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Videogames Doomed for a 'Comics-like Ghetto'?
At the Newsweek blog LevelUp, journalist N'Gai Croal wrote this week about the sometimes-precarious position of videogames in popular culture. The frustrations of legislators, lawyers, and 'pro-family' groups aside, the popularity and record sales of the gaming industry would seem to indicate rising stock for gaming as an art form in the US. And yet, there are some folks who see gaming as just another fad, which in some time will be equal in popularity to comic books or tabletop roleplaying. N'Gai starts to form his response by noting that learning to play videogames is considerably easier than developing an appreciation for literature of any kind. He then goes on to note that the (oft-cited) lack of weighty subjects in gaming is more due to the 'pop culture' nature of the hobby than the medium itself. "Popular fiction generally outsells literary fiction. Summer blockbusters generally out-gross arthouse films. Is this any different from, say, Call of Duty 4: Modern Combat out-NPD-ing BioShock last year, or Madden doing the same to Shadow of the Colossus in 2005?" He discusses some ways to address that, but do you have any solutions? Or are games doomed to be the playthings of adolescent boys for the rest of the century? (And yeah, I resent the 'comics ghetto' label too.)
Every male in my high school played starcraft, no matter what social group they came from. The same could be said for halo. Gaming should be thought of as a medium or a category, like comics are a subcategory of literature, and RPGs are a subcategory of card/board games. I don't see the popularity of Halo or of Guitar Hero-type games fading.
Of course, it's really pretty simple. If there's a demand for games, more games will be made. If there isn't, there won't. We can go around and around on whether X is as popular as Y or is it as popular as B? Who cares?
Right now, the gaming industry is moving a lot of units. There are also a lot of really good games out there now, too. Is this because it's a lucrative market or is the market lucrative because of the good games? Again, an argument that really doesn't matter to anyone that's not trying to get ad clicks.
In summary, if you like to play games, play them. If you don't, no one's forcing you to. No big deal. Life's short. Get some fresh air now and then too...
What doesn't kill you only delays the inevitable
Remember, it's not art unless it takes eight or more years of expensive (and exclusive) education to enjoy it.
Everything else is just "folk art". But we just call it "art" to make the simpletons feel better. They aren't good enough to begin to understand Art.
Last year Roger Ebert responded to Clive Barker's comments on Ebert not considering video games art:
http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070721/COMMENTARY/70721001
There are some good thoughts in there even though Ebert is definitely in "Get off my lawn" territory.
I love the Half-Life series. I think there's a lot of wit and intelligence and creativity there that you don't see in a lot of other games. But every time I sit down to play a new episode I inevitably think: "It's just a First Person Shooter." Portal gets even higher marks for creativity. The way they develop the GLaDOS character and the use of plot twists and the out-of-left-field use of music is brilliant. But is it art?
I guess I tend to think of video games being "artful" rather than "art".
... American Comics deserve every bit of ghettoization they have. The vast majority are of the superhero type, which are mindboggingly complex in their timelines, crossovers, retconning and super powers galore. Compare this with European comics (specifically Belgian and French), and you'll find everything from High Art to Low Art, super heros, Sci-Fi, Fantasy, surreal, spy, WW2, funny, serious, story-driven, art-driven, and anything else you can think of.
As an example, after hearing so much about the Sandman chronicles, I browsed through one. I found the art disappointing, and the story mildly interesting. However, it was still miles beyond any of the DC and Marvel comic books next to it.
Yes, there are great examples of American comic artists - Frank Miller comes to mind. But they are the vast exception in a sea of mediocrity.
This is also why I think that videogames will escape ghettoization - they are a worldwide phenomenon, and this alone will prevent them from sliding into a state that is as narrowly focused as american comics. To some extent, I think they already have. I can think of a number of games that are more art than game - Psychonauts, for one. Okami, for another.
Those who can, do. Those who can't, sue.
Full disclosure: I worked heavily on the production of Bioshock's voiceover, so I have a bit of an opinion on this topic.
:)
My own take is that gaming is a very broad medium - possibly even beyond film. We see in the film industry a single medium containing both Requiem For A Dream and Dumb and Dumberer. Miller's Crossing and Sister Act 2: Back In The Habit.
Games (not "entertainment software", games, damnit) cover a similar spectrum, even if the high-brow fare is a bit thin on the ground right now. Such was the case for film when that industry was gaming's current age.
At this point in time much of the gaming industry occupies the same functional niche as pornography - people go home after an exhausting day at work, have a beer, demolish noobs on Team Fortress 2 to relax, and then go to bed. But the existence of pornography in film does not prevent that medium from providing works of real intellectual and artistic substance. Neither does gaming as pornography - both literally and metaphorically - hinder the development of deeper experiences.
I think if anything gaming provides the potential for experiences of greater power than film because we can develop both narrative-driven and sandbox experiences for our audience. We've seen the promise of the latter in GTA*, Oblivion, and I believe we'll see more of it in Spore. We've witnessed an outstanding achievement in the former named Call of Duty 4 - and my hat is off to Infinity Ward for such an amazing work. Beyond the singleplayer, massively multiplayer games can also provide a great range of experiences - from Ultima Online's open-ended fantasy simulation to Planetside's extremely structured gameplay.
We will get gaming to the level where it can be taken seriously as a work of art. We are getting it to that level. Right this moment. Your patience, please.
*I am a Take 2 employee, blah blah blah the opinions expressed here do not reflect the views of my employer etc. etc. ad nauseum.
Maybe you should be asking "How many people under 30 read comics?". One of the reasons why the comics industry is doing so badly is because there are few new readers, and the existing readership keeps getting older.
Kids don't read comics anymore. Most comics readers _are_ over 30. I'm 23, and most people I see at the comic shop are older than me.
I support the Center for Consumer Freedom
The lack of weighty subjects ceased being a problem in the video game industry many years ago, when Tomb Raider's Lara Croft gave us not one but two weighty subjects to consider.
Blearf. Blearf, I say.
Games are different. There will always be games in one form or another. Which form will they take? Well, if convenience and accessibility have anything to do with it, then how about in my living room, on my pc, my cell, or a portable device in my pocket? Coincidentally, these all fall under "video games". So unless these mediums go away, video games are here to stay.
As a species we've been playing games far before we started reading, and surely we will continue far after we stop.
Moreover games are an EMERGING popular art form, most emerging art forms are effectively shunned by the mainstream art world until they BECOME the mainstream. Video games as a medium are only a few decades old, and as a MASS market medium only a decade or so.
Look at the history of movies and movie making for example, how many directors, actors or script writers were recognized as artists in 1920 or 1930? Compare that with the explosion of the art form in the 50's and 60's. Note also the parallel between the censorship that occurred then with film that is now beginning with games.
People who DO look at the best of the gaming world as an art form and appreciate it as such are becoming more and more common, and as that progresses so will it's recognition by the mainstream art world. This is probably not something that will happen overnight, I expect it will take years or decades... but I wouldn't be at all surprised if 50 years from now there was not a gaming equivalent of the academy awards where some otherwise unknown will get the "Best Rendering in a Simulated World" and getting a script writing credit on the "Game of the Year" is as valued as much as one for a major film.
Patience Grasshopper, waiting is... you grok?XML is a known as a key material required to create SMD: Software of Mass Destruction
Kids don't read comics anymore. Most comics readers _are_ over 30. I'm 23, and most people I see at the comic shop are older than me. You raise a good point. This isn't a question of comics vs. rpg's vs. video games, this is about entertainment dollars and what people spend them on, period. All of the above are just avenues of entertainment.
Now American comics, the print kind sold in stores, they petty much suck. Heroes in spandex, boring plots, recycled everything, yuck. But if you take a look at the manga section in bookstores, it's off the charts. There are plenty of young people reading comics, even girls! But it's manga they're going for. Since the American comics aren't developing a new audience, they have to enhance the value for older readers to keep them coming back, like the tobacco companies spiking the nicotine in ciggies. And that means more masturbatory aid females, more fan service, more pandering, just to keep the books moving. It doesn't help that rising prices have pushed comics out of the casual purchase territory for today's teens.
As for pencil and paper RPG's, the demographic is there, same as always, even bigger than before! But they're playing the games on computers now. Video games are poaching those dollars.
There are so many more companies competing for dollars compared to when I was a kid and compared to the previous decades before my time, it's even crazier. DVD's, video games, CD's, MMORPG's, cars, ipods, laptops, computers, not to mention books, comics, etc, too many things to split the entertainment dollar amongst.
Now if they want to talk about video games getting ghettoized, just look at the Wii. Old folks play it. Over the holidays, my sister brought her Wii along and the whole family enjoyed it. It's the first video game system my mom's liked since the Odyssey from the early 80's. Nintendo proved the market is there, companies just have to get inventive about serving it. Same goes for the comics. No self-respecting geek gamer wanted a Wii but it looks like the market is bigger than that. No self-respecting comic publisher would want to trade spandex heroes for yaoi but the girls are buying it up in droves. There are ways to make money, they just might not be the way the industry leaders want to make it.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
You think a game that came with Windows 3.1 and up is less popular than Bejeweled, a flash game?
I bet the 2 most popular games, in terms of man-hours spent playing it, are minesweeper and solitaire.
If I have nothing to hide, don't search me
I think you're right on the money about games being an emerging form, and you're right to compare games to film as well. In fact, the more you know about film, the more striking that analogy becomes. So if you'll forgive a film geek for drawing the analogy in even more detail:
When film first began, it was a widely accepted fact that it would never be an art form. To a large degree, this was because people mistook temporary technical limitations for inherent artistic ones. "Film is silent and in black and white, and theater is in color with sound. Film will therefore always be an inferior version of the stage, at best." Indeed, film was generally seen as nothing more than lowbrow entertainment for illiterates, immigrants, and other types deemed inferior by meanstream society.
But then technicians solved more and more of the technical problems--allowing filmmakers to tell longer stories, and to film in more settings--and meanwhile, filmmakers were learning more and more about the possibilities of this new art form. Even before sound and color, you were beginning to have masterpieces that were recognized as works of art. Birth of a Nation was the first one, although it seems crude (and horribly racist) by modern standards. But by the time you got to the 1920s, people were making films that can still move modern audiences. Yet it took another decade or two for highbrow literary critics to catch on to this explosion of creativity.
The comparison to games is pretty obvious, I think. Technical developments are allowing better and better visual effects, and game makers are getting more and more sophisticated about exploiting the strengths of the form and working around the weaknesses. I would say that Doom was the gaming world's equivalent of Birth of A Nation--a work of tremendous energy that synthesized a whole lot of already existing elements into something that felt new and exciting. And I would say Deus Ex and Thief were like the films of the early 1920's--one day they will be classics, but when they came out, they were still part of a particular artistic ghetto. And now videogames are catching up to the films of the late 1920's/early 1930s--they are very sophisticated, and the outside world is just beginning to wake up to their merit.
One last thought: if commercial gaming began in 1972 with Pong, then the medium is 36 years old. If commercial film began in 1896 with the Lumiere brothers, then it would have been 36 years old in 1932. Which means that videogaming is evolving right on schedule. This means we can expect the Citizen Kane of the videogame world sometime in the next five or six years...
Arr! Read The Government Manual for New Pirates!
Odd - since quite young children seem to enjoy being told stories (which sounds like "developing an appreciation for literature" to me).
So, perhaps the translation is "The videogame industry has yet to fully develop a parasitic industry of critics who 'appreciate' video games by writing pretentious deconstructions of them".
Currently, so-called "reviews" of video games are just descriptions of what the game entails, whether the gameplay is compelling and the quality of the technical execution. Anybody who has "developed an appreciation for literature" knows that proper reviews are smug little essays designed to impress upon the reader the reviewer's extreme wit and cleverness while scrupulously avoiding saying anything informative about the actual work under review, but citing myriad other obscure works in the clear expectation that any worthy reader will be familliar with them all.
Once the videogame industry has evolved such critics, all that remains is to ensure that all 5th graders are forced to write 1000 word reports on the influence of the depiction of dwarves in "Colossal Cave" on the works of Scott Adams then videogames will be accepted into the pantheon of true art.
In a survey of 100 programmers, 111111 thought that duck-typing was a good idea.
- infinite spin (explained),
- spin triples (explained), and
- a randomizer that lets you play forever (explained part 1 and part 2).
It's a good thing that there are still fan games that let the player screw back.I think the problem with American comics is that they just don't know when to end them. Ok, so you've got a character that's really popular like a Batman. Well crap, it would be best if you just rotated writers every few years and let them tell stories with beginnings, middles, and ends. When they try to keep the same thing going on for 50 years, you end up with continuity problems that make the dogma of the early Christian church look coherent. With something like Archie Comics, people accept that they're in a perpetual time warp where everyone is a teenager in an idealized 1950's world even though modern appliances appear. But when you're talking about a long-running American comic, everything goes to stupid-ville.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne