Video games are about imagination. They’re about going to places you might not otherwise go and doing things you might not otherwise do; they’re about meeting people and entities you might not otherwise meet and having experiences you might not otherwise have. The medium allows us, essentially, to take a life for a test drive. And the more advanced the technology gets, the less hard imagination work is required to “be” there. I don’t know whether this is good or bad, it’s just the way things are. But one thing’s remained the same since day one: there is always you, on the other end of the mouse or controller, always you separated from the other world by a screen. Video games can be about anything, but they always have you in common.
Mark Newheiser offers an interesting view on the role of narrative agents in games, and he devotes a good portion of his article to the connection between the “agent” and the player. Sometimes they’re one and the same; sometimes you take on a role that’s very expressly not you. Character is such a primary driver in any narrative medium that it deserves special attention; only in games can the character and the consumer be one and the same.
But characters live inside a narrative, and games continue to struggle with that. Not only how to create good ones, but even how to present them. SVGL’s Leigh Alexander’s got this piece about game narrative – well, not just narrative, something more meta. From long cutscenes to the modern design tenets of simplicity and bite-sized information, she ruminates on how the experience of the game is changing, particularly in narrative, but in other ways as well.
What it all comes down to, though, is imagination. The amount of mental elbow grease that a player puts into experiencing the world. The more imaginative the player, and the more effort the player applies to his or her imaginings, the more rich and immersive the game.
That issue of effort, obviously, has really changed in the last few years. After all, at the nativity of the video game, we were dealing with pixels the size of chiclets. This was a “dragon” back in those days:
Games had no choice but to be abstract, because the limitations of technology forced it. It’s similar to the technical limitations of early movie effects – there was really only so much you could do to make King Kong look real in 1933, compared to what Weta managed in 2005. Theatre, to a certain degree, has also been able to improve the veracity of its worlds as technology improves. Books, meanwhile, haven’t, can’t, won’t, and don’t need to. A novel is the ultimate mental exercise, because you don’t even get a representation of the world as the creator envisions it – it’s up to you to interpret words on the page and run them through your own image processing system. And yet “getting lost in a book” is arguably the easiest thing to do, assuming it’s a good one.
The image that headlines this piece paraphrases what’s probably the single most famous line of interactive experience ever penned:
You are standing in an open field west of a white house. There is a mailbox here.
It is the opening of Zork, and I ask you, does it get more cinematic than that? And once again, that ineffable YOU, always present, the one thing every game must have. It’s up to you to imagine that field, to decide whether it has dandelions or clover, to see the cherry blossoms (if there are any) fluttering through the air. You’ve gotta see the house: is it dilapidated, or well-kept? Is it entirely white, or are the outdoor shutters blue, or black? What is the day like? Is it summer, or is the air getting a little nippy from oncoming fall? Is the sun out? Is it morning or afternoon? Has it rained recently? What kind of birds are singing in the trees that surround the field? Do any trees surround the field?
You don’t get any of that from “You are standing in an open field west of a white house.” You have to make it. Gaming is an act of creation for the player as well as the developer.
Later on games were able to help us a little more… but with the help came challenges. Have a look at this shot from Ultima II. This is the Atari ST version, circa 1985.
Ultima II was the Oblivion of its time. The enormity of its game world, not to mention the degree of nonlinearity it offered, was amazing. And kind of still is, especially when you consider that it was entirely designed by one dude. Its visuals are hopelessly archaic by today’s standards, obviously, but back then we hadn’t tasted the sultry fruits of 3D worlds. Back then we had to imagine the world of Ultima II, using only what little help the screen image provided us. And yet to some, it was possible to look at that 32-color mess and see a lush world as verdant and mysterious as any fairy tale.
It wasn’t easy, though, that’s for sure. As with Zork, it took a good deal of imagination to really work out the details of the place. I suppose many people didn’t bother, but they’re missing out.
But time marched on, and even those players who lacked the imagination or the inclination to really immerse got the tools to do so. After all, Ultima II was the Oblivion of its time… but Oblivion was the Oblivion of its time:
As the technology of graphics improved, the amount of toil required to really see the game world diminished. We’re now at a point where graphics are so close to photo-realism that imagination isn’t necessary, at least not from a visual perspective. Now the imagination requirements are about the experience, and how the game makes us feel.
I’m not a big fan of existence. I don’t really love life and I’m not particularly enthused about being stuck here for god knows how many more years. At the risk of sounding outrageously morose, life, to me, has always seemed like a party I never really wanted to attend in the first place, but was dragged to by friends, and now that I’m here I’m not having a very good time and I want to go home. That’s just how it is for me.
And thus it should come as no surprise that I like video games, because they give me the chance to visit other worlds, inhabit other personalities, and possibly kill people with shovels. Sigmund Freud was wrong. Dreams aren’t “the royal road to the unconscious,” video games are. Nothing lets us get closer to our own imaginations than when we’re in a good game.
The reason I like them in the first place is that they stimulate my imagination, and I prefer my imagination to reality. Their narratives and characters, so often lacking, don’t usually bother me because I simply imagine my own stuff to fill in holes and inadequacies. I’ve noted on other occasions that this talent isn’t always a good thing; sometimes I’ve found myself devoting waaaaaay too much effort to bolster a terrible alien Nazi zombie invasion story or a cardboard space marine character. It’s a cross I occasionally bear.
More and more we are seeing games that seem to recognize this role they play as evocateurs of the imagination, and clever developers are taking advantage of it. It’s been a while, for example, since a game unnerved me quite as much as Cryostasis, even though it’s actually kind of boring; more impressive than the creepy factor is that it’s the only game I can think of that makes you actually feel the cold. Plus, since there’s no way in hell I’m going to visit a haunted frozen Russian icebreaker in real life, I’m glad to have had the opportunity to do so from the comfort of my home.
The visual impeccability of modern games has forced designers to experiment with other techniques for immersion, even within the confines of zombie Nazi alien space marine cliche. Say what you will about Gears of War’s storyline and the many, many missteps it makes, one thing Gears does better than so many other games is that it makes you feel awesome. Simple additions like the roadie run and handheld camera give you the visceral sensation of being part of the action.
It is unquestionably harder to make a game that evokes feelings and ignites the imagination than it is to make a cookie cutter title. As such we’ll see plenty of those in coming years. But the industry is in a state of massive flux right now; no one yet fully comprehends or appreciates the sea change that digital distribution models will bring, any more than we truly grokked what Google would mean when it first launched.
Because the model of how games are disseminated is changing, I believe we’re going to see more risk-taking and more innovation – not just from crazy indies (though we’ll see plenty there), but from the entrenched establishment as well. They’ll have to if they want to remain competitive… because gamers won’t settle for less. I think we’ve established that Dead Space wasn’t a scary game, or an innovative one. It was a reasonably good one, sure, but it wasn’t anything special. And I think EA took notice of that. Gamers want more than ordinary these days, a desire that ironically mirrors the fact that games themselves are all about escaping the ordinariness of everyday life.
Don’t expect the change to happen overnight, and understand that even with a model that allows games to bypass the publisher structure and go straight into gamers’ brains, someone is going to have to pay for development. That someone, whoever it is, will be risk-averse, at a cost to innovation. But the fundamental truth remains: games are evolving, slowly but inexorably, into something entirely new. Just as the imagination was once fired by the drab 16-color effects of The Legend of Zelda, to the extent that for millions of gamers Hyrule became a real place filled with real people, so too will games come to effect us on a far more subtle but delicious level. With nowhere to go in stimulating the senses, games will soon have to start stimulating the soul.
Email the author of this post at steerpike@tap-repeatedly.com.
True, there’s an abundance of pretty games out there, but in five years, they will all look primitive. Good writing, however, will last forever–what’s engrossing, ironic, and/or moving will always remain so, which is why we still talk about games like System Shock, Half Life, and Shadow of the Colossus (not so old but it will be nigh-eternal).
All too often, solid writing involving an unpredictable plot and interesting characters takes the trunk to eye candy and proven gameplay. Even so, not every memorable game involves particularly impressive writing; Zelda and X-Com won’t be remembered for they’re storylines, but they “did what they did” so well that the gameplay spawned franchises.
Actually, X-COM will be remembered for its story, imagery, and characters.
The story and the use of various iconic space-alien images and descriptions was a masterpiece, against which pretty much all more recent alien invasion game plots have measured up poorly. I can’t be sure that the original inspiration for the “Klingon in the wheatfield” opening of _Enterprise_ came from X-COM, but all my friends and I certainly thought of it.
To this day in my real life as a computer UI engineer, I’ve seen few images as evocative, compelling, and simple as the washed background graphic of a clandestine meeting and a suitcase full of money, when you were reviewing your budget.
And just last Saturday in our regular FtF roleplaying game, the group learned about the nasty way a demon was reproducing and one of the players cried out “OK, we are hunting Chrysallids”.
X-COM, along with MoO, MoO2, MoM, and one’s favorite flavor of Civilization (I, II, SMAC, III, IV), are not just seminal games, they are games that are *still fun to play today*, because they transcended the limitations of the hardware at the time instead of being limited by it. I still play these games from time to time today. Many other great, seminal games don’t have that. I actually hunted down a copy of _Wizardry Gold_ a few years ago, wanting to relive the glory of the original _Wizardry_. Sadly, once I got it installed I found that I just couldn’t recapture the joy.
What’s interesting is that I think games can immerse you or transport you in different ways. For some games, it’s the writing. For others it’s just, well, something else really. Like Steerpike said in “Gears of War” it’s being able to be awesome. In “Left 4 Dead”, I think it’s the whole cinematic/team work aspect that works so well.
In “X-Com” it was something else. I am not sure what it was exactly, but I certainly became completely immersed in it. I always tried to give my little soldiers some type of personality after a few missions. There were the reckless soldiers who ran ahead, the grizzled leaders, soldiers who had relationships, etc. None of this was really part of the game (save when your guys panicked and went berserk), but there was enough there to let my imagination run free. I had soldiers committing “suicide” after something terrible happened (just drop a gernade on their position), soldiers killing others (purposefully), soldiers sacrificing themselves, etc. It was great. As good as any “written” RPG type story for PCs/NPCs as I have ever had.
X-Com was very good at that. The combination of atmosphere, politics, and style – even the music was perfect – really resulted in a game that made you feel like you were part of it, despite the fact that strategy games don’t necessarily need to be as immersive as other games.
Transcendent games, like those Paul describes, are indeed rare. Thief: The Dark Project and STALKER are two that’ve always stuck with me. Morrowind. Caesar III. World in Conflict. These are games I know I’ll still be revisiting in years, assuming I can get the darn things to run.
“assuming I can get the darn things to run.”
Which has for years been a pet obssession of mine. Literature and to a lesser extent film are not artistic media with an expiry date, because they are reasonably easy to duplicate and can transcend formats again with relatively little effort. I literally have books at home that are hundred years old (and more) and can still be read despite being a little worse for wear.
However, try playing Ultima II today. Yes, it’s ugly, yes, it’s clunky, but those are things you will notice if you can actually run it. 99% of all people on Earth will not be able to run it, because they do not have access to the appropriate hardware, and emulation software that they would need to acquire, understand and configure might be in another universe for that matter. Not to mention the dubious legal position they would be putting themselves in. So, the ACTUAL classics of the artform (or at least artistic media… or just entertainment media) are not just distanced from people who haven’t been around in the first place (and so can appreciate) the crude graphical abstractions and difficult interfaces, but are actually blocked from them.
The actually legal and feasible ways to play Ultima II or the first Legend of Zelda are few and pretty esotheric for most people. And we’re talking stone cold classics of the medium here. Like, if Crime and Punishment or The Old Man and the Sea or Don Quijote (or Illiyad for that matter) was only available to a small, borderline illegal cult of obssessives…
Yes, the current ‘digital distribution’ model actually helps bridge the gap a little bit but there and then you are again inseparably tied not just to a technology but to an actual Company that will (inevitably?) disappear one day and you will be left without legal AND technical mens to play the games you ‘own’.
Yes?
Too true, Meho. And don’t forget that even if the user gets the game to run, in the absence of documentation, he/she will have to trial-and-error the often arcane controls.
Services like GameTap offer legal and affordable access to many older games, but GameTap has already changed owners once and there’s no guarantee the place will survive in the long term. The industry as a whole is making efforts toward preservation, but not playership. An industry alliance needs to form with the express intention (and authority to) gather the games of yore and make them available for play. This would be indispensable to universities, students, and of course classicists such as ourselves.
“This would be indispensable to universities, students”
Exacerly!!! I mean, there are game design courses all over the rich and corrupt West, but if a student wants to play an old Infocom adventure, they have to resort to torrents and emulation. Unlike literature students who just have to go to the school library and get their copy of Beowulf in their preferred language…
“and of course classicists such as ourselves.”
I think this is the first time ever I have been lumped in with the classicists… It is a strange feeling…
It’s the dilemma of a new medium. Theatre can be preserved, prose can be preserved, even film – with care – can be preserved indefinitely. Games are not so lucky, because it’s not the medium they’re “printed” on, it’s the mechanism that runs them… made worse by a modern era of IP protection.
There are so many games I remember from my childhood that I’d love to play again. My brother and I used to routinely get our asses handed to us in a Conan game, it was a platformer of sorts in which you threw axes. Earlier still I remember a semi-text adventure called Spelunker that entranced us. Plus some sort of timed game where you raced through several islands of different challenges, trying to accomplish some goal before the clock ran out; your character had a yo-yo is all I remember. I miss Infiltrator, and Archon, and Adventure Construction Set. And don’t forget the gold-label Sierra games… Cranston Manor, Wizard and the Princess, Ulysses and the Golden Fleece, and of course the indomitable Time Zone.
It is sad to see so much lost. Now I’m depressed.
But Meho, based on your comments here at this site, you’re a classicist whether you expected to be or not.
A nice set of emulators and a nice set of ROMs and things are not so much lost as they are in a legally grey area. I should know, my harddrive is chockfull of classics. But the thing is: this clearly is NOT an acceptable solution for an entertainment form, let alone an artform. Emulation and ROM dumping/ preservation/ distribution is still seen as borderline criminal even though this is the only way to preserve a lot of things that today’s owners of distribution channels simply don’t see as profitable enough to warrant resurrection…
“Emulation and ROM dumping/ preservation/ distribution is still seen as borderline criminal even though this is the only way to preserve a lot of things that today’s owners of distribution channels simply don’t see as profitable enough to warrant resurrection”
Which is exactly the problem. The publishers that own some of the classic IPs aren’t interested in them any more but refuse to give them away.
In fact, there’s still a lot of confusion about who owns what from the early years. I attended a conference on this at GDC and people pointed out that in the 1980s and early 1990s, there was so much consolidation going on among publishers that oftentimes a publisher would swallow another, along with its IP, and never even know the extent of the catalog it had inherited. That makes it borderline impossible to even TRY and get publishers to release classics for free.
Until the industry allows emulation on a cross-platform scale, many classics will continue to be lost.
It’s not just borderline impossible, it is impossible for some IP’s, hearing some of the games stuck in limbo like that.
There is no “orphaned works” thing going on with videogames sadly (well, not that the book one is any good for America, since it is Google doing it, hah).
The major problem is still just the publishers sitting on things though. The number of legally buyable first hand games (in whatever format) is not going to be much, and the percent of fully freely released games is in the hundreds, no more.
Out of interest Matt what GDC session was that? I work for the IGDA Game Preservation SIG and that was brought up but not that example, so any other history stuff and I could check the vault for recordings or notes 🙂