Games are Everything

Winning isn't everything, it's the only thing.
If this is true (and I think we all know it isn't, but just for the introduction, bear with me), then video games offer us an accessible avenue to one of the great senses of euphoria available to the conscious mind inside the functioning human body.  While winning may not be the only thing for most if not all of us, it still offers us something that is unattainable nearly anywhere else - a sense of accomplishment paired with a feeling of superiority.  While it doesn't need to be stated again how unique the role of a game is, some of the ways in which a game operates need to be outlined.  Ludologists seem content to search only for differences between games and the other arts.  This line of reasoning will make their arguments invaluable in the future, when everyone can see games in the same way they might see literature or film.  But currently games are seen my many (most importantly, all major media) as trivial time wasters.  If comic books are unintellectual sub-literary stories for nerds (not the case, of course), then video games are some combination of that realm (now often of the 'choose-your-own-adventure' style) combined with sport... but still for nerds.  It's no wonder their having such a hard time getting taken seriously aside from the money they generate.  But games aren't about revenue, their about interaction, and often narrative (whether implied, overt, or whatever).  If video games already interest you, you can look at them however you like, and read theories and articles covering a wide array of lenses through which to view games.  To get non-gamers to care, we have to compare games with other forms of entertainment and art.  Luckily there are already plenty of examples to help us prove the importance of games, even to someone with no interest in playing them.

Film
from Lost Highway - 
Ed: Do you own a video camera?
Renee Madison: No. Fred hates them.
Fred Madison: I like to remember things my own way.
Ed: What do you mean by that?
Fred Madison: How I remembered them. Not necessarily the way they happened. 

 Maybe the easiest connection to see is between modern games and film.  From the extensive cut-scenes of Final Fantasy VII to the 'play an action movie' appeal of Uncharted 2, games have been working in as much film appeal as possible since technology allowed any similarities at all.  With graphical supremacy being an easy path to increasing sales, visual aspects of games (or at least mainstream games) will always be at the forefront of innovation, much like the skyrocketing of special effects in the horror movies of the late 70s and early 80s.  


A similar wave of innovation may currently be taking over the gaming industry, as Nolan North (Uncharted's Nathan Drake), Ikka Villi (Alan Wake), and Aaron Stanton (L.A. Noire's Cole Phelps) lead the way in contributing body, face, voice, or all three to game characters.  My hope is that this style of motion- and facial- capture will become cheaper and more accessible with continual successful uses in games.  If theater is dying, somebody needs to pick up the slack, and there's no reason every triple-A title can't utilize technology of this nature to enhance realism (which is what most of them are in an arms race toward anyway).


Certainly the visual appeal of games can work in the same way that films appeal to us, but often they are less appealing.  Every gamer knows at least one person who routinely skips cut-scenes 'to get to the gameplay'.  There's also the issue of length.  More often than not, a game will take more than ten hours to complete, with some games stretching out to over one hundred.  How can we be expected to keep everything straight?  How can we remember the opening scenes of a game when we played them two months ago?  And how can developers put any matters of great import into cut-scenes when they know players can skip them or simply won't pay attention to them?  


Gamers don't want everything presented to them exactly as developers dictate (if we did, we'd be watching film, right?), we an opportunity to complete what's set out before us by developers, and create our own experience, narrative, and memories out of them.  We want things the way we remember them, not necessarily how they happened.  This, among other things, serves to link games to novels.


Literature
About a year ago (or two, I'm not sure) I read John Fante's Ask The Dust.  The book is set in L.A. (maybe a good ten years or so before our man Cole Phelps was put on the LAPD payroll) and follows the misadventures of Fante's alter-ego, Arturo Bandini.  If I remember correctly, and I may not, I read it in my spare time over the course of a two- or three- week period.  That's how most books go - I read occasionally, every once in a while hitting a little spree of a few hours (usually one when the thing starts picking up, another as I near the finish), and I go on like this until the thing is done.  My friend Daniel prefers to finish books as quickly as possible, reading all day as often as he can.  It doesn't surprise me in the least that our gaming habits mirror our reading habits.  My loves for gaming and reading were strengthened when I realized how similar the processes are.  Here we can also find a link between the sense of accomplishment gained from reading and finishing of a novel and the one gained from playing and beating a game.


When I was young, I saw the first Harry Potter movie in a theater and fell asleep.  The fact that films are, for the most part, designed to be viewed with strangers in theaters, and that they can and will go on without you if you stop paying attention or lose consciousness means that they're remarkably separated from the game-playing experience, and that lets us understand why gamers so often see it acceptable to skip cut-scenes.  L.A. Noire occupies an odd spot that lets you skip gameplay as well as cut-scenes, even going out of its way to tell you that you can, while it hides the ability to skip cut-scenes.  But other than this example, games very often reflect books.  Books are read alone, at one's own pace.  Books are too long to remember in entirety with perfect clarity, so we choose which parts to remember and which to forget.  

The part of Ask The Dust that I remember most clearly is a scene in which Arturo finally kisses Camilla, a Mexican waitress he's been boyishly vying after the attention of.  Their relationship is more like how I would interact with an ex-girlfriend than a current interest - immature, malicious.  And so when Arturo finally kisses Camilla, she bites his lip, drawing blood.  There's a lot of other stuff in there, but that's the one piece that rose above the rest.  This is certainly because of the rocky relationship I had with the first girl I ever had sex with, who was born in Venezuela, and the lip-biting that took place between us.


In Ian Bogost's Unit Operations, he uses the example of the Bukowski poem, "A woman on the street."  The poem is an example of 'the figure that fascinates' in literature.  Fante is possibly the single largest influence on Bukowski and so like this woman on the street, Camilla is very much a figure that fascinates, but one which the protagonist spends some time with before they are forced to separate.  Anyone that has played Ico will remember one scene without fail.  Near the end of the game, Ico and Yorda cross a bridge that begins to collapse.  Ico is further ahead and could easily keep running and escape the castle in which the game is set (or so it seems, as players that attempt this will fall to their death.  Look, I've played this game three times, I had to try to break it eventually).  However escape, the goal of the entire game, is put on the back-burner (or possibly taken off of the stove completely) as Ico turns around to run back to Yorda.  Even this isn't enough, as players must complete a short Yorda-less section before being reunited, but at that point, the player knows everything will be alright.  It's that short time, those few seconds on the bridge at which point I (and a small, but equally devoted group of other gamers) realized that I didn't want to go on without the girl.  With her frail body and inability to help me with puzzles, she had made things difficult every step of the way.  She didn't speak anything that I could understand, and even her subtitles were in a language made of foreign looking symbols.  But I had to go back to her.  She's the figure that fascinates, and given the choice to continue my journey with her or alone, there was only one real option.  


It's in moments like these, among hours of other obstacles, be they puzzles, boss fights, or that 35-page section that does absolutely nothing to progress the plot, that games and novels operate in the same way.  We go through it all to remember very little with any clarity, but those moments make the experience for us.  


Experience is everything
What makes literature and film Art as well as entertainment, is the implied emotional experience that each suggests.  I value bonding over Street Fighter as much as bonding over watching or playing football, but that comparison isn't as important, as I find most young sports fans are willing to add Call of Duty or Madden to their list of competitive activities.  It's the intellectual crowd and the elitists that need to be won over - though I'm sure I can only hurt my chances calling them a "crowd" of "elitists." To win over the haters, the industry needs not only to show the ability of the medium to mirror film and literature, but its ability to mirror the right film and literature.  It's an uphill battle when Gears of War outsells Alan Wake, but if Heavy Rain, Team Ico games, the Bioshock series, and Metal Gear Solid are any indicators, video games as a medium will eventually garner enough respect to move them up the ladder to industrial-art-entertainment.