Extra Lives (5 page)

This brilliantly conceived game of uncompromising stupidity was, in retrospect, a disastrous formal template. Terrible dialogue? It was still a great game. A constant situational ridiculousness that makes
The Texas Chain Saw Massacre
seem like a restrained portrait of rural dysfunction? It was still a great game. And it
is
a great game, and will be ever thus. It was eventually remade, more than once, most notably for release on the Nintendo GameCube, with better graphics and voice actors and a script translated by someone who had occasionally heard spoken English. It, too, was a great game. But the success of the first
Resident Evil
established the
permissibility
of a great game that happened to be stupid. This set the tone for half a decade of savagely unintelligent games and helped to create an unnecessary hostility between the greatness of a game and the sophistication of things such as narrative, dialogue, dramatic motivation, and characterization. In accounting for this state of affairs, many game designers have, over the years,
claimed that gamers do not much think about such highfaluting matters. This may or may not be largely true. But most gamers do not care because they have been trained by game designers not to care.

Without a doubt,
Resident Evil
showed how good games could be. Unfortunately, it also showed how bad games could be. Too amazed by the former, gamers neglected to question the latter. It rang a bell to which too many of us still, and stupidly, salivate.

I
have been publishing long enough now to look back on much of what I have written and feel the sudden, pressing need to throw myself off the nearest bridge. Every person lucky enough to turn a creative pursuit into a career has these moments, and at least, I sometimes tell myself, I do not often look back on my writing with shame.

I am ashamed of one thing, however, and that is an essay I contributed to a nonfiction anthology of “young writing.” I was encouraged to write about anything I pleased, so long as it addressed what being a young writer today felt like. I wrote about video games and whether they were a distraction from the calling of literature. Even as I was writing it, I was aware that the essay did not accurately reflect my feelings. Recently I wondered if the essay was maybe somewhat better than I remembered. I then reread it and spent much of the following afternoon driving around, idly looking for bridges.

“As for video games,” I wrote, “very few people over the age of forty would recognize them as even a lower form of art. I am always wavering as to where I would locate video games along art’s fairly forgiving sliding scale.” Video games are obviously and manifestly
a form of popular art, and every form of art, popular or otherwise, has its ghettos, from the crack houses along Michael Bay Avenue to the tubercular prostitutes coughing at the corner of Steele and Patterson. The video game is the youngest and, increasingly, most dominant popular art form of our time. To study the origins of any popular new medium is to become an archaeologist of skeptical opprobrium. It seems to me that anyone passionate about video games has better things to do than walk chin-first into sucker-punch arguments about whether they qualify as art. Those who do not believe video games are or ever will be art deserve nothing more goading or indulgent than a smile.

I think that was what I was trying to say. But I was then and am now routinely torn about whether video games are a worthy way to spend my time and often ask myself why I like them as much as I do, especially when, very often, I hate them. Sometimes I think I hate them because of how purely they bring me back to childhood, when I could only imagine what I would do if I were single-handedly fighting off an alien army or driving down the street in a very fast car while the police try to shoot out my tires or told that I was the ancestral inheritor of some primeval sword and my destiny was to rid the realm of evil. These are very intriguing scenarios if you are twelve years old. They are far less intriguing if you are thirty-five and have a career, friends, a relationship, or children. The problem, however, at least for me, is that they are no less
fun
. I like fighting aliens and I like driving fast cars. Tell me the secret sword is just over the mountain and I will light off into goblin-haunted territory to claim it. For me, video games often restore an unearned, vaguely loathsome form of innocence—an innocence derived of
not knowing anything
. For this and all sorts of other complicated historical reasons—starting with the fact that they began as toys directly marketed to children—video games crash any cocktail-party rationale you attempt to formulate as to
why, exactly, you love them. More than any other form of entertainment, video games tend to divide rooms into Us and Them. We are, in effect, admitting that we like to spend our time shooting monsters, and They are, not unreasonably, failing to find the value in that.

I wrote in my essay that art is “obligated to address questions allergic to mere entertainment….In my humble estimation, no video game has yet crossed the Rubicon from entertainment to true art.” Here I was trying to say that what distinguishes one work of art from another is primarily intelligence, which is as multivalent as art itself. Artistic or creative intelligence can express itself formally, stylistically, emotionally, thematically, morally, or any number of ways. Works of art we call masterpieces typically run the table on the many forms artistic intelligence can take: They are comprehensively intelligent. This kind of intelligence is most frequently apparent in great works of art created by individuals. Unity of artistic effect is something human beings have learned to respond to, and for obvious reasons this is best achieved by individual artists. Many games—which are, to be sure, corporate entertainments created by dozens of people with a strong expectation of making a lot of money—have more formal and stylistic intelligence than they know what to do with and not even trace amounts of thematic, emotional, or moral intelligence. One could argue that these games succeed as works of art in some ways and either fail or do not attempt to succeed in others. “True” art makes the attempt to succeed in every way available to it. At least, I think so.

My ambivalence goes much deeper, though. A few years ago I was asked by a magazine for my year-end roundup of interesting aesthetic experiences, among which I included 2K Boston’s peerless first-person shooter
BioShock
, which, I wrote, “I would hesitate to call…a legitimate work of art,” even though “its engrossing
and intelligent story line made it the first game to absorb me without also embarrassing me for being so absorbed.” Seeing that halfhearted encomium in print, with my name attached to it, about a game I adored, obsessed over, and thought about for weeks drove home the plunger of a fresh syringe of shame. Was I apologizing to some imaginary cultural arbiter for finding value in a form of creative expression whose considerable deficits I recognize but which I nevertheless believe is important? Or is this evidence of an authentic scruple? On one hand, I love
BioShock
, which is frequently saluted as one of the first games to tackle what might be considered intellectual subject matter—namely, a gameworld exploration of the social consequences inherent within Ayn Rand’s Objectivism (long story). On the other hand, what passes for intellectual subject matter in a video game is still far from intellectually compelling, at least to me, and I know I was not imagining the feeling of slipping, hourglass loss I experienced when I played
BioShock
ten hours a day for three days straight. If I really wanted to explore the implications and consequences of Objectivism, there were better, more sophisticated places to look, even if few of them would be as much fun (though getting shot in the knee would be more fun than rereading
Atlas Shrugged)
. When I think about games, here is where I bottom out. Is it okay that they are
mostly
fun? Am I a philistine or simply a coward? Are games the problem, or am I?

I came to this once-embarrassed, formerly furtive love of games honestly. Because the majority of the games I have enjoyed most as an adult tell stories, I was always comparing those stories with the novels and films I admire. Naturally, I found (and find) most video-game stories wanting. But this may be a flagrant category mistake. For one thing, no one is sure what purpose “story” actually serves in video games. Games with any kind of narrative
structure usually employ two kinds of storytelling. One is the framed narrative of the game itself, set in the fictional “present” and traditionally doled out in what are called cut scenes or cinematics, which in most cases take control away from the gamer, who is forced to watch the scene unfold. The other, which some game designers and theoreticians refer to as the “ludonarrative,” is unscripted and gamer-determined—the “fun” portions of the “played” game—and usually amounts to some frenetic reconception of getting from point A to point B. The differences between the framed narrative and the ludonarrative are what make story in games so unmanageable: One is fixed, the other is fluid, and yet they are intended, however notionally, to work together. Their historical inability to do so may be best described as congressional.

An example of such narrative cross-purpose can be found in Infinity Ward’s first-person shooter
Call of Duty 4
. In one memorable sequence, moving forward the framed narrative requires you and a computer-controlled partner to crawl and sneak your way through the irradiated farmlands of Chernobyl in order to assassinate an arms dealer. The ludonarrative, meanwhile, is the actual (and, as it happens, pretty thrilling) process of getting there. If you choose to be a dick and frag your partner, it has only ludonarrative consequences. At worst, you have to start the mission over. No matter what you do, the framed narrative does not change: You and he need to get there together.
Call of Duty 4
is a game with little to no ambition to change the emotional outlook of anyone who plays it. It is a war-porn story of good and evil. All the same, the chasm between its framed narrative and ludonarrative calls attention to the artificiality of both. While the former attempts to be narratively meaningful, the latter is concerned only with being exciting. The former grants the player no agency and thus has no emotional resonance because the latter, with its illusion of agency, does nothing to reinforce what that resonance might be, other
than that shooting your friend in the head is bad news. Believing in the game’s fiction often becomes as difficult as obeying orders issued by a world-class hypocrite. For a game of
Call of Duty 4
’s simplistic themes, this is a problem of glancing consequence. For games of greater ambition, however, the problem becomes exponentially larger.
(Call of Duty 4
does offer a couple of formally compelling experiences. One is that it kills off the character you assume you will control for the duration in a mid-game helicopter crash, but not before allowing you to take a few disoriented steps from the wreckage—altogether an eerie sequence. Another is the game’s opening, which grants the gamer the helpless first-person POV of a man being driven, it becomes increasingly evident, to his execution. This sequence ends with the gamer being shot, jarringly, in the face.)

Several games have lately been experimenting with allowing decisions made during the ludonarrative to alter the framed narrative, most notably in
Fallout 3
and Lionhead’s
Fable II
, but this is mainly expressed in how you are perceived by other characters. Once a game comes along that figures out a way around the technical challenges of allowing a large number of ludonarrative decisions to have framed-narrative-altering consequences—none of which challenges I understand but whose existence several game designers sighingly confirmed for me—an altogether new form of storytelling might be born: stories that, with your help, create themselves. There is, of course, another word for stories that, with your help, create themselves. That word is
life
. So would this even be a good thing?

I am not so sure. When I am being entertained, I am also being manipulated. I am
allowing
myself to be manipulated. I am, in other words, surrendering. When I watch television, one of our less exalted forms of popular entertainment, I am surrendering to the inevitability of commercials amid bite-sized narrative blocks.
When I watch a film, the most imperial form of popular entertainment—particularly when experienced in a proper movie theater—I am surrendering most humiliatingly, for the film begins at a time I cannot control, has nothing to sell me that I have not already purchased, and goes on whether or not I happen to be in my seat. When I read a novel I am not only surrendering; I am allowing my mind to be occupied by a colonizer of uncertain intent. Entertainment takes it as a given that I cannot affect it other than in brutish, exterior ways: turning it off, leaving the theater, pausing the disc, stuffing in a bookmark, underlining a phrase. But for those television programs, films, and novels febrile with self-consciousness, entertainment pretends it is unaware of me, and I allow it to.