1337philosophxorz

No, I am not loudly announcing a new Citizen Kane in video games – which seems to have become popular around every major serial’s release, but rather to examine what a Citizen Kane of video games may look like. The problem I see every time somebody attempts to label a famous title as a Citizen Kane analogous moment in video game history is that no one seems to understand why Citizen Kane is famous or assumes that film has enviable progress some how tied into the medium itself. The progress theory is simply a falsehood; there is only need for the artist. If RKO didn’t give Orson Wells the type of creative control and leeway that they did then Citizen Kane would not have come about – actually I think they were more interested in a War of the Worlds picture.

You may ask yourself what Citizen Kane is and the answer is simple. It is a story that could only have been shown. Just try to explain the plot of Citizen Kane. You will become bored about halfway through. It’s basically a version of Faust – Orson may have been trying to prove Wilde right – without the devil and a bit of popular Freudism. I believe Orson himself said that the whole Rosebud thing was a dollar book Freudian technique. A video game to reach this level must have to be a story, which could easily be a Jesus tale to fill out the Wilde quote with the added benefit that most video games are about saving the world, that could only be played and as of my now – April 22nd 2010 – this story has not happened but there has been some signs that some of the key pieces of theory about it have been laid down.

I feel that there is a need for a bit of house keeping. I obviously need to define what is meant by play. Play tends to have a sense of amusement or enjoyment but I enjoy books and can be amused at the theatre but no one would assume I was playing – hopefully not at least. The reason for this is that play is the a verb that puts me in the action inside the suspension of disbelief. You can think of actors inside of play being the players and you will get the gist of my meaning.

Since video games are called games I guess it would be useful to establish how game like they are. Ebert quite rightly points out, in a recent blog entry, that very concept of game suggests that you can win or lose for that matter. We do not say we won the play or book but we still reach the intended climax of the work. So what we may ask what is particularly different between games and most cases of art is that you are intimately involved in the outcome. You win not you watch others win.

To expand a little bit further with the more classic games let me provide an example. If you play a game of chess, I am stretching a bit here because I prefer go over chess for the reason I am about to describe, you meet the other person in a unique way. You see how they think. You can see how the mind is operating and due to the general telos of chess you are forced in a combative position. That is merely the rules of the game shaping the way the story plays out – I grant it would be a particular boring story even with a great amount of adjectives used in the description of such a match but still you meet the mind of the player on the board given these limitations. If we think back to one of the more famous chess games as of late we can all remember what happened when Kasparov saw something he assumed was a person and his reaction to it. He thought he has met a mind and accused IBM of cheating by allowing a human to interfere. In this sense he met deep blue. I do not think that deep blue is a subjective thing but when something happens that takes us off guard we assume a modi operator behind it. I feel this is much the case behind people unversed in evolutionary theory and are vocal about it.

Now, these more classic games always require a second person to play against. Much to the chargin‘ of misanthropic intellectuals that need to have a bit of fun. Which is what made video games a rather unique thing when they started being large set pieces as apposed to earlier sets like pong. If I had to pin down the first major step at presenting a world I would have to say the first Super Mario Bros. game was the first to do something odd. It showed us a world with its own set of physics and sense of timing. This is also true of Pac-Man and Asteroids but those games didn’t have much of telos to them and are more about high scores. This is not much different than chess but it is without the other player and instead you are just against a certain amount of fixed problems in the world and you don’t have to live there but get to the end which honestly gives the whole concept of game a bit of a misnomer since this would be more like a puzzle with multiple solutions rather than a game. Yet they are still games because we are interacting with a modi operator but in a different sense.

This is where narrative should step in but at the same time I have only seen hints towards this in Bioware games and any other game with a moral choice system – although I have to say that in Dragon Age there is less of a moral choice system than in Knights of the Old Republic and more of choice system where plot elements hinge around a bit of the morality that each of your companion characters has picked up in their biographies. Ideally a video game’s narrative structure should be built into the idea of a conditional universe. Computer code is built on conditional statements so why not? Some have attempted to do this with the moral choice system which leads to the supposed good ending and supposed bad ending to each game but there is certainly more that can be done with the concept. My current pet theories for a truly conditional narrative involve either a branching storyline that would lead to many different endings or the more clever version which based on what you have done in game the final ending before the credits role would allow for a different meaning of experiencing the game as whole. The only reason I think this has not been done is because it is a writer’s nightmare to be forced to have to write all those storylines or thinking in so many conditional statements to lead to a different emotional meaning to each cutscene. This is how the player should be interacting with the telos of the game to come to satisfactory emotional depth to a video games narrative but I have not seen the full potential of this idea in any game that currently exists.

Ebert, some time ago, tweeted a article saying that Metroid Prime is not the Citizen Kane of gaming. I agree so let’s just knock off for coffee – but while we have that coffee let us have a bit of meditation on why someone would ever dare to claim that. Michael Thomsen goes on at some length about integration and of character and player. The chief problem with this idea is that Samus Aran is less of a character than she is an avatar – I do not mean she is ten feet tall and blue. For those of us that spent some of our time playing the Original Metroid will remember the moment when we finally made it through the world of Zebes to discover that Samus was a girl. Or to put it more accurately we were a girl. This is an important idea which seems to be lost and I think Metroid is on of the earlier examples of how this particular function of video game psychology works.

If you talk to a a person playing a video game with a life system you will notice that they usually say “I have so many lives” as opposed to “I have x number of attempts to get through this particular puzzle.” The same goes for health metres and ammunition. The character never has these items – you do. This is just one of the types of suspension of disbelief that is assumed of video games. The forth wall is not the screen or the edge of theatre. It is the controller and you become somewhat intergrated with the avatar. Despite the fact that I have never been to planet Zebes to fight the metroids and space pirates when referencing the story to someone else, I still have destroyed a few metroids in my time when I think about the personal experience of playing the game. Or to return to chess I have never taken a castle in my life but at the same time I have taken many.

The reason I am referencing Metroid so much here is because this is the Metroid Prime series strong point. The only time you see Samus is in cut scenes and reflections. The problem with a Metroid Prime series is that, despite being fun, the entire story of three games spanning about 40 hours of my life fit on the back of about 6 postcards. I am not estimating here. Nintendo has published a story primer in the recent trilogy set.

Camera control has become important since Mario 64 but I can think of only one game that used it exceptionally well. This game is Michel Ancel’s Beyond Good and Evil. It’s it not entirely Camera Control but a combination of camera control and set design. One particular moment I can think of is that when crawling around the run off sewers attempting to hide from the Alpha Sections the only way to check on their status is to tilt the camera angle at a rather steep angle. Not only this but the holes which you can get of are nearly completely taken up by one Alpha Section soldier passing by. I always found this to be a good idea taken from 12 Angry Men to intensify claustrophobia and stress. Camera and level design should meld in this way to help with emotional identification. And to be fair many video games have taken good ideas about camera angles from cinema despite the fact very few outside cinematic cut scenes have any sort of emotional rationale which is annoying.

The final bit I would like to address is music. Which is by far the most under utilized thing in video games. There have been some great songs floating about video game land for quite some time and my iTunes library can attest to that but it is rarely used as part of the narrative flow except in a few cases like Final Fantasy VI and Persona 3. Music in video games needs to be more operatic than cinema because of the shear amount of time that you must listen to it. To put it another way. Both Final Fantasy VI and Persona 3 take around 60 hours a piece to finish. Meaning you could listen the entire Ring of Nibelung 4 times given the same amount of time. Now I grant that a video game is not entirely about music but anyone that has played a video game should realize that music is always playing in the background and if have an artistic goal in mind really the music should have some more resonance beyond tone especially given there are long stretches where no one talks. It should, in some way, be helping the narrative along or have some meaning at the ending that it didn’t have when each element of it was introduced. My example here would be to take each leitmotif of each character – including the antagonist – when you first encounter them and that what do the songs mean to you when the accumulated in Dancing Mad and the Final March of Final Fantasy VI.

I started writing this because I wanted to concentrate my ideas the more artistic side of video games which in itself was prompted by Ebert’s proclamation that video games will never be art . Although I disagree with the never, which he admits to would be silly, but I also disagree, mind this is just those last remenants of hope that I have managed to manintain, that it is not going to happen in this generation. I am willing to say that it will happen within this generation of people just because of there are enough people interested in advancing video games as an art form. Someone may be able to shuffle past the current corporate paradigm. Much like how Orson Welles by passed the usual Hollywood crap.

Right now almost every game that is released is more like an experiment than a work of art. The Metroid Prime series can be considered like Eisenstien’s early experiments in montage but not Battleship Potemkin and so on. There are some games that are pretty good but to me they seem more like moustachioed villains tying women to railroad tracks rather than some statement of the human condition. Beyond Good and Evil, although it is one of my favourite games, broke the mould slightly with its story being more about the choice of who you are by your actions and relationships over genetic meaning to life; it didn’t quite go far enough and it really did not take full advantage of medium. I do look forward to the day that the artist appears and makes a culturally significant game where I will learn something new about myself and world around me in such a way that it could only have been played but that game does not exist — yet.