I still remember sitting on my little brother’s bed when we were kids and playing the old Nintendo version of “Rampage.” The game gave two players the chance to work together to destroy a city….or the temptation to destroy each other. Each time we sat down to play, we would vow to each other that THIS time would be the time when we would work together to destroy the city. And each time we would descend into a pit of base human rage, ultimately culminating in a physical altercation that could only be ended by adult intervention.
Commercial video games have only been around for about 30 years, but their impact on our society is indisputable. And they don’t just tell a story…they put you IN the story. And like novels and films and theatre and television shows, video games offer the opportunity to escape from the tedium and occasional agony of daily life. But does that make them art? In a recent article in the New Statesman, Tom Chatfield argues that video games are indeed a form of artistic expression, and a unique one at that. But there is one major, inherent limitation that prevents video games from joining the ranks of other storytelling mediums: their lack of inevitability.
The design advancements in video games since 1972’s “Pong” have been so vast that now you can practically taste the blood spilling out of your opponent’s carotid artery after you tear his head off. But it’s not just blood and guts that have improved – storylines and characters and artistic concepts conceived by the best and the brightest have taken this unique form of interactive storytelling to the next level. Chatfield likens the evolution of the video game industry to the emergence of the film industry almost 120 years ago, and claims that the challenge now is to determine how to aesthetically categorize and define this new art form.
OK, so it’s “art” – but is it storytelling? For the answer to this, he goes a little old school – Chatfield and Steven Poole pull out some Aristotle:
“As the tech-savvy critic and author Steven Poole has argued, ‘great stories depend for their effect on irreversibility – and this is because life, too, is irreversible. The pity and terror that Aristotle says we feel as spectators to a tragedy are clearly dependent on our apprehension of circumstances that cannot be undone.’ Games have only a limited, and often incidental, ability to convey such feelings.”
In his Poetics, Aristotle argues that a tragedy is most effective if the outcome simultaneously surprises AND feels totally inevitable. Each piece of the dramatic puzzle must be carefully arranged so that suspense builds and the audience doesn’t know what’s going to happen. But if the climax of the story reveals that each of those dramatic puzzle pieces naturally led to an inevitable conclusion, the story is a good one and will resonate intellectually and emotionally.
I wonder how Aristotle would have reacted to video games. While a video game (for the most part) adheres to the rules of cause and effect, here you have a medium where inevitability has been thrown out the window. Everything can be undone. Every time you play, the consequences will be different. The neat, compact, well-planned tragic journey doesn’t mean shit. And as such, the story of a video game is unable to stir the same profound emotions that the story of Oedipus can. Because really, what’s at stake?
Yes, your character may die….but you usually have multiple lives and can always just play the game again. And there are always techniques to outsmart it (back in the day, my little brother used something called a “Game Genie,” but I’m sure now you can hop online and find the secrets to beating every single video game that exists).
How powerful would the tale of Oedipus have been if he suddenly stuck his eyes back in, brought his father back to life, and unfucked his mother? I would argue that the message of this tragedy would have been far less potent. But it was potent. And it still is. Because Oedipus wasn’t a video game.
Although….that would pretty much be the most awesome video game EVER.
