JOHN THE
OBSCURE ™
©
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.
Posted Dec.
24, 2005.