by Lana Polansky
Not long ago, Matthew S. Burns posted a very succinct, very apt response on his blog, Magical Wasteland, to Taylor Clarke’s now-infamous Kotaku piece, “ Most Popular Video Games are Dumb. Can We Stop Apologizing For Them Now .”
As Burns points out in “ Dumbness In Games, Or, The Animal As A System ,” several of Clark’s general criticisms—largely regarding things like story, characterization and dialogue—of (primarily) blockbuster or mainstream games sort of fall apart on their own without being discussed in the context of what kind of gameplay is being used to demonstrate these other elements. For instance, how do we even begin to acknowledge fine writing in a medium inflated with genre conventions or design possessing questionable moral underpinnings or overwhelming suspensions of disbelief just its own?
As much as I would love to dissect the totality of the piece, one aspect of it struck me as being particularly emblematic of why this critique on thinking about games in terms of their “parts” is so important:
A game is a whole system; the pieces that we like to dissect are its organs. You can take issue with and maybe even improve the components, but what you really want is a brand new animal, a new system where all the parts work together.
Burns’s argument essentially describes some of the sophistication and legitimacy problems games seem to have in terms of the whole systems simply not providing a viable creative space in which to be earnestly resonant. But what I really want to extract from this is the notion that video games should be treated as unified pieces of art, in which story, character, gameplay, level design, sound—all of it—are thought of as inseparable parts of an overall system. What this means is that whenever we think of one element of a game, we must think not only about the singular way in which it contributes to the game, but how it works in harmony with its other parts. It’s not just about having really great gameplay and a lousy story, or vice versa. It’s certainly not about thinking of them as though they’re irreconcilably diametric opposites. Rather, it’s about making sure there’s an aesthetic, conceptual and thematic coherence between the game’s various elements so that they reinforce one another.
Think about how Bastion combines storytelling, narration and active gameplay to provide you with the sensation that you’re a vital part of an ongoing narrative—like you’re making history within the game’s universe. Remark how that makes the game feel active and reflective all at once. Or think about how Rez lulls you into a sensory hypnotism by connecting the mechanic of a rail shooter with generative music design.
Unification feels naturalistic; it allows you to suspend disbelief about something fantastic or fabricated so that it has an easier time inspiring pathos in you; inversely “pastiche” makes what you’re experiencing or observing feel ridiculous and inelegant. Just look to Heroes of Might & Magic , which in its own right is a really fun and interesting series (this isn’t a dismissal: believe me, I played plenty of Heroes in high school). But some of the hallmarks of the series are the quirkiness of high fantasy settings, Tolkienesque throwbacks, and…a Panoptes with tentacles that hovers over the ground? Heroes offers such a smorgasbord of all-things-fantastical that it stops actually being a coherent fantasy world. This isn’t inherently a bad thing, but a player’s way of looking past these things is by simply “not questioning it.” I shrug, I laugh and I go collect some ore.
But it’s fair to argue that Heroes isn’t trying to be particularly coherent or resonant and so these are really non-issues. Okay, fine—but what about when a game is actually trying? What about the cognitive dissonance of ludic elements and story in a game like Catherine , which suggests a narrative about the complexities of relationships that its own gameplay system largely fails to uphold ? What about the commonality of shooting every last living thing and still perceiving oneself to be heroic and moral? Black Ops , to its credit, tries to tease out these themes in its story, but the acts of shooting mostly-redundant waves of terrorist enemies does little to reinforce what these themes on violence and psychological distress should have me feeling. On the other hand, Alois Wittwer describes how Nier uses a combination of its ludic, narrative and visual elements to make you hyper-aware of the morality of your decisions and of the philosophical atmosphere presented in the game world.
Even Vanquish , which is widely discussed in both Clark’s and Burns’s pieces, can be accused of god-awful writing (which wouldn’t be unfair.) But it’s not meant to be serious—it’s meant to be a satire of the modern FPS. By both accounts it’s a fun game—so how does this tongue-in-cheek play on the brown shooter and American cultural memory of the Cold War lose its edge? There is certainly a lack of subtlety to the symbolism, characterization and storytelling in Vanquish. And it isn’t a matter of fantastical weaponry and merrily oblivious hyper-violence that make the game feel sort of dense. It’s a combination of individual parts (like story) being poor on their own, but also not quite connecting to other parts of the game. The defiantly fast-paced gameplay doesn’t quite pace well with the parts of the game which are meant to feel satirical: the themes become lost as one is actually playing, and the cutscenes feel more than just badly acted and written, but a slow-paced drudgery. Vanquish is like a mixed bag of puzzle pieces, some of which hint at a potentially beautiful image, but don’t actually connect to anything.
This is not to say that unification will necessarily always produce “better” or more evocative art, nor does it mean that absurdity, pastiche or devices like the breaking of the fourth wall can’t have value. But what it does allow us to do is understand how seemingly disparate elements within a work of art can fit together effectively, and it makes us all better at knowing how to mix and match specific concepts in ways that don’t undermine the integrity of the whole piece (for instance, the tacked-on overuse of quick time events undermining the actual feeling of interaction in a game, versus the sparing and precise use of quick time events to instil a sense of immediacy in the player.)
Of course, I’m not presuming upon the work of developers, many of whom are already doing fantastic things in terms of unifying gameplay et al. What I am saying, however, is that thinking of games in terms of how they’re unified may help us to understand, as players, what feels “right” or “wrong” about them. It might help us to identify why we dismiss or scoff at some of our stories, not just because the writing is asinine but because almost everything surrounding it, including gameplay, feels asinine, or at least disjointed, too, whether or not as a factor or a result.
I would argue that a reasonably good historical example of unification is found in the bronze door panels of artists Filippo Brunelleschi and Lorenzo Ghiberti, who competed against one another in 15 th -century Florence to have their depictions of the Sacrifice of Isaac applied to the Florence Baptistery doors. (A quick aside: this particular biblical story has been inspiring art for centuries, and roguelike The Binding of Isaac fits within that tradition.)
I’ll spare you too much of a history lesson and tell you right now that Ghiberti ended up winning, but let’s compare the two side-by-side to talk about why his is potentially better.
As art historians Dr. David Drogin and Dr. Beth Harris eloquently explain , one of the reasons which may have lead to Ghiberti’s victory has to do with his use of space. Brunelleschi’s panel doesn’t quite fit into the space allotted by the quatrefoil panels, and because he cast the figures separately, is much heavier and clunkier—and more fractured-looking—than Ghiberti’s who cast his all as one piece.
Brunelleschi has posed the figures in a staggered way, like a pyramid, so that the figures on the bottom cover all of the space allotted and form a base. The vanishing point is dead center is Isaac on an altar, with Abraham at his neck ready to strike, and the angel coming down from Heaven on the far left of the panel, just in time to stop him. While I can safely assume that Brunelleschi is following in the medieval tradition of “balancing” the focal point in the center of the image ( Giotto’s Lamentation being one of the first remarkable exceptions), there is too much space covered at the bottom of the panel, and too little space being used on the middle-left and top-right. This is visually cluttered compared with Ghiberti, who placed Isaac on the far right with a vanishing point on a downward diagonal, with the chest of Isaac even casting off a reflection that draws more attention to itself. What this does is draw the eye to the actual scene of the near-sacrifice, where Abraham, Isaac and the angel form a triangle, rather than having extraneous details and empty spaces.
What Ghiberti has done is used the space and materials comprehensively, in a way which gets the story across much more efficiently and elegantly than Brunelleschi does. On the other hand, does he unify his magnificent craftsmanship to the theme and emotion in the story?
According to Dr. Drogin and Dr. Harris, it’s arguable that Brunelleschi captured the emotion better in the faces of the figures. They are less Classical and idealized than Ghiberti’s (particularly the figure of Isaac, whom Ghiberti apparently envisioned with the cut of Charles Atlas.) Brunelleschi’s Isaac appears like a helpless little boy, weak and scared; Abraham looks distraught and confused; the angel looks urgent and magnanimous; the whole scene arguably captures the action of the moment better. Ghiberti’s, on the other hand, is set right before the angel stops him, and there’s actually a lack of intimacy in the way the figures are posed and designed. Presumably, according to Dr. Drogin and Dr. Harris, one of the reasons Ghiberti even won at all is because he fashioned his panel after Classical aesthetics, which were undergoing a popular revival at the time.
So what if these pieces were to combine? What if the figures were less idealized and more involved and emotional, but were posed in a way which used the space to its best to tell the story to the observer? What if Ghiberti’s use of space and posing, better at arresting attention, were unified with Brunelleschi’s capturing of action and emotion, which is better at inspiring resonance? Imagine if Brunelleschi put aside his pride and agreed to collaborate with Ghiberti on finishing the doors, as the judges (who admired both artists), suggested he should have.
And so this brings us back to videogames. I am more or less echoing Clark’s use of Tom Bissell’s argument that a work must be “comprehensively intelligent,” or “intelligent in every way available to it.” But more than that, each available part mustn’t just be intelligent on its own; the whole piece must be comprehensive and coherent. Does this mean I’m saying that all games that struggle with unification are bad or stupid? Not in the least. Not to necessarily compare their art to that of all videogames, but Ghiberti and Brunelleschi each did magnificent work—yet their panels were not perfectly, “comprehensively intelligent.” But when a game—or any work of art—is being classified by value judgements, we must think of it as a whole entity which doesn’t necessarily benefit from a tweaked story here or a gameplay convention there. We also have to think about the structural and formal foundation of the game, the interplay of its parts to adequately convey whatever it’s trying to convey. This isn’t just a matter of a game being comprehensively—or partially—dumb, but of the bronze parts cast separately, cluttered into a space that can’t reasonably support them.
