Missing the Point: Games Are Narratives, Get Over It

There's a lot of talk on the inside these days about what it means to write about games with anything approaching insight and clarity. Most of this talk you don't hear about (or probably don't care to) because it comes off as overly personal, maybe even a little incestuous, sort of like the little water cooler chats you have at your place of business about what's right and wrong with the local universe. Talking about it in public, in any case, can seem a little like waving dirty laundry on the end of a stick.

Case in point, Newsweek's N'Gai Croal has a bone to pick with The New York Times, USA Today, The Associated Press, and more, when he opines on his games blog that

?games are not a fundamentally narrative medium; we all "see" games with our hands; we videogame journalists need to develop a critical vocabulary that will enable us to better explain the unique qualities of this art form.

And again, slightly later, where he says:

Mainstream critics must sum up an experience that's anywhere from six to 100 hours long-one that's fundamentally non-narrative, as we keep insisting--in the same amount of space or less that's devoted to 90-120-minute movie.

Now -- excuse me for a moment, I'm going to wave some of that laundry around -- I don't disagree for a nanosecond that game writers face a Sisyphean task trying to condense hundreds of hours of potential gameplay into something that conveys a helpful sense of what it's like to actually play a given game to readers in search of (a) purchasing advice, (b) insight, or (c) both. On this point, at least, Croal and I are in complete accord.

But we're less so on the issue of "space," and at complete loggerheads over the question of a game experience as non-narrative.

As any writer worth a dime knows (as well as readers who made it gasping and sputtering through IGN's word-soaked seven page review of GTA IV) word counts are our friends. Word counts hold us accountable. Anyone can blather on for a thousand (or ten thousand) words, but it takes exceptional talent to get the hook out in less than five- or three-hundred. Railing against the crass commercialism of a media that puts its print-to-news ratio at something like 60-40 or 70-30 is totally cool, but intimating that games writing needs more space than reviews of "90-120-minute" movies is just wrong. Give Seth Schiesel (New York Times) two, three -- ten times the amount of space to somehow "convey the gameplay experience" in that hallowed paper's print version and you only pander to an increasingly small group of propellerheads, i.e. the less-than-five-percent of you who care enough to come out and raise a ruckus.

Hey, I count myself in the latter group, and I can't stand to read chapter-length missives on blogs by writers whose lame attempts at conveying "gameplay (but which reads like "first-person-meta-fiction") sound like they're more interested in foisting introspective blather on their audiences than simply getting their insights out. Don't get me wrong, I'm not saying it'd all be okay if only we had better writers. I'm saying our entertainments come in all shapes and sizes and chronometric lengths, and that the most sophisticated games we play in virtual spheres today aren't so different from the ones we played as kids throwing footballs, hiding behind trees, or toting plastic guns around backyards we'd re-imagined into distant otherworldly landscapes.

While word counts can certainly be abused by editors who can't see the difference between Tetris and Oblivion, having space constraints for games that correspond to wildly diverse mediums like film, books, and music, is only the enemy of lazy or just plain bad writing.

As for the other point about games as non-narrative, let's go with Dictionary.com's rendition of "narrative" as "a story or account of events, experiences, or the like, whether true or fictitious." And let me just jump in, both feet in the water, and state unequivocally that I think games are as purely narrative-driven as any entertainment medium in the history of human civilization. Just, you know, so there's no doubt about where I stand. And the reason I say so is pretty elementary: I subscribe to the theory which posits that on a fundamental level, each one of us "re-reads" the experience we're having, on-the-fly, no two ways about it. And in that crucially important sense, that we therefore create a narrative every time we play a game that describes our journey.

Test the theory. Tell me about Grand Theft Auto IV. I'll probably get one of two responses. Either you'll describe the game's technical merits (or shortcomings) as in visuals, controls, list of things you can do or places you can go, etc., or you'll tell me, as in narrate, what you actually did while playing. Did you think you weren't narrating to yourself on-the-fly while playing? Did you think that narration only happens in retrospect? Think again.

I like the way an old mentor puts it here best, when he writes:

Everyone's a storyteller. Walk past a group of kids, and you'll almost always hear one of them telling the others a story ("And he's there...and she's there..."). Jokes are stories. Telling someone about your day is a story. Recalling the details of a traffic accident is a story. Evidence suggests even prehistoric people told stories. There seems to be a neverending need for people to exchange stories, to define our world and our selves with narrative.

Sure, games aren't merely movie. They're more than just sequentially deterministic images projected against the back of our retinas in deliberate sequence. But there's a false sense out there coming from those who've never picked up a theory book, for instance, or who think theory's just a fetish for academic elitists, that we need to somehow create a new language that accommodates games, despite the fact that we already largely have one, even if it's "distinctiveness" is more technical than theoretical.

What's more, games borrow hugely and increasingly from other mediums. The reason Grand Theft Auto IV is what it is today has more to do with a design aesthetic that privileges those other so-called "narrative" mediums over plotless puzzle-like gameplay. Travel back with me to 1997: The original GTA was basically a driving-based, level-shackled, crude economic simulation, i.e. no story to speak of. GTA IV's story, by contrast -- even the story you make up as you run around and poke the world in a thousand different ways -- still owes more to Georges Melies and the Lumiere brothers and even something as seemingly trivial as "Who Killed Harlowe Thromby?" than some magical, mystical paradigm shift that occurs when you pick up a game controller.

I'm not saying games aren't different in important ways from books and film and music and painted/drawn/photographic art, or that we don't need to identify the differences and ambiguous spaces between games and other mediums. Sure we do. Those difference matter. We also deserve to have the conversation about games as an art form without old-media elitists dismissing the possibility on the one side and easily worn-out pundits caviling about having the discussion in the first place on the other. But painting with a broad brush about "space" and "narrative" isn't how we're going to get there, because in the end, words do matter, and those two hinder more than help to clarify the debate.

Re-Play

Fearless or feckless? Have your say below or pelt me with emails here.