Two Roads Diverge...Or Do They?

In the short past of game criticism, there have been two, typically opposing, approaches: narratology and ludology.  Narratology is the approach that looks at video games through their narrative, much as they’d look at a book or movie’s narrative.  Ludology is literally “the study of games,” and its approach focuses on gameplay as the chief item of intrigue in games.  Since the beginning of these terms and ideas, they’ve been chiefly two different approaches practiced usually by different people, but almost never used at the same time: you either talked about the gameplay or the narrative.  This was how they were first described to me in my very first class on video games: two different ways of approaching game criticism. ¹

In industry, ludology tends to dominate.  There is a very strong sentiment that gameplay is the most important thing in creating a game.  In some books on game design, this idea is offered as "always have more gameplay than story."² This approach was the chief way of making games early on, as you can see by the negligible narrative in most early games (though there are notable exceptions).

On the other hand, narrative tends to be the focus in academia (such as it is for video games).  Most video game scholars today have a theoretical background in literature or film where there isn't even a term to indicate a focus on narrative, since the focus is so prevalent.  So it's easy to see why this focus tends to be more prevalent.

There are exceptions, of course.  There are story-heavy studios in industry and scholars that study the effects of gameplay.

Studios like Bioware have pushed the role of the story in a game well beyond what it was earlier on.  In particular, games like Mass Effect, Knights of the Old Republic, and Dragon Age have a very strong focus on narrative, and even their newest game, The Old Republic, is bringing a new emphasis on story into a new genre.

There are also game scholars who study the various effects of gameplay with very little attention given to the nature of the story itself.  Jane McGonigal is a revolutionary author who has studied games through a largely ludological lens.  Her main book is Reality is Broken: Why Games Make us Better and How they can Change the World.  The subtitle sums up the content exactly, and the reasons she offers for both parts, making us better people and changing the world for the better, are largely about how the gameplay does so.³  There are occasional nods towards the stories told in games, but especially when she analyses games that go beyond just video games, she’s usually talking about games with virtually no narrative in a traditional sense.

The existence of two vastly different approaches is even seen in most games today.  You have periods of storytelling, often cut-scenes, and periods of gameplay where relatively little takes place in terms of story.   An example of this is when you’ve just finished a fierce boss battle, and rather than dealing the death blow within gameplay, the game seizes control and displays the end of the battle in a cut scene.   Of those games that let you strike the final blow, you often have scenes depicting extended death scenes and exposition directly following the fight.

This division is an interesting way to divide analysis, but there's been a shift away from this in the last few years, particularly among the online crowd of game journalists, reviewers, and critics.  A shift towards understanding games not by looking at just the narrative or just the gameplay, but understanding games by looking at both: how narrative empowers gameplay and how gameplay delivers narrative.  This is something happening more and more all the time, so I’ll stick to just one good example.

Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw on escapistmagazine.com repeatedly states that he prefers games where story and gameplay merge seamlessly in both his video series and column.  From his biggest praise of Halo: Reach to his main argument for Bioshock’s introduction sequence being the best in gaming history, Yahtzee consistently has high praises for games that mix story and gameplay.⁴  The virtues he describes in doing this ranges from immersion to storytelling depth to allowing the player to express themselves in-game.

While this new approach isn’t something nobody has thought of, using this approach explicitly in discussions and in game design is definitely new.  What do I think of this?  Well, that’s another topic, which I hope to cover next time.

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1. Corrinne Lewis, "Ludology & Narratology Explored," (lecture, Intro to Video Games class, Salt Lake City, UT, Spring 2011).

2. Ernest Adams, Fundamentals of Game Design (2nd Edition), (Berkeley: New Riders Press, September 24, 2009).

3. Jane McGonigal, Reality is Broken: Why Games Make Us Better and How They Can Change the World, (New York: Penguin Press Group, January 20, 2011).

4. Ben Croshaw, "Extra Punctuation: Interactivity," The Escapist, March 9, 2010, Accessed: November 30, 2011, http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/extra-punctuation/7268-Extra-Punctuation-Interactivity.

Critique: What it's not

Now that I’ve actually done some game criticism and have something to reference, I think it’s good to compare criticism with game reviewing.  On the surface, these things are similar, but in reality, the goals and content of a game review and a piece of game criticism are very much different.

A review’s ultimate goal is to inform potential buyers.  When you walk away from a successful review, you should walk away with a better understanding of what the game is and whether you’d be interested in buying it.  This would be review:

“Bastion is a game with well-executed combat, interesting and well-delivered narration, and a great story.  The soundtrack is great, but it suffers from some minor balance issues and clashing, if colorful, visuals.”

On the other hand, criticism (also called critique) is about looking at the game and getting a “deeper” understanding of it.  Criticism deals with looking at the meaning behind different aspects of the game or how the story is told with the different elements.  This would be critique:

“Bastion’s narrative is delivered in an impressive interactive manner, which creates impressive world and deep characters within gameplay while avoiding a traditional text dump.  This is done through comments made by a narrator triggered by player action.”

There is a clear difference on a very basic level.  Articles that describe the gameplay and story and end with a score and/or recommendation are clearly reviews.  An article describing how to interpret a particular part of a game and the literary background behind it is clearly critique.  But things aren’t always as simple as textbook examples.

The first thing that confuses things is the language for describing this stuff.  “Criticism” generally indicates describing something’s flaws, but that’s a long way from “criticism” when appending to “literary” or in my case, “game.”  Also, a “critic,” is someone who points out flaws (as in the general definition of criticism), and they’re often also a reviewer.  Second, good reviews often do some amount of critique, since it can be a good way to explain a portion of the game succinctly.

A great example is Ben “Yahtzee” Croshaw’s work on the Escapist.  Zero Punctuation is, first and foremost, a review show, since every single episode states in some way whether the game is worth buying, and that’s really the main point behind each episode: how good (or bad) the game is.  But if you sift out the content only there for humor and set aside everything that’s review, you will find gems of game criticism here and there.  This is when he steps back and comments on what games say about society, how a particular mechanic tells the story, or does a bit of interpretation.  As for a specific example, virtually every time he mentions Freud, he’s briefly jumped into critique rather than review.  Often these sections are brushed aside with humor, probably to hide the intellectual games-are-art hippy that he is, but they’re there if you’re capable of not blinking for five minutes straight.

Coming back to the subject of keeping reviewing separate from critique, I think more examples might help.  Finding something that’s purely review is relatively easy, as reviews are clearly labeled and there are a ton of them spread throughout the internet.  Criticism can be harder to find, though, especially outside the depths of forums, and as much as I love forums, that’s a rabbit hole far too deep for a couple of examples.

First, my Youtube channel, Korial00 is dedicated to a series called Game Talk, which is all game criticism, though it’s still in its infancy (as is this blog, of course, at least at time of writing).  Yahtzee’s written column, Extra Punctuation (also on the Escapist) includes game criticism far more often than his videos.  The Game Overthinker by Bob “Moviebob” Chipman posted on Screw Attack has quite a bit of critique.  Extra Credits by James Portnow, Daniel Floyd, and Allison Theus over on Penny Arcade does game criticism whenever they delve into a discussion about a specific game or mechanic, rather than broad issues in the game industry.  I’m sure there are tons of other instances, but these are what I’m familiar with and I’ll happily plug these guys, though not all they do is game critique (not that the other stuff they do isn’t great) and each has its own quirks.  If you know of any other places that do game criticism, share them!

Both game critique and reviews are important, but I think that a very important part in understanding game criticism and studying games in general is to know what different kinds of approaches there are to looking at games.  There’s another whole discussion that can be had about why we make these distinctions and how we should go about it, but that’s taking the meta nature of this blog to a whole new level, and I think I’ve said enough for one post.

Check out the links below for the shows/blogs mentioned and share any others you know of in the comments!  See you next week.

Zero Punctuation by Yahtzee: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/videos/view/zero-punctuation

Extra Punctuation by Yahtzee: http://www.escapistmagazine.com/articles/view/columns/extra-punctuation

The Game Overthinker by MovieBob: http://www.screwattack.com/shows/partners/game-overthinker

Extra Credits by James, Daniel, and Allison: http://penny-arcade.com/patv/show/extra-credits

Game Talk: Actual Game Criticism

So I've decided that rather than actually doing game criticism here, I'd do the actual criticism in a more immediately available medium: videos.  Thus, I'll continue to talk about game criticism here on my blog, while I instead actually analyze games in a video series on Youtube, Game Talk.

The first episode is on narrative in a game called Bastion developed by Supergiant Games.  Check it out:

I hope you enjoy some actual game criticism.

The Ripples Before the Waves

Coming into this post, I realized I’ve talked a lot about literary criticism and video games, and I’ve promised to apply the former to the latter, but I have yet to actually do so.  Unfortunately, I’m going to put that off yet again to talk about something related and important, but still not game criticism.  This is because I want to make sure all my cards are on the table: what I’m doing, where I’m coming from, and why this all matters.  The last is the final piece in the puzzle and the subject of this post.

I’ve mentioned that I’ve taken a literary theory class covering the basics of how we approach literary criticism.  The last day, we had a class-wide debate over whether college level humanities classes should exist, to question why we should be doing what we did in that class.  I ended up on the side arguing that they shouldn’t, and due to my history in debate (I was a state champion in high school debate), I got the class truly riled up by my arguments.  In general, I speak firmly and without apologizing regardless of the subject, and when I’m also presenting arguments in a semi-formal debate, this effect is amplified, even if I’m presenting the side I disagree with.  So despite the fact that I had been put on this side by the professor and I was taking an English class that gave me no credit towards my major or graduation, they felt extremely threatened by the arguments.

I think that’s because the answer to the question doesn’t come as easily as any of us would wish.  What people learn in English doesn’t save lives with medicine, build bridges or buildings, or any other practically useful skill.  But these classes should exist, and what they teach is useful to everyone, not just lovers of the esoteric and academic.

These classes teach how to find meaning in life and understand humanity (thus “humanities”).  More specific to those classes I focus on: music, literature, film, etc., these things teach us how to find meaning in art and, to a varying extent, how to forge meaning into art.  This meaning we find in art makes us stronger people by helping us understand ourselves more completely.  Within literature specifically, it helps us empathize with people in a vastly different position than our own.  We find that we’re not so different from those we thought different, and we find that other people in the world have to face challenges we can’t imagine.  It can give us an idea, however incomplete, of what others go through without having to experience it ourselves.  And this allows us to empathize with, appreciate, and understand others when we’d otherwise remain ignorant.

All throughout history, we see that these things make society better.  Bigotry struggles to survive if you know someone who is black or gay.  It struggles even more if you’ve walked in the shoes of someone you once hated, as a video game allows a player to do.  Having a vicarious experience as a refugee in a war-torn country or as a slave through literature also helps you to understand the injustices that exist in such places.  A different perspective can even reveal flaws within yourself, where you otherwise wouldn’t have seen it.

These things we gain from the experiences offered by art and literature make us better people who are more able to tackle the problems of the world.  Far from being something that should be left by the way-side, learning how to find meaning in art should be something everyone learns.  Not everyone needs to be a film buff or a bookworm, but everyone should be able to walk away from a book, movie, or video game having learned something.  About themselves, about the world, about their place in the world.  We all have an opportunity to make something fun into something both enriching and often, more fun than it was before.

That’s what makes this worth it.

Everyone playing modern video games should be taking much more than a few hours of fun from the experience.  There have been literary giants in the past that changed the world, and in the future, there will be video games that will change the world.  That time has yet to come, but for now, I can demonstrate how video games can enrich our understanding of ourselves and our world, so that time may come sooner.  Learning from a video game or any kind of literature doesn’t require an English degree.  It just takes a willingness to learn, a willingness to think, and a bit of direction on how to get started.  I hope I can provide the last, and the ripples of game-based understanding can become the waves that can change the world for the better.

On the Shoulders of Giants

Before diving into game criticism, it’s useful to look back at where this all began and how we got here.  Trying to find meaning in fiction isn’t anything new; we simple develop new methods for telling our stories.  The discussion of “literature” reaches back to the classical Greek philosophers: Plato and Aristotle, and perhaps further.  Since then, a foundation of knowledge has been built up that gives us a great deal to draw on in order to understand and learn from what we read, watch, and play.  So let me begin a crash course in the history of literary criticism!  I learned much of this stuff in a class on literary theory, but the basic order I confirmed with the Wikipedia page.¹

The origin of studying fiction begins with Aristotle.  During that period, all literature was referred to as “poetry,” which in ancient Greece meant plays or epic poems like the Odyssey.  Aristotle approached poetry as something to study, and in Poetics, he treats it as he would any natural science.²  His focus was on what makes a good poem, rather modern ideas about interpretation, and his ideas became the foundation of western thought on the matter, so most of what he wrote seems clear to us today.

By medieval times, the ideas of the Greeks had been lost and new literary traditions grew out of the Christian interpretation of scripture.  During these times, we see the beginning of two key ideas that persist today.  First, the idea of a literary “canon,” or the books everyone is supposed to know, grew from ideas about the Biblical canon.  Second is the idea of interpretation, which is finding meaning in texts, rather than exploring how good literature works (which was Aristotle’s approach).  However, interpretation back then was meant to discover the author’s intent, just as interpreting scripture was meant to unveil divine intention.  The renaissance brought little new thought to interpretation, though it did revive Aristotle’s work and that’s how his ideas reached us today.

Just after World War II, a new form of interpretation came about which was called “New Criticism,” which, oddly enough, is an idea about 80 years old (makes me think of a more recent trend dubbing itself “New X”).  This school of thought arose as a response to interpretation based on authorial intention.  Instead, new critics advocated a form of interpretation more familiar to the modern day English class, which we now call “close reading.”  This is trying to derive meaning from the text based on the words themselves and requires little esoteric knowledge of the authors and classical texts necessary for earlier interpretation.  This is the method of interpretation used today in most English classes, and the time in history it grew out of is taught in any literature theory class.³ There is a great deal of writing and discussion from this time that formed what we now see as interpretation and this is the era of history most pertinent to what we do today.

Once movies had been rolling for some time, people applied similar methodologies to films, and film criticism was born.  In addition to looking at analysis of the content, film criticism looked at “cinematic form,” as magazines like Film Criticism state.⁴  This cinematic form is the first time meaningful analysis was done with more than the story’s content.  There’s not much you can say about the font, size, and so on in a book, but there’s a lot to say about the delivery of a story in a movie.  This added new dynamics to the analysis done, adding to the methods of new critics.

And finally, we arrive at video games, hopefully with you somewhere short of bored out of your mind.  History has yet to be written in video game criticism.  There have been books written, online videos made, and more, but even only a few years ago, real game criticism had yet to begin, and there are good reasons for that, as several people agree.⁵  Yet now the dawn of a new type of criticism is just beginning, and it’s foolish to ignore the history that brought us here.  We who choose to do game criticism have the chance to stand on the shoulders of giants, and we should take that chance.  Game scholars, designers, gamers, and observers can benefit from this history, and we all should.  This history gives us the result of a lot of hard, theoretical work in criticism.  This history tells us how people have thought about literature and film.  The only work left is to adapt it to our own use.

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1. “Literary Criticism,” Wikipedia, accessed September 20, 2011, http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Literary_criticism.
2. Aristotle, Poetics, trans. S. H. Butcher (Procyon Publishing, 1995), accessed September 20, 2011, http://libertyonline.hypermall.com/Aristotle/Poetics.html.
3. Michael Delahoyde, “New Criticism,” accessed September 20, 2011, http://public.wsu.edu/~delahoyd/new.crit.html.
4. Lloyd Michaels, “Editor’s Note,” Film Criticism, accessed September 20, 2011, http://filmcriticism.allegheny.edu/News.html.
5. Why There Are No Great Video Game Critics (Yet),” Whatever (blog), June 23, 2006, http://scalzi.com/whatever/004301.html.

No Longer a Toy

When video games first began they were little more than toys.  However, as they grew to be more complex, longer, and deeper, they became much more.  Video games grew to become a new medium for delivering a story, or more broadly, information.  They’ve become monumental developments, many requiring hard work and cooperation from many different disciplines.  Teams that number from a dozen to well over a hundred work to create the final product.  Musicians, visual artists, writers, level designers, voice actors, programmers, sound designers, and more come together to create.  The development usually takes at least a year, often several.  The result represents thousands upon thousands of man-hours of creation, much of it taken as artistic when looked at on its own.

And some claim this result is not art?  Wrong!  To approach a modern video game as a toy is to approach a Tyrannosaurus Rex a kitten.

Modern video games, even smaller “indie” games, are a far cry from Pong, the first successful commercial video game.  And this new medium has more potential than the wildest dreams at Atari when it was founded back in 1972.  Even now, what we’ve done has barely scratched the surface of the potential video games have for art, literature, or education.

Unfortunately, the study and thought needed to explore this potential is only now just beginning.  People have studied art and literature since the times of the ancient Greeks, perhaps since before.  Film has gone a similar route in recent times, with film schools not just teaching people how to make films, but truly studying what they are and what they can do as an artistic medium.  This needs to happen for video games, too.  In fact, this study needs to go beyond looking at video games as art.  Books and now even movies have been thoroughly explored for education and passing on information.  But video games’ potential for education and more is explored even less than they’re explored as art.

This potential is what I want to study.  At the moment, I’m working on a degree in Computer Science with a focus on Entertainment Arts and Engineering.  Basically, that’s a long-winded way of saying “degree in video game development.”  I hope this will give me a solid background in game development, which will be useful in my ultimate goal to study games from an academic perspective.  I’m only just now getting my feet wet in this realm of game scholarship, but I think that there is potential here, and if it’s discovered and fulfilled, we could use games to inspire, to educate, and to make the world a better place.

So what do I intend to do here?  Start thinking about video games, of course.  And hopefully, inspire thought about video games, as well.  At this point, the only thing I can explore is the artistic side of video games, as the educational side of study requires more resources than a blog and some thought.  And since I have much more experience with literature than with visual art, music, or other aspects of video games, that’s the part of the artistic side I’ll be focusing on.

The result: game criticism.  No, not criticizing games and saying what’s good and bad about them; that’d be reviewing games.  When I say criticism here, I mean the same thing as when we say “literary criticism.”  Game criticism is just a very new branch of literary criticism, as I’m going to be treating games as literature.  For those hearing of “literary criticism” for the first time, “game criticism” simply means thinking about games (and, of course, writing down and sharing those thoughts).  The details of what this thought should entail has been the subject of debate for thousands of years and this, too, is part of what game criticism as the theory behind it.

Now there’s two groups of people who should be interested in engaging in game criticism who may be skeptical of this: first, people who play games, but aren’t interested in giving them such thought, and second, people who are interested in literary criticism who don’t think video games are worthy of the thought.

To all the gamers out there, let me say this: a video game is work.  Even on easier difficulties, you have to make an effort to continue and claim victory.  And it’s through this effort and work that we enjoy a game.  Putting in extra work in order to enjoy something more is nothing new to us.  Think of the times when you’ve pushed yourself to get that one extra achievement, or even to get all of them or all the times you replayed a game at a higher difficulty to get more challenge.  Game criticism pushes you to think and understand the hidden aspects and nuances of a game to enjoy it more or to understand why you enjoy it or even to find meaning beyond entertainment.  And these extra things you get out of thinking about games will enhance the enjoyment, too.

To all the literature majors out there, I’ve already explained how video games aren’t just toys.  The only way to demonstrate the literary nature of a game is by simply doing literary criticism about games.  This will be something I do in the future, but let me point out some brief examples.  Entire side quests in Mass Effect 2 are Biblical allusions.  Many laud specific horror games for setting up the tone and atmosphere, and this is fertile ground for analysis, just as texts’ tones are analyzed.  Bioshock is an exploration of a dystopia based on Ayn Rand’s philosophy of objectivism.  There is much, much more out there and I’ll be doing analysis about video games just as I would analyze a book.  You might just find that many games are worth taking a second look at.

The game criticism I do will fall into one of three different approaches.  First, I’ll do direct analysis of a game and how it works as literature.  Second, I’ll explain how already established theories about literary criticism interact with video games.  Third, I’ll explore new ideas about how to approach video games as literature based on how video games diverge from classical literature.  I also may just occasionally rant about something related to all this.

I hope anyone reading will be inspired to join me in giving games the thought they deserve.