world. I know I'm not the first person to say this - its not exactly a radical conclusion, but its one worth repeating.

So how can we, the gamers, bring our medium out of the Cave and into the sunlight of Respectability? Well, not buying shovelware knockoffs of Nintendogs would be a good start. The more genuinely good games that come out, the closer we are. And that brings me to the question I want to analyze in this *blog* (I know that term is here to stay, but I still cringe.) What makes a game good? What elements contribute to that golden idol, the game that is also art? I don't know, but I want to find out. And what better way to do that than analyze aspects of games I'm playing? I'm not trying to make this a review site by any means, its just a few observations on game elements that contribute (or don't) to games finally being considered an art. Given my backlog of games, there will probably be a lot of RPGs as subject matter. Just a warning, but I promise to branch out.