By Brendan Keogh
With every major game release, interesting discussions bloom across the world. Articles, reviews, and conversations on Twitter and Facebook flourish as one critic gushes about the game and another person dismisses it. Of course, there’s no ‘right’ or ‘wrong’ observations: there’s only the myriad perspectives on the game and how players experience it.
But then, someone will pop up and say something that, really, isn’t about that videogame at all but about All Videogames Ever. They will say something like, ”This game’s narrative is too restrictive or linear!”, or maybe, “There weren’t enough options to make ‘meaningful’ choices!” The game or genre doesn’t matter: some critic is inevitably disappointed by the game because it doesn’t match their detailed preconceptions of what this game was going to be. Or, more accurately, what a videogame ‘should’ be. Betrayed, they write something about what the game ‘should have done’ where, really, they are talking about ’the way they think videogames Should Be.’
Usually, this idea of what the game ‘should’ be is utterly unfeasible (most typically, a narrative that pivots on every minuscule action of the player), and usually it is something that completely ignores or contradicts what that videogame is trying to achieve. Someone always complains that a linear military shooter is too linear, or an open, emergent game is lacking focus.
Critics often condemn videogames for not being things that — let’s face it — videogames are never going to be. Critics and players alike have been wandering a critical desert for decades, searching for a promised land that we ourselves made up but are certain exists over the next dune. We play the videogames we have today and grudgingly accept that they are good enough for now but that games will surely be better in the future. I think it is time we stopped searching for this promised land of the flawless videogame and embrace our desert. Videogame criticism must stop looking forward to a potential future and study games as they exist right now.
So many critics focus, not on understanding the videogames they play, but on drawing blueprints for tomorrow’s games once technology lets them catch up to our fantasies. But we’re chasing a mirage: a perfect land of mirth and honey and destructible terrain, where even the tiniest action is a meaningful choice, and where everything and everyone reacts realistically to the player. It’s an oasis where a story doesn’t have five possible endings but five million. It’s a phenomenon Atkins and Krzywinska note in the introduction to Videogame, Player, Text , an anthology of essays leading the counterattack against this delusion: “There is a continually renewed claim, reinforced by the rhetoric through which games are marketed, reviewed, and discussed by their players, that suggests that we ain’t seen nothing yet; videogames are regarded […] as an infant media that have not yet grown into their mature forms.”
I don’t doubt there will be new and exciting videogames in the future, but this medium isn’t an infant. It’s a manchild, unable to accept that today’s videogames are Modern Warfare and Minecraft and Mass Effect and FarmVille and Tiny Tower and Vanquish instead of Tron or The Matrix . So why do we still expect them to be?
Whenever I see an article pose an enormous question like “Should Videogames Tell Stories or Have Cutscenes or Use Tutorials or Be Linear or Open?” my answer is this: Who cares?
Videogames do tell stories, do have cutscenes, do use tutorials, and are both linear and open. What videogames ‘should’ be is a conceptual dead end. Instead we must look at what videogames are –what they actually already are –and try to understand that.
I want a criticism of close analysis, a criticism that looks at today’s games and tries to understand how they work and what they say. This is a criticism that has room for the most experimental IGF dropout alongside the biggest military shooters, because when faced with the question “what is a videogame,” it answers not with a list of attributes to be ticked off but with a list of videogame titles.
It won’t be easy. We’ll have to re-evaluate what we hold dear: our ideas of how games should be judged. Instead of debating whether Modern Warfare 3, Heavy Rain, Minecraft , or Sleep is Death are videogames, we need to accept that they are simply because they claim to be. The real work is trying to understand what that means.
None of this means that we can’t affect what videogames become. Criticism is a vital tool in improving any medium— even moreso than new technology. But it doesn’t do this by dictating where it should go, but by helping us better understand where it does go. Videogame criticism should not be a bearded prophet, promising utopia as a reward for enduring the desert we live in every day. It should be a map, not of the desert, but of the world; it is a microscope that enables us to look closer at the world instead of dreaming of paradise.
The next time you sit at your keyboard, don’t write about how
Farmville
is not even a game when your friends and family play it daily. Watch them. Ask — them and yourself — why they are playing it, how it affects their lives, and think about how
that
might or might not be a problem. Don’t write about how the biggest selling game of all time couldn’t possibly be important when millions of people are enjoying it. Write about why you think its representation of world politics is problematic and, if you’re feeling energetic, try to understand why those millions of people
do
enjoy it. Don’t ask whether or not games can tell stories when the last dozen games you played all told stories to varying degrees of success. Write an article on how they told a story and where it was or wasn’t successful. Focus on the game itself. Focus on what it accomplished and where it fell down. Maybe then we’ll look around and see, not a barren desert without potential, but an enormous sandbox with fantastic possibilities.
Brendan Keogh is a freelance videogame journalist and critic who works for a variety of outlets including Edge, Hyper, Kill Screen, Ars Technica, and Paste. He is also commencing a PhD at RMIT University, Melbourne, looking at videogame criticism. He is known to blog sometimes at
http://critdamage.blogspot.com
