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Academics Turn Their Attention To Videogames
Onyxviper writes "As one who is an avid gamer, an article by USA Today/AP discussing the growing academic study of games, or 'Ludology', makes some points about gaming that I had only begun to think about. Seems like the plots and composition of the game are starting to overtake the gameplay itself, and it is interesting to see that others are starting to look at it in a more serious light. What do the rest of you think, are any of you actually involved in one of these programs?" Is there plenty important being done in this field, or is it possible that academic study of videogames can tend towards overanalysis?
Some in the industry, however, are not so sure that games will ever mature. They fear games could be a dead end like comic books ? valuable as a social phenomenon, but outside a select few titles like Art Spiegelman's Maus, not worth a great deal of individual study.
Anything that can produce a very large profit will always garner a great deal of study. This is the reason why the game industry is compared to the movie industry more then any other.
Like the film industry produces great works of art like Gone with the Wind, they also produce trash like Legally Blonde. The Video game industry has their Quake 2s and Final Fantasy's but they come out with way too much garbage like Gods and Generals, and Enter the Matrix (didn't mean to pick 2 video game adaptations of movies but those 2 just happen to suck)
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Maybe you could claim the old BASIC adventures from the 80s didn't have much a plot, but Infocom was famous for them, even Zork has a large background story - or it felt that way anyway, you didn't always know what or why but the feeling was that there was a large back ground. And the latter works got better.
If you look at the current winners of contests, you will see they are about plot and story, in some cases there aren't even puzzles. Graphics has a ways to go to get to this level, in part because there is so much more territory to cover before they get there, and in part because hardware isn't up to some of what is needed even yet.
Of course no graphical adventure can equal a good imagination when you come across a "breath taking view".
Of course overanalysis is possible in the study of videogames as art, but that's not really important. First, video games are nearing the point where, in a few years, it can begin to be considered an art form in the mainstream. However, we're not quite at that point yet so there's no real point in worrying about overanalysis. Second, any art can be overanalyzed so that's really not a concern. You could easily apply lots of analysis for a novel, painting, etc. and just go overboard.
I recently took a course on the history of video games and in the process, we explored a lot of the concept of games as art and I really think that it's the right path to take. When film first started out, it was not considered art and took a good few decades to be considered more than just entertainment. I think the same is true of video games and its transition to both art and entertainment is happening today.
The big concern that I see is convincing the mainstream audience that video games can be an art. Whereas film was widely accessible to all audiences, video games tend to cater to a specific market. The typical gamer is a 28-year-old male and games will need to broaden their base so that other groups (especially women and older generations) can come to appreciate them as an art. Will that happen in the near future? I think so but it's not looking too good when games, like Tomb Raider, that really challenge gender roles fall flat in sales.
However, if you look at the reviews on Amazon for their books, they are filled with grudging, negative reviews from school children who were compeled to read the books in class.
I'm not saying that this is a bad thing, but I would rather not see this repeat itself with video games. They were designed to make money for developer by giving their customers some enjoyment. By turning it into 'study' the fun will all be sucked out of it. Can you hear it now?
Teacher: "Johny! You are three days late in finishing Metriod Prime and the rest of the class has already begun Halo."
Johny: "But teacher.... I don't feel like it."
Teacher: "Maybe if you put that War and Peace down and focused on the t.v...."
But both of my points note something important. The gamer has to be able to step back and look at a game from this perspective to understand what the designer is trying to do with the plot. A large feat considering some gamers consider The Matrix and Half-Life to be original storylines (they're not, they've been done many times.)
Now as a producer for a company whos out to make money, what are you gonna do?
Sacrifice a couple million dollars, piss off the 'casual gamer' base, risk getting bad reviews, and bad press in exchange for a few words along the lines of "Well the game did a good job at trying something new but..."
Or...
Sacrifice whatever storyline or tradition a game/name/franchise, stick with a bread-and-butter gameplay, and the same ol crap that people seem to buy every year in exchange for a few million dollars?
In the end, yes there is a very small field in gaming which could be formed based on studing game storylines. However, games which fall into this catagory are few and far between (pretty much an easy 50% of anyone's gaming library fails to land in this catagory, with a 100% rate of sports games).
Both are nice to have in a game, but it must be remebered that it is a *game*. Games are meant to be *played* by their very nature.
Frankly, there have been primarily story driven games known as 'point and click' adventures. They are all but extinct now since they aren't very engaging *as a game* as opposed to a form of *interactive media*.
At the end of the day, when someone plays a game they probably wish to play with it as opposed to interact with it. Its excelent seing new technology such as 'realistic physics' coming into games since this will allow players to play with the game in a new way.
In a way, the storyline is actually becoming a hinderance to gameplay, with more frequent and longer non-interactive 'cutscenes' (not necessarily CGI/movies, but also including those damn 5 second snippets which are in-engine).
A good example of this is in Prince of Persia: Sands of time: At the end of a battle the prince puts away his sword. Slowly. In an in-engine cutscene. I can't begin to articulate how frustrated I was by the end of the game with that. A for more preferable solution, by my reckoning, would have been to have the sword put away automatically whicle I retained control of all of the other properties of the prince, or even better, if I had to manually put away the sword.
Most seem to think that as games increasingly approximate real life they get better (not necessarily a good thing, as games "in principle" games with dragons are better than those without). I tend to agree with how games are heading as well, and I enjoy the reality provided by realistic sound, light and physics. But I note that not once in my life I have experienced a cutscene, or any other situation where I have consciously not been in control of my body (drunkeness is just reduced control!)
The one line summary: Story and plot are good, but not at the expense of gameplay and interaction.
DEATH TO CUTSCENES!