JOHN THE OBSCURE ™
By John Ruch
© 2005
Toward a Critical Theory of Video Games
Video games, in artistic terms, are about where movies were in the late 1920s. That is to say, they comprise a sophisticated and potent but still nascent medium that is only going to become more significant in decades to come.
Like all great art, they deserve a criticism to match, and will cease to be great without it. (Witness modern movies—and modern movie criticism.) Commerce and technology will ensure the continued production of video games for years to come, but it will be up to critics whether they are regarded, and regard themselves, as art.
Recognizing this inexorable significance, a few years ago I proposed video game reviews to a major newspaper I wrote for. To my surprise, I was told the paper already ran video game reviews. I had to dig deeply into a weekend edition to find this elusive creature: a syndicated featurette that consisted essentially of tips on which button combinations result in specialty moves in Nintendo console games.
The Generation X version of a chess column, such tripe embodies the problem with the current state of video game criticism: mechanistic, myopic and often condescending.
Many publications, including the paper previously referred to, now run syndicated video game features that are a bit wordier, a bit more narrative, but essentially the same thing: insider-y, superficial, favoring console games over the far superior PC platform.
This type of “criticism” is mostly a sop to already-interested readers, a way of acknowledging they exist without actually offering them anything.
Such condescension toward video games can also be seen in journalistic reporting about the medium. This consists predominantly of expressions of horror over video game content and how it will turn our children into lust killers, and business reporting about the “surprising” success of the medium, product placements within it, etc. In all cases, the emphasis is on extreme cases and curiosities—people with gaming addictions, easter eggs hidden in games—that actually say little about the state of the medium, let alone respect it.
Some academic articles and books take video games seriously, but their approach tends to be empiricist, not artistic, focused on the economic or behavorial/social impacts of gaming.
What is left is a gaping hole in mainstream popular criticism, cultivating ignorance of what is already an exciting and rich body of outstanding modern (post-1990s computing renaissance) video games: the powerful and often moving drama of “Planescape: Torment” and “Baldur’s Gate”; the savage wit of “Grand Theft Auto”; the unearthly beauty of “Morrowind”; the Hitchcockian tensions of “Splinter Cell” and “Half-Life”; the amazingly self-created, neverending worlds of “EverQuest” and “Neverwinter Nights.” Any one of these games is enough to illustrate that video games are the next great artistic medium to emerge after movies.
It is time for video game criticism to catch up.
The Problems of Video
Game Criticism
Obviously, video game criticism faces the elemental external difficulty that all groundbreaking, youth-based movements face: sheer ignorance, suspicion and even hostility from the publishers who still hold the purse-strings (a system even the wonders of the Internet have yet to untangle).
This problem is perhaps intensified by video games’ roots in other forms the masses also don’t get—role-playing games, coding, punk rock, anime—and its general association with intelligent fans in an anti-intellectual American era.
However, this is a problem that tends to solve itself economically. As media become more popular and significant, they generate more advertising revenue, and publishers feel the need to make at least a pretense of paying attention.
The real danger is that critics—who tend to be fans—will themselves buy into this system. A real problem in video game criticism today is lazy dimwits who willingly churn out bland formula reviews just so they can enjoy the benefits of an endless supply of free video games.
However, video games have several unique aspects and circumstances that hobble even passable attempts at serious (if still more tech-minded than literary) criticism, such as that on GameSpot.com.
One of these aspects can be summed up as ambiguity—both technological and narrative.
Video game technology is not unified and is constantly being updated. Consoles are all different and have different games produced uniquely for them. PCs have wildly different components and processing capacities, changing the way the game looks and plays between computers. (Some games cannot even be played on low-end systems.) Games produced for both PCs and a console can be very different on the differing systems—lacking entire scenes or gameplay features, for example.
In this sense, most people never really play a video game the way it was meant to be played back when it was being created on super-duper production computers. With the variations in systems and in audio/video capabilities, it could be said that video games are not a medium but media. (Arguably, this is happening with all electronic media; e.g., movies on DVDs.)
An even more significant element of ambiguity is that video games are, obviously, participatory. Some games are extremely interactive; even those that are fairly basic maze-running games challenge the user to come up with a personalized solution. The bottom line is that the playing experience tends to be unique for each player (which indeed is a major appeal of the medium). This can become extreme in online persistent worlds where the game never ends; open-ended games that allow “play” to continue even when the main story is over; and games that allow (or are hacked to allow) players to create their own games with the code.
The old moronic anti-critic complaint, “Did you even see the same [movie, work of art, TV show, etc.] I did?” can actually become valid in the world of video games. The answer is likely to be “no,” to a significant degree. It’s an entertainment boon and a critical bane.
Another complicating factor of interactivity is that it emphasizes genre distinctions. A film critic might not prefer a particular genre, but can passively observe it anyway. But in video games, a critic might be literally unskilled and unable to progress in a particular genre, such as complex strategy games.
Ironically, while video games have so many unique elements as a medium, a critical danger is thinking of them too much like movies.
There is certainly some literal technological convergence of movies and video games—enough that, I believe, film critics must become video-game-literate if they are to consider themselves competent. The same computer graphic techniques are often used in both media, especially as movies become significantly computer-generated. Computer-animated movies such as “Lord of the Rings” and the recent “Star Wars” prequels are essentially indistinguishable from their own video games. Meanwhile, video games borrow major elements of narrative technique and “camera angles” (often described as “cinematic”) from movies. The similarities are interesting even in such obscure phenomena as fans using video game code to create their own movies.1
But the convergence is far from complete. Overselling the similarities buries the unique powers of video games—interactivity, creativity, viewer immersion, narrative length and depth.
The wrongheaded, phony comparisons to movies are often simply done for critical convenience. Movie criticism is the only kind of criticism most people are familiar with or have engaged in themselves (especially in the Internet Movie Database age). As a former professional movie critic, I understand the urge and the convenience. But I also sense the dangers—especially since so much movie criticism is itself godawful.
The negative aspect borrowed from movie reviews is a slangy, superficial approach with heavy emphasis on (but lightweight explanation of) visuals and camera angles.
A final problem facing criticism is the term “video game” and the general concept of the medium as a game. It’s a convenient term, but rather trivializing and, I think, rarely accurate. Most of the early classics like “Space Invaders” and “Pac-Man” were intended to be practically unwinnable and should be classed more as pastimes than games. Today’s offerings tend to be so sophisticated that puzzle elements are just that—elements. It would be like calling mystery novels “games” because they’re narrative puzzles that the reader follows and is invited to solve as they go. Narrative tends to dominate puzzle in today’s video games. Video games today are a specialized form of storytelling more than games per se.
Toward a Criticism of
Video Games
As I’ve implied, an essential basis for improvement would be simply taking video games and their criticism seriously. I won’t turn this essay into a dictionary, nor am I interested in undertaking a criticism of criticism. The basics of art criticism can be gleaned in many other places.
However, it’s worth emphasizing a couple of basics that are particularly lacking in today’s video game criticism.
More independent, outsider perspectives are sorely needed, as the medium is still heavily dominated by youngish, jargon-addicted white men.
Also, critics must be thorough and hearty, perhaps moreso than in any other medium. They need to invest the time to play and investigate games thoroughly, which can run anywhere from 24 to more than 100 hours. They must also play as many games as possible in all genres so as to have a holistic view of the medium. Too many are now mired in fanboy overspecialization and a general aura of prejudgment.
And while I would be wary of importing the auteur theory from movie criticism (itself used mostly as a narrative convenience), there has to be more individual recognition and knowledge of the writers and coders who create games—perhaps particularly those who create the coolest, most innovative moments within a given game. Their ideas, theories, insights and influences are currently masked by a 500-name credit crawl at the end of the game, with very few exceptions even within fandom. Of course, this would also entail revealing video game production houses to be vicious white-collar sweatshops, which I consider a side benefit.
As far as securing venues for a new video game criticism, the economic aspect has to be attacked head-on. I do not advocate the wanton introduction of commerciality into reviewing, which is already far too corrupted by money. But the very presence of reviews is ultimately revenue-driven under the current sociopolitical system. Video game companies themselves can greatly help by advertising games in more publications. This will teach publishers—through money, the only guru they follow—that games are important and worthy of review. Today, most movie publicity agencies don’t place movie ads in publications that don’t carry film reviews. Likewise, no major publication now considers itself complete without at least one staff film critic. The video game industry could adopt a similar advertising model.
So much for old-school issues. The really significant effort must be made toward developing new critical language for video games’ unique challenges.
I spoke of the problem of ambiguity in video games. This must be viewed as a source of fruitful, creative tension and choice, not something to propose a solution for (because it is critically insoluble). Criticism is itself an art, and like all arts benefits from contradiction and complexity.
Dealing with the technological aspect of ambiguity is pretty easy and obvious—the critic decides whether they’re writing about the game in its highest-performance form, or more as the average geek will see it.
But in the humanistic part of criticism—the really important stuff—the ambiguity will always remain due to the unique aspects of gameplay. You can only play your game, not everybody else’s.
Therefore, video game criticism must be a criticism of possibilities. This is a new and difficult concept. We’re used to reviews that are almost wholly interpretive—what happened and what it was like. Video game criticism must be about what happened and what could have happened—as much speculative as interpretive.
When addressed at all in current criticism, this facet of video games is usually shorthanded as “replayability”—i.e., is it worth replaying the whole thing as, say, a wizard rather than a fighter. This mechanistic, gameplay-oriented commentary has its place, but the narrative and emotional impact of such interactivity have to be discussed, too, and indeed most prominently. One of the key emotional powers of video games is the knowledge that your choices have enormous significance in the story; thus, what might have happened looms as large as what did happen—much as in real life.
By the same token, all do-it-yourself elements of video games must be fully explored and commented upon. I especially refer to adventure-building kits included in many games these days that allow players to write their own video games. These are typically given no significant treatment whatsoever, even though they’re often the most exciting and innovative part of a game. “Neverwinter Nights” was a mediocre game, but a groundbreaking phenomenon as a DIY module-builder. Now thousands of people trade their own custom-made “Neverwinter Nights” adventures online, at least a dozen of which are superior to the original commercial product. Indeed, such amateur products should be reviewed themselves. (There is a mildly moderated forum in which amateurs do so, in sore need of principles such as the ones enumerated here.)
These DIY elements are also important because they are another unique distinction of the artform. Video games aren’t just about passive consumerism; they have participatory, creative elements.
For this reason, they require their own language. It is awkward to write about video games, because on the one hand there is the storyline with its incredibly hypnotic power derived from the player’s personal involvement; and on the other hand there is the ticky-tacky stuff of gameplay and online connection and custom module-building.
I propose that it might be appropriate for video game criticism to adopt the “in-game”/“out-of-game” (i.e., in-character/out-of-character) language of role-playing games. It seems reasonable for the part of the criticism that addresses the narrative to be presented literally in first-person narration—after all, the player “did” it all himself or herself. The out-of-game elements could be discussed separately and objectively. This technique could be as strict as actually delineating “in-game” and “out-of-game” sections of the review.
However it is done, video game criticism certainly needs to train more attention on the psychology and emotion of gaming, which today’s quasi-professional boy-critics generally lack the emotional openness to do.
First-person games in particular are dreamlike experiences; the immersion is thorough and the sense of outside time disappears.2 I literally dream about games if I play them excessively, part of which may be a learning-related response in the brain (we tend to dream about any newly learned repetitive skill), but which also seems linked to their hallucinatory nature. I’ve seen many players refer to this dreamy phenomenon, but I’ve never seen a critical treatment of it. That must change. A contrast of the in-game and out-of-game experiences as they mentally diverge would be interesting indeed.
Another problem I mentioned before is the potentially unskilled critic facing a challenging game. This is, of course, not insuperable. A critic could muddle through anyway, if badly, and sometimes difficult play is a criticism of itself.
But it could also be that video game criticism will require its own techniques, and that this might be such a case. It may sound a little bit crazy, but why not experiment with a kind of Ebert and Roeper set-up in which one partner—a pan-skilled button wizard—does all the hard playing, while the other partner observes the game critically, freed from the constraints of his or her skill level?3
I can think of several objections to this myself, but I also see no reason why it wouldn’t be a provocative and fruitful experiment—one of the responsibilities of the critic, I believe.
This also ties into my interest with experimenting with new ways of playing and observing video games. Internet cafes are already popular places for multiplayer games like “Warcraft,” but why not create such a set-up for high-end single-player games like the latest “Elder Scrolls” and “Splinter Cell,” so average folks can play them even if they can’t afford the required hardware? (I naturally envision personal save-game accounts with some kind of encryption, so they can keep coming back.) An exhibition(ist) factor could be tied into this: Other people could sit and watch select skilled players play on a big screen of some kind, maybe while munching pizza and popcorn. Just watching someone play a visually exciting new video game is already better than watching 90 percent of today’s movies.
OK, that was a crazy, tangential idea. But criticism must involve crazy, tangential ideas. It has to envision and suppose as much as it declares and pontificates.
In that vein, criticism must attempt to look ahead—or even forge ahead—to the future of the medium. This should be up to the brains of the critics, but I’d like to note a couple of potentially interesting areas.
Criticism should be taking a hard and comprehensive look at the convergence of gaming and the Internet: not just the ubiquitous online multiplayer gaming, but the lesser-known world of module-sharing and the new “1984”-ish world of games that require an Internet connection to play (sieg heil, “Neverwinter Nights” and “Half-Life 2”) for reasons of “security” and who knows what other evils.
Due to my own biases and preferences, I also think the role-playing genre should get special critical attention. Story is the most significant aspect of the medium, I still believe, and RPGs have the most story. Thus, they have the most potential for being the place the truly great, breakthrough game will come from—a drama or avant-garde experiment that draws the attention of even non-gamers. (This will be a mixed blessing, but it will happen.)
Critics should also be considering the term “video games.” I think this is another problem that will solve itself. I think they will cease to be known as “games” at some point, at least overall (“game” may become a subgenre tag), through some neologistic quirk that is impossible to predict, much less to craft. But it is the job of the critic to think over the term, suggest alternatives if they seem fit, and possibly to be the one who coins the term of the future.
Most of all, criticism must be unusually alive and responsive, because video games are still vibrant infants growing rapidly.
Several years ago, a modern art museum I respect highly held an exhibit on computer art using then-new media like CD-ROMs—a bunch of highfalutin’ stuff with touch-screen navigations through modern dance assemblages and the like. Out in the lobby was a collection of old arcade video games. Naturally, that was the best part of the show. As I protested at the time, video games are cutting-edge modern art, not lobby novelties. Giving old fogeys the new tech was totally the wrong way to explore the computer era.
Video game criticism must not make the same mistake. We should not be trying to seek old-fashioned glory. Video games cannot exist frozen in a museum—either a literal building or a metaphorical museum of old critical approaches. Otherwise, we’ll just create a monstrosity as dead as the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame. Video games belong on our desks and in front of our TVs and most of all within our heads and in our hands.
We must speak in their language, and the first thing we must say is that video games are art. Let the games begin.
1 The convergence of movies and
computing is prominently (though I think
mistakenly) discussed in the introduction to Adam Nathan’s recent (and
hilariously titled) “Windows Presentation Foundation Unleashed,” a handbook to
Microsoft’s new .NET code underlying the user interface of the new
2 More specifically, while I find
video games to be very intense, vivid experiences, I generally forget when and
for how long I played them—unable to say whether it took me a week or a month
to finish a game, and to name a date range more specific than six months or so.
This is duplicative of vivid dreaming.
3 This reference turned out to be
somewhat ironic as I have learned Roger Ebert recently caused a mini-scandal
among his fans by denouncing video games as not being art—specifically because
of their element of interactivity. Unsurprisingly, he did this while confessing
to being a video game ignoramus. I might add that he is a quintessential
passive-voyeur critic and someone who praises Chuck Norris and Steven Seagal
movies; but it is more pertinent to note that his argument revolved around
fetishizing “authorial control” as the element of serious art. I am unaware of
any game so interactive that it lacks authorial control, nor can I
conceptualize how one would function. But I have no doubt that it would still
be art—all the more so, in fact. The creation of freedom is still creative, as
I think little things like, oh, the existence of our very country demonstrate
pretty well.
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