JOHN THE OBSCURE ™
By John Ruch
© 2005
Further Notes on Video Game Criticism
Rather than weigh down my previous essay on this subject with endnotes, I offer the following further notes on a theory (and, I might add, practice) of video game criticism. Some of these points are more crucial than anything I mentioned in the original essay; like prestigious dinner guests, their late arrival does not imply inferiority.
· The absolutely greatest problem facing video game criticism is that all gaming is itself critical. By that I mean the viewer/player is actively engaged in pushing, prodding and exploring the work. Gaming is ultimately hacking, an exploration of the limits of the game code. Gaming always involves figuring out what the underlying code will allow one to do in the virtual environment, and there are inevitably bugs that lay some of this bare. (This goes even further in the subset of gamers who actually use the game’s code to create alternative versions of the game or new games altogether.) No other artform allows (indeed, demands) this kind of exploration and deconstruction—at least, not as its essential element. Everyone who plays a video game is a critic of it. The key to great criticism will be objectifying that process, or otherwise giving insight on it.
· In a related point, and as I’ve said elsewhere, video games are essentially about exploration. I didn’t go into this crucial theme in my original essay, but was reminded of it by a GameSpy.com article previewing “The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion.” The author, Allen Rausch, says that, “To an extent, all RPGs [role-playing games] are about exploration.” As I’ve argued elsewhere, all computer games are 100 percent about exploration. The entire point of early arcade games like “Pac-Man” or “Donkey Kong” was battling for the right to see what the next screen looked like. In incredibly huge modern games like the “Elder Scrolls” series, that ethos has evolved from “what happens next” to “anything can happen”—total immersion in a believable, enormous environment. I’m not sure any game is really about its battles anymore—maybe they never were—but rather about the worlds they create. Ultimately, this is an exploration of computer code, to go back to my hacking point. But at the same time, it’s about exploring a dream world.
· The exploration aspect of video games, as well as its social aspects (multiplayer games), are often conceived of as taking place in “virtual reality.” (Not that anybody uses that term anymore, but it’s what we would default to in describing it.) But I think that video games are becoming less virtual and more concrete—indeed, they probably already are moreso than is obvious. For one thing, the fundamental exploration and exploitation of the underlying code is very concrete. More importantly, as video games converge with the Internet, where people playing commercial and custom games en masse, meeting and affecting each other, they become effectively “real.” The science fiction author William Gibson made a similar important distinction in a talk on cybernetics, in which he mocked the concept of “virtual reality” and said we instead live in a world of “augmented reality” in which we are already human-machine cyborg hybrids; the Internet, he argued, is the world’s largest cybernetic organism. Obviously, I agree with Gibson, and I would say video games are certainly becoming (or have become) “augmented reality.” Just as one example, in online gaming people now meet in fantastical environments and exciting circumstances, their personas buffed up with battle suits or magical abilities. It’s augmented hanging out. This aspect of gaming is only going to become more significant and prevalent.
· A final point on exploration in video games: You always do find a limit. Video games ultimately take place in a Flat Earth kind of realm, where there’s always an edge (sometimes literally—you plunge off the map and into the ether). This affects video game narrative technique in a way that is perhaps comparable only to mystery novels or surreal/postmodern fiction. One of the interesting (and often aggravating) things about mystery fiction is its narrative ambiguity (to go back to a key term from my original essay): the narrative is in flux between what’s real (or what’s true) and what isn’t. On a detailed level, this means the reader is often unsure, when encountering something strange in the narrative, whether it’s deliberately, significantly strange, or just some flaw in the writing or an aspect of writing conventions. Video games have a very similar narrative technique (and problem), and one made incarnate by game physics—a major challenge is figuring out how to interact with the game world, and on the detail level, whether particular actions are allowed, banned or just difficult to pull off with the right button combo. For example, I was recently playing the first-person shooter game “Half-Life,” and encountered a stack of metal boxes, about the size of footlockers, I wished to climb over. But the game wouldn’t let me climb or jump over them, nor grab and drag them. Nor would they budge an inch under high-power gunfire or even high explosives. It turned out that I could indeed leap over the boxes, but I needed to do a special, slightly more complicated type of button-pushing to achieve the required height. Arguably, that is realistically akin to learning to jump (if easier to learn and more reliable). At the same time, it’s utterly unrealistic that I can’t climb over a waist-high box or blow it to smithereens with a military bomb. It’s easy to grumble about mechanics triumphing over realism in a case like that. But in fact, the whole scenario was a narrative device for making it difficult for me to access the chamber beyond. It served story, not physics. In that way, it’s very similar to mystery fiction. All of this is a long way of saying the similarities between video game narrative and that of mystery fiction and postmodern fiction should be explored. Physical (or just physics) challenge as narrative device seems a fruitful field to explore.
·
My comments on the possibilities of video game
exhibition in my original essay came days before I became aware of the ESPN 2
TV series “Madden Nation,” a reality/tournament show about people playing the
“Madden NFL 06” football video game. While mired in its conventional format,
much of the show is devoted to watching virtual professional football games.
Think about how revolutionary that is: a sports TV channel airing a video-game
version of professional sport. Even more potentially revolutionary is that the
video games could well be better than most actual professional football games.
(The “Madden” line of football games is already more responsible for the fame
of
· While I do regard story-oriented games as the most significant and artistic, there’s no doubt that genres such as sports games are art as well. The “Madden” football games are wonders of artificial intelligence and should be appreciated abstractly as such. There is a real danger that such genres will be ignored, or commented on only by fans interested in their overt context (e.g., sports fans).
· It can’t be said enough that video game criticism must be a criticism of possibility. Another strong example: the fans who have turned the first-person shooter “Half-Life 2” into brand new role-playing games. Criticism must consider not just what a video game does, but how its code might be appropriated (through open source or otherwise). The “engine” (the core game mechanics and artificial intelligence system) should be critiqued. This is important not just in thinking about what code-rippers might do, but has commercial consequences as well, as sequels and other games are likely to use the engine. The engine is another unique element of video game art, narrative and critical theory. Books may have common plots, music may have common chords or themes, movies rob and remake each other shamelessly, but many video games share the same literal underlying code, and hence the same interaction with their internal realities. I should probably have my hand slapped for reaching for a jazz metaphor here, but the interplay between similarity and deviation in engine-sharing is fascinating. Much literary theory is devoted to looking at varying stories and finding common formats, techniques and themes; in video games, it can work in exactly the opposite way, as the critic knows the unifying engine from the start and can then examine the creative variations. The differences between the commercial “Half-Life 2” and its homemade versions are striking. So is the difference between “Half-Life 2” and other commercial games that use its engine, like the RPG “Vampire: The Masquerade—Bloodlines.” Code duplicating, exploring, ripping apart and putting back together again—such are the possibilities of video games and their criticism.
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