Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Outside the Game!

I’d never seen City of Lost Children until the other night. This seminal French film, which would catapult Ron Perlman into a superstar career of playing intimidating, if somewhat slow, characters, immediately made me think of the much better known and harder to avoid Dark City (itself still somewhat obscure) with its evocative imagery and pale, shuffling cultists. It might’ve been the whiskey, but I thought the themes of the films matched up nicely as well, with the power of one’s own mind granting freedom when realized. The thematic similarities (aside from creepy midgets) kind of end there, but as the images of City of Lost Children seemed familiar in my mind.

The man in a diving suit carrying the child, the idiot giant working ceaselessly to protect his surrogate little sister, all the while searching for another surrogate family member, fighting his own mind at times and eventually defeating an evil, selfish madman who wanted to exploit and even kill children to create his own fantasy world... I’d seen all of this before. This was Bioshock, twelve years before Bioshock ever hit shelves.

Leigh Alexander frequently discusses the manner in which games need to look outside of their own medium (and moreover the comfort zone of their culture) in order to find source material, and Bioshock is a great example of a game steeped in this practice. From the art-deco architecture to the Randian themes penetrating the game, the influence of the larger world outside of video games is apparent in every brushstroke making up its tableau. I’d never heard City mentioned in the context of Bioshock before either, but it seems fairly clear right now (although that could be the hangover).

This is not to say that Bioshock ignored video games. It also took into account the structure and success of games like System Shock 2 and, to hear the art designers discuss the game’s structure now, titles as venerable as Doom. Bioshock emerged as a conglomeration of influences, both video game related and not, centered around an original creative center, and as a result it was fucking incredible. Its narrative is pitch perfect, the pacing unusually good for a video game. I have veteran gamer friends who have trouble playing it for long stretches, just because it measures and delivers tension in a way that makes them uncomfortable after decades of playing games like Unreal and Call of Duty. And the story, with its various character arcs and betrayal, actually made me angry and sad in turn. I even teared up like the bitch I am when those little girls (all grown up) grabbed my dying hand and let me know I’d done right.

This powerful narrative came not only from Ken Levine’s amazing capacity for creativity. It also came from the manner in which he was aware of and engaged existing material to make his story. The story is literate in the best traditions of narrative. Like Baxter’s suburban Delphi in The Feast of Love, Levine clearly knows the people who have tread this ground before and knows how to reference them without calling attention to the references. He’s got a deft hand for making characters and fitting them with both our world and the world they live in.

Compare this to the creative direction of say, Mass Effect. The creative directors of Mass Effect are almost proud of not having read what is frequently interpreted as their source material. Listening to Tom Chick interview Casey Hudson of Bioware made me feel bad. They trotted out a Tennyson reference in the first game to moderate effect and they had some nice awareness of Star Trek which lead to an ironic interpretation of what the Federation might actually look like if an upstart group of humans tried to storm the galaxy and make their mark on it, but the story ran shallow and their lack of reference points becomes readily clear when you examine the moving parts of their narrative. The Quarians are possessed of the resources to maintain a small armada but cannot use it to defeat the Geth, a group of creatures who could be rendered inert by electromagnetic forces. The Geth are a group of sentient machines who apparently want to be left alone or destroy all intelligent life, depending on the day of the week and who you ask. The Krogan somehow managed to dominate the universe without any apparent capacity for naval combat or medicine. Unless they were hurling their people through space and crashing into planets where they’d breed I fail to see how the Krogan could possibly constitute a threat in a world where a spaceship is required to grab a god damn carton of milk.

Then there are the more specific references. Hudson readily admits to not having read Berserker or Battlestar Gallactica, two works that deal directly with themes that Mass Effect’s story is all about engaging. It wouldn’t shock me to hear that he hasn’t read Asimov either. Before writing a novel a novelist will take great pains to research the topic of the novel. Everything from politics to traffic patterns to the factory default weight of a 1986 Malibu’s clutch, these are the details that make your narrative, and one of the more challenging parts of writing a book is making sure that your story accounts for and utilizes these disparate facts to some effect.

But game developers seem largely unconcerned with stepping outside of their normal consumption of media to research their worlds and flesh them out. Not to rag on Hudson too bad, but listening to him rattle off the creative influences of Mass Effect 2 is like listening to your nerdy freshman roommate list of his favorite movies. Making games is hard work, certainly, and far more time and cooperation intensive than say making a novel or even a film, but writing is writing, and when you’re planning on releasing a artistic work for and pricing it at $60 you’d better take the time to write it well and do what writers do: research, research, research.

In the end it’s not just about engaging media outside of the world of games, although that is important. Music, art, film and literature are all important mediums that can teach games quite a bit, but its not enough to just look at them and reflect upon them. Game developers need to take lessons from them as well, to look at them critically and understand how they were both developed and what they can offer as narrative touchstones. They need to think about the work they’re making and the elements that compose it, the way the parts of that work fit together and whether or not their world makes sense when placed under a microscope. They need to know about the existence of similar works and account for them, even if they don’t build off of them.

No author would ever write a mystery novel without considering Raymond Chandler and Dashiell Hammett, as well as, more recently, Michael Chabon. Well, no author worth his salt. No filmmaker would make a western without considering The Good, The Bad and The Ugly, Tombstone and Unforgiven. A really good western director would also spend some time with The Quick and the Dead and Yojimbo. An artist wouldn’t make a Pointillist painting without looking at Monet, as well as Van Gogh and Picasso. And that’s sort of the difference. People working in other mediums who want to be taken seriously will look beyond the sort of work they want to produce to get a sense of the context surrounding that work. Art never exists in a vacuum, but this seems to be a lesson many game developers have yet to learn. The staggering scale of the undertaking they engage in makes that statement more than a little unfair, but people like Levine and Schafer prove that this is far from impossible. I shouldn’t feel that Brutal Legends world was better thought out than Mass Effect’s, but I do, motorcycle pigs and all.

So while Alexander is totally on the right track, I think we need to go further while proscribing advice that developers are almost certain to ignore. It’s not enough just to engage works outside of your medium and consider them while creating your own world. I think that creative success relies on a combination of research and critical thought on your own creation, regardless of medium. And the reticence games have shown towards this as a medium is discouraging, but not so pervasive as to be overwhelming. For every Casey Hudson there is a Ken Levine. For every Mackey McCandish there is a Tim Schafer. For every developer like Infinity Ward making a thoughtless, structurally lazy and technologically impressive AAA title there is an indie developer like Tale of Tales making a pensive, thoughtful thing that might not even be a game by modern standards which puts more thought into its story than its ability to push a technological envelope. And that gives me hope, although I’d like to see it more often.