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Steve Palley Associate Editor, Mobile |
It's Academic, Really
Welcome to the early 21st century. We, lucky people of the future that we are, have ready access to video gaming technology that can actualize dreams in a seven-digit spray of triangles and whirling, semi-intelligent algorithms. Photorealism isn't here yet, but it will be within the blink of an eye--and now full-motion video is old hat. Naturally, we couldn't have done it without a functional sales model and large-scale distribution. Video gaming is well into its third decade as a broad-based consumer product. It generates tens of billions of dollars a year, and it has finally leapfrogged film as the entertainment market's most lucrative form of media.
The gaming tide is gradually suffusing every facet of American life, even as the movies once did. A few examples are in order. Vin Diesel, stealing a march on the competition, has founded his own video game studio to leverage his larger-than-life characters off the screen and into more appropriate, interactive venues. The US Army uses video games like Full Spectrum Warrior to train their soldiers in squad-based combat, and the Marine Corps and the Air Force aren't far behind. It's a rare professional athlete that would eschew box placement on EA's next sports game. You yourself may spend more time plotting with your squadmates over an Xbox Live headset than you do speaking to them telephonically.
Please check your outmoded cultural detritus at the door--your stodgy entertainment forms are of little interest here, to anyone other than antiquarians and mountain men. But don't let me catch you playing Riddick when you should be researching that paper on French New Wave cinema, bucko. You want to get into grad school, right?
We've bought video gaming's economic line completely, and it would be difficult to argue against the burgeoning social impact of the phenomena. But, however much the new media permeates our culture at present time, its ascendancy will be incomplete until the White Towers of academia coronate it.
Video games have long since matured to the point of accepting functional and technical criticism. You're reading GameSpot at the moment, right? I posit that there will soon be a sufficient corpus of video game work to support a more theory-oriented, academic brand of criticism, built upon equal parts social analysis, history, and artistic interpretation. This process takes time. Keep in mind that film criticism didn't develop instantaneously, either. The first Academy Awards weren't held until 1929, nearly a quarter-century after the introduction of the feature film. Film studies didn't gain much purchase as an academic discipline until the 1960s, and television studies followed a decade or two later.
Am I crazy for suggesting that such an obviously venal enterprise as video games could transcend the merely commercial and exist on the same plane as architecture, theater, literature, music, film, and television? I will readily admit that the majority of video games are targeted at the magic demographic of 18- to 34-year-old males; therefore, they are hardly universal in scope and neither are they ambitious in topic. Most developers aren't independent of economic imperatives, which generally trump artistic mores. It's a hell of a lot easier to make a World Wrestling Entertainment game than it is to read a Pynchon or Murakami novel, let alone make a game out it. And even that rare game that generates some kind of spiritual resonance could be called a fluke. When I asked for his opinion on the subject, a superior of mine told me that art should be intentional in its creation. Gamers may experience a visceral or intellectual reaction to a particular game, but the catalyst for this reaction is usually superb craftsmanship, and not often intentional guidance on the part of the creator.
And what of this supposed creator? How much control can an individual craftsman have over the creative process in video games, which now involve huge teams of programmers, artists, and designers? Some might argue that video game production is incapable of supporting auteurs; in video games, as in film, the budgets are too high and the risks involved are too great to allow any one artist complete, "final cut" control over the end product. But the industry is changing in this respect, as well. There are some video game designers whose work is so consistently brilliant that their names are attached to their products, even if unofficially. Shigeru Miyamoto, Will Wright, and "Igo" Igarashi are a few examples that spring immediately to mind.
Designers like these may not have carte blanche from their studios and underwriters, but they certainly command a lot of influence over the shape of the project. Their creative imprimatur is apparent to experienced gamers and cognoscenti. I would say that the work of some of these designers isn't just canonical: it's thematically unified artwork. Do they make money on the final product? They certainly hope to. But Charles Dickens made a fortune writing serial novels, which eventually turned into ammunition for many a doctorate candidate's thesis.
There are video games that have something to offer beyond their base entertainment value--even without so-called literary content. They are the media in which all of the previously mentioned art forms can be combined into a single multidisciplinary edifice. Dance equates to fighting choreography, level design to architecture, artwork and character modeling to painting and sculpture, writing to writing, full-motion video to film. In my experience, the very best video games duplicate the type of universal semiotic structure that is present in myth and legend. They could be accessible to anyone--if they were marketed that way. In terms of ambition, what separates the fantastically detailed, immense universes of Final Fantasy or Ultima, for instance, from J.R.R. Tolkien's Middle-earth--besides the agreement of scholars and intellectuals?
Academic programs centered on the technical aspects of video game production have begun to pop up in universities worldwide. Notables include the Massachusetts Institute of Technology's Media Lab programs, the University of Southern California's Video Game Design minor, and Carnegie Mellon's Entertainment Technology Center course of study, which offers a master's degree. Academic criticism will inevitably lag behind until enough interested young people decide that there's more to their video gaming experience than meets the eye. The context of video games may be different than film at this early point in its evolution, but its impact as a cultural medium will eventually be very much the same.
So, which is higher? Your test scores, or your Symphony of the Night completion percentage?
Nitro Burnin' GameSpotting
Welcome to another top-fuel edition of everyone's favorite video game editorial, where you pay for the whole seat, but you only need the edge!
