I have not said much about video games here on this blog. I kept it kind of book-centric, possibly in order to impress myself with a sense of prestige, but the fact is that I play a large number of video games, particularly PC games. I particularly like to keep my eye on the indie game world– not the world of games with indie-music soundtracks, or the world of games featuring characters in plaid collared shirts and thick glasses, but the world of video games that have been designed and coded by individuals outside the major game-design studios. Some recent notables include World of Goo, Mount and Blade, Braid, And Yet It Moves, and a few others.
There has been some controversy over the past few years about whether or not the narrative of a video game is comparable to other narrative-based art forms, like books or movies. There has also been some controversy as to whether or not video games are art. For me the question is pretty simple: they ARE art, undoubtedly, and there are some games which carry a narrative of a quality matching or exceeding that of most typical movies or books. These strong-narrative games include the Half Life series and various RPG games like Knights of the Old Republic or Mass Effect or Baldur’s Gate. Portal has recently been lauded for its professionally-written storyline and its hilarious scripting. Dead Space, I hear, had a pretty neat plot, but I haven’t played it. The games I’ve mentioned here, besides Balduir’s Gate and KOTOR, are more-recent games, but there are plenty of older ones that have plenty of excellent narrative. There are also, of course, all those old 90s point-and-click adventure games, like Myst or the old Lucasarts adventure games. They always had to rely on stories to remain even vaguely playable.
Past years have shown that the games that do best are the games with the best storylines. Half-Life, Bioshock, Mass Effect– the big-sellers are nearly always also the ones that go beyond game mechanics (which, by the way, have to be excellent) to tell a serious story. Braid, for example, was a bitty little platformer with neat mechanics, but it also did experimental, nonlinear things with story that just blew everyone away, and it’s since become one of the best indie success stories in the past five years. Mount and Blade, one of my favorite indie games, has beautiful mechanics and a great feel, but no story whatsoever. It’s a half-baked cross between a fighting game and an RPG, and because the role-playing part is so dreadfully atrophoed– the missions are incredibly dull and repeat endlessly– it’s never done particularly well ratings-wise, despite the fact that the fighting aspects of the game are wonderfully fun. This is partly due to the fact that it’s an English-language game designed and written by a Turkish couple, but it’s still going to need to find a way to overcome that in order to make anything of itself.
So: will video games come to rival books in the future? Only to the same degree that movies do, I think. Any artistic experience which we are inteded to absorb over any period of time– radio plays, theater productions, novels, nonfiction works, movies, television shows and series– the ones that do well always have a story. So why not video games? PC games in particular have gone a long way towards plot-driven experiences, since the market for PC games is a bit more cerebral (also, this is one of the reasons why the market is doing so poorly: the games require mental effort in order to be enjoyed). Roger Ebert wrote a year or so ago that games could not be art. He’s since retracted his opinion, slightly: according to Ebert, games CAN be art, but they’ll never be as good as older, less-tech-y forms of art, like plays (or movies, I assume?), and they’re only art in the sense that anything can be art. Well, Ebert is part of the generation that will never catch on to games-as-art because the medium is simply to alien for them. Give us fifty years. By then, the games will not only be much farther down the road towards narrative and artistic perfection, but the world in which they are created will consist of several generations of long-time gamers. By the time our kids grow up, games will be as typical as movies, and as respected. And they’ll be telling much better stories.
