Prêt-à-Jouer and Videogame Couture
October 8, 2013 6:12 AM   Subscribe

 
Paging Rory Maranich to the pixelated white courtesy phone.
posted by The Whelk at 6:15 AM on October 8, 2013 [2 favorites]


Why don't we stop acting like video games are solidly one kind of thing any more than "Theater" is. Like other non-foundational, collaborative modern arts they are composed of lots of elements lifted from other mediums.

Doodle Jump is more like dance. Hard Rain is more like a movie. Myst is more like a novel. NBA jam is more like..well, candy.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 6:39 AM on October 8, 2013 [3 favorites]


Doodle Jump is more like dance. Hard Rain is more like a movie. Myst is more like a novel. NBA jam is more like..well, candy.

NOOOO it is all art or none of it is because that is how things work.
posted by Going To Maine at 6:44 AM on October 8, 2013 [6 favorites]


NBA jam is more like..well, candy

Rigged candy.
posted by uncleozzy at 6:45 AM on October 8, 2013


This article is fundamentally right in it's criticism though. Being cinematic is one way to think of video games, but there are many others. My favorites have very little storytelling in them. In fact if anything the best ones are essentially visual art that you can manipulate. Imagine if you could move the pieces of a Mondrian around and make them explode and sparkle and give you points? To me games like Eliss are among the most exciting kind of innovation going these days.
posted by Potomac Avenue at 6:49 AM on October 8, 2013


Hard Rain

Obviously I meant heavy rain. Doh!
posted by Potomac Avenue at 6:50 AM on October 8, 2013


Very good piece. The author isn't trying to "fashionify" games, just show how similar these two things are once you look below the surface. Maybe game developers and fans can gain new insights and avoid mistakes if we broaden our horizons and pay attention.
posted by Foci for Analysis at 7:05 AM on October 8, 2013


Things will always be described in the context of other things. It's called rock math in music criticism -- easiest way to convey through words how one band sounds is to compare it to the bands it shares characteristics with.

In gaming, which lacks the depth and breadth of antecedents that music and literature have, this is harder to do. Add to this how rapidly the changes in technology have affected the capabilities of games, making much of the legacy inapplicable to contemporary criticism.

And, to a great extent, the majority of the audience of a think piece in a popular publication is only going to be familiar with the most famous game titles of the past couple years, but be able to recognize references to movies that are sixty years old, or novels that are 150 years old. If those pieces of art have something to contribute or illustrate in a discussion of a new game, they're gonna get name checked.
posted by ardgedee at 7:15 AM on October 8, 2013 [1 favorite]


The music industry is more similar to the fashion industry: more attention for tangentially related bullshit antics than for the thing you'd think they were supposed to be creating.

To some extent, film shares that -- look how much media bandwidth is dedicated to celebrity gossip compared to serious criticism.

The cloud of journalism/criticism/etc. around video games is mostly about the content of video games. The more serious pieces question pretty deeply our perception of and participation in virtual violence, sexism, racism and other serious issues. Sure there are occasional bits about Richard Garriot IN SPAAAAAAAAAAACE etc. but those are in the minority.
posted by Foosnark at 7:19 AM on October 8, 2013


This article is fundamentally right in it's criticism though. Being cinematic is one way to think of video games, but there are many others. My favorites have very little storytelling in them.

I wasn't trying to disagree with this point; I think that people view games through extremely constrained lenses that demand they come across as a gesamtkunstwerk bent towards a particular philosophical meaning, which usually results in things that seem kind of heavy-handed. (e.g. Train, which uses a mechanic that I briefly thought was clever but now just think of as "SURPRISE! YOU'RE A NAZI!" but also features some very high concept aesthetic choices.)
posted by Going To Maine at 7:22 AM on October 8, 2013


Going To Maine: I wasn't trying to disagree with this point; I think that people view games through extremely constrained lenses that demand they come across as a gesamtkunstwerk bent towards a particular philosophical meaning, which usually results in things that seem kind of heavy-handed.

Bioware's Michael-Bay-like attempts to tackle historical determinism and terrorism via characters who butcher NPCs by the hundreds probably doesn't help much. On the other side, there's this interesting attempt to teach intersectionality using the optional difficulty modifiers of Bastion.
posted by CBrachyrhynchos at 7:53 AM on October 8, 2013 [4 favorites]


I just think of them as video games. Let's not get carried away.
posted by GallonOfAlan at 8:40 AM on October 8, 2013 [1 favorite]


Paging Rory Maranich to the pixelated white courtesy phone.

uggggggggh this guy isn't wrong, and his likening of video games to the fashion industry is an unusually and interesting comparison to make, but he meanders on for about a trillion thousand words to get to a blatantly generic conclusion, which is: video games are more than just movies. Dingdingding. Whoopdee-shit.

The frustrating thing is that the author, by bringing up Bauchard and The Poetics of Space, is hitting on something very important about game design, but ironically—because he's going about critiquing the limited knowledge of game designers and critics—he misses that game design theorists have explored this territory far more succinctly and satisfyingly than his stabs at enlightenment have taken him. In fact, it has been argued that the simplest definition of "play" that exists anywhere is essentially: "freedom within a defined space". And from this simple definition, you can make a far stronger and simpler argument about why these cinematic video games are often unsatisfying on a certain level: a crafted cinematic experience is one in which your motion throughout a space is pre-defined.

I mean this is why the open-world Hyrule in Zelda: Ocarina of Time is considered one of the greatest environments in a video game ever. It's because after the first tutorial dungeon you're literally given an open circle of a world that can take you to a dozen different places you can explore. Super exciting! And the order in the game is defined, not by Navi's irritating little hints, but by the fact that without certain tools you can't plumb the depths of certain areas, which means that each time you revisit a place you're tine new opportunities that weren't accessible to you before. It's a model that's been sadly abandoned by most video games of late, including by the Zelda franchise itself.

It's why Half-Life 2 is so acclaimed not for its openness, but for the craft in which it make you feel like you're traveling through an open environment even when you basically have no choices at any time. By turning the question of "where do I go next?" into a puzzle rather than an obvious railroad, HL2 gives you the feeling that you're up against an opponent whose power is all-pervasive and incredibly hard to escape, and figuring out which predetermined event comes next feels oddly liberating. It's a trick Valve uses in the Portal franchise as well.

The author of this piece utterly fails to point to the video games which he thinks are doing interesting things, partly because his ideas about what makes a video game interesting are somewhat confused—and for all I'm kind of grumpy about this article, that is perfectly understandable—so I'll offer some of my favorite recent titles as a counterbalance. Starseed Pilgrim is the game that ought to show up at the end of that image montage of how video games have changed over time; it's a platformer in which you're required to grow your own platform, and it's incredibly hard but also unbelievably satisfying when you finally learn how to grow the universe around you in a way that lets you get to the things you seek. Corrypt is an iPad game that everybody who owns an iPad should seriously play: it's a box-pushing puzzle game that essentially lets you "corrupt" the game's universe using Magic, which allows you to point to a tile on one map and have that tile replace EVERY corresponding tile on every other map, meaning you can replicate ladders and disappear boxes and generally cause a lot of trouble for yourself as the world that you're living in becomes increasingly fucked-up. So goddamn fun. And if you have a tolerance for frustrating user interfaces, I heartily recommend Cart Life, in which you try to set up a cart and sell things in a city that is way more complex and intricate than could ever be considered "casual entertainment".

Oh and for an example of how video games can "subvert genres" by changing the freedoms you're typically given within a space, please look at this Let's Play video of Enviro-Bear 2000, in which you are a bear. That drives a car. With one hand. It is like any other car driving video game except you can only do a single action at any given time, so you can't (for instance) steer and hit the gas pedal at the same time. Similarly there's You Can Only Live Once, which is like Mario except, well. Or there's Syobon Action, in which the world of Mario becomes absurdly, hilariously hostile, and the game becomes more of a puzzle game than anything else as you try to work out just how the universe is rigged to make you fail.

I have answered my summons! *disappears in a puff of 16-bit smoke*
posted by Rory Marinich at 9:54 AM on October 8, 2013 [17 favorites]


Who said that "writing about video games is like dancing about architecture"? (Too obscure?)
posted by oneswellfoop at 10:48 AM on October 8, 2013


I don't think the intent of the piece was to say, "Video games aren't like movies! They're like FASHION!" Rather, I think the idea was to try on a different lens and see what kinds of similarities fall out—a think-piece designed to draw some basic comparisons and see where the implications lead. More importantly, I feel like the piece isn't talking about specific video games or even necessarily video games as a medium, but rather video games as an industry with peculiar qualities that so happen to mirror some of the qualities of the fashion industry.

Yeah, he probably could've made the Project Runway comparison and left it at that, because frankly that's my biggest takeaway from the whole thing. The way the panelists critique a piece from their own perspectives eerily mirrors the kinds of conversations—especially the disagreements—you see a lot on video game forums and podcasts and whatnot. But even beyond that, I think there's some interesting food for thought to be had.
posted by chrominance at 11:24 AM on October 8, 2013


The comparisons are pretty generic. Most of the same things happen in most creative industries, even engineering.

The thing about fashion iis you want to make people react to you at a glance. Lots of games do that with their graphics, sure--and lots of MMOs and F2Ps and some other divisive acronyms implement fashion items that some players spend socially unacceptableamounts of time, effort, and money on. It's hard to do that in noninteractive media. But perhaps the case design of game consoles is the nearest match. Handheld devices in particular.

I think the catwalk best corresponds to the demo kiosks at game conventions where you have ten minutes to learn, play, and form an opinion on a game you can't have yet.
posted by LogicalDash at 12:23 PM on October 8, 2013


I mean this is why the open-world Hyrule in Zelda: Ocarina of Time is considered one of the greatest environments in a video game ever. It's because after the first tutorial dungeon you're literally given an open circle of a world that can take you to a dozen different places you can explore. Super exciting! And the order in the game is defined, not by Navi's irritating little hints, but by the fact that without certain tools you can't plumb the depths of certain areas, which means that each time you revisit a place you're tine new opportunities that weren't accessible to you before. It's a model that's been sadly abandoned by most video games of late, including by the Zelda franchise itself.

Well....

While it is true that being limited from going places by your equipment is a more "organic" way of halting player progress than being disallowed via arbitrary cutscene or NPC barrier, ultimately there is no difference, and carried to its logical conclusion such a game can be just as artificial and limiting as one where you're riding in a boat that tells you "you can't go there!" if you leave the beaten path (my least favorite thing about Wind Waker, at least until the third dungeon is finished). And on the average, the history of this kind of design (be it called Zelda or Metroidvania) has progressed from massive non-linearity towards strict and obnoxious ordering, to the extent that when a game actually introduced planned sequence breaking (the phenomenal Metroid: Zero Mission) it felt like a breath of fresh air.

And indeed, one can point to developers from a decade ago saying they felt their games had to be more linear to players didn't get "lost," or be unable to figure out what to do next. There was a strong sense at the time that the purpose of a game was to shepherd a player through its points in a strict order, and the only end was to complete it, and maybe do things perfectly along the way to earn "unlocks," and anything else was player confusion, because there really wasn't anything else to do in those games except rush towards the next Hollywood-style cutscene.

Anyway, the games that did this best were, oddly, two of the first of the type: the original Zelda and Metroid, both of which did have inventory barriers, but surprisingly few of them.

please look at this Let's Play video of Enviro-Bear 2000, in which you are a bear. That drives a car. With one hand.

Yes. Please, please, please look at it. It is much more awesome than you'd think from its description -- and its description is great!
posted by JHarris at 2:26 PM on October 8, 2013 [1 favorite]


JHarris: you're definitely right that as far as main quest goes, Ocarina of Time has a very particular order. But my fondest memories of that game are things like exploring the Kakariko graveyard and being taught to play the Sun's Song by a ghost, or becoming a Happy Mask salesman, or teaching the frogs how to play music along that one river whose name I forget—there are plenty of occasions where you can ignore the main gameplay and just explore the world, and find things to do that are often more fun even than the main path you're supposed to follow.

One of the things I've discussed with I think every single one of my IRL game designer friends, because it's such a good way to talk about how any one person wants to go about building a game, is the difference between Ocarina and the follow-up Majora's Mask, which in my mind had one of the most innovative quest systems in any game I've played to boot. The thing is, Majora's mask had a core set-up, the Bomber's Notebook, that I think is still my favorite Zelda thing ever, and probably one of my top five game things period. But I go back to Ocarina way more often than I return to Majora, because Majora's world is just cripplingly limited, in terms of exploration and unlocking new terrains. If you can stomach finishing all but one of its central dungeons, then you're free to do the Bomber's missions and watch the world change in any number of ways—but that change happens so late in the game and the side quests you have up to that point all feel pretty dissatisfying by comparison.

Ocarina had less stuff in it, but it gave you access to that stuff much more readily and returning to it is more satisfying because of it.
posted by Rory Marinich at 3:25 PM on October 8, 2013 [1 favorite]


Fell in love with the second level of Enviro-Bear 2000 pretty quickly.

The article was a good read and parallels some of the perennial "comics v. movies" criticism too. I seem to recall Grant Morrison mentioning the idea of filtering comics through opera rather than Hollywood.
posted by comealongpole at 3:33 PM on October 8, 2013


Rory, the key is that Majora's Mask is only nominally a Zelda game. It's great for what it is, but its structure is entirely different. And it is nice that most of Ocarina's world is open soon, although it's also true that most of the game is astonishingly, amazingly empty. There's so little to do in Hyrule Field....
posted by JHarris at 7:42 PM on October 8, 2013


True. Twilight Princess's Hyrule, on the other hand, is where I've spent some of my happiest times in a video game... mmm.
posted by Rory Marinich at 8:05 PM on October 8, 2013


Twilight Princess's Hyrule Field had more to do, but you spend so little of the game there relative to the many dungeons.

When Wind Waker came out, I thought its lack of dungeons meant it was kind of light. But then Twilight Princess came out and I came to dread dungeon exploration. Now I'd much rather play Wind Waker where so much more of the game is tooling around the overworld.
posted by JHarris at 12:26 AM on October 9, 2013


(And then of course Skyward Sword came out, and turned the overworld itself into dungeons, and put other dungeons within them. And the new overworld, the sky, became the least interesting overworld in a Zelda to date.)
posted by JHarris at 12:54 AM on October 9, 2013


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