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.