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Attempting To Create A Gaming Canon

Posted by simoniker on from the who's-first-to-be-canonized? dept.

David Thomas writes "There's a newly posted list of games every developer should know over at Costik.com, and a similar recent attempt at The Ludologist - both articles concern the idea of a 'canon' of games. Like a literary canon, the idea is there is a list of classic games anyone serious about games should have played, in the same way any serious lit person will have read through the canon of literary works." Gentlemen, look over the lists, and please start your heckling now.

3 of 160 comments (clear)

  1. Will we ever learn... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 3, Interesting

    Having just come out of a liberal arts program, I know all too well that there is a great deal of contemporary scholarship bemoaning the fact that there is a canon. Say what you will about it, but post-modern scholarship is quite right when it says that the very existence of a canon restrains us. While it might make indoctrination more efficient, all a canon really is is a set of volumes (of whatever media) that some self-proclaimed experts say are required to appreciate said media. That creates a power structure in at least an abstract sense between the canon-makers and the canon-supplicants. And what do these people really know?

    There is only one purpose of a canon. There is an established structure of experts, and they're worried that the "common people" don't appreciate games the way they do, thus trivilizing them. So in order to indoctrinate them with similar value systems (even about video games) they manufacture a canon defining what they claim is "good" in a video game.

    Fuck that! Like most social structures, groups of critics judge games with 90% finger-in-the-wind and 10% what they actually let themselves think for themselves. Suuure, Black and White is a reallly great game. Thanks, IGN/GameSpot/your favorite gaming rag. Are these the people who should decide what is "important" or "critical" to play before you can "properly appreciate" games?

    What is wrong with exploring for yourself?

    I don't want to sound to matrixy, but in the end, it's all about control. Organisations like EA will eat this shit up.

    S[0o0]2

    1. Re:Will we ever learn... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Interesting

      Good points all.

      I argue against a canon but without one, are we really free to explore? Above one of you mentioned that the selection is too vast to just plunge in head first. I'd like to say that's silly, just start at an arbitrary point, but the fact is, even before we officially proclaim a canon, there already is one.

      We can all name the must-have games currently out for the X-Box or a few undeniable classics of the Super Nintendo. Whether through word of mouth or through the media, someone probably recommended a game to us or led us to play the game. Even if it is just placement on a store shelf, then it's the publisher who paid for that prominent shelf space that captured your first interest!

      Therefore instead of letting the media and commercial interests control an unspoken canon, some people propose a more purposefully constructed one. That's not such a bad thing, right?

      Well, I think it sort of is. The problem isn't that we have a bad canon or no canon, it's that we have one or will have one. I'd much rather have a more active discussion of game criticism than an establishment of a higher (than the current unspoken) canon.

      We need more inquiry into what people like in games and why, and which games do it the best, and how. People like the eye candy, or escapism, or intellectual stimulation, or reflex testing, or educational value of games. And within these categories there is a huge diversity in the ways games shine.

      What a post modern ideal... an academy without a canon. A canon is a short cut. Some people do like to be told what to do... and that sells them short. Some people like to be told what to think, but that doesn't mean we should hand them over to the Bush administration or Fox News (or NPR...) Similarly we should struggle against a canon, in all things, not just videogames.

      Videogames have a concreteness and a abstractness that no media has and therefore begs for a new kind of criticism. Yet it is so rare that someone discusses a videogame in terms of their own experience with it instead of in comparison to the already existing canon... just cue up IGN/GameSpot and you'll see that.

      What do you think?

      S[0o0]2

  2. Why Ultima IV by Vaevictis666 · · Score: 3, Interesting
    Ultima 4? why not 3 or 5? what's so special about 4? I'd say 6 or 7, as they were the last of the Ultima Great Map unlinear games, and should probbably be tought at gamemking school today.

    You go with 4 because it was a turning point. The first three were ad-hoc, do what you will games. Ultima 4 introduced the concept of the Avatar, and actually had you do something other than dungeon-crawl and kill everything in sight. It required you to actually role-play the virtuous avatar of Lord British if you wanted to finish the game - cheating the shopkeepers for magic ingredients is a nice way to get ahead early on, but you will need to make up for it later on.

    Just because 6 or 7 were towards the end of the list, doesn't mean they were specifically innovative in one way or another - I can't comment on these directly because I haven't played them.

    What I would've liked to see was Ultima Underworld, which was a good early take on 3d environments in an RPG.