Honoring cinema

This post and the last one were written for the Blogs of the Round Table at Critical Distance, a monthly invitation for video game bloggers to discuss about a proposed topic. The theme this time was "What's the Story?", storytelling in video games. You can find the other entries by following the previous link.

My last article was a bit dishonest. I almost scrap the entire text a couple of times and instead write about how it would be cool to transfer André Bazin defense of impure cinema to the context of video games, but how it is not quite possible. I do think that video games are fundamentally impure, I love the idea of cinematic video games, and I don’t think there’s anything wrong with linear storytelling or with cutscenes in an interactive medium. The problem I had was that as soon as I began to write about a particular game, my “defense” of cinematic video games didn’t look so much like a “defense” anymore. In truth, I am much more ambivalent about the reality of cinematic video games than what my article implied: let’s say, then, that it was an ideal defense of these games.

So, here are the nuances I lifted out last time, with some additional musings on the subject, with an ethical twist, leading to a long coda on the Last of Us.

The Illusion of Choice

“A game is a series of interesting decisions.” We all know this famous assertion made by Sid Meier (does anyone know when and in which context he said it, or do we just have to take it for granted because it has been repeated so many times that it became its own truth?), but what did he mean by “interesting decisions”?

Let’s take strategy games, maybe the more “gamey” genre of game, or at least the one closer to traditional games, and the one Meier is renowned for: they’re a precarious balancing act, where every decision must lead to various consequences, preferably with some degree of unpredictability, or else there’s no strategy at all, just an optimal tactic that will work in every situation. But in a narrative-centric game, what makes a decision interesting is completely different, and is not necessarily coherent with what would be best from a purely ludic’s perspective: for example, it is not always wise to present equally seductive rewards when a player has to choose between a “good” and an “evil” option. The designer would say we should not penalize a player for prefering one or the other path, because who will want to be “good” if the game becomes dull or too hard or too easy? But what does it say, from the point of view of ethics, when a game presents such “interesting decisions”, based on a system of rewards?

The Protean Form of Videogames

Maybe this can explain why I find videogame criticism so difficult or at least so alien for me, with my background in cinema: it is the only form of criticism relying both on what the critic hasn’t experienced himself and on an object that will appear differently for each player. The videogame critic has to write about an object so fluid that nobody else (not even him) will encounter it again the same way he did. 

Sure, seeing a movie in the (usually) respectful ambiance of an almost empty morning press screening is clearly different from seeing the same movie the night of the premiere in a crowded frantic theater, or as seeing it in the comfort of your own sofa, but we’re more or less able to abstract the physical context of our encounter with a movie and concentrate our criticism on the moving images themselves, even if we know that this context contributed to our appreciation. And sure, every individual brings his own experience to an artwork, but in traditional art forms, these subjectivities still confront the same immutable object made by the artist; an artwork may exist only once it’s interpreted, and therefore the same object may produce different artworks (like I wrote before, my Citizen Kane is not your Citizen Kane), but every spectator should be able to describe the same physical object that sustains each of their unique interpretation. Indeed, an interpretation is only as good as its capacity to properly encompass the whole of an artist’s work, in the most coherent way possible, so it’s not an entirely subjective process.

The Experience of Art

I should have learned by now: never announce an article that is not yet written. I will not answer (for now) the questions raised at the end of my last article. I want to write about videogames, but strangely every time I begin an article on the subject, I struggle with my ideas and come back to what I’m more comfortable with: cinema, authors, nature of art, Spielberg, etc. Maybe all those numerous re-definitions of what games are (or not) are confusing me, and now I just can’t grasp the concept anymore? I don’t know, but for now, I have an article on my favorite subject, criticism, which is going to lead, hopefully, to another one on videogame criticism, and we will then be a little closer to the subject – but it’s another not-yet-written text, so I’m not going to promise anything…

If it wasn’t clear already: I come to cinema and videogames through the perspective of art. Without directly addressing the “videogame as art” question, I’ll just say that I believe all videogames have the potential to be art, and in the end it’s all that matters. Likewise, not all movies can be described as artworks, but cinema has the potential to produce artworks, so for me all movies should be considered on that level. I don’t even understand what would be the point of doing otherwise, unless you have a very low opinion of criticism and just want to know where to invest your entertainment money. I guess many people are looking just for that, a consumer’s guide, but they’re the ones we should convince that there is more to cinema and videogames than a good way to spend some time. And I guess, also, that for most people this consumer’s guide approach makes more sense with videogames: after all, the first thing we associate with games is “fun”, as if there’s nothing else to look for in a game, or rather as if everything else is tangential to the “fun” factor (it’s partly true for cinema also, but we’re more accustomed to the idea of movies as something more than pure entertainment). Videogames are still struggling to be considered as a “serious” expressive medium, but in order to achieve this, the first step would be to offer good criticism; we have to prove that we can write about games seriously before we can convince an outsider of their value. All this has been said before in the last decade, and it’s not difficult nowadays to find meaningful videogame criticism, but I think we still lack a proper theoretical framing akin to what was auteurism for cinema, something that could reach outside of the (relatively) small videogame community. One could argue that this is exactly what New Games Journalism did in 2004, and while it is undeniable that Kieron Gillen’s manifesto inspired some important pieces of videogame criticism, I’m not sure it really helped to show how videogames can be important for people who are not a New Games Journalist.

Citizen Kane and Me (1): Me

What is Citizen Kane? Obviously it’s a movie, but what does Citizen Kane represent, or what do we mean when we say “this is the Citizen Kane of videogames”, or “there is no Citizen Kane in videogames”?

Orson Welles’ masterpiece is usually recognized as the “best movie of all time”, it’s a symbol, it's the pinnacle of what cinema is capable of. If cinema is an art, then Citizen Kane is the truest artistic expression of this medium; it represents the idea of perfection of an artistic idiom. So when we say “this is the Citizen Kane of videogame”, we’re really saying “cinema became an art with Citizen Kane, or at least this movie helped cinema to be officially acknowledged as an art form, or Citizen Kane is the undeniable proof that cinema is art, so the game X accomplishes the same operation of artistic validation for the videogame industry”. But Citizen Kane didn’t become Citizen Kane (this symbol of absolute perfection) until the 60’s, when cinema was already largely considered as an art, and anyway cinema, at first a simple parlor trick shown in fun fairs, did not become an art because of one movie. Art didn’t suddenly appear during a projection for the benefit of unwary spectators: cinema became an art form because it was conceived and discussed as such by critics, theoreticians and the audience. I could describe Citizen Kane as a simple product created by several individuals working in an industrial fashion, mass produced and distributed in many copies that were more or less the same. I could write about Citizen Kane without even mentioning that it’s a work of art, the same way I would do about some can coming out of an ordinary factory. Would I be wrong? I don’t think so, cinema is by essence an industry, my description of Citizen Kane would be incomplete, but it would still express some undeniable aspects of this object.