What language should video games speak?

The essay below was posted by Wes Jacks as a comment to this blog post. I have reprinted it here in full.

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(Be forewarned, what follows are the half-conceived thoughts of a grad student who needs to be reading the 300 page book on Griffith that's due Thursday.)

In hopes of "further muddying the intellectual waters," which a professor once told me was about the best one could realistically hope for as a grad student, I'll toss my cinematically-styled hat into this gaming debate.

I find Radosh's piece on videogame potential eerily reflects many of the same arguments and contradictions found in Classical Film theory (up to and including Bazin, let's say) and contemporary theory on Early Film (written post-1978 Brighton conference). In this post, I hope to draw out a few of these parallels as food for thought and ask some questions about the future of the gaming medium.

Like Radosh, Classical Film theorists were deeply focused on determining what the potential of cinema was and what its purpose should be. Writers like Hugo Munsterberg, Rudolf Arnheim, and (most significantly) Andre Bazin all had different notions about what the cinematic form was best at doing and what it should avoid trying in order to fulfill an ‘essence’ of cinema. Unsurprisingly, the earliest film theorists (pre-1920) were facing a problem very similar to the one which confronts serious scholars writing about video games today. They were writing about an unrespected predominantly-narrative medium which was about 25 years old, and they wanted to prove that cinema could be a unique art form. In order to emphasize its uniqueness, the writers were likely to point out techniques film was adept at using that other art forms were not. Editing was the early, popular example. Through editing, film carries an amazing ability to manipulate space and time. Unlike theater, a film narrative can jump from the birth of man to the space age with a single cut, to take an extreme and well-known example. Similarly, through parallel editing, film can show the progression of two simultaneous actions in a way that theater, and even the novel, is less adept at capturing. See any post-1910 or so Griffith film for evidence. The early film theorists were quick to pick up on these areas of uniqueness and emphasize them as proof of cinema's status as an independent art.

I see this technique, referred to as a Medium-Specificity argument, echoed in Radosh’s article when he calls on game designers to use ‘the fundamentals of gameplay’ in new ways. Radosh defines these fundamentals as “giving players challenges to work through and choices to make.” In Radosh’s mind, like those early film theorists, there are certain fundamental tasks which video games rely on that are unique to the gaming medium. Obviously, this type of argument helps reinforce the status of the medium as offering a unique gamer (not spectator) experience.

Very often, the loudest cries for a more artistic treatment of marginalized media like early cinema, video games, and comic books come from outside the industry. The arguments I’ve set forth so far were/are all made by intellectuals, who have a right and responsibility to critically examine new media. Critics, professors, film enthusiasts, and hardcore gamers should use their voices to point out what is great and awful about cinema, and should push for these media to accomplish more. However, we can never forget that video games and film are big businesses.

Even before film critics were calling for medium-specific storytelling and the use of specifically cinematic devices in order for the filmmaking corpus to stand out from the historical crowd, producers and exhibitors wanted to demonstrate the respectability of the film medium so they could make more money. The earliest exhibition sites for film were vaudeville houses and traveling fairs. Nickelodeons, the first stable exhibition sites, don’t appear until 1905. All of these exhibition sites and the medium found within were considered horribly low-class. ‘Respectable’ middle- and upper-class individuals simply did not attend the cinema on a regular basis. In order to draw these, more financially solvent, crowds into the theater, filmmakers and exhibitors began calling for producers to create films based on highly-respected plays and novels. So Shakespeare, Dickens, and the Bible all began to be tackled onscreen. Production companies like Famous Players in Famous Plays were founded, and established theatrical talent was hired to bring greater respectability to plays.

Again, contemporary video game production in some respects mimics this progress. Judi Dench voices her own character a recent Bond game. The GTA franchise carries a cast list on imdb.com that would make many film producers jealous and a soundtrack that features major musicians. In terms of lifting entire narratives from other mediums, I would argue (with admittedly-limited gaming experience behind me) that video games do this more sparingly than did early film. Are there instances where an established narrative from another medium was used as video game material in an attempt to attract an older, more respectable audience? If there aren’t yet, some people think there should be. In a recent interview with Wired magazine, green-screen king, Andy Serkis, suggested that plays like Romeo and Juliet and Macbeth be transferred to the video game world and that gamers should play as the lead characters. Radosh echoes this notion, albeit much less prescriptively, when he says “games will need to embrace the dynamics of failure, tragedy, comedy and romance.” While I’m not sure what the ‘dynamics’ of these genres are, the author definitely seems to suggest video games begin to work with established forms of storytelling.

The problem with the appeal to older forms of storytelling is that the new medium sacrifices a sense of its uniqueness. Although I admit to entering dangerous waters, I would argue (alongside a theorist like Kracauer) that a film like Umberto D, which was written directly for the screen and depends so heavily on the visual style developed by the director, is inherently ‘more cinematic’ than a faithful cinematic adaptation of Dickens’ Great Expectations. Likewise, I'd consider a game like Katamari more intimately tied to the potential of the video gaming medium than the latest LOTR spinoff.

So far, I’ve been writing about narrative film and narrative video gaming. What about less strictly-narrative gaming? After all, Radosh asserts in his article “The games that come closest to achieving artistry tend to be non-narrative: manipulable abstractions of light and sound, whimsical virtual toys or puzzle adventures that subvert the gamer’s sense of space, time and physics.” Surely, these sorts of games play to the unique strengths of an immersive gaming experience in a way that cinema and literature cannot offer. Personally, I love these games. In these titles, I see a parallel with what Tom Gunning designated the “Cinema of Attractions.” Before 1907, filmmaking was primarily non-narrative. No one went to the movies to see films with their favorite stars or made by their favorite directors because they weren’t even named. Instead, it was the technology itself which was on display. Signs advertised the Cinematographe and Edison’s much less adept knockoff. The short films made during this time were consistently concerned with showing off what film could do. Close-ups were used not so much for narrative motivation but because a close-up was a big deal. Men like Melies made films replete with special effects and spare on story. Double exposures, superimpositions, fast and slow motion were all on display. In a similar manner, there are games that use the potentials of the medium for the sake of showing off what it can do. Remember when the Wii remote was just announced? Everyone began speculating about just what the remote could do. I’d venture no one thought ‘well, now they can tackle a truly respectable version of The Three Musketeers.” The joy was in the potential of the console, just like the initial joy in cinema came from the potential of the device itself.

After championing these less-conventional games, I find it ironic that Radosh invokes the 30s as the beginning of cinematic art, because the 30s were truly part of the height of the structured studio system in Hollywood. During the teens and twenties, filmmakers were given more freedom to experiment with narrative and non-narrative forms to see what the possibilities of cinema were. Avant-garde filmmaking flourished in France. The Russians pushed the bounds of montage. The Germans dabbled in hyper-stylized expressionism. By the 30s, studios knew what storylines sold well and genre filmmaking was streamlined. Film budgets were calculated precisely so that production risk was minimized. The producer and director unit system had certain filmmakers working on the same type of films for their entire careers. Innovation and experimentation were at a low-point in American film. Of course, this didn't destroy good filmmaking, but it did severely restrict the range of style in cinema.

I wonder if the same thing will happen to the gaming world. Radosh calls gaming a ‘backward-looking medium’ (and for the record, can anyone name a medium created in the last 200 years that wasn’t backward-looking) and laments that because ‘game designers rely on the language of cinema, they have not sufficiently developed a new form of storytelling based on the language of video games.’ I suspect when such a language is developed and standardized it will spread just like the conventions of early cinema and squash the experimentation in gaming that we all love. Once a language is set and genres are established, gaming will become even more reliably profitable and radical innovation will become less fundable. And that would be a loss to us all.