“Why we need a ‘Citizen Kane’…”
A few weeks ago, IGN editor Michael Tomsen committed one of the worst sins a game journalist can commit: he reminded the world that video games still are just games for kids. Invited by ABC news to come forth with a name for “our” <<Citizen Kane>>, he chose “Metroid Prime” as the most eligible candidate for that honor. I won’t bother you with the justifications he used to back up his choice, as Anthony Burch, in his somewhat truculent style, already addressed them with the necessary criticism in this interesting read. Suffice to say, IGN’s editor might’ve been better off not saying anything, instead of spewing such ridiculous statements, that serve only to show the lack of culture most game journalists possess.
The formulation of this question is not new. Where is the <<Citizen Kane>> of video games? This problem is very ambiguous, and the way in which it was phrased can lead to a host of misinterpretations on what is being discussed. The most important disclaimer in this regard is – I am not, in any way, about to compare cinema with video games, they are different mediums with different expressions, and we would do well to accept the differences. The truly relevant question which lies hidden in the “Citizen Kane” conundrum is this: what video game can you show the world that will convince it of the medium’s legitimacy and maturity as a means of expression?
Whether someone chose “Citizen Kane” or “Metropolis” or “Nosferatu” or “Birth of a Nation” or any other film for the comparison is irrelevant. The reason why someone thought of “Citizen Kane” probably derives from its relative closeness to present day, and to the profuse knowledge most of us possess regarding film and its history (as opposed to the illiteracy we show towards older art forms). It is easy for us to track the relevance of film as an art form as a consequence of the study of certain works, in which “Citizen Kane” plays a major role. Also, film, being a product of the XXth century, emerged in a somewhat similar social and economic climate to that of video games, making its process of maturing from a purely commercial business to a wider, more encompassing artistic medium, seem replicable in our means. This is why we should crave a “Citizen Kane” – we want video games to achieve the same status as cinema did, and so we await eagerly the prophetic light of a piece of art so profound, that it can turn the blindest of skeptics into an illuminate, devote follower of video games. But what features made “Citizen Kane” relevant enough as to establish film as more than a form of entertainment? The answers are many and highly subjective. What follows are my own answers, and anyone is free to give theirs to help the debate.
The most important of “Citizen Kane’s” qualities is, without a shadow of a doubt, it being a true film. It isn’t a piece of theatrical performance set in an intangible stage, it isn’t a novel with its text hammered into spoken words by both narrator and actors, no! It was pure image and sound in narrative form. The cinematic language employed in Welles’ masterpiece was so powerful and visionary, that it would take more than a quarter of a century for someone to even consider updating it. Welles took all the potential of cinema and attempted fulfilling it, by virtuously condensing a story into an expressive piece of celluloid, captured thanks to a beautiful (and revolutionary) cinematography, exquisite soundtrack, and an outstanding work in terms of actor performance. Every framing, mise-en-scéne and camera movement serves as a vessel of metaphor for the telling of Kane’s life – these are the only true words of the language used by this audiovisual book. This is what eventually lent artistic legitimacy to cinema – “Citizen Kane” was a work that could not be replicated in other formats without losing its greatest strengths as a work of art.
The second, sometimes forgotten, quality of “Citizen Kane”, stems from its universal, perpetual appeal. “Kane” may bear a special figure as a man, being a magnate like we have seen so few, but his story was personal, human… familiar. We can all relate to his life in some way, to his desperate attempts at happiness through all the wrong ways, his wild spiral of triumph and decay, his moral and emotional contradictions as a human being, his ever frustrated obsessions with money, power, love and immortality. Forget the outstanding nature of the characters, this film addresses life, period. These are the challenges that all our lives hold in storage for us, our own existentialist anxieties and psychological dramas. And “Kane” doesn’t touch these subjects with superficiality or carelessness, it is pondered, ambiguous, profound and life-like. As Roger Ebert put it: “Its surface is as much fun as any movie ever made. Its depths surpass understanding. I have analyzed it a shot at a time with more than 30 groups, and together we have seen, I believe, pretty much everything that is there on the screen. The more clearly I can see its physical manifestation, the more I am stirred by its mystery.”
Last, but not least, there is the matter of it being a work that is unique, personal, authorial, unbound by genre conventions or pre-determined notions of what films should be, and, of course, not oriented in any way with a commercial logic. It was not only ahead of its time, as it was honest and true to its authors’ visions. This is their tale, their ideas, their craftsmanship, their art. This is a movie about their message, and it’s that notion which governs everything in it, from the seemingly meaningless stage prop to each earth-shattering dialogue. This is probably why it wasn’t a commercial success and why it was shunned by the producers of the time (despite marginal profit!), eventually leading to a troublesome dispute with Welles throughout the remainder of his career, with several unauthorized edits to his works that, still today, rob them of their artistic value. “Citizen Kane” is a work of art, something which in the world of money… is usually misunderstood. Despite all this, “Citizen Kane” lives on still today, thanks to the continuous recognition by many critics and scholars (heck, even the Academy recognized it with several Oscar nominations!), and by a growing interest of the public in the work throughout the 1950’s and beyond. It became a symbol – a popular one at that, I might add – that film can be art. Many haven’t seen it (and if you’re one of those, stop right now, and go watch it), but everyone knows that “Citizen Kane” is considered the greatest film ever made.
Now returning to what lead us to this film. Where is our <<Citizen Kane>>? What video game has become a symbol of our medium’s maturity and legitimacy as art? So far, I’d say none. No one sees, and rightfully so, video games as artistic objects. Perhaps the question then is, does a game with the qualities I’ve mentioned before even exist? Namely, a game that fulfills the medium’s potentials, that has an adult and universal discourse, and is an authorial work? And if it does, how can we make that game a symbol? Is that even possible? How and where can we find our own Rosebud?
“Mr. Kane was a man who got everything he wanted and then lost it. Maybe Rosebud was something he couldn’t get, or something he lost. Anyway, it wouldn’t have explained anything… I don’t think any word can explain a man’s life. No, I guess Rosebud is just a… piece in a jigsaw puzzle… a missing piece.”
[More unanswered questions in the next article concerning our <<Citizen Kane>>.]
Wave Foam – “Jenova speaks… and we’d do well to listen”
Jenova Chen (“flOw”, “flower“) spoke at the Develop 2009 conference in Brighton. I’ve found two different excerpts of his talk, which you can access here and here. Besides mentioning that a new game is in the making (rejoice!) he mentions similar ideas to the ones I’ve discussed in my recent “State of the Art” editorials. I’d like to give particular emphasis to one sentence that I find of utmost importance – according to Gamasutra, while developing “flower“, Chen realized “that in the attempt to make a “fun” game, the team had blunted the emotional impact.” This is a crucial point of my “games can’t express emotions” ‘thesis’, and something I’ve argued for a long time.
Art is a vehicle of emotional expression and communication, the translation of an author’s personal beliefs, feelings and sense of aesthetics into the work of a specific medium. That’s why, for games to be an art form, designers need to focus on emotional expressiveness, and to do so there is no other answer than shunning ‘ludism’ and the ‘fun’ side of games. Because ‘ludism’ is the shape of traditional games, and games aren’t about emotion, they’re about challenge, competition, reward and penalty. That’s why they could never serve as proper inspiration for an art form. But in its current form, computer games’ interactive dimension can only express very crude, low level emotions – the ones it inherited from traditional games. And because we’ve been stuck with that (pseudo) emotional template, we’re still light-years away from the expressive power of a film, book, symphony or painting.
This is the main reason why games “don’t have their own Citizen Kane” [yes, I'm pulling a "Citizen Kane" on you guys, you've earned it]. I don’t know what a “Citizen Kane” of video-games would look like, and quite honestly, I don’t think it even matters to this debate. Because whatever it looks (or will look) like, I’m pretty sure I haven’t seen it yet. And whoever thinks otherwise needs to watch “Citizen Kane” again, and appreciate how far cinema went from its genesis to that singular point in time. Games haven’t tread that path yet, and they’re pretty much where they were when they first emerged. Matter of fact is: video-games still aren’t able to convey madness, loss, nostalgia, hope, aging, infancy, memory, love, longing, or any of the other complex dimensions that are part of the wealthy, emotional tapestry of “Citizen Kane”. And in place of “Citizen Kane” you can place any other masterpiece of cinema, literature or music, that this fundamental truth will still hold. There is no “Citizen Kane” of video-games.
And while we’re on a fatalist note, let’s be honest, with the way things are going, it’s likely games never will achieve that high point. Designers blindly insist on this abhorrent paradigm of ‘fun’, and everyone seems to be on board with them. But for the interactive medium to evolve into a proper art form, it needs to move away from the language of ‘fun’, and into a new interactive language that can express emotions and complex abstract concepts. An emotional, artistic language. Right now, games aren’t artistic, they’re ‘fun’. For some that suffices. Not to me.
That is why I’m curious to see where this newfound truth will lead Chen, and other visionary creators like him, in future ventures.
State of the Art Interlude – “Battle of the Minds”
Earlier this week, Dieubussy warned me of “Into the Night, with Jason Rohrer and Chris Crawford”, an ARTE documentary that places face to face two very important figures of the video-game world. On one side is veteran Chris Crawford, a man that my games’ professor likes to call the grand-daddy of video-games, someone who devoted his entire life to the medium we so love. He was the first great promoter of the games as art debate, published numerous books on game design, and is the author of many notorious games such as “Balance of Power” or “Balance of the Planet”. On the other side, is an aspiring youngster named Jason Rohrer, a sort of new found hope for art games that has authored a number of interesting indie ventures, such as “Passage” and “Between”. The documentary follows a casual and provocative debate between these two figures, the old and the new, as they cover everything from the state of the industry, to what paths lie ahead for games so that they become an artistic medium. Two different views on the same sort of issues I’ve been addressing in this series of articles called “State of the Art”.
I really recommend this documentary, as we get a rare, unedited, unbiased glimpse at the minds of some of the most important designers in the medium. This isn’t an entertainment media piece, with flashy scenarios, catchy phrases, pompous segments and simplified analysis, no, you only get two insightful creators from different times and places, having an honest, heartfelt discussion about video-games. It’s a conversation filled with possibilities, loose ends and unanswered questions, making it a wonderful starting point for a profound reflection on all the matters that surround the medium. It’s old school journalism and documentary at it’s best, and quite possibly, the best documentary piece on video-games ever made.
With some luck, I will soon post a more in-depth analysis of some of the ideas present in the documentary.
For those in Germany and France, the documentary is available online at the ARTE website, and for all the rest, well… you know where to find it *wink* *wink*.
State of the Art pt.3 – “Touch of Evil”
I left the last article with a prominent question: what is ludism, and why is it hurtful to the medium we so treasure? Ludism comes from “ludus”, the roman word that translates the concept of “play”. Playing can mean many things, but in this case, the dimension we’re looking for is that of “playing a game”.
A game is not like a toy, which allows children to fully author their own little fantasies and decide on how they want to entertain themselves. Kids can take an Action Man and make him fight against the evil Dr. X, as the box entices them to, but they can also play doctors with Dr. X and pretend Action Man is just a sick military man straight up from Iraq. For a child with a toy in hand, the sky is the limit – the toy is but a facilitator, or catalyst, to a type of play governed by his own imagination. It serves only as physical accessory that can help emulate fantasies, bringing them a step towards reality; but in the end, the real magic is happening in each kid’s heads.
A game is a different beast altogether. It’s structured – a pre-determined form of play that is static and unchangeable. It usually has a metaphorical background (war in “Chess’” case, or finances in “Monopoly”), a set of strict rules, goals and challenges, and also a number of rewards and penalties. It is, in its very essence, a competitive form of play, whether the competition comes from a direct opponent (“Chess”, “Tennis”), an indirect opponent (beating a pre-established record in a racing track), or just an abstract challenge (improving the number of elevations you can endure). There are many more aspects to what defines a game – from the voluntary choice of players to participate, to the possible cooperative dimensions, etc. -, but the key idea here is: a game is a structured form oriented towards a specific type of experience, with a specific type of entertainment that advents from that same experience.
What do you get from playing a game? When stripped to its barest, competition leads to certain psychological effects. Humans are biologically driven by goals, which is probably why Capitalism seems to drive people to work so damn hard. When people achieve goals and get rewards in the real world, the brain itself rewards the person on a psicobiological level, by releasing a specific type of pleasure hormone that makes the person happy, even euphoric – it’s the brain’s own way of saying “congratulations on the job well done”. The reverse is also true, so when you lose, you feel frustrated, angry and annoyed. Games are entertaining exactly because they tap into that whole “reward/penalty” dialectic of our mind. Our brain is wired to respond to that sort of experience, so when you emulate it with a game, you get the same results, despite not having the real life consequences. Video-games (for the reasons I wrote in the previous article) are exactly the same – they’re normal games, with the small exception that instead of playing them with a board, pencil & paper, or a football camp, you play them with a computer or computer-like device (such as a console).
So, now that we know what a game is and what it accomplishes, let’s dissect its limitations. Games, and by extent, video-games, can really only transmit two sets of emotional responses: the sentiment of achievement and realization when you win (usually called “fun” in this context) and the infinite frustration you get when you lose. That is all. Some of you might say- What? , but I laughed in “Monkey Island”, cried in “Final Fantasy VII” and was in love with Yorda in “ICO”!!! And here is where we start discussing the importance of video-games being so much more than solely “games”, which is where I wanted to get all along.
Ever since the birth of the medium, it has evolved by merging with many other languages and mediums, giving birth to new landscapes inside the realm. “Monkey Island” makes you laugh because of its textual and literary qualities – its off-beat humor comes mostly in the form of dialog and narrative description, not game-play. Aeris’ death in “Final Fantasy VII” is a pure cinematic moment, translated through a wonderfully designed FMV, which acts as an emotional peak, also thanks to a text-heavy scenario. The actual games in “Monkey Island” and “Final Fantasy VII” had nothing to do with the emotions you felt. The added dimensions that were on top of those games, are what really made these, like others, highly emotional and, by consequence, memorable. But what about “ICO”? Wasn’t the act of holding Yorda’s hand a game-play mechanic that made you feel something? This is where it gets tricky, and where the barrier between what is a game and what isn’t starts to blur. For the sake of argument (and to avoid extending this beyond its already enormous length) I’ll leave you to think about this matter for now, and further on, I’ll digress on “ICO’s” exact nature as a “game”.
The fact remains: games are not expressive enough to encompass powerful feelings such as loss, sadness, fear, happiness, etc, etc, etc – none of you have ever felt these emotions while playing “Chess” or “Monopoly”, have you? But we know that the “video-game” (or whatever you wanna call it) medium is, in fact, capable of producing those same emotional reactions by using other mediums’ language, but with an added bonus, that of interactivity. However, we cannot harness that potential if we continue to merely create games, or complex forms of emotional cinematic/literary/visual/musical experiences with games underneath. If we do that, then we are wasting all the potential expressiveness of our medium by reducing it to its ludic or game-y dimension, which is severely limited.
And so, we come to the million dollar question: if games are so limited in terms of emotional expressiveness, then why are we still calling our interactive medium “games” or “video-games”, and more importantly, why are we using “games” as a model for our medium when it’s so poor compared to others? And the answer is so simple. Because in reality, we, as gamers and consumers, are happy that games are the way they are. We like the familiar, universal appeal of the ludic dimension, which has been present in the medium since day one (the tragic, original sin I’ve written about before). We, as players, designers and journalists, have come to expect games to be “games”. We do not envision a different, higher vision for “video-games”, closer to that of Art, for instance. Hell, we don’t even reward or buy works that are trying to achieve that higher concept. Quite on the contrary, the more polished and entertaining a game is, the better grades and sales it gets. However, if a game is artistic, it is usually dismissed by everyone for not being “fun”, even if it gives us so much more on an emotional level. We simply do not account for the added expressiveness the medium can offer, and thus we remain adamant that “fun” is the only emotion games can convey to us. And as long as this situation perpetuates itself, then “video-games” will remain “games”. And I’m sorry, but it’s not the fault of the industry, as much as it is our own fault for not telling it, as consumers, that we want more. If we want Art in video-games, then we must learn to support it whenever it arises.
[In the coming articles I will continue delving on these issues and explore how everyone can help change the current video-game landscape.]
State of the Art pt.2 – “Original Sin”
Like any new means, when the video-game medium originated, it was an exciting, unexplored new world filled with promise. But like in any realm of the unknown, there were no guidelines on how to garner the potential of that vast reign of unfathomed possibilities, which lied feverishly in wait in the tips of programmers’ fingers. And it was precisely in that now distant moment of genesis, that the original sin of the video-game means was committed. The moment in which that glorious plain of infinite potential was transformed into the claustrophobic gallows of technological toys. But it was not a sin that came by chance, for it was the natural course of things taking its toll.
Video-games never were anything more than virtual shapes built on intrinsic webs of computer hardware and software. Such objects, much to our dismay, could only be crafted by engineers; with their front row seat in the creation of video-games, came the comprehensible urge to imprint a technological and scientific paradigm into them. Painters and sculptors would have surely thought differently, but alas, they knew not how to program in assembly. But even engineers were nothing more than modern craftsmen; they knew not how to mold video-games on their own, and thus had to seek outside influences for inspiration for that monumental task of creation.
Inspiration eventually came from games: from sports and tennis, to board-games like monopoly or go; these were the defining models that shaped the medium. There were many reasons for that misled choice: from the playful nature of the original video-game applications (“Nimrod”, “OXO”, “Tennis for Two”, “Spacewar!”) and consoles (such as the pivotal Magnavox Odyssey and the later ATARI Pong), which seemed perfect for a younger demographic, to the estrangement that most adults had with computers, which made it impossible to reach different audiences, down to the fact that it was a language that engineers understood, whilst art for example, was something well beyond their cultural and academic background. With these two worlds conceptually intertwined at the very conception of the medium, video-games soon became the technological counterpart, or evolution if you will, to traditional games… and thus it was that the word “video-game” was born.
In a quiet instant, computer engineering companies – Capcom (originally named Japan Capsule Computers), ATARI (which stemmed from Nolan Bushnell’s Syzygy Engineering), and game/toys/entertainment companies – Nintendo (which started in the hanafuda cards business), Sega (formerly named Standard Games, a company that built coin-operated amusements), Namco (initially devoted to building children rides), Konami (percussed by a jukebox rental and repair company) – had taken the leading role in the industry side of the medium, designing hardware and software applications. The origins of these companies subtly dictated their own orientations and the mind-sets of their creators, eventually determining what the video-game medium would stand for. Despite all the good that came from these and many other companies (e.g. the later Sony and Microsoft), they still ended up branding video-games with a specific image that, in the long term, has become prejudicial to their own business.
The term video-game is not neutral or associated with a vaster conceptual ground, like Cinema or Music are; video-games are seen as nothing more than computer games made to entertain little kids and adolescents. Just think on how close the aesthetic of a vast majority of games is to that of toys, action figures and cartoon series. And how similar, on an abstract level, is the interaction of games to that of a board or sports game. How equally inexpressive all these mediums are on an emotional level. That is why games are never associated with a powerful cultural medium that can take on artistic forms and expressions. If you’ve ever been to a museum showing an interactive media work, you won’t see the term “game” or “video-game” written underneath. Yet if you see a conceptual film, the word film will surely be in its description. This is the type of prejudice that has become associated with the term game… a prejudice that, in my opinion, is completely understandable.
But what malicious archetype is this, so strong that it can dictate the complete lack of depth and maturity that is pervasive to such a potentially powerful medium? What is this thing that sucks up so much artistic vision and technical prowess, that we so rarely get to experience something that escapes its clutches? And how come so many visionary works are understated and underrated in a vast sea of glorified computer toys, that have become the de facto standard of the means?
It is the sin of games’ ludic paradigm.
[In the next part I will address the reasons why games shouldn't be just "games" and why ludism is such a malicious influence on an artistic medium. In the coming articles I will continue delving on these issues and explore how everyone can help change the current video-game landscape.]
