by [name redacted]

Part one of my ongoing culture column; originally published by Next Generation, under the title “Culture: Games and Metaphor”.

For the last several months, this site and others have been nodding along to figures like Satoru Iwata explaining that everything you know is wrong; that everything you recognize as videogames is actually backward and childish, and making bold claims about what the future might hold for the medium. We’ve seen the “games as art” movement and “new games journalism”, and the backlash to both. It’s understandable enough; we’re human. We get attached to things; mere familiarity is enough to calm us down. Make the world a little less lonely.

Something I’ve not really seen addressed is, well, what’s wrong with videogames, anyway? The simple answer is that, in their current form, they’re pointless. Or, well. They’re not conducive to conveying a point, anyway. That’s not to imply that videogames need to be deep and significant and Important, with a capital “I”. Play three self-important artsy games in a row and you’ll want to do anything to escape. It’s just that there’s so much more than can be done with videogames, on a real, human level. There are so many ideas, so many emotions that they could illustrate for us in a way impossible anywhere else – and there’s such potential to make it all fun, and engaging. To make videogames actually significant to us as something other than an obsession or a diversion.

The idea is that videogames must move forward; there’s nothing necessarily wrong with what we’ve got, except that it ain’t going anywhere. It just exists for its own sake. Videogames are like Uroboros: they feed on their own tail, on their own history, a fetish unto themselves. They exist because they’re fun and they make money; they’re made the way they are because that’s the way they’ve been successfully made in the past.

So all right; let’s say I’ve got a point here, and that videogames in general aren’t really living up to their promise. Fair enough. What are they doing wrong, then? Or, better, what aren’t they doing? Though it’ll take a lot of words to explain it, it’s actually pretty simple: they simply don’t know a metaphor from a hole in the wall.

There Was a Hole Here. It’s Gone Now.

Funny thing, the human brain. You can see a hundred ships disappear over the horizon, yet until you make that leap of imagination – start making analogies to grapefruits or eggs – or unless someone explains it to you in those terms, it’ll never click, what’s happening. And yet if you do get that push, and if you’re receptive enough, a spark will go off in your head. This new realization will set off another. Then another. And just maybe the dominoes will keep going down.

Thus is the power of metaphor: it’s all nonlinear. All subconscious. It’s the way we’re able to make connections between seemingly disconnected ideas, and do such inane things as see patterns, form words that stand in for abstract concepts, and store all this information in our tiny little brains. If we had to process and store everything linearly, we’d be no better than hairless apes.

If it’s fair to say that metaphor is the fabric of human understanding – and it is – then consider that art is a language of pure metaphor. Art is a subconscious thing. It deals in shapes, concepts, ideas that you recognize intuitively, that would take a thousand words to explain.

In case anyone was wondering, this is the value of art: just as writing furthers your capacity for language and exercising increases your body’s energy, art flexes our command of metaphor, and thereby – logically enough – helps us process and store our own life experiences. You sometimes hear that art helps you understand the world. Well, that’s why; it’s an entirely practical benefit. The only reason it seems so flaky is that, by its very nature, art is irrational. If art does its job, you first get a general impression – something you can’t really describe – then maybe later, if you’ve got the time and energy, you break down what you saw. Figure out how you got from A to B.

There’s another reason people consider art flaky – and that’s because all too often it can become lost up its own backside: metaphor begins to stand in for metaphor, which stands in for metaphor, and no one knows or acknowledges where the original metaphor came from, or why. And that’s the thing: metaphor needs context, or else it’s basically meaningless. It’s an exercise in obfuscation – in making a work more and more impenetrable. It’s bad enough when people are unclear out of simple ignorance; when it’s done intentionally, you just feel like smacking the author. And it’s here where, I think, everyone’s on the same page in this discussion.

Now, with a good metaphor – assuming the metaphor is meant for you, meaning you’ve got the context that it’s assuming in its audience – you get the allusion and you move on, without a word. There’s no need to explain. No need to dwell or rationalize. No need for a twenty-minute tutorial that explains how to jump. No need for an info box to appear with every rupee you discover. You just run to the right, dodge the Goomba – or die trying – and jump up to hit that weird, shiny block labeled with a “[?]”. Everything is self-evident. Everything about the gameworld calls upon your natural human intuition.

Keeping It Real

This is not to say that a gameworld has to make sense, rationally – remember the “uneasy bedfellows” thing. Even if your goal is realism, there will always be compromises, simply in that videogames – as with movies, books, music – are not life; they are only imperfect, incomplete illustrations. This is not a weakness; it is their purpose. All expression is meant to illustrate a certain point, or certain set of points; there is always a focus. There will therefore always be need for shortcuts.

The key issue, rather, is one of verisimilitude. Though by definition any given world you draw up is going to be false, for its audience to engage with it – however abstract or ridiculous – it must be believable, according to its own rules. That means being internally consistent And to be consistent in a world where by definition you can’t literally account for everything means you’ve got to mask each shortcut in metaphor, so you and the player can just get on with your conversation – seamlessly.

Videogames have it a little tougher than other media, as they demand an additional level of abstraction not really found in other media. Whereas books and movies and music use metaphor in their representation – red means life, that goat in the background stands for death – the whole point of videogames is that you actively converse with the world given to you. Therefore, that interaction has to somehow be facilitated.

The Game is the Pong

An interface has two ends: the game and the player. The game deals you information with its heads-up displays and numbers and bars. You give it information back by jamming on buttons or a dance mat. Roll the joystick forward and hit the button, and the game knows you want to throw a fireball. Maybe it’s kind of clunky; after some practice you tend to get used to it.

A curious thing about metaphor is that it doesn’t necessarily have to be flawless, so long as it is functional and consistent with the rest of your world. In a 2D fighting game, life bars are a practical solution to show which fighter has been more badly beaten; complex button combinations are a convenient stand-in for the skill required in performing martial arts. It doesn’t really matter that the fighters are uninjured until the last sliver of life is drained, because the metaphors are both clear and consistent. The real world isn’t 2D or sprite-based, either; that doesn’t mean your fiction can’t be.

Could a modern fighter do away with life bars and these other stylizations? Sure; check out Fight Night Round 3, for the 360. It has its own metaphors, of course; they’re just less abstract. Still, elements like those in 2D fighters persist as legacy; they were created for the sake of convenience, and they continue for the sake of familiarity. If fireballs and super moves are unrealistic, that’s a pretty minor nitpick – especially if you’re playing the newest King of Fighters or whatever, where the gameworld and its laws are so clearly stylized.

Legacy of the Wizard

Legacy can also, of course, be a bit of a problem. Throwbacks are fine and all – Lord of the Rings was a neat attempt at a modern Beowulf; Chinatown is both an homage and one of the best movies of all time; Cave Story is one of the neatest adventure games in years – so long as they’re conscious of the template they’re using. What happens, though, when a whole medium – a young and hypothetically growing one – is built on a template that has failed to see a serious revision in twenty years?

Let’s take your run-of-the-mill role playing game, for instance – say, Dragon Quest. (We’ll go Japanese, for the sake of illustration.) When you walk outside a city, the scene shifts; your avatar appears on a world map and the city appears next to your avatar, as an icon of about the same size. If you wander around a little, suddenly the game switches to a turn-based with a previously-invisible monster. When you kill the monster, you get experience points and gold. None of this is literal, of course; these are all metaphors for more complex ideas. And all these metaphors, you can trace back to Dungeons & Dragons.

The point of D&D was to allow people to play-act within a throw-back fantasy world like Tolkien’s; the rules served the same purpose as a Sonic Screwdriver in Doctor Who: to deal with all of the logistical drudgery, so as to allow players to just get on with their playing. Nascent computer whizzes like Richard Garriot admired the rules for their elegance, so they adapted them into software. The computer would automatically keep track of all the inane details – hit points and magic and levels and experience – letting the player grow and flourish and get on with a rousing old adventure.

When you walk outside, the town doesn’t really shrink to a box; the game just shifts views, Indiana Jones-style, to a travel map, dotted with representations of your character and all the important landmarks on that terrain. When you take five steps and run into an invisible enemy, the ensuing battle stands in for hours of literal walking and close scrapes and hardship. When you earn experience, it stands in for the growing muscles and reflexes and self-reliance that would result from such a journey.

Again, metaphors are a Band-Aid. They’re used to get the idea across because – for whatever reason – there’s no way to show it literally. In this case, the reason was mostly technical. The metaphors were great at boiling down the epic scope of the adventure to a set of bullet points, giving an experience unheard of in a console game – which means, in biz terms, surely Enix had hit upon the magic formula.

Gene X Meme X Scene

Here’s where things go a bit sour. Flash forward twenty years, pull any random JRPG off the shelf – SaGa, Wild Arms, Xenogears – and what do you find? It’s still Dragon Quest, except… almost a parody. All the metaphors are still there, rearranged – except they no longer stand for anything. Desperate to set their games apart, yet desperate not to stray too far from that game Japan fell in love with twenty years ago, developers have piled metaphors on top of the existing metaphors; abstractions on top of abstractions. Each game is now distinguished by what gimmicks it introduces to the puddle of game systems that are now there just for the sake of being game systems, because everyone’s familiar with the earlier systems.

Modern RPGs mistake the literal game systems and the literal plot as the major attraction of Dragon Quest, and of the “role playing” format (leading to no end of arguments amongst RPG fans against the merits of one element over the other), when both are basically MacGuffins for the emotional experience that Dragon Quest attempts to sketch out. They’re just metaphors; they’re just methods. You’re supposed to look through them, not at them. To look at them as opaque boundaries is to objectify them; to fetishize them. That’s how genres form, and that’s how the videogame industry has come to stagnate.

A Flight of Fantasy

Now that I’ve made that broad statement, let’s jump aside to illustrate what I’m talking about. Since we’re already beating up on the typical JRPG, let’s take a look at Final Fantasy – the easiest and clearest target. Here I’ll focus on the game systems used to trace player progress – the modern stand-ins for the Dungeons & Dragons rule set.

In Final Fantasy X, one of the more popular chapters of the series, characters grow and evolve through an abstract system called the “Sphere Grid”: you’ve got a plate with a “path” traced around it like the Game of Life, and you have playing pieces in the form of spheres. You move the spheres along the path, according to certain rules, to cause your character to learn new abilities and to improve random statistics (strength, intelligence). A little arbitrary perhaps – why am I moving these spheres around, and what does it have to do with the gameworld? Maybe that’s not a big problem, though.

The problem comes when you realize you can find these spheres scattered everywhere in the gameworld. You will literally pick up a sphere off the ground, which you then plug into your wholly metaphorical grid that represents… something having to do with character growth.

For all its photo-realistic locations and well-proportioned characters, the game does not distinguish between the reality of its gameworld and its metaphors intended for the player’s benefit. In not making that distinction, the game shoots its own sense of reality in the foot.

Counterexamples

Compare this to the Sphere Grid’s prototype, the Materia system from Final Fantasy VII. The difference there is that Materia are consistent with the gameworld. Whereas in FFX you slide the Spheres around a nonsense game board, in FFVII you physically plug Materia orbs into holes in the weapons and armor your characters are carrying, to absorb their powers. Unequip the Materia to lose the powers. Beyond that practical issue, the orbs are integrated into the game’s plot and premise to such an extent that the player accepts Materia without question as just one more element of the gameworld. There’s nothing in the system to challenge the game’s verisimilitude. If anything, Materia help to sell it.

Likewise, Final Fantasy XII seems to succeed in that it takes an almost wholly abstract approach to its game systems. Here, the player determines character growth by moving pieces around a chessboard. You don’t go around finding chess pieces in the gameworld; the pieces are completely metaphorical. (And they’re chess pieces because FFXII is a war game.) They represent potential for growth, which you manage in a strategic way. Further, there is a comprehensible logic and balance behind the growth that the board manages. The verisimilitude’s intact again, because the game makes a clean distinction between what is metaphor (the interface) and what is literal “reality” (what that interface represents).

FFXII has even done one better, by getting rid of purposeless metaphors elsewhere that have built up like so much mildew over the past twenty years, such as the random battles that have so long been used to glorify combat. For many people, fights have come to represent “the whole point” of RPGs simply because they’re where most of the rules come together. Most character statistics detail how well characters can perform in a battle; battles are the main opportunity to improve those statistics. Since rules make the game, hey, RPGs are about battles. Now there’s barely any glory in battles at all: they occur on the main playfield, and the player and his party simply washes over most enemies, without hardly having to press a button. Violence is just something that happens, in this world. It’s not an event. It’s not really an opportunity for growth. It’s nothing to celebrate. It’s just there, as something to be ready for.

The Nose on your Face

You could say that Final Fantasy XII is as in touch with what it wants to accomplish as a videogame, and as adept at representing those goals to the player through its game systems, as Final Fantasy X is a muddle of its own history. The difference is that Final Fantasy XII has a handle on what is a metaphor and what is literal, and understands the actual purpose of metaphor: to stand in for things that you can’t represent otherwise, in such a way that nobody even notices they’re missing. Again, they’re shortcuts, used to aid understanding and belief. No more, no less.

Now. Extrapolate a bit, and you will find that the Final Fantasy X situation is a rough metaphor for the industry in general, in its current shape. Ever since Super Mario Bros. came out, basically all we’ve done is build on it – mindlessly, heedlessly to why it did what it did, to what its metaphors actually meant, concerned only with the literal result of what it did, with the literal form of those metaphors. We’ve been stacking more metaphors on top of the old metaphors, treating Mario as the platonic ideal of game design and everything else merely a variation on a form. We’ve built up twenty years of this sediment, entrenching us, basically just because this one game on this one console with this one control scheme once spurred a revolution. For this reason, Shigeru Miyamoto is revered as God and father of the modern videogame industry: the entire modern industry is forged in his image.

Thing is – though Super Mario Bros. was a very nice game for its time, there were videogames before it. You could well argue that there were many more kinds of videogame before it, before everything became standardized. Before Nintendo came up with the same gamepad we’ve been using – with no important alterations – since 1985. Before videogames became all about defined gameworlds and characters and linear narrative progression and jumping – not that there’s any inherent problem with any of this. It’s just, there’s more out there than Super Mario Bros. and its legacy. There always was. There always will be. Mario was a product of his time; a practical creation, who came about for largely practical reasons. Twenty years on, he ain’t so practical anymore.

The result of this in-growth? Though correlation isn’t causation, it’s awfully suspicious that the market for videogames has not statistically grown in twenty years: about one-third of American households now, versus about one-third in the NES era. Since videogames have become defined by one particular mold, they have not significantly evolved in terms of how they represent themselves. To the contrary, they’ve become a mockery of their potential – as has the culture that’s developed around them.

On the one hand, you only need to look at the growing malaise in the current gaming audience: this creeping sense that all videogames are starting to feel the same. That somehow things were more fun, more vital back in the 8-bit or 16-bit era. On the other, you only need to look at non-gamers and why they don’t play videogames: the medium is seen as puerile, stunted. And ignoring that, it’s hard to break into. It’s hard to make the association between a gamepad and the on-screen action. Besides, there are too many buttons, with too many special purposes. In a broad sense, either you’re in or you’re out. And the high entry level means that anyone who’s in tends to like things exactly as they are.

You Tell Me It’s the Institution

Given that Nintendo is both responsible for setting the template and one of the bigger factors in its entrenchment, it is curious that, as of about the last two and a half years, Nintendo has also been one of the only strong voices for change. Though its software could still use some work, with its recent hardware – the DS and Wii – the company has gone some length to address the above concerns, by effectively clearing the ground for communication between the game and the player.

Gunpei Yokoi’s original NES pad design was, for its time, a breakthrough: a simple cross button for the off hand, and two buttons for the “on” hand: a primary and a secondary. A pause button, and a maybe-extraneous “select” button, legacy from Nintendo’s arcade days. All on a small, easy-to-hold wafer. The most important action in the game, whatever it might be, would be assigned to the button closest to the edge of the pad, where a person’s thumb would naturally rest. The secondary button keeps the game from seeming too limited, by adding a backup function, that can complicate the action: running, shooting, what have you.

The metaphors were clear: move in any of the primary directions by pressing the cross-pad. Just as you don’t think about walking in real life, movement is assigned to the left hand (appropriate for 90% of the potential audience): the hand you use for clutching, holding things of less than primary focus. The more active work, dealing with timing and task-switching, is assigned to the right hand. With only two buttons of tiered import, one quickly associates their pressing to the binary release of on-screen action. Either you’re acting (by pressing the button) or you’re not.

The SNES added two more face buttons, because more complex hardware meant more possible actions – and hey, everyone was used to the NES pad by now, right? They can handle two more buttons. Perhaps not coincidentally, around here is where control mapping started to get wonky. With so many buttons, which is the primary one? How do we map actions to the pad? Should we still map secondary weapons to Up + B, or should we throw them onto a third button? Why condense controls when you’ve got so much space? (Word to PC game developers.) And of course, the old chestnut: the button’s there; we’ve got to use it somehow.

The one curiosity, that would have greater significance later, is in the pad’s shoulder buttons. They were originally stuck on there as a sort of camera control for the system’s pseudo-3D Mode-7 chip; later developers found shoulder buttons useful for adding adverbs to the verbs of the face buttons: walk slowly, attack differently. Added nuance to player involvement, at the cost of complication.

The Blue Beast

Then came Sony, and its philosophy of blind one-upsmanship. If the SNES doubled the face buttons on the NES pad (and did nothing about that legacy “select” button), the Sony PlayStation would double the shoulder buttons on the SNES pad. With the N64 Nintendo introduced an analog stick and force feedback, to maybe slap another level of nuance on top of the heap – so Sony added two analog sticks and force feedback. Sega added analog triggers to the Dreamcast, so Sony made every button analog – whether it made sense or not. Nintendo stripped away the last twenty years of duct tape and chewing gum and introduced motion sensors, to try to establish a more elegant form of nuance… so Sony added a half-assed motion sensor to the same old pad, two weeks before E3.

And then, with thumb firmly planted to nose, Nintendo introduced a “classic gaming” controller for its virtual console that resembled nothing so much as its own stripped-down rendition of Sony’s Dual Shock – intended to represent the past of gaming. Practically every home console game made between 1985 and 2005 can (and will) be played with that one controller. That’s how much the medium has been held back, by losing touch with our metaphors. All the advances in player interface made over that time were simply flourishes taped on to the old model like so many Sphere Grids.

Wii is People

So the Wii (and to a lesser extent, the DS) is the first real revision of the gaming controller since Nintendo’s first revision. It’s significant in a couple of ways. One is in the sheer degree of nuance afforded by the controller – the kind that analog sticks and shoulder buttons and any number of face buttons could only hope at allowing the player. With a little psychology behind the way people move, future metaphors have the potential to be clear in nature, degree, and quality, to a degree never before possible – broadening the dialog between game and player and opening that many more opportunities for what can be expressed by a videogame.

The other important detail is an abandonment of standardization (with the exception of the Virtual Console pad): the Wii controller is, literally, meant to be used however a developer sees fit. Nintendo is encouraging everyone to make add-ons to the controller. There’s a Zapper shell. There’s the “nunchuck”. Suddenly we’re back to the old arcade era, where anything goes. Where every game has its own specialized interface that’s designed precisely according to what the developer hoped to express – instead of boiled down to fit one control scheme, one template, one rough set of metaphors for every game.

It’s the Games, Stupid!

Of course, hardware is only half the story. If developers can’t figure out anything interesting or important to say with this freedom of expression – if we end up with nothing except first-person shooters and and racing games and cute tech demos and light saber mini-games – then maybe we’re lost. Recently Koji Igarashi – the guy who’s been in charge of Castlevania, the last few years – expressed concern about the Wii, and said he couldn’t think of anything truly interesting to do with the system. Say what? Hello, Mr. Belmont! What a handsome whip you’ve got there!

Videogames offer a unique opportunity, not afforded by other media, to actively explore a fictionalized world – its rules, its laws, its logistics. To live in someone else’s shoes, and understand the way he thinks, he sees things; the way his world works. To experiment – to use trial and error; to see how the world reacts to your actions; to see what new courses of action are thereby provided you. The potential here for insight – for something truly profound and important (not to mention entertaining) – is enormous. It’s huge! And we’re just racing cars, and shooting people and being all bad-ass. All we’re doing is playing videogames.

Again, we’re just taking things too literally. The number of games that actually engage the medium, to try to express something personal and significant – that actually take command of the innately metaphorical nature of videogames, to make parallels to things that actually matter on a human level, is so small I could cover it in a single feature someday. Instead, here’s a vague idea what we’re missing out on:

Silent Hill 2 is essentially a game about the psychology of a man who lost his wife, and has been living in depression ever since. Everything in the game is a metaphor for some aspect of the protagonist’s subconscious. In addition, the game it pays attention to every move you take – all of the subconscious or unconscious actions that make up a personality. It sets up situations to see how you will react, and it takes notes. And it never reveals any of this. At the end, it gives your the ending that matches your behavior. As a result, it’s very hard to get a different ending – as you have to first know what the game is looking for, then to consciously monitor your behavior to ensure you act in ways you normally wouldn’t.

Similarly, Silent Hill 4 is all about the psychology of a “Silent Hill fan”: a guy trapped in his room, whose only escape is into videogame worlds – which somehow aren’t as scary as they seem like they should be. Then every time he retreats from the game world, and wakes back up in his apartment, things are even worse. The only way he can interact with other people is by peeping at them through his door or windows or holes in the wall. Then, in a Twilight Zone moment, there’s a moment where the game world becomes aware of him – and there’s no place safe for him to retreat to, anymore.

In Tim Schafer’s Psychonauts, every level represents the psyche of a different patient in a loony bin. The logic and atmosphere of each section of the game differs accordingly.

Shadow of the Colossus is a sort of a meditation on violence; every aspect of the game, from the controls to the stylized presentation, emphasizes the innately pathetic, selfish, and disturbing nature of violence. And yet the player is driven on, because there’s a girl to save, causing more and more death, destroying more and more beauty, and ultimately killing his own soul, for no particularly good reason. Logically, what’s one girl, compared to all this tragedy? Sadness begets sadness; death begets death. In a sense the only way to win is to put off the violence; to glory in the lonely wonders of the world. To explore and to awe, instead of doing as you’ve pledged, as a character, as a traditional gamer.

At the Heart of it All

So. Why aren’t videogames popularly appealing? Because they’ve got their head up their butt. They’re focused on being videogames – on taking their own metaphors literally – instead of on expressing something with the tools at hand. And also, maybe to some extent, because the tools at hand kind of suck, for the purpose of expressing anything meaningful. A developer has to actively work against the hardware, the controls, audience and publisher expectations, to get anything original done – and then those games tend to get buried.

The videogame industry is a mess because it knows it’s the videogame industry. It’s gotten too big for its britches, too fast, and labeled and frozen its product in stone before the medium actually had a chance to find itself. Now it’s all about idolatry for a long-dead ideal, the rational for which is buried in time. It’s all backwards: it’s about what videogames tangibly are, rather than about what they have to say.

Mechanics, metaphors, control pads, interfaces, game systems, the tools and fabric of videogames, implicitly exist to express things bigger, more important, more compelling, more human than themselves. They’re just pointers; bits of code; a delivery system for ideas. They’re worth nothing on their own. That goes for the Wii as much as it does the Atari Jaguar.

Now we’ve got some more useful interface elements on the way. That’s nice. That’s… something anyway, if not an end in itself. Now if we can only keep straight what’s metaphor and what’s literal, and what we’re actually trying to accomplish with our metaphors, maybe we’ll be on the way to developing a mature craft. Something that will be relevant to a mass audience, and that will be rewarding as a form of expression. We’ve got the key to the human psyche, and right now it’s just dangling there.