In the recent debate as to whether or not video games can be considered art, there is one thing both sides can agree on: as a whole, video games have yet to be taken seriously by the academic community.
There are exceptions to this, of course. Video games have been looked at from an anthropological perspective, examining the cultures that build around specific games or genres. There have been psychological studies of gamers that looked to ascertain the effect of games on the player, or the relation between player and avatar. Game theorists have largely embraced games wholesale, as well as people interested in game design for game design’s sake. But works examining a game itself, looking at the story, the design, the theory, music, etc. etc., are limited to a few outliers. Any examination of the narrative of a game is largely restricted to one line questions, much like the ones that follow this colon: What does the Halo series say about organized religion’s place in modern society? What does Red Dead Redemption say about an increasingly politically divided America? How does Final Fantasy X exemplify and work out the disagreements between Freudian and Lacanian theory?
Of course, the average gamer probably won’t pay any more attention to a sudden surge of video game theory than the average reader would care about what academicians think about Stephanie Meyer’s latest work. And that’s perfectly fine. But the acceptance of video games into academia would signal (or signify, I always confuse the two) that video games are worthy of serious, prolonged thought, as I believe them to be. But before video games can be ushered into the elevator and fast-tracked to the Ivory Tower Penthouse, there are a few things that need to be worked out.
First, what is a video game? This isn’t something I ask flippantly; the term video game is given to a vast and varied array of works. Pong is a video game. So is Mass Effect. So is Farmville. One of the first things a good theoretician does is define his/her terms. So how do we define video games? I think we can agree that there is some sort of player interactivity, whether it’s pushing a button or making a choice. And to make it a video game, there would have to be some sort of technology involved. But beyond that? I don’t have the answers, but there are a few options I can imagine. We can leave the definition as is, which isn’t a great option, but is an option. We can set up different game design style genres: a puzzle game with no discernible plot could simply be a puzzle game; a puzzle game with a narrative could be a puzzle narrative. We could separate games into plot genres: Mass Effect would be a sci-fi space opera; Mirror’s Edge is a noir; Fable is a coming-of-age story, or a kind of bildungsroman. Entire papers have been devoted to arguing the genre of a particular work (No one thinks that Charles Chesnutt wrote in the Gothic tradition, but Aha! Have you considered this?), so that last one may not work. Or maybe it would. Or perhaps some combination of the second and third option. Or something someone else comes up with after much thought. Regardless, it is a question that has to be answered. Readers across the world may not agree on what makes a good novel and what makes a bad novel, but most could agree that any given novel is, indeed, a novel.
Secondly, how would a video game be cited? If I want to make a point about the scene in The Great Gatsby where Gatsby drinks a gin rickey, I put the page numbers at the end of the sentence in parenthesis, with the author’s last name (Fitzgerald 117-118). Likewise, if I want to talk about death and sexual awakening in Ellen Raskin’s The Westing Game. If I want to cite a movie, I can give the points in the running time (at the 1:14:32 mark). I could do the same with a song. But all of those rely on a shared experience, an agreement about where things are located. We may completely disagree about what the first line of Dorianne Laux’s “Facts About the Moon” really “means”, but we at least agree that the first line is “The moon is backing away from us.” But video games, especially larger, longer ones, are not experienced in linearity. I might play a certain segment three hours in; you may have ignored that segment until you were nine hours in. Or maybe I played a mission that is only available if your avatar is a female, or only available if you’re playing the game in a cutthroat fashion. In some games, the experience of it drastically changes depending on how you play the game. So, how to cite it, so that the reader of the article can go to the exact part the critic is referencing? A partial solution to this is also the solution to the third problem.
A single word can change everything. There’s a deep canyon of difference between “He moaned” and “He whimpered” or “She demanded” and “She implored.” A critic’s argument can sometimes hinge on one or two words, or one or two plot points. Double checking whether the author (or singer, or poet) used “rafters” or “crossbars” when describing a house is as simple as turning to the page (or the line, or the point in time). With video games, it’s exponentially more problematic. I only have to flip a few pages to see if Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man starts with “I am an invisible man” or “I was an invisible man.” I may have to play through forty hours of Fallout 3 to check and see what the main character’s father says when he/she finally reaches him. And as long as that’s the way it is, video games’ journey to Academia Land will be stalled. But, this can be circumvented if developers could be convinced to release copies of all of a game’s dialogue. This could be a convoluted process, particularly in games such as Dragon Age, where the choices you make can alter the dialogue you experience. But if a system of organization could be figured out, this could greatly aid critics, especially if a critic wanted to examine the differences choice made in game experience. I imagine it wouldn’t be easy to convince developers to release full dialogs of the game, and some rules may have to be laid down to determine who could access them (for instance, you could only download the files if you had purchased a copy of the game or had a .edu email address), but without this ease of access, teachers and professors who have their hands full already with class loads, committee meetings, and departmental conferences are not going to have the time to look at games through a critical lens. I’m afraid there’s no way around it.
There are, of course, problems beyond these three. For instance, it could be argued that there is a world of difference between writing or reading the line “Saren can still be saved” and choosing the line “Saren can still be saved.” Those first steps into video game criticism will be murky, no doubt. What is the difference, if any, between playing the game and “reading” the game? Are sports games right out? Or could the argument be made that the career mode of, say, MLB 11: The Show, is a viable text?
Again, there are many questions that will have to be sorted through as the field of video game criticism is slowly opened up. But if we don’t start answering through them, now, then video games will never achieve the level of accepted art form that they deserve.
