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.