Games are a strange medium, and the way they’re written about and discussed is just as strange to match. In relatively few other mediums do we assess our entertainment as an investment rather than an experience. Occasionally people will bring up the rising price of a film ticket to demonstrate something’s poor quality or claim that a book isn’t worth the paper it’s printed on, to take our cultural discourse back a few steps, but no other medium really seems as obsessed with consumer costs as video games.
Games like World of Goo and The Path, for example, can afford to be touted as experience because of their low price point. But compare that to games like No More Heroes, Call of Duty and Dawn of War. In each case we’re forced to assess these works with an eye towards their cost because we’re in an industry obsessed with how much these objects cost.
And it’s totally understandable, really. Other mediums have delivery methods which allow them to focus on critical reception and response. They develop “classics,” and the creators of these classics move in to public discourse and become indelibly connected with their creations. Games are just starting to develop this sort of developer-player trust, whereas films and television have had it for years. If Joss Whedon makes a show there is an established audience. It will be a relatively sizeable one, at that, and the strength of his work will probably draw in people unfamiliar with his creation.
But aside from Shigeru Miyamoto there aren’t too many household names in games with Whedon’s sort of pull. There are rising stars like Ken Levine and old stalwarts like Ron Gilbert, but these names mean relatively little to the “man on the street.” And it shows. Whose name is being used to sell Brutal Legend? Is it Tim Schaffer, critically celebrated game developer who has a lengthy career of making wonderfully imaginative games with vastly varying degrees of commercial success but consistent quality throughout? Or is Jack Black, a comedian whose career could be used to model a high frequency wave, who’s still trying to ride Tenacious D to some sort of public goodwill almost a decade after their antics, whose most memorable recent performance was as a junkie who remakes Eddie Murphy movies?
This sort of shit is commonplace. We lack real celebrities because our creators, like our players, are awkward nerds. They’re not outdoor kids. And if they were we’d hate them. Remember Jon Romero, back in the 90s, with his talk of sports cars and his supermodel girlfriend? Remember how great it felt to watch him fail? And today we have CliffyB, whose is possessed of an awkward dual person where he drives a lambourgini and poses with giant replica weapons from his games and also speaks softly and eloquently, with great enthusiasm, about games as an art form.
And this is the sort of dichotomy we have to embrace in discourse of our games. We have to recognize that we are enthusiasts in a medium that is simultaneously a huge, developing business and a nascent art form. As a result the only way to effectively write about this medium is to write with both of these points in mind. And that’s completely alien to any other sort of writing about entertainment.
Let’s take a look at Starcraft 2 and the recent news of its delay for a perfect example. There were two stories here, one about a perfectionist developer trying to hammer out the kinks in what most of the gaming public already believed was an excellent multiplayer matching service and the tale of a greedy CEO and CFO purposefully fudging their numbers so that their public shareholders wouldn’t develop unrealistic expectations for next year. The only person I saw reporting both these stories was Tom Chick, despite the prolific nature of the news. What’s bigger, especially to gaming in a global context, than Starcraft’s sequel? Nothing, that’s what.
But we, as a cultural group, seemed content to watch one side of the story push through, doing our best to ignore the business end. We found the story we wanted, the story of artists perfecting their craft, and as a result we lost the entire story. It’s something we do all too often, something which tends to skew our expectations for various games. We try to look at the game from one perspective or another rather than viewing it simultaneously from both an artistic and a business-minded perspective.
And it makes life a lot easier. Let’s look at EA, a company which has undergone some pretty serious changes in the last year but still has some serious problems. EA’s marketing machine is completely divorced, or so it would seem, from the artistic input of their game makers. The abysmal Dragon Age trailers, the absolutely retarded Dante’s Inferno marketing campaign twists, the continued pursuit of booth babes and the attempt to convince non-gamers that games are just as cool as summer blockbusters in order to get their attention, all of these trends display a profound disrespect for the established community of gamers who now, in their approaching maturity, want to be sold something on its genuine merits rather than being treated like they’re at the kids table at Thanksgiving. But if they market it this way they still get to make great games and introduce new people to games as an art form without risking money, because they’re divorcing their brainless marketing machine from their frankly incredible creative enterprise.
Of course, this causes no shortage of hate speech targetting EA, and rightly so. They’re hurting our medium, stifling our growth and our attempts to become all grown up. But then we actually sit down and play their games and nod in satisfaction: these games were made by people who get games and their production and should continue to make them. Left 4 Dead, Mass Effect and, hell, even Mirror’s Edge were all clearly games for gamers and all of them attempted to forward gaming as a medium and make an interesting statement about games as an unconventional narrative form.
But we’d never know to watch their seemingly carelessly hired marketing agencies tout their products. The only hints we get of how much EA genuinely cares for their creative people come during crisis times. Remember when Mass Effect came under all that flak for having a PG-13 sex scene in it? Bioware didn’t rush to their own defense. Instead it was John Ricotello, of all people, who came out and defended the game. They got Geoff Keighly on Fox News to defend it and they did all they could to let people know that this was an artistic labor of love and not a softcore porn sim. And when the invisible wall between the business and art ends of their business collapsed, a strange thing happened.
I developed a modicum of respect for John Ricotello.
I know, I probably just lost all of my gamer cred there, but hear me out. The people he represents, the people upon whose creative efforts his empire is built, came under attack. And he stood up for them. He spoke to the legitimacy of their creations as the man who bankrolls them. He made sure we knew he cared about games as more than a meal ticket. And that’s the sort of discourse we need.
Some people are taking a very direct approach to it. Gamasutra, for example, discusses both the business and artistic elements of games with great aplomb. Leigh Alexander is sort of a paragon of this. Anyone who wants to see how the discussion of games should work should check out her blog piece on Evergreen titles, the titles which result in sustained hardware sales for a particular console. Leigh grasps that this is a creative industry with a high per-unit cost which results in a really strange sort of business and consumer environment, and she’s willing to talk about the issues that this brings up both on her personal site and on Gamasutra through amazing business authors like Christian Nutt, who exposes elements of the way games are made that I would never understand without his aid.
And other critics, such as Tom Chick and Geoff Keighly, combine these elements in their discussions, consciously or unconsciously, Chick through his sometimes scattered but always intriguing writing, Keighly by bringing people like Michael Patcher into discussions with people like David Jaffe (with hilarious results). These are the sort of writers and reporters we need more of, people who perceive games as both a business and an art form and who can impart the importance of both these aspects on to their readership.
Because games as a business and an art are so different from anything else out there right now. Games cost more to produce and purchase and take more effort than any other sort of medium. And no other entertainment medium, aside from perhaps television, has to be quite so concerned with both public and critical reception. And games have it much rougher. There aren’t magazines dedicated to the private lives of the people who make games, nor is their discourse on the behavior and thoughts of any but the most outrageous of game makers. The closest thing we have to a Joss Whedon or a J.J. Abrams is Shigeru Miyamoto, and it’s hard to tell just how much creative input that venerable game maker has nowadays.
Because we’re not trying to talk about it. We’re not sitting down, micing him up and asking him where he wants Mario to go as a franchise and why he’s making the games he’s making. Instead we’re satisfied to look at his games as commercial measures which succeed or fail and then discuss them as entirely separate artistic endeavors which accomplish their goals or don’t. We’re willing to let things like Beyond Good and Evil and Psychonauts happen again and again because we, as an audience, aren’t stepping up and forcing our writers to engage in a higher level discussion.
And that’s a problem. It’s a problem with an easy solution, though. Stop reading industry-only press run by people who seem to want internet fame and start reading writing by actual, legitimate journalists like Keighly and Alexander who want to elevate the discourse on games and bring it to a popular audience without losing any of its heft. Because the only people we can really blame for the current state of discourse on games, on the iron curtain between people who love games and sell them, are ourselves.
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