A lot of folks compare the video game industry to movies. I know I used to. And to some extent I still do. The film industry is still relatively young and lots of people have dreams of “playing a movie.” Movies have a little to do with video games, but not much. Nonetheless, looking towards older forms of media is a good start in developing a language for talking about this new medium of video games. Why not books? Music? Or just plain life? Let’s break it down.
Why do we want to be a movie?
As I pointed out earlier, gamers once thought the ultimate gaming experience was playing something so real, it was like playing a movie. Words like “cinematic gameplay” have become selling points on large titles beefing up their integrated cut-scene chops. But what does film [as an art form] really have in common with games?
- They both involve moving pictures. [film, animated frames etc.]
- Both attempt to deliver some kind of narrative.
- They are both linear. [A point of contention, but games are linear, because the player lives within a linear time-frame, i.e. Planet Earth. Even non-linear games can't erase the player's memory.]
Frankly, the comparison has much more to do with business/industry behind-the-scenes types of deals than it has anything to do with the process and expressive characteristics of the two mediums. Hollywood has acted as a model for large publishers/developers to produce games, and it may have been a good move for the industry, but not the art form.
Hey, devs are the new rockstars!
As much as I’d like this to be true, it’s simply not going to happen. The process of creating games is not an act of performance. Their memes and humor can be translated into a culture of sorts, but that’s about it. And besides, watching people develop games is boring. Trust me.
Music runs an interesting parallel to games insofar as that it relies on technical excellence [muscianship] but it ends there. Music is moving because of its rhythm, exploring the pace of the human heart and elaborating on that in order to control our emotions. That’s a gross oversimplification, but I think it works here. Music can only go so far until it is performed live. It’s then that the connection is made personal between the author and our ears joined with “the moment.” When, all at once, everyone is engaged simultaneously in both the creation, execution and retention of the musical expression at hand. When done right, it is an awe-some experience, and often a religious one for me. But without those elements of the musicians playing their piece, the collective audience receiving it and the overwhelming fact that we all know it’s “all happening now,” that is lost.
What’s the most interactive ancient media?
Books. Words are the most abstract representation of an idea we’ve ever had, and somehow we manage to communicate using their tiny minutiae everyday. This doesn’t exclude speaking either. Speech is the most ancient form of communication, but still, the word “tree” has absolutely nothing to do with a real tree. It’s just an abstract piece of data used to represent something explicit to a certain group of people. But I’m going to leave speech, since that’s performance art. But in books, this is where the interactivity comes in. It takes a brain to translate all that crazy language into workable imagery that can be understood, moved around and formulated into a world. The simple nature of words and representational glyphs generate an environment for the reader to imagine their own world, in their own way, whether it be separate from the author’s intention or not.
Games are the same way, not just video games. The rules of the game provide a world of bounds for the players to interact. Even if the game is sound and proven, players may choose to play it in a way that they think is fun, and perhaps outside the intention of the author. Say for instance, team-killing in co-op Halo to prevent any progress. While Bungie may not mind, their original intention for the co-op experience probably had more to do with the pacing of the action and drama of each mission than accounting for 50 master chief corpses blown sky-high with a pile of frag grenades after hours of assassination TKs.
But that’s what ’s great about our video games, isn’t it? Expanding the bounds of the worlds we love to inhabit. In great books, the worlds will travel with me. They’ll follow me into my sleep and iterate inside my dreams. The reality of that world, that impossible “science fiction,” becomes real in my head and all those books had were some ink on a book of paper. I’ll cut it short, but here’s a few more about books and games.
Also, from a business perspective. Books are bought and consumed in private. They are not to be spoken aloud, played or shared. You purchase games in the exact same way. There are no video game premiers [Cliffy B aside], and no awards for best performance [screw the VGAs, it's an adapter not an award], and you can’t go see it with a date. You possess it, and consume it on your own time however you want. Sometimes you don’t play your game for weeks and then come back to it, to that… bookmark.
Nonetheless, the artform of writing still has little to do with designing games themselves. It is much more useful to think of the experience of reading in regards to playing video games, than applying the process of writing to game development.
Playing games in the car.
There’s really no prior medium to inform us on the nature of interactivity. Well except one. But it’s one that was here all along. Life. I know. I’m really deep. But seriously, one of the most interesting quips about game development I’ve ever heard is the little story from Miyamoto on how he got the idea for Mario.
I got the idea for Mario while riding a train. I had a window seat and found tracing the trees and clouds with my finger to be pretty entertaining.
~ Miyamoto, not the quote, but paraphrased by me
I thought this was genius, and immediately thought back to all the games I would play with my brother when riding in the backseat of our station wagon. We’d come up with some stupid stuff to pass the time. One game was shooting all the birds with our “laser” [a recessed cap that covered a screw on the door handle] while calling out “got one!” to one another. Perhaps more promising, I would pick out a speck of bug guts on the windshield and focus on it. By moving my head around, I would dodge the oncoming terrain, weave between the dotted lines of the interstate, and jump around in the clouds. To this day, this is probably why I play with an inverted mouse/joystick.
There is nothing more interactive than life itself. And often, a single life has no real cumulative meaning. Even those with great purpose, such as MLK, Ghandi or Bill Gates [wait, what?] have meaning as icons to the greater society. Unto themselves, their lives were [and are] probably much more fragmented than we would care to know. Our lives are filled with short bits of meaning when the pieces come together at the right time to create something greater than the sum of their parts. My life is chaotic, imbalanced, unfair and mostly dull, but it is the most important thing in the world because I am doing it!
Comparing games to other media again!?
Maybe I’m late to the party, or just hung around too long to be kicked out onto the patio with road-beer in hand. This is just my thought-vomit over the last few days of driving around the barren Midwest.