Yes, videogames are toys.
I don’t think anyone’s saying that there isn’t human potential to videogames. It’s just that they aren’t really living up to that potential yet. Even in the best cases. Give ’em a couple of decades.
Ebert hasn’t spent much time with them. He hasn’t really thought about them. Freeman’s basically on mark in saying the problem is, we don’t really have the vocabulary down.
I responded to Ebert, telling him that although he was essentially right as far as he went with his argument, he was a little off base in what he was using to judge. He says the main problem with videogames is that they ask for user input, so there isn’t any “authorial control” to them. Well, sure there is. The control is, as with film or novels, in the rules that the fictional world goes by. The difference is really just in what the different media study.
Film is about the juxtaposition of imagery over time, and what that can do to us. Videogames are about cause and effect, and what that ultimately can do to us.
The reason most videogames are kind of trivial right now is that few games really bother with the idea of consequences. I don’t even necessarily mean within the gameworld itself, although in some cases that could be a good step. I just mean emotional consequences. Given that almost all videogames are based on physical violence, you can see how they’re a little hard to take seriously.
This is the problem with the whole “videogames are supposed to be fun!” argument. Not really. Videogames are supposed to elicit some kind of emotion in the player. It’s the quality of that emotion which the medium and indeed the game must be judged on. That, and the elegance with which the emotion is elicited.
This is not to imply that every videogame must be “serious” — meaning Important or Dark or Thoughtful or Artsy or what-have-you. Or that most should be. Or that any should be, really. I still can’t bring myself to play killer7 because the beginning annoyed me so much. I’m just saying that they should try to be a little more human, is all.
Ideally, every videogame offers us a unique perspective of the Way Things Are. The way life works. What the rules are, what the possibilities are.
Are there any videogames out there that revolve around the bizarre way rules work when you’re a child? I don’t mean the invisible walls that don’t let you explore that part of a level just “because I said so”. I mean all of the little lies and half-truths and simplifications that are handed to us, either to get us to obey or to shut up or to mask that our parents don’t really know the answer — or just to toy with us. What about a game that explores that world, and the fear that comes along with potentially violating a rule by accident. The fear that comes with being called in that certain tone of voice, even if you don’t remember doing anything bad.
There are so many interesting things to explore. Instead we’re mostly just collecting trinkets and shooting things. See something, shoot it, get points. Cause and effect. We’ve still yet to progress past Space Invaders.
I guess maybe the reason I like older games so much, especially things like scrolling shooters and fighting games, is how honest they are. Somewhere in the last fifteen years, between the RPG explosion and the SNES and 3D and full-motion video, things have gotten kind of distracted. There’s this idea that videogames are better than they ever have been, that because people have (in some cases) learned how to put together the old pieces rather more competently than before, we’re at the heights of the craft and the art of game design. It’s all inbred bullshit. A group hug about how great Videogames are for their own sake. It’s a lie, like William Gibson’s computer-generated pop stars. Or like pop music as a genre and an industry, really.
Everyone’s been so busy looking down that something’s gotten lost and no one’s much noticed: the justification for any of this shit being here to begin with. Why are we doing this? Why are we playing videogames? Why are they being made? The only answer is that it’s because they’re videogames!
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Now. This is real, and it’s a real problem. Most people just don’t have a name for it yet. They don’t know how to describe it. The industry’s getting restless. People are always complaining about sequels and about EA and about lack of good IP. Japan’s gaming industry has been imploding for a while. People keep predicting crashes. People keep talking about how jaded they’re getting, and about how much better videogames used to be. To shrug off any of that, no matter how much you might be thrilled with things as they are now, is pretty hard to excuse.
For all the talk about how healthy the industry is, how much money it’s making, as a percentage of the population videogames have exactly the same market saturation they did twenty years ago, during the NES era. There’s just more on the market, and the people who buy videogames are getting older and buying more. New people aren’t really playing videogames. And if they are, they’re doing it at about the same rate as existing players grow disillusioned.
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If modern videogames tend to take the player for granted, I guess it’s because they take videogames for granted. Everyone does, really. Videogames are videogames. They’re Mario and Pokemon and Grand Theft Auto and everything we’ve ever seen. That’s all kind of poisonous. It’s best we just put it out of our heads. Those are examples of what has been done with videogames. Most of them are very well-done, for what they are. They’re just sketches, though. Videogames can be so much more interesting. So much more relevant. To see how, don’t look at videogames; look into yourself. Look at your life. Look around your town. Look at the news. Society. Look at why you like anything. Look at what makes Catch-22 such a great work and not just a funny story about World War II.
For those of you have attained enlightenment from widget-gathering, feel free to ignore this whole argument.