Super Nerd Sundays Presents: The Path is a Poem.

That title isn’t entirely accurate. The path isn’t a poem. It’s a series of poems. It’s like a poetry collection. Whereas Flower is something more like Elliot’s The Wasteland, an involved, elaborate poem with clear authorial intent, the Path is closer to the work of say, Charles Simic. It’s disjointed, oddly humorous and touching. It has some disturbing portrayals of humanity in it and its meaning is largely imparted by the reader.

Let’s take a step back from these declarations, though. Games still aren’t widely perceived as art. Part of that has to do with the discussion surrounding them: reviewers are, for the most part, interested in writing about the merits of games as entertainment products, as “value per dollar” investments which players can make. And there’s nothing wrong with these conversations. After all, games are expensive and people do purchase them for their entertainment value.

What’s harmful is when this same critical mechanism actively ignores the questions critics of other mediums find themselves asking: “Does this advance the medium? Does this show us something new? Does it comment, through iteration, on previous themes? Does it respond to other games? What does it say?”

It’s not absurd to hold games to this standard, though context is still required to make the discussion useful. We can’t expect games to generate a Ulysses or a Spring and All. To be honest, we can’t even expect games to generate a Farewell My Lovely or Neuromancer, although games have generated their very own House of Leaves in the form of Assault on Dark Athena (oh, obtuse burn on you and your masturbatory slog, Mark Danielwinski!) But consider present day respectable literature during its nascent period.

The poems and, later on, novels being created weren’t really great reads for almost a century. A lot of the material was puerile and childish, the jokes frequent and lowbrow. Some of the books were little better than incredibly well written and well characterized pornography. I mean Gulliver’s Travels opens with a masturbation joke. Pamela is a few steps up from a dime store romance novel and, despite its popularity, was widely criticized for its lewdness. A slough of other works from this time, ranging from the Rape of the Lock to The Rover, all showcase this childish brilliance, this wonderful intellect mixed with entertaining sleaze.

You might’ve noticed that all of these examples are literary and, if you’re especially perceptive, that they emerged during the seventeenth and eighteenth century. That’s because this was the period which saw the birth and rise to prominence of the novel. It’s hard to believe that the golden standard of contemporary literature is the youngest member of the family, bar arguably the graphic novel, but it's true. The advantage of studying this period, aside from reading some pretty interesting stuff, is that it allows us to look at early novels and hold them up against early efforts in other mediums to keep the way these mediums are telling stories and developing as a whole in context.

But I’ve selected literary analogies for another reason. Most of the time when critics are discussing games and their narrative potential they relate them to film. It’s clear why. Both mediums are strongly visual and aural. Sometimes there’s reading involved, which scares off some of the slower enthusiasts for each medium, but for the most part they’re all talkies.

It happens on both sides. Critics who want to excoriate a movie for using a lot of action sequences and telling a story poorly call it out as being “little better than a video game.” And people who want to animate just how great a game looks or feels will discuss its cinematic beauty. Resident Evil 5, for example, was called a summer blockbuster I don’t know how many god damn times by Geoff Keighly and a bevy of other games critics on Bonus Round. And I’d like to stand up and say that this sort of discussion really isn’t helping us. Games and movies don’t have as much in common as we’d like to think.

Movies aren’t interactive experiences. They’re as far from it as you can get. You sit down and watch a movie. You might pause it, get up and pee or make some nachos or popcorn or get a beer, but for the most part you’re sitting there watching a movie. You’re engaging the story using the information the filmmakers have given you, but most of this information is readily accessible. Sometimes films will have a lot of subtext or be purposefully obtuse and they’ll require some extrapolation on the part of the viewer, but for the most part films are experiences ranging in length from an hour and a half to two and a half hours which demand the viewer’s attention and work best watched in one sitting. You can go back and watch particular scenes, and they might be enjoyable, but they won’t really work without the context of the film surrounding them.

Games aren’t really like that at all. Games are long, wandering experiences, ranging in time from two hours to one hundred. The generally accepted amount of time for a game to not be a “deal breaker” at $60 is 12-20 hours, with 40 hours composing a sort of golden standard. Games are meant to be picked up and put down a lot, sometimes in chunks as small as 20 minutes. Games are also, when done best, flooded with subtext imparted through art, language, character design and movement and overall level design. They’ve got that fancy pants dialogue and exposition going for them too but anyone who’s listened to a Valve commentary can tell you that subtext is what really makes a game. It's what immerses gamers in a different world and helps to tell the game’s story. Without subtext games can’t really function. Even Asteroids relies on subtext.

This is very similar to the way literature operates. Books rely on the nuances of language and voice to establish so much of their stories. The way people, places and things are described is as important as the description itself. The way chapters are put together, the way paragraphs flow, the way words are selected and used; all of these things combine to make a book work. At the core there is a story, but only so much of the story is in the set pieces. So much more of it is in the telling: the way you engage each page, the way you interpret the characters you’re given, the way you fill in the blanks with your mind. You can do these things with movies, its true, but there are generally fewer ways to interpret filmic characters. Compare John McLane in Die Hard to Phillip Marlowe in The Big Sleep. Both men are hardened crime fighters operating outside of the regular bounds of the law, but one of those characters is a lot more interesting to think about and the other is a lot more interesting to watch.

And this is the way that games, really good games, work as well. They’re less about the experience you’re presented with and more about the way that this experience impacts you. Portal, oh darling Portal, is a great example of this. We’re presented with the standard trappings of video games and the puzzles they force us through and then we’re told that we need to rebel against these concepts and these puzzles and make this experience our own. We’re taught how to do this by our adversary and before the game’s end we wonder: just how bad was GlaDOS? Sure, she tried to murder us, but she did offer us cake.

As such, when trying to consider or discuss games as art I find that I have an easier time working from parallels in novels. Bioshock had this in spades, where your interaction with each segment of the game was what was really important. Bioshock also allowed the player a great deal of interpretive space within the game. Many experiences were optional and even the necessary experiences needed to be processed. It’s quite easy to miss out on just who your mother is on the first playthrough, to lose track of any number of other smaller details or skip far too many of the delightful little experiences we're presented with.

And that’s fine. You can easily miss details in the story of a book and still get a lot of enjoyment out of it. And what’s more, you can come back to the same book and read it multiple times and get something interesting out of it with each attempt. Games are the same way. The Half-Life games are especially perfect for this type of iterative replaying. The texture of the world is so rich, so many of the side areas cannily hidden and completely optional, that it almost demands to be played through again and again.

My point is that most games involve moving through a relatively linear story, or a collection of linear story segments, to a conclusion established by the author, and so most games can readily be compared to novels or short stories. Novels and short stories of greatly varying quality, of course, but still, novels and short stories in the way they tell their tales and expect “readers” to interact with them. But what about the new slough of experiential indie games? Games like Flower? Games like The Path?

I believe that these games are representative of a type of “poetry” in gaming. Think of it this way. Poems are dense, image laden experiences. In most cases a poem demands a lot from the reader and doesn’t necessarily offer a clear message of just what has transpired within. Instead it asks you to interpret an author’s language using your own experiences and thoughts. It asks you to impart meaning on to their words. That’s what makes poetry cool: not its flowery language or wandering thought process. Its ability to be a completely interactive static medium.

The Path does just this. It doesn’t give players enough information to make a complete story. There are bits and pieces there, hidden throughout the woods, but even once you have all of them the game won’t sit down and let you know what it all means. Instead it gives you snippits of a reality. It tells you things about each of the characters involved and then it sits back and lets you deal with these things. Ruby’s leg brace, Robin’s disheveled cloak, Ginger’s boy shorts. These all speak volumes about their owners without ever saying anything explicitly.

There aren’t many games like this yet, games which demand that players engage subtext in order to find any meaning at all, and its understandable. They’re not going to sell very well. People who buy Madden aren’t interested in games like The Path, almost as a rule, and games like Madden sell millions of copies, despite being little more than annual re-releases. But the very existence of these games gives me hope, because it shows developers taking an increasingly artistic approach to how they develop games. And that’s what we need more of: more digital poetry to help us assess the medium for the way it communicates, as well as the ideas it offers.

Because if masturbation jokes can form the foundation of classics like Swift's imagine what they’ll write about Duke Nukem 3D in two hundred years. Imagine what they’ll write about Bioshock and Half-Life and all the runty children of the 640x480 graphics era. Just imagine what we can do if we all start looking a little closer at the games we play and picking out the art in them. Because it’s there to find, and as long as people like Tale of Tales are making games there’ll be plenty more to come.