Greg Costikyan wrote an article called “Death to the Games Industry” (Part 2 here) about two years ago. As much as I disagree with some of the things he says, I have to admit he’s right in this case. I read this article first around the beginning of this year or the end of last, and I had my own take on it back then. I completely disagreed. After learning a lot about the history of 20th century art, however, and analyzing the market over and over again, turning things around in my head, I’ve come to some very terrifying conclusions.
First off, let’s talk about Clement Greenberg. Clem was an art critic back in the 1950s and late into the 1980s that was known for his high praise of Abstract Expressionist art (more commonly referred to on Teh Interwebs as “Art That Doesn’t Look Like Anything”). Despite the cruel sport of “Clembashing” that has become popular over the years, reducing the critic to nothing more than a rambling old fool who couldn’t love anything more than pictures that look like nothing, Clement Greenberg was one of the most knowledgeable and insightful people of his time that helped establish a careful and precarious balance between what is “Kitsch” and what is “Avant-Garde”. He is the one who saw what no-one else seemed to be seeing: that art must be challenging the prior generation, making it, therefore, “Avant-Garde”, or “advance guard”, propelling art forward. Otherwise, it becomes “Kitsch”: easy, common, unchallenging, almost tacky in comparison. Pointless.
Now, this is especially important, because “kitsch” and “avant-garde” is not only relevant to painting. We see the same trend in literature and movies: compare a new book by Stephen King to his older works. Do you notice the difference? Back in the day, King was edgy, angry. Excited to write for a new audience, a new, darker world. Nowadays, he just releases gore on a payroll. It’s become easy, unchallenging. He’s stopped advancing. It’s the dividing line between avant-garde and kitch!
Now let’s move on to games. The problem with the games industry is that we’re starting to stagnate: to become to repetitive with our formulas. In other words, we’re becoming Kitsch. I call to the stand critically acclaimed games like Halo 3 and Soul Calibur IV. While the Halo 3 craze is slowly dying out, and more and more people admit, embarrassed, that no, Halo 3 isn’t Jesus Christ on Toast, Soul Calibur IV only came out recently and we’re still enjoying the hell out of it. I love it. I do. Personally, I enjoy it, and love it, and can’t wait to get more downloadable content so I can deck out my characters in all the armor I’m missing.
But it’s stale. It’s the same game it’s been for the past three games; don’t try to tell me about refining and balance and innovation, because I’ve heard it all before. Soul Calibur IV brings nothing new to the table, at all. You can give it stellar reviews. You can say it’s the best fighter game this year. But I can also give a restaurant five stars and say that it’s the best Italian food I’ve ever had. I can also compare two brands of soap, or hair conditioner, or soda, or furniture sets, and tell you which is better. It doesn’t mean it’s revolutionary. And here I must grudgingly concede another point to Costikyan when he says game critique is virtually nonexistant in today’s world. See, I’m not reviewing Soul Calibur IV right now. I could review it and say it’s great. Really, it is. Go buy it. But to critque art, to analyze it and to determine what was done, what was used, whether or not it’s moving forward… to determine whether it’s being avant-garde or kitsch… that’s what we need.
To elaborate on what’s avant-garde, let’s look at Portal for a moment. We all know Portal. It was stupendous. Do you know why? Yes, Glad-OS was awesome. But do you realize that you played through an entire first person shooter without actually firing any bullets? In fact, you never actually hurt anything directly, did you? Other than the Companion Cube. You jerk. But really, Valve in making Portal really challenged us to see what it could be like to play the same game we’ve played over and over again, but this time, do it in a completely differerent way. This time, we’re not going to shoot anything or anyone. This time, we’re not going to hurt people. In that same way, Mirror’s Edge might be doing exactly the same thing, really changing up the idea of what we’ve all experienced. But see, someone had to do it first. That’s avant-garde.
I wanted to disagree at first with Costik’s and my own thoughs. I mean, truly spectacular-seeming games like Heavy Rain and Little Big Planet are only on the horizon, and Fable 2 holds great promise (promises Molyneaux made for Fable 1, but we’re giving him the benefit of the doubt anyway). But we’re out of time already. Gameplay is dying. We need the industry to change fast, or it will be crushed.
Now, a lot of people thought the Wii was the savior of gameplay, and I know game designers all over were extremely enthusiastic about it. But I’ve been calling it for a while now, and nobody seems to have been listening. And now that we’re all more aware of Nintendo’s new end goal, people are walking around with their tails between their legs, and I feel awful because I was expecting it.
Here’s the thing about the Wii that people have been neglecting to think about: when you make a game focused on a new form of play, it’s revolutionary. Right? The Wii doesn’t do that; rather, it gives people the new form of play right off the bat. Therefore, most Wii games are forced designed around motion-sensing capabilities. To be blunt, every Wii game that comes out is basically just hacking off the motion sensor. Show me a Wii game that doesn’t use motion sensing technology in some fashion. It’s its only selling point! The Wiimote doesn’t open up new styles of play; it essentially incarcerates games into one hackneyed mechanic that requires little thought to implement!
Compare Portal to any new Wii title you’re looking at now. Raving Rabbids or that new Shaun White Snowboarding game. Raving Rabbids 2 actually uses the balance board as a sled function just like the Shaun White snowboarding game. And yet it’s so cheap! Anyone could have thought of that. The design requires no real challenge or thought as to how to radically change or improve a player’s experience–it’s just recieve, reprocess, repack and repeat! Whereas Portal took something people hadn’t done before and really moved the face of gaming! It’s now one of the most recognized titles on the market, acclaimed even by extremely embittered Yahtzee Croshaw, recognized internet game critic and author of the video series Zero Punctuation.
I mean, what are you going to do in Harvest Moon for the Wii? Tilt the Wiimote as if you’re watering plants? Move it up and down as if you’re cutting wood? Really? Seriously, think about it. Could it really be that hard to come up with the idea?
No.
Because when you do something once that no-one has ever done before, it’s innovative. When you give someone something nobody has ever done before and you let them all use it for their own creations, it’s a tool. The Wiimote is just another controller. It’s just another joystick. The design of games is still no different.
So gameplay is dying. And according to Costikyan, the industry needs to die, or it will crash itself. This sort of collapse happened in 1983, called the “Atari Crash.” A lot of us hip young freshie designers don’t know about it or can’t concieve of it because we weren’t alive back then. But it was bad, and there was a period of almost nothing in gaming until Japan and Nintendo suddenly brought it back again with the NES. We don’t want that to happen. So we need to look for innovation, for avant-garde games, to stop us from stagnating.
A huge source of inspiration for developers and publishers right now should be independent games. Not that independent games are all that great; personally, I usually can’t stand playing many of them. Much like indie film, they rely too much on shock value and mechanics and not enough on substantial experience. For them, it’s all about gameplay: it’s all casual. I’m a hardcore gamers. I’m a narratologist. I like story and plot points and cinematic. I like experience, and my closest friends dying, and the rookie coming out on top and Saving Private Ryan stories. I won’t experience those things in my own life; that’s why I play games, for new experiences.
However, developers need to learn from the indie market! The game I’ve been referring to again and again through this article, Portal, such a great example of what we need, is based off an independently developed student game named Narbacular Drop! I played it, and it was awful. Revolutionary, but terrible. But they had the idea down: portals, gravity, acceleration and perhaps most importantly, the core thesis of designing an action game you never actually hurt anyone or anything. Add some fascinating narrative and make the experience unforgettable, courtesy of Valve, and you have yourself a gorgeous gem of a game that now sells companion cube plushies.
The time is coming where the game market will be flooded by kitsch games that people will buy just because they’re on the market, and slowly gaming will lose its steam. Much like the decline of our contemporary civilization, we can’t let that happen. We need to continue forward, pushing for development, for improvement and preventing collapse at all angles. In this time of dire need, we need avant-garde. Otherwise, it’ll be a sad, slow, funless time before gaming comes back in a rebirth again.
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