Super Nerd Sundays Presents: A Coda of Sorts!

I feel like I’m kind of illustrating a facile point here, but I still feel like I have to do so. Games have been in a cultural ghetto for a long time, mostly undeservedly so. Considered as a whole, games are no more childish or ridiculous than any other medium, no less problematic than novels or films. All of these mediums have issues in breaking out of pre-conceived molds, exploring new forms and, all too often, breaking out of stereotypical cultural portrayals of women. If we read shitty romance novels and compared them to shitty video games, we’d likely see a lot of parallelism in their storytelling: lots of Mary Sue insertion, unfortunate and oversimplified characterizations prone to outlandish acts for the sake of plot and possessed of non-sense motivation.

But it seems like only games are judged by the worst examples of the medium. Only games have their potential assessed by the worst of the worst of their field, and only games lack the sort of lionistic protectors and celebrated critiquing, enshrined in academic pursuit, that other literary mediums, even the humble graphic novel/comic book, are now receiving. It’s bullshit, and if I’ve sought to illustrate one point here, that’s it.

Games are, in a literary sense, a new medium, something fresh and native to the post-structural contexts that we often seek to generate in more conventional literary contexts. We’re often prone to approach games from the perspective of familiar, narrative oriented mediums. Who can say why; that’s unimportant. What is readily apparent is that these means of assessing games and their narratives are inadequate. The experience of playing a game is just that: an experience, informed largely by the player. We need to develop a critical apparatus that accounts for this empowerment of the player/reader figure in order to effectively discuss games as a narrative medium, and I genuinely believe poetry offers us the best possible inroad to do so.

Poems, after all, rely on their reader more than any other literary medium to establish things like context, narrative and coherence. Poetry cannot function without a reader, and it doesn’t just provide a reader with a set of images the way that films or novels might. Instead it presents readers with an experience and leaves them to interpret it, much in the way that games, good games do. Good is the key word here, though perhaps effective is a more apt term. Games that work, games that function as games not as novels and films outside of their native format, trade heavily on the experience they generate. They don’t provide an explicit context for players to engage in so much as they provide a context for the players to emerge within: the way that a good poem allows a reader to form their own ideas and will, if we’re lucky, elicit their own poems from them.

The key factor here is the role of the reader figure. Poems and games that trade on the power that reader figures can exert over them tend to be more effective at telling stories and conveying ideas and themes than poems and games that ignore the power of the reader, instead relying on standards of other mediums, attempting to establish meaning and impress it upon reader figures in a clumsy attempt to convey ideas. If you write a poem that might as well be a novel, then it might as well have been a novel. If you make a game that might as well have been a film, why not simply generate a film? The apparent lower bar for games is only apparent if we ignore the bulk of cinema, the dross that we often don’t even see in theaters which is frequently (and fairly) reviled.

It should come as no surprise then that writers who understand the potential of the medium understand the maturity of their audience, and, therefore, tend to utilize it to better effect. Games that recognize their own structures, games that know they’re supposed to be games and not any other kind of medium, display complex ideas every bit as worthy of our attention as a good movie, a good poem, a good novel or short story. I hope my depictions of The Path, Portal and the Half-Life series have illustrated the complex female characters you can find in games if you, you know, look at them, and the complex weaving of theme, story and play that players (readers) experience when they play games.

There’s a reason people like them.

I feel like a bit of an ass writing this coda, because what I’m really doing is asking a group of people uninterested in a medium to grow up. Critics of the facility of games, individuals who are unfamiliar with concepts as simple as authorship and collaboration in game design environments, will bash or dismiss the medium as insignificant. People scoff at the idea of having a profound or well constructed experience in a game, and all too often, as a pass-time, it feels like games are something we can’t shamelessly show our love of. If I tell you I love games, you’ll think I’m childish, a boob, underdeveloped and emotionally stunted. And while I’m all of those things, the fact that I love games and find them to be profound experiences has nothing to do with it.

Games tell stories. They’re good at it. And they’re good at doing it in a post-structural context, where the story unfolds as the reader inserts themselves into it. It isn’t simply a matter of constructing an experience from pieces provided, however. It’s more of a collaborative effort wherein reader figures and author figures engage in a tacit exchange of creation and play: through play, the creation is realized, the story is generated on a moment to moment basis and a narrative begins to emerge.

The narrative can be as simple as a red wheelbarrow, covered with rain (or a yellow disk eating dots to escape its stark prison) or it can be something deeper, more profound, more complex. It can be a multi-volume treatise on what it means to grow up, a story about revolution and rejection of authority or a story about what it means to be a woman in a man’s world. It’s easy to snicker when we see something unexpected or seemingly out of place, and far far harder to look at this new object, consider it and try to find meaning within it, as well as meaning that it reflects in us as we engage with it.

I feel silly to be writing about games in this way, to be writing about them like I have to defend them after spending the last few weeks illustrating just how they form complex narratives with compelling female characters and a surrounding cultural discourse every bit as rich (and a great deal more accessible) than the discourse that surrounds other literary mediums. But I feel like I have to.

No medium should ever be in a cultural ghetto. No medium should be assessed by its worst case scenarios. We shouldn’t be talking about Real Housewives or Jersey Shore when we discuss the potential of reality television. We should be talking about The Deadliest Catch or…some…whatever thing. I don’t know anything about reality television, so I can’t really do a lot with that analogy. And by looking at games, actually looking at games that matter, we can see this particularly clearly. Because no one would ever call novels a universally infantile medium based on having read two or three romance novels and be considered anything but a buffoon. But prominent cultural critics have done just this to games in the past and been criticized minimally, by cultural outliers.

Now I’m starting to whine, and that doesn’t help anything. So I’m gonna close this up and start working on it as a paper, not a series of posts. Thanks to all my reader(s) for bearing with me while I experimented with this idea of forming content and developing a bigger idea. I think it lead to some interesting and dramatically varying outcomes here, but overall I feel like I made something that illustrates in some manner in the importance and care that goes into developing games, the complexity of the themes that games convey and the driving impetus that makes me a gamer. This is an incredible medium which has long been denied its due consideration in my estimation, and if I’ve elevated the conversation on games to equal footing with other literary mediums, if I’ve appropriated a means by which to comprehend, interpret and discuss them, even a little, then I’m happy.

Thanks for reading. Super Nerd Sundays will return to their normal rambling randomness soon, I promise.