No, Seriously, I’ve Gone Legit
Brian Green (“often known by the pseudonym ‘Psychochild’,” according to his official biography) has written for Gamasutra yet another one of those facile pieces that explores the issue of cultural legitimacy, why we don’t have it and how we can claim it for ourselves. Consternation of the why-don’t-they-respect-us variety has always struck me as more an expression of deep-set insecurity on the part of game developers than any genuine deficiency in others’ regard for us. Nobody convened a symposium or wrote an article for an industry trade magazine about how to get rock and roll accepted as a legitimate form of artistic expression; a rock star becomes one partially because he doesn’t explicitly seek the approval of the wider mass of culture about him. And now here we are, sitting on a new medium often portrayed as dangerous and subversive, and we’re wondering how we can get away from that, like we’re afraid of the barely perceptible frown on our dentist neighbor’s face when we tell him what we do for a living.
Legitimacy, like respect or admiration, is a quality bestowed by others upon you, and something you’ll never truly achieve if you grovel after it like a dog. Clambering onto the treadmill of validation can easily lead you away from what really matters in your work. Emma Bovary pined for membership in social circles she wasn’t really a part of, and felt she’d finally been accepted when she was invited to an aristocratic ball, unaware that her presence there did not reflect a permanent change in her status; these sorts of delusions eventually lead to her ruin. We find ourselves bragging about our money and our New Yorker profiles and our game-specific categories at ritzy awards shows, and yet all we can think of is how to further situate ourselves in what we think of as our new club, because for some reason other people still don’t look at us the right way.
The article itself is a mess; it assumes, incorrectly, that respect necessarily follows legitimacy when in fact the two are often found divorced (for example, someone of an older generation who recognizes hip-hop as a legitimate culture but does not respect it), and it concludes with an exhortation for developers to focus on the “positive aspects” of games and to eschew the blood and the breasts, which seems strange given its position immediately following a passage about how exploring serious topics will help us avoid the specter of censorship. Even more inexplicable is the way he then blithely instructs developers to “take your games seriously,” as if nobody does! I’m tempted to suggest in turn that if one writes for a publication, even one as small as Gamasutra, one ought to take that seriously, too.
Commentary | February 10, 2009
Reader Comments (13)
And who are we trying to impress, anyway? I accidently went to a lecture about videogame theory the other day, and found out that the biggest school of thought was rooted in literature. Based on the writings of Brenda Laurel (if I remember right), they viewed every human-game interaction as a story, based on the old Aristotelian narrativism. You often read similar analogies where the developer or the journalist tries to stress the importance of games by comparing them with great literary works or whether they can make you cry ot not (Margaret Robertson wrote a good piece on it here: http://lookspring.co.uk/snapping-point). If all it comes down to in the end is trying to measure up to the thousands-of-years-old literary canon, trying to be as good as the old greeks, Tolstoy or Hemingway, I think we need to reevaluate our aims.
Surely there's got to be some kind of moratorium declared on whether games can be considered as culturally worthy as film or music or books, since I suspect that this is going to happen either in a culturally tectonic way, as happened with film (as Mr. Grenne points out), or more spontaneously, as happened with rock and roll (when, for instance, purebred intellectuals like Susan Sontag and Leonard Bernstein went on the record to say that, you know, the Beatles were actually pretty damned good). The point is, why worry about it? Games are clearly one of the two or three most dominant modes of cultural expression in the Western world right now, and cultural opinion will eventually catch up to that, because it will have to. That's what cultural opinion does; it catches up. Amid the comments to Mr. Greene's article, someone rather hoarily reminded us that games do not yet have their Citizen Kane. Another moratorium on this, please. What would the Citizen Kane of games look like? Well, I'm pretty sure it would not look or feel like Citizen Kane. What games have had is their Resident Evil, their Indigo Prophecy, their Shadow of the Colossus, their GTA IV, their [insert your innovative title here]. I know I'm not the first to argue this. Moving on.
That said . . . surely there is something more to this argument than a lot of gamers and game designers want to admit. I love games, but I know a lot of intelligent, culturally aware people who don't. I also know a lot of people who like games but regard them, essentially, as cultural effluvium, "mere entertainment," as Mr. Greene puts it. And I'm going to go out on a limb here and suggest that this is because the vast majority of games--even great games I love--are simply not emotionally affecting. Games whose mechanics and gameplay astound me, games that do fascinating stuff with P.O.V., games like Metal Gear Solid 4, which are as sophisticatedly aware of themselves as a Borges story, games that stand as tremendous leaps forward for the medium, still somehow fall consistently short in terms of what even a middling novel or film of serious artistic intent can be relied upon to deliver. I loved Fallout 3, but every time it tried to move me, my eyes rolled heavenward. And it was trying to move me, depressingly so. I can count on one hand the number of times I've felt emotionally startled or changed by a game. This is either a problem games have not faced up to or it's something games are generally incapable of doing. My suspicion is the former, not the latter. I further suspect that this is because "storytelling" in games (loaded concept, I'm well aware) still has not figured out what it is it does well. Story still feels too often too dimestore and gimcrack. And maybe I'm saying this as a writer, but it seems to me at least some of this has to do with the, on average, appallingly poor quality of writing in games, so much so that a game like The Force Unleashed (and, yeah, I really liked it), which basically inherited from an outside party 90 percent of its storytelling, is awarded and lionized for its story. That is a pretty damning indictment, to my mind, of where it is that "writing" stands in games today.
There's always going to be someone who feels differently about games, which is fine too.
As far as taking my job seriously, you can bring this argument to any industry. Hopefully everyone takes their job seriously, but there will always be people who don't. I don't feel the game industry has an excess of loafs, in fact from my experience most people do take their jobs very seriously.
ok, cheap shot nerd jokes besides the point, legitimacy comes not only from innovation or "artistic status". legitimacy is, as almost anything in our XXI century world, bought. and we are well on our way. as sales still increase (less and for now, though) during crisis we get legitimacy because we make money. this is the bottom line: games, as tv and music and theater and pro-sports are entertainment. we give honest bang-to-the-buck for millions of people who come back for more. this is all the legitimacy one needs: the fact that millions of people prefer to spend their free time playing video games than doing other entertainment.
john ford started one of the most important discourses about art and ideology, drawing the line between his job and mccarthy's witch hunt, by saying "my name is john ford and i make westerns". no mention to oscars or whatever. as long as we "keep it real" the legitimacy will come because all "art" is, in the end, entertainment. shakespeare and movies and painting all started like this. actually, unetertaining art is a perversion of their original sense.
my point is that there is only one person who can judge games, the player. and his consideration is all we should sought. magazines who "dig it or not" are not important because they will, inevitably. and more people with different tastes and playing on Wiis and DSs are changing radically the gamer-profile. they are changing the games. so, just make it fun and entertaining. the "seal of big wig approval" will come (or not, and who cares, anyway, since we got people who love what we do and money to keep doing it?).
I feel some game designers have shifted away from "just making cool games" to "legitimate art games", which entails all of the negative, ignorant and pretentious attitude of the "art" world, with none of the perspective, skill, drive or cultural relevance.
It's worth criticizing the medium and its best examples, and figuring out where it's lacking - as Bissell talks about. That doesn't necessarily imply an inferiority complex.
For instance, and Bissell's examples bear this out, you could make a really good case that plot isn't important in games, in the same way that melody isn't important in some styles of music. Separating the general concept of storytelling from the specific mechanic of the plot would be a constructive way to move past what seems like a flaw.
I know we're all sick of these debates (and GSW/Gamasutra does run them a little more often than I'd like, and I think I contributed one or two myself), but hey, genre adolescence is tough.
Seen as being geeky and for children, and for the good reason that most of them are geeky and childish - especially the 18 rated ones about big macho guys with guns. Comic books really did have to grow up, and it was when they did (with the likes of Alan Moore, Grant Morrison, and so on) that they found both wider areas to explore artistically and as a side-effect greater 'cultural legitimacy'.
So games should not be aiming for cultural legitimacy in itself, but the lack of it is a good indicator for how far we still have to go as a medium.