Disclaimer: QWERTY’s opinions are not mine nor the site’s. The psudonym QWERTY is used to protect the innocent.
(I thought today would be a better date to publish this instead of Friday – The Swain)
Everyone is always comparing video games to movies and for some reason people are complaining about his. Someone says Citizen Kane this or The Godfather that and everyone gets all in a huff. Stop that. Looking to other mediums is the only way we’ll get any good games out of these people anytime soon. We need to learn so we can speed up the process.
However, I’d like to use my soapbox to correct one minor flaw in everyone’s logic. This was the logic of the time that film first came onto the scene. The first films were just plays put on movie reel. And given video games as we know then are only 30 years old, films at that time were plays.
So really we’re looking in the wrong place. Video games are really plays. People forced to move along predetermined paths with only minor variations from event to event. Regardless of those minor movement, tonal, and timing changes Claudius is poisoned, Nora walks out, and the Wingfields fall apart. Kind of like how no matter what Kratos will kill a god, Master Chief will blow up a HALO, and Bowser will always lose. It’s all inevitable. So lets take our lessons from the right source, the theater.
It’s not like our medium is bringing together material from two very different sources and forcing them to work together like comic books. Now that’s just stupid.
Been reading awhile, and while I sort of understand the QWERTY thing as full of half-truth and jokes… 30 years into film history we had French Impressionist, Soviet Montage, and German Expressionist cinemas. We also had Dreyer making Vampyr and the Jean d’Arc (probably the peak of silent film). So filmmakers were already at art, and they had already advanced numerous theories on the essence and strengths of the cinema as its own medium.
Not to mention that even though Edison’s and Melies’ films were basically stage plays, the Lumiere films were roughly 1/4 “plays” and 3/4 documentaries.
I suppose it’s possible that the Swain already knew this, but QWERTY didn’t? Anyhow, while there are certainly performative lessons we can take from theatre, there are already quite a few ludologists who’ve laid out the formal properties of games as unique from other media… in fact, we had a lot of these theories back when games were a lot slower, that is, when they were board games and sports. Homo ludens was 1938. Videogames already had basic theories in place when they were -50 years old. Computational theories came around 1987, when Chris Crawford explained the difference between process and data intensity. QWERTY needs a reading list.