Storytellersunplugged

One of the things that concerns folks in the video game industry to a surprising degree is whether or not we make what can generally be referred to as “art.” Roger Ebert thinks that we can’t, which is his prerogative, except that he insists on looking at games as if they were films, which they’re not. Developers on projects from Indigo Prophecy to Façade to Shadow of the Colossus seem to think that we can, and offer up variations on gameplay models that serve as their arguments. Every year at the Game Developers’ Conference, there’s a debate on whether we can generate “higher” emotions, and honestly, whether we should even try.

(For a while, the debate was whether games could generate any emotion at all, which I always thought was a non-starter of a discussion. Games absolutely generate emotions – the joy of the particularly sweet snipe shot of your buddy in multiplayer, the frustration of failing a jumping puzzle for the umpteenth time, the rage at a spawn camper who takes you out lickety-split, the relief after winning a particularly tough boss fight – these are all emotions generated by games. What they’re not, however, are “higher” emotions like love or bravery or anything else that someone at a small liberal arts college could conceivably write a thesis on, and as such they’re not viewed as worth mentioning. To this, I say pfui. The stuff that comes from the viscera is just as important, and if you can invoke a good primal response, you’re probably doing something right.)

I can understand the fixation on art, believe it or not. Huge sales are nice, the adoration of 12 year olds is groovy, and knowing how to conjugate the word “R0XX0R” is something that my high school Latin teacher would probably appreciate. But with all that being said, our work is in many cases, still ephemeral. Because the medium of delivery is so important and the technology advances so fast, very few games linger in the general consciousness. There’s no discernable difference between a book printed in the 1960s and one printed today, but there’s a world of difference between an Xbox 360 game and one that was made for a PSOne. As the new consoles arrive, the old games vanish from mindshare and memory and most importantly store shelves, rendering it ever harder for them to become classics or reference points. A book that’s not read for a while can still be returned to and referenced. A game that’s not played is out of mind, and sooner or later there’s nothing around to play it on.

Even when the platforms don’t change out from under you, the evolution of what developers can do leaves games that are even a year or two old in the dust. New features, new graphics tricks, new tools, and a fan base that demands the bleeding edge all conspire to push older games into the background. It’s a nigh-immutable law of the industry. But when you’ve spent eighteen months or two years or even longer pouring yourself into a project, you want it to last a while in people’s minds. You want it to be remembered, to have everything you put into it taken out and recognized, and maybe even admired.

Ultimately, I find myself torn on the subject. Do I want the games I write to have a real impact beyond the blam and the kablooey? Absolutely. I want my characters to breathe and live. I want people to have to think hard about pulling the trigger on them or genuinely wanting to avenge them when they go down in a bloody hail of zap gun fire. I want my jokes to be laughed at, my references and in-jokes to be excavated and analyzed, and my storylines analyzed and assessed by the standards of game stories instead of whether they fit into the too-small shoes of cinematic narrative. So in that respect, I do want to make art, or something close to it.

Except that I don’t, and I particularly don’t want to spend my energy and effort on the deliberate attempt to create something that will acquire lofty titles. My job is to work as part of a team that, ultimately, ensures that people have fun. If I do that well, if I mesh with the team to create characters and situations and dialogue that bear weight and that the player can attach to, then I’ve done my job, and maybe, just maybe, this vanishingly rare “art” will fall out of it.

Or it won’t, but people will still have a good time, and will still remember the game as a pleasant experience. They might even want to see more of those characters, or want another chance to be those characters. That may not be art, but it is good writing, and it means I’ve done my job. The memories the game creates won’t linger in academic journals, but there’s something just as meaningful about a nation’s worth of “no shit, there I was” war stories about a game I worked on. And maybe, ultimately, those are in fact the first steps on the road to art. If they are, I won’t complain. If they aren’t, I won’t say anything either. Either way, there’s another game to make, another opportunity to push the envelope of my craft.

That is, after all, what it still is: a craft. Video game development is young, and serious game writing is even younger (or perhaps it just spent twenty years in suspended animation, between the heydays of adventure games like Planetfall and Hitchiker’s Guide to the Galaxy and the current blossoming of writing-heavy titles like Knights of the Old Republic and God of War). As game writers, we are still figuring out our roles, our shared vocabulary, and the limitations of what we can and cannot do. We’re inching our way toward the video game equivalent of talkies, but we’re not there yet, and we’re still figuring out how to use our tools – words – to best effect in a non-verbal medium. Even the best of us have, I think, an imperfect understanding of what we can do, brought on by still-developing technologies and processes and team structures.

Does that mean art is impossible in a game? Absolutely not. The cave painters at Lascaux didn’t have the advantage of a Pearl Art Supplies store down the street, yet they still managed to turn out a few things that are worthy of the term. F.W. Murnau made art without the benefit of render farms, CGI, or (presumably) on-set catering. If poked, I’d be able to point at a few titles that I think will be considered “art”, once we figure out what video game art is supposed to be – Grim Fandango and Planetfall and a few others, with a double fistful of games like Planescape: Torment that come damn close.

But ultimately, do I think I, as a game writer, should strive to make art? Absolutely not. I should instead try to do the best job I can with the tools I have, and if art emerges, it will be wiser heads than mine that declare it so. As I told a table full of junior game designers and writers in Shanghai, we are not artists, not yet and maybe not ever. What we are is honorable craftsmen, perfecting what we do in hopes that others will find pleasure and perhaps something more in our labors. To actively seek something more perhaps risks shortchanging what we must do.

Besides, I like being an honorable craftsman.