Slashdot Mirror
Sci-Fi Writer Considers BioShock's Artistic Merit
The LevelUp blog considers an article on the Washington Post site, where their tech columnist did a little experiment. He set Science Fiction author Michael Dirda down in front of Irrational's BioShock, and asked him to consider the game's artistic merit. N'Gai has himself some interesting commentary about the article, which raises a flurry of question on its own: "Dirda, to use his word, doesn't know the 'rhetoric' of video games. Me: I've spent so much time playing video games over the years that I'd forgotten people aren't born instinctively knowing how to 'circlestrafe' a monster ... 'I could lose myself in this, in some ways, easier than in a book,' he said. Dirda said the game showed him that video games 'obviously have artistic value' and will likely become more of a recognized art form. So: Is BioShock art? 'I would hesitate to go that far,' he said after a short pause."
I especially liked the author's comparison of people new to videogames to schoolchildren who have just learned to read. In fact I sometimes show a great videogame to someone who's not into gaming and they obviously "don't get it". I think this shows that videogames are progressing and becoming more and more sophisticated all the time, and maybe sometime soon they won't be dissed as some "inferior kind of art" anymore. Even though I, myself, still consider books and music to be somehow superior to games. Good article anyway, /. needs more like this.
Global warming is a cube.
The question is not whether video games are or aren't art.
The question is why, oh why, are artists in other genres so utterly threatened by the concept that it might be.
I mean, just look at the constituent properties of games.
Games have music of all genres, and nobody denies that can be art.
Screen shots from many games could probably be snuck into your local modern art gallery. Nobody denies imagery can be art.
They went to a sci-fi author! Certainly a science fiction tale can be art.
If you combine all three of the above -- well, you end up with a movie, and nobody denies that cinema is an art form.
Even if you take away the controlled progression of experiences -- well, welcome to architecture. Was Frank Lloyd Wright not an artist?
I think the bottom line is that a lot of people who don't play games, but do pay attention to art, don't want to imagine that they're not trained to appreciate a particular art form. Better to deny its potential as being art at all.
The real question is -- why should gamers care?
... the truth is bioshcok being a game couldn't easily BE like a movie, game makers haven't totally mastered storytelling by merging the best elements of cinema with the best elements of games yet. We're getting their slowly, but I ultimately believe games will one day be 'art', it's juts a matter of time. Part of the real problem is the passive nature of exposition and the desire for the player to be "having fun".
Movies are a passive media, games are not, and the thing with bioshock was if you didn't explore everwhere you'd miss the recorders, they should have just had 'scripted' exposition which you could replay back, the whole pick up recorder bit while congruent-with the game world, the placement of them as not exactly the greatest.
Also bioshock as a game felt unfinished toward the end, the story was interesting for the first part of the game, but by the time you got to Andrew ryan things just seemed to get really weird, and then on your journey to fountain the story loses all cohesiveness really.
As far as I can tell, the man is a book critic. The write-up makes it seem as he's actually written sci-fi books?
I started playing Bioshock a few days ago, I'm enjoying the game (and find it kinda creepy). I wouldn't consider it art.
The closest I've seen in a game I would consider art is Zelda: Twilight Princess. It has a compelling story, good graphics and was very enjoyable.
Gameplay and artistic depth are two very orthogonal goals. It's hard to engineer a game which is fun to play and tells a truly original story -- generally, the high ratio of (time spent killing people) to (time spent talking to people) precludes a lot of useful dialogue.
Probably the last game which spoke to me in any meaningful literary way was Deus Ex -- and even that had long stretches of plot-thin killing.
We recently had heard in the office over one of the Yellow Machine that's made by Anthology Solutions.
I think it really comes down to how you define art. I personally will consider a lot of things as art that most people wouldn't, things like games, graffiti, and even source code. If you look at things like music, movies, and images you'll notice one thing in common. They all show or inspire emotions. I think that is how art should be defined. So why would a game, which quite often inspire emotions like fear and victory, and many games have quite elaborate and emotional stories, not be considered an art form?
Just my opinion though.
http://blog.heavensdomain.net
> The fact is that BioShock, at its best, is capable of evoking some complicated responses
> from players--among them, shame, guilt, remorse, regret, and, yes, sadness--using not
> only its story, but most interestingly, its gameplay.
Isn't it sad that people spend so much time making games to make us scared, shameful, and depressed, instead of using the genre to make us self-confident, satisfied, and happy?
Why is Michael Dirda labelled as being a science fiction writer?
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
The real question: is it *good* art? Nobody will deny that a painting or a novel is art, but 99% of all of them are crap. Good art provokes a response- you think about it and remember it later, and not just because you managed to frag some noob thirteen times in a row. Video games for the most part have not reached this state. I can only think of a few that merit the title "Good art" that tell stories that are interesting enough to reach that goal.
"Seven Deadly Sins? I thought it was a to-do list!"
That's just your choice of games, though. There are games available for us that enjoy a good story.
For an extreme example, how about 'Hotel Dusk: Room 215'? It's basically an interactive book, and I still enjoyed it quite a lot.
It doesn't have to be story, either. A rich, explorable game world can have artistic merit even in the total absence of plot.
How about Myst?
In a fair world, refrigerators would make electricity.
It seems to me that the whole shooter genre is quickly moving away from regular people and becoming focused solely on hardcore players of the shooter genre, who know how to "circlestrafe" a monster, whatever that means. As a result, all those hardcore strafers like the game, and the rest of us stand scratching our heads and wondering what could any sane person like about it.
"Deus Ex" was a better game than it was literature or philosophy, "Bioshock" excels as both.
Books are not art. I can see how they are useful to art when, for example, you need to record the script for a play or a story, or the mathematical formulas needed in architecture, but they themselves are not art. Give me one example of a book that can be considered art! Surely, they don't compare to classical epic plays and stories, to music, to statues or even pottery.
Besides, they are just a fad. People might be reading a lot now, but it will soon fade away again when people realize that the theater was superior all along when it comes to art.
Now, what are these "games" you speak off? Are they too some new invention? Never mind, spare me.
So going by that logic games like Chrono Trigger and the oft mentioned FF 7 would be good art, because most remember them years later and the emotions they envoked. Granted the two chosen are rather subjective as not everyone cared for them, but most people I've run into seem to remember both rather fondly.
I'd have to say games don't do things as well as other "real world" pursuits:
I don't think that they tell stories as well as movies and books.
I don't think that they do "challenge" as well as physical sports (from team sports all the way to darts and bowling")
In some ways, I don't think do "gaming" as well as traditional board, card, and RPGs (though it depends on what you're looking for...)
What I think games do really well, that no other genre can touch, is making new, creative, interactive systems and worlds. It's just amazing that we can have these virtual microcosms to run around in and can make immersive but utterly fantastic envirionments.
That's why I don't dig on traditional RPGs, where your interaction is menu-driven, and the only thing that changes is the story. I understand that the first-person aspect makes it more immersive than some other forms of storytelling, but still. Basically, if what makes your game different is strictly a team of writers and artists, I think you have a less engrossing product. (Conversely, I find a game with a well fleshed out story and heavy use of real world elements to be more engaging than an abstract or pure sandbox title.)
Even when the core of the game is tried-and-true, like w/ BioShock, there magic-ish elements and enemy behaviors allow for some novel interactions, and really that's what I'm after.
I think that's one reason other traditional media are jealous of their definition of art... they're ultimately more limited in how they interact. And that pure-cerebral, artist-mentally-changing-the-audience idea is important, but games have more objective novelty creative space to play in.
SO YOU'RE GOING TO DIE: The Comic for Dealing with Death
Where did the submitter or editor get the idea that Michael Dirda is a "Sci-Fi Writer"?
He's a journalist. He writes book reviews. His only other publication I can find is an autobiography.
You can't blame the Washington Post, there is no description of Dirda as "sci-fi writer".
The GAME is described as sci-fi. That's all.
Get a fucking clue, "editors".
Would they indeed..? Games are generally meant to entertain. Perhaps one could focus on the delivery of of the story. Graphics matter, but not a lot. (FFVI? Chronotrigger? Illusion of Gaia?)
Music entertains, TV and movies entertain as well. There are a lot of music and books out there that are depressing. A lot of it can make you feel depressed if you let yourself become drawn in. See the first few minutes of High Fidelity for an interesting monologue (I'd link imdb if I weren't at work).
I seriously doubt I'd continue to play a game that affected my mood enough to throw me into depression. I don't listen to music that makes it easy for me to be drawn into depression either. It's just not healthy. Music can help a person face their emotions, which is good. But anything that has a negative affect is just that, negative. Movies could have the same effect... Chasing Amy
To wrap it up I personally think the idea of a game that is meant to depress a person is a terrible thing (as with other media). Invoking actual emotions such as anger, sadness, remorse... that's good. People should be able to feel those. If a form of media helps to explore an emotion, it should be considered a form of art. Also, with games, you can have a rich mixture of visual, audio and written (storyline) art that is very engrossing... in short, art.
I find that only games that are just HORRIBLE are the games that are depressing... I suppose that in that context ET is a form of art.
This sig isn't original enough, it's time to come up with something witty...
Michael Dirda is not a science fiction author. He's a literary critic. Which the submitter probably should have known if he'd read, like, the very first sentence of the article: "On a recent Saturday morning, I headed over to the house of Pulitzer Prize-winning Post book columnist Michael Dirda with an Xbox 360 under my arm."
From the third paragraph: "But [Dirda] is a sci-fi fan and an open-minded fellow, and I was curious whether BioShock's story would be compelling enough to draw him in."
Did a quick Amazon search of his work, and the only things I noticed were essentially books about reading itself.
Just sayin'.
It's an important discussion to be sure. Is Bioshock art?
Definitely it has fantastic "art". But then books have beautiful covers... but we don't judge the books on that basis...usually.
More importantly though, he didn't finish the game. Barely played a few hours.
Is that the test of art? To sit somebody down in front of a quicktime trailer and make a judgement of a movie from the first 5 minutes?
I think that the final assessment, that they picked the wrong person to do this because of a lack of familiarity with games, is dead on.
Why can't someone get a better reviewer to do this? Cory Doctorow? Orson Scott Card? Bruce Sterling? Dan Simmons?
I'm a bit confused as to why, if Dirda's 16 year old son finished it, why didn't he ask for help? Seems to me this implies he really wasn't that into the experiment himself. Surely there's directions someplace on the basics? RTFM?
I think the real challenge is to get some serious "artists", be they of books, music, movies, or whatever, to play the games and give their impressions.
A better analogy for the person they picked would be to take my grandparents (who can barely use the MS Works that came pre-installed on a computer) and ask them to do a review of OpenOffice vs. MS Office 2007. Without the basic minimum skill threshold, the whole thing is tainted anyway.
Bill
Some of you think that no one denies that movies are art but you are wrong. Many believe that most movies are not art and that only some movies can be considered art. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Art_film
This is important because if you consider that all movies are art, well if you film your vacations you have a storyline (your vacations), you have characters, you have different backgrounds, you have emotions, etc. So why shouldn't your vacations be considered art? If I draw a square with a pen is this art or not? If not then why is this art http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Mondrian_CompRYB.jpg ? If you look at dadaism (here's an example: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Image:Duchamp_Fountaine.jpg ) can this be considered art or not?
Before arguing about games being art or not, we should start by arguing over what is art.
Forget all the rhetoric about whether the game itself is art. It's a shiny plastic disk with microsocopic dots. It becomes art when it comes to life, when the actors are "on stage" and I begin the performance. From the opening scenes where I guide my digital avatar, be it knight in shining armor or polygonal abstract, I am creating my own story based upon my interpretation of an outline of the rules that other mediums would call a script. How I interpret that script is completely at my whim; flexibility with a purpose is the sign of a masterfully written script, an art form in it's own. My interpretation, my performance, my unique take on the rules and how I choose to act upon the situations presented are dutifully enacted by the most perfect thespian a director could hope for.
Bioshock is Shakespeare's Folio; and I am Martin Scorsese.
If anything, art in games will probably come from the gameplay itself. For instance; games have the unique ability to let people experience paradoxal situations or vicious circles. I think games are getting ever closer to this, but it's still tied to the concept that games can somehow be "won". A game like the infamous Columbine RPG is a good example of how you can make a game where the concept of "winning" isn't clear anymore.
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
I can't believe that nobody's tried to make a System Shock movie yet. It's the classic Hollywood horror movie formula. A "star" in the middle of a hostile environment, interacting with remote people who may or may not be real, hunted by an omniscient evil overlord. I want to go to the theater and when the trailers come on I want a black screen with Terry Brosius' voice, saying, "L-l-look at you, hacker... a pathetic creature of meat and bone...." And then, the cortex reavers, the invisible mutants, Edward Diego... geez, it's practically written already.
So: Is BioShock art? "I would hesitate to go that far," he said after a short pause.
When there's a video game that makes the player depressed, that's when the medium might be onto something as an art form, Dirda said. It's easy to like something that makes you feel powerful in its fantasy world, as games generally do. But would anybody play a game that makes him sad?
Yes, of course, Any game that has solid enough writing that you care about characters or the world has that ability. For me, Planescape: Torment, Sanitarium, Fallout 2, Baldur's Gate 2 (death of vampire villain Bohdi "No! It's mine! This life is mine!"), and FF7 are just a few examples that come to mind.
Being bitter is drinking poison and hoping someone else will die
man... it's like impossible to do that in bioshock in many places, just no room to do so. i have to be creative on hiding, taking pot shots, making a run to another area and ready up the next weapon or plasmid :)
With videogames as a recognized Art form what established Artists know and do becomes cloudy, just as the value of great scenery artists was questioned by the rise of great scenery photographers. Prior to photography it was simply understood that a great painter had value, because he could render an emotionally powerful image. With photographers on the scene, painters had to step back and answer questions they'd never had to ask before. They finally came to realize they weren't diminished by photographers - but that was after quite a bit of resistance and denial.
But more than anything, what challenges the Art establishment is the idea that videogames don't work like other forms.
Traditional artists present meticulously crafted fixed pieces that convey some emotional truth they find in the world. The basic strength of interactive art is its ability to convey emotional truth through the rules of simulation; allowing Art to emerge from play. Rather than beat us over the head by showing or telling us what happens when life goes astray for one carefully constructed protagonist, games have the ability to let us experience it; to react to our choices, to our struggle against increasing odds as we run headlong in the wrong direction until we hopefully find the wisdom and truth in turning around.
It's this core feature of interactivity that raises the same questions for every fixed-form artist that photographers raised of painters and that movie-makers raised of the theatre. And so we reach the one really good question:
Is a game that can exhibit Art more like a song, or an instrument?
Because interactivity also requires that we can fuck it all up, wander in circles and fail. While that's not too different from someone giving up on "Finnegan's Wake" halfway through, it raises the question of whether the inaccessible is still Art. Because when most people simply can't see our Art, we ought give a moment's thought to whether we're striding around in the buff.
As gamers we rightly shouldn't care whether a scifi author, movie critic or anyone else deigns to validate our preferred medium. They're more barometers of their generation than gatekeepers of meaning. If they come around, it will be long after gaming has proven itself.
At the same time, we should care whether people outside the hardcore niche 'get' our art. Any art form that aims to please only its close circle of devotees and critics is diving headlong into irrelevance. So it's helpful to come up for air from time to time and see whether we're striking true emotional chords in the general audience.
And it never hurts to see whether the general audience can find the B button.
// "Can't clowns and pirates just -try- to get along?"
You're damn right they are :-)
Seriously, i keep thinking of Chrono Trigger while reading this. It was one of the first games that made me feel emotions for characters. Not like the love for my parents, but the same amount of affection or "will" for a character to win as i see in an epic sports movie, or sad at the loss of a character equivalent to the death of character in a film.
I think it's unreasonable to only call a game art if it gives you lifelike emotions, as most mediums don't give me lifelike emotions, other than, well, life. I'm sure some people have stronger emotions to games than i do, which is fine- I just, again, feel a double standard is being applied for some reason.
Haven't played Bioshock yet, but I'm constantly reminded of Deus Ex as I read or take classes. As I read Bertrand Russell's A History of Western Philosophy recently, I was reminded of characters, lines, or episodes from that game at least half a dozen times. Several times, my experience with the game has helped me to more quickly grasp an idea, or to make connections between it and others which I might not otherwise have made.
I don't know of any other game like that, not even among the other plot-heavy games I've played (Thief series, System Shock 2, a whole host of RPGs). Mind you, this is a game that I re-play every 1-1.5 years or so, along with a couple of others (Fallout1/2, notably). There are a ton of throwaway lines and little references that relate to all kinds of aspects of philosophy--especially political philosophy--and, to a lesser extent, to a variety of other topics. Once you've played the game a bunch, and assuming you've got some level of familiarity with political philosophy, you start to see Rousseau in Tracer Tong, Nietzsche everywhere (obviously), Aristotle in the AI, etc., and minor aspects of those and other philosophers scattered about and woven into the storyline.
Or, you play the hell out of the game in high school, and later end up seeing Tracer Tong in Rousseau, the AI in Aristotle... heh.
Uhh, because there are plenty of games that do make us happy? I don't see how 1 game that elicits emotion like Bioshock is an example of every major game on the market.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
It's not that many games (like Bioshock) aren't art on the level of many quality films and novels, it's just that with things like literature, you can fall back and say "This author was the greatest there ever was!" Since "mainstream" culture is familiar with great books (or at least knows they exist even if they've never read any), no one thinks about all the terrible ones out there when they talk about the medium as a whole. I have no qualms in saying that most video games are better than, say, a Nora Roberts book. I would argue that there are quite a few games on the level of an Orson Scott Card or a Robert Jordan novel. We just haven't seen one on the level of Hemingway yet, and until then, people outside of gaming will never take it seriously.
Conversely, we also need to realize that we don't need them to take it seriously to appreciate the art inherent in some titles. It is they who are missing out.
TRHOnline - Staggering Towards Brilliance
Very few people are going to object if you call "Les Mis" art. But is Harry Potter art? Certainly, it has been read by more people then most all other literature. But it is a story written primarily for children (nothing wrong with adults loving it) that is more about entertaining than challenging the reader. Fantasy and sci fi has always struggled to be recognized as art. It takes a move like LOTR to show that fantasy can be as good as movies like the Godfather or The good, the bad, and the ugly.
This is part of the problem with video games. Like Harry Potter, they are in a fantasy world and the art snobs perceive it as being geared towards children. But I have found few other things in art that moved me as much as Aeris's death in FF7. And I think I am not alone in that. Really, the old generation that didn't grow up with video games will have to die off before video games get the respect they deserve.
Support a great indie game: http://www.abaddon360.com
How anyone can play games like Final Fantasy 10 or 12, and say, "This is not art," amazes me.
Those two games (and in general, most RPGs) are almost like playing movies:
- moving realistic scenery
- talking people
- an ongoing storyline that hooks the player (and even casual non-playing viewers)
If a movie can be considered art,
these games can be too.
Actually, Bioshock is a damned piss poor rebuttal of Objectivism. Mind you, it tries so very hard, but it happens in a closed system with a hard limit on resources that has already been reached. Any remotely intelligent economist could tell you that it was already fucked, no matter the economic system. Add in the fact that extremely life-altering changes were introduced in an astonishingly rapid fashion, and any two-bit hack could tell you bad things would go down. Not to mention that from a scientific standpoint the discovery of the uses of ADAM happened entirely too rapidly. Genetics takes time to make understandable changes as there are so very many options. And without modern computers I fail to understand how they were even supposed to understand how to make those changes. Gaping plot holes abound. A much better rebuttal of Objectivism is simply this: Given that Objectivism expects around 95% of citizens to be almost completely rational in deed if not thought, it is doomed to failure in a world populated by humans.
I think a greater challenge would simply to define art. That's a bit philosophical and certainly subjective. Is Bioshock art? Absolutely. As Tycho put it (http://www.penny-arcade.com/2007/08/15) "If Bioshock isn't "art," then art is the poorer for it." To my mind, Tycho is absolutely correct. Games are art. As much as any book, any song or any painting. Games are a compilation of all three of those. And just like books, music or paintings, some are of greater or lesser value to the viewer/listener than others.
Games as an art form: Shadow of the Colossus. 'nuff said.
i PERSONALLY found the game rather pretentious and boring. as an avid gamer, all i saw was an FPS with plasmids throw on top to make it appear as, well, not an FPS. it would have made for a good movie, but there were too many holes in the story to even make me want to believe in it.
sigs suck
The biggest flaw in the Columbine RPG was [SPOILERS AHEAD] sending Harris and Klebold to hell after they commit suicide. Until that point, it was a poor game, but it was a thrilling story. But that turned it into a stupid joke. It should have ended right there. Or, even better, but maybe too big to be viable... it should have had an earlier starting point. It should show the whole story, rather than just its last day; not only the massacre, but what drove them to that path.
Circumcision is child abuse.
You're not kidding, O AC.
That book could probably be cut to 1/2 size if you took out all of the boring-ass, irrelevant actions scenes and replaced them with, "Then they fought. X and Y died, and so did a bunch of other people who are named here but aren't mentioned anywhere else in extant ancient literature, including the rest of this book."
I'd prefer such an abridgment should I ever go back to re-read the damn thing. I like the book a lot (Odyssey's better, though, IMO) and I even like a few of the less-important battle scenes because they're well-done, but most of it's boring crap.
When there's a video game that makes the player depressed, that's when the medium might be onto something as an art form, Dirda said. It's easy to like something that makes you feel powerful in its fantasy world, as games generally do. But would anybody play a game that makes him sad?
There have already been quite a few video games which make the player depressed as a part of their storytelling. The most obvious example is Final Fantasy VII, where Aeris dies. If nothing else, this certainly shows that it is possible for someone to empathize with characters portrayed in a game, and I would assert that tragic events occurring to its characters is the most common way any fiction book depresses the reader.
Another example might be Planescape: Torment, which uses a question as the inspiration for its plot: "what can change the heart of a man?" While the effectiveness of the storytelling can certainly be debated, it is clear that the subject, at least, is a fairly deep and potentially depressing one.
It is perhaps also worth mentioning, for those who have not read the article, that Dirda does concede that games could be art, or perhaps will be considered art in the future:
Dirda said the game showed him that video games "obviously have artistic value" and will likely become more of a recognized art form.
Really, I think the point is that if you start judging the quality of art, it is necessarily subjective. When broken down to basics, something being art simply means it plays on your senses and the way you percieve beauty. Art is mainly just a way we reference the human pursuit of aesthetics, and sometimes we tend to get so caught up in what pleases us that we start calling things that are not pleasing to us "bad art". Something that makes you feel disgust or boredom is still invoking your senses and is thus art, there is no good or bad. Something you want to hang on your wall and see every day is not better art then something you never want to see again, it is just something you want to hang on your wall and see every day.
For such a young medium, video games have produced some amazing art. I think Tempest was probably the first art game, although I, Robot comes a close second. I, Robot even has a doodle mode which you can 'play' instead of playing the shooter part of the game, and draw with all the game shapes. Tempest looks like a piece of abstract art in motion, as do many of its spiritual successors. Rez is less a video game, and more a piece of playable, interactive art.
I think it's the layers of interactivity that perhaps make it hard for games to be seen as art. Many people perceive art as something you experience, or something you create. I, Robot got it right all those years ago, and a few games have got it over the years - what's to stop art being something you play? If I compose a piece of music, is that art? How about if I play a tune written by someone else - still art? If I play a tune someone else wrote, on an instrument someone else built - still art? So how does playing through Rez differ materially from playing through a Mozart sonata? I didn't write the game, I didn't build the console, but completing the sequence successfully requires a good deal of practice, and a great many things to be done in precise order, with a bit of free-forming thrown in. Maybe Coltrane, rather than Mozart then...
As for emotional impact, that can come from a simple musical phrase, a sound effect, a single image. Halo's opening chords, the 'task complete' chime in a Zelda game, the radio crackle in Silent Hill.
Storytelling in video games is traditionally weak, because there is no story, or rather, you are the story, playing out your chosen path. All too often, even in games like Bioshock, the story is irrelevant, cutscenes or audio backstory merely being extra treats for killing your way through X number of monsters. Mostly, the story doesn't make any difference, except where you get one ending for being Good, and another for being Bad. You can have preset events within the game, such as the death of a main character, but I generally find these to be overly manipulative. I'd rather have my choices mean something within the game, as opposed to which 90 seconds of CGI I get as my reward at the end. This, however, represents far more work for the programmers, so is much less likely to happen.
I've been involved in paper/pencil/dice RPGs before now, in which players have come away from sessions genuinely upset and unhappy about the situations they'd ended up in, and often the compromises they'd had to make to get out of them. This was because they had months, sometimes years invested in these characters, and the players knew them well. It's difficult to get emotionally invested in a video game character in the same way, especially when the character displays no emotional range within the game (Gordon Freeman, Link, Master Chief). Having said that, my son was very upset by the ending of Panzer Dragoon Zwei, but then he was only about 9 at the time...
Alternatively, you could have read Rousseau, Nietzsche, Aristotle, Hume, Machiavelli, etc in High School. Not that anyone does, except myself apparently.
I was too busy learning computer shit and reading sci-fi. *shrug*
I'm making up for it now.