I couldn’t bring myself to ask for a new video game console
for Christmas this year. I wanted one, I
really did. But I just couldn’t.
I was embarrassed about it, and embarrassment is not
something I often feel. Suddenly, this
year, there was something about being a college graduate, with a job and a car
payment and all that, which made me feel like video games were no longer
something I could defensibly spend much time on. I’ve spoken out so often against my
generation’s extended adolescence, how can I justify laying out hundreds of
hours and dollars on the Mario brothers?
At the moment, I think, video games are in a deeply awkward
transitional period. Like Pinocchio, the
form is a toy aspiring to become real. Because
to a large degree, video games are toys.
That is how they started. Pong,
for example, is a toy just like a table tennis set. And to this day, many games still are toys:
Super Smash Bros, Left 4 Dead, or Street Fighter don’t pretend to be something
they aren’t. But now that technology has
progressed, game designers have the capacity to tell meaningful stories.
It is easy to think of video games which are works of
art. Some are solid, middlebrow
experiences, as serious as any Oscar-nominated film or bestselling novel. The
strong voice acting and gradually unravelling backstory of Shadow of Mordor
springs to mind, or the long, self-important narrative arcs of the Metal Gear
series. Other games are high art pure
and simple, saying something true and beautiful in an unexpected way, or
playing with the limitations and expectations of the form as masterfully as Jean-Luc
Godard or Richard Brautigan. The
haunting, stark aesthetics and ever-deepening sense of desperation of the Dark
Souls games, or the mix of tenderness and absurdity in When the Bomb Goes Off
are easy examples. (When you are done
reading this article, click that link and play When the Bomb Goes Off. The whole game only takes a few minutes, and
it’s deeply moving.)
But video games, as a form of art or entertainment, still
aren’t at the level of books, films, or even TV shows. They have yet to reach a large enough or
respected enough audience to gain real cultural cache. When a game like Grand Theft Auto faces
censorship, gamers all unite to say that video games are a form of artistic
expression, and deserving of first amendment protection. Yet when a nascent generation of critics
arises to begin interpreting that art, the gaming community collectively loses
its mind. Anita Sarkeesian, who dared
publish some astute and widely-shared feminist critiques of video games, had to
flee her home after receiving death threats from outraged gamers. Imagine that happening to a professor
offering a critique of Tolstoy.
You only have to glance through the bullshit carnival that
is (or was?) Gamergate to understand why so many people still consider video
games mere toys. It’s because many
people who play them act like children.
But maybe I will get a new game console. In fact, I think I’ve talked myself into
it. Because here is an opportunity
unlike anything critics have seen for over a century: the birth of a new
storytelling medium. Surely audiences
watching The Great Train Robbery in 1902 must have understood this, a new art
form for telling stories that could not otherwise have been told. That doesn’t happen every day.
I’d like to watch this happen. So that, in 40 years, when interactive,
game-based storytelling is established and respected as an artistic endeavor, I
can look back on years of careful criticism and say “I watched video games grow
up.” And maybe I will grow up with it.
