My purpose with this piece of writing is not to argue about video games as art; I don’t find the query very interesting, nor do I find the result of trying to answer it to be very helpful. What I do find is interesting, however, is the questions of what kind of value games might present as a form of art? whether there are a multitude of values that should be differentiated between? and how they may compare to what we gain from other kinds of media.
Mainly though, I want to reflect on the ways we choose to play and examine games and how that affects both the games, what we gain from them, and at times us as people.
Now, full disclosure here: In the group of mediums that relate the most to games, I’m quite partial to books, so I’ll be coming to these questions from that angle. I suppose a number of the intrigue of those trails of mind may rise up from a focal point on books in the first location, though, because the medium most usually in comparison to video games appears to be that of film (and not wrongfully so by any means.)
For starters, I definitely do believe there’s a variety of ways in which games can give us something meaningful by playing them. Some games will focus solely on narrative and story-telling, and in the other end of the spectrum you’ll have games that thrive purely on its gameplay and mechanics. And I don’t mean to say any one type of gift received from a game is better than the next. There is room for all varieties of games, really, however humans being attentive to what they need to benefit from their games in the first area can also additionally assist to:
1) Guide you personally to the kind of games you want to play.
2) Give a pointer on a more general level and help raise awareness among both players and developers about what their games should really attempt to achieve.
Imagine putting down the controller after finishing a narrative-focused game — one that has few-to-none traditional mechanics — and then imagine finishing a game where the suspense hardly comes from the story at all, perhaps something along the lines of an old Nintendo platformer. The feeling you’re left with in those two different scenarios are very different. It’s also interesting to note how the feeling you’re left with after finishing a tightly woven narrative-driven experience might be much more aching as the feeling you’re left with after watching a movie or reading a book.
The sensation of completing a more challenge-based game might be described as somewhat more unique in terms of consuming a medium: one of personal triumph and accomplishment. So how about we attempt to examine this from the opposite aspect of the equation: what are you left with after, say, analyzing a book, and the way does it compare?
Personally, at least, I suppose books serve to place the reader in some other person’s thoughts in extra powerful approaches than each film and video games generally tend to do. A lot of people would argue that current games offers better opportunities at this, seeing as you can be in direct control of a game’s character, but please note that directly controlling the actions of a given character, does not necessarily give you any valuable insight into the thoughts and feelings of said character.
There’s a lot of potential there, for sure, but having control over someone and sympathizing with someone is simply not that inherently correlated. Not to say there’s additionally the ability to create unwanted dissonance among the participant and anything they're controlling if now no longer dealt with care.
Let’s look at this through the lens of Majora’s Mask, in which I’d argue that the hero — we’ll call him Link for simplicity’s sake — is not really a character who’s set up to be empathized with. In fact, we know little to nothing about Link, and outside the game itself, he’s mostly a blank slate save for the introductory sentences and a short flashback, neither of which serve to flesh out much.
But of course, Link is not the character you’re left thinking the most about at all after you put down the game: he is more like a vessel — your piece to play on the board which is, The World of Termina, if you will. The fascinating characters are by far the citizens, regardless of the small amount of time we might spend with them individually compared to Link.
The citizens of Termina, if put together, holds several handfuls of stories, some of which play together in more intricate ways than you’d might at first expect, but a lot of the characters also develop over their story.
A story which, without exception, lasts for the 3 days that the loop of time spans, only to start anew. Sure, their stories are not epics, told through hours and hours of dialogue, scenes and exposition, but the time a story takes to attain its quit has by no means been a degree of ways accurate of a tale it is. Besides, time in Majora’s Mask is a renewable resource. In fact, if you wish to make any real progress in the game, you have no choice but to experience the multitudes of stories replay several times over, often in ways different from what they had before, as you interfere with their stories to alter their outcome.
You get to observe their lives, listen to their conversations, hear their thoughts, and doing so as their scenarios play out in different ways enables you to get to know them, despite the actual span of time only stretching over the game’s three days.
But there’s also the fact that none of these stories are explicitly shown to you: you need to seek them out for yourselves — you need to actively follow a story and its character to get the full picture. In that manner, the narrative's characteristic extra like a book’s narrative would, because it isn't always a lot exhibited to you as it's far there a good way to actively take in.
The game doesn’t just invite you to follow the story of the individual characters, either, but it rewards you by allowing you to more clearly see in what ways you can interact with them to alter the stories and what may be needed to trigger these changes.
I’d also argue that the lack of detail and visual fidelity in the graphics themselves also serve to make the experience just a bit more book-like, as your own imagination plays a more active role to construct and fill in for what the details lack. This visible gain is the equal located in all varieties of extra summary art, and it's one we’ve visible a resurgence of these days, with extra video games going for a much less exact art-style. This is both why the pictures books provide us may be so frightening at times, and why our imagining of something may be a way scarier the element itself: planting the idea of something in your mind, is often so much more effective than simply showing you the thing.
The most important parallel I want to draw between Majora’s Mask and a lot of books, however, is the one I want to make (or want to be able to make) between games and books in a more general sense: that they make you think about and feel things and provide ways to interesting questions and conversations.
For one component there’s lots of symbolism to be discovered with the game, from the ever-lurching moon with the sky with a truly pained expression on its face, to barely greater diffused or broader such things as how one would possibly examine the game’s places and their inhabitant’s mindset as an analogy for the levels of grief.
And then there are the questions it might make you ask yourself. Like the fact that no matter how much some characters may struggle, no matter how much you may help them, and no matter how happy they might finally become with the aid of using the give up of the three-day cycle, you’ll be pressured to rewind time earlier than the moon subsequently falls down upon the land.
Does the temporariness of their happiness negate its value? Is it not still worth the effort if these people can achieve what they want and become contempt in this cycle of time in which they exist and know? Reflecting on it, what makes our happiness here in our world worthy of chasing? If happiness needs to last to be of worth, then how long must it last? As temporary beings, all of our happiness is — after all — temporary, so if you need to argue, it wishes a little toughness to it, then in which does the mystical line lie that separates the two?
This is all just an example, of course. Different people may be left with entirely different questions, and might interpret the symbols in ways that are nothing alike. That’s fine. That’s good, I think. My issue lies with the question: “aren’t you reading too much into this?”
With games and books alike, I don’t think there is or should be such a thing as “reading too much into it”. Some people’s way of arguing that something is being read too much into is that the creators of the piece in question never put that kind of thought into it to begin with, and did not intend for you to read it that way. This is something referred to as authorial intent in the world of literature, about how important it is what the author intended.
Personally, and with all due respect to all authors and creators, I hardly think it matters much what the author intended. If you as a writer for a few motives need to govern each a part of the manner a person sees or reads your art, then you’re free to explicitly force it onto your audience in every way you want (although in that case I feel like you might as well be writing instruction manuals). And if you are a consumer who reads or interprets something in a way that was never intended by the creator, and that reading of it allows you to view the creation in more meaningful approaches and leads you to exciting questions, then that’s nevertheless a win-win state of affairs for you.
Some games make the book-parallel more literal, like visual novels. All that being said, there is such a thing as writing a book to stand up to critical reading — to write it in a way that specifically aims to reward those readers who look deeper and perhaps read things over. And not only would I argue this makes for more interesting books, but it creates a sort of trust between authors and readers, where an author puts so much thought into their work, trusting that the reader will be willing to read thoughtfully and generously enough to see it. The reader in turn can read deeper with the faith that there will be things of interest there to find.
A lot of books are written with an eye for critical readers — hardly all of them, of course, but a lot. Which finally brings me to the question at the heart of this whole article: are games created with the same kind of critical reading in mind, and should they be?
There are exceptions, (obvious ones being something like Tetris, Pac-Man, etc.) but I strongly believe the majority of the games we see release and gain attention today are games that should be created in a manner that rewards the consumer who chooses to approach them thoughtfully and in a manner that is generous reward to the creator.
And my first instinct was to argue that this is something that has been sorely lacking from video games, but then again, who’s to say I ever looked closely enough? Who’s to say that most games weren’t made in ways that tries to achieve that kind of thought-provoking nature, and I am among a broad group of people who simply has not read into them in the way they deserve?
I don’t want to claim either one thing or the other in this case, but I know it’s hardly ever felt like all the games I played since childhood were made to stand up to that kind of reading. A lot of that is based on me feeling like I’m really grasping at straws when searching deeply for something of this nature, and a lot of it is due to the community of people who play games, as well as those who make them.
In my experience, those greater hard-hitting and reflective mind is something you listen mentioned best with the rarest of instances among folks who play, review, or critique games, however I’m additionally normally left with the experience that builders don’t always try and construct that sort of praise into their sport for greater than the maximum apparent topics and questions of the sport, the maximum outstanding exceptions being greater current indie-games.
I might be wrong about one or both of these, and you may disagree with me to equal degree, but one thing I do have faith in is that to change something like this, the change needs to happen on both sides of the equation. For developers to more eagerly invest their time into a game to make it stand up to critical reading from the players, those players in turn need to start playing games that honor those efforts. I do not believe it is a change that can happen all at once, or entirely from one side and then the other, but I do believe it’s a change we’ve come to see ever so gradually, and I do know it is something that I would want and something I would welcome into this medium with open arms, and a generous mindset.
