“Too often we are so preoccupied with the destination, we forget the journey,” goes that age old and oft repeated aphorism, one that critics of the artistic potential of video games should consider.
Games have not yet been accepted into the zealously guarded enclave of artistic mediums, and many avid gamers, including myself and an industry insider pseudonymed Matthew Wasteland, want that to change.
Most people in the video game industry, and many people who write about them for a living, hope for games to be taken seriously as art or literature. It’s just around the corner, we believe— the day the establishment flings open the door to us and lets us in, apologetic tears streaming from their eyes. ‘We misjudged you,’ they’ll cry, ‘Just like we initially misjudged movies, jazz, and prose poetry.’
Matthew’s column on GameSetWatch does not feed these sentiments, but rather explains why video games have been dismissed by critics outside the industry. I disagree with Matthew’s position, but its a well-stated one that offers a good opportunity to address one of the most common criticisms of games as a medium.
In his column, Matthew explores the problems of a game based on Herman Melville’s classic Moby Dick. “No matter how much freedom the player was given to navigate the ocean in his own self-directed way,” writes Matthew, “the predetermined story of Captain Ahab’s obsession wins out, and at the end of the game, Moby Dick destroys the Pequod no matter what happened in the intervening time.”
Matthew’s argument is that the fixed outcome of Moby Dick is what makes it so powerful. To simply follow the linear plot that works for the book fails to take advantage of the interactive potential of games, says Matthew, but to implement interactivity and allow the player to change the ending would take away its power.
This puts us in a strange bind: we’re either imitative of, and beholden to, the arts that preceded us (“if you want a good story, why not read a book?”), or we are unmoored in a postmodern haze, trying to argue that a quantum superposition of many possible outcomes is just as artful as a linear story (“this painting is a work of art and self-expression— but it doesn’t matter if that part is red or blue or green”). Neither of these options is fully satisfying.
Roger Ebert raises this same criticism — that art requires authorial intent, and the guiding hand of the creator must take the viewer down a set path to a pre-established conclusion and lesson — but I don’t agree with it. The journey is what moves us in Moby Dick, and it has the power to do so with or without the climactic destination.
Moby Dick is not a powerful story because of the final destruction of Captain Ahab; it’s power lies in the whaler’s obsessive journey, which would have destroyed him whether it succeeded or not. Ahab’s character is what makes Moby Dick art because his humanity makes the story’s grand themes resonate with and inspire the reader.
A Moby Dick game, to use Matthew’s example, would let the player speak directly to Captain Ahab and personally define Ishmael’s relationship with the crew. Interactivity would allow a much more personal experience with the story, one that would retain the grace of artistic satisfaction whether or not it ended as Melville intended.
Building a game with the power of Moby Dick is not about setting up plot points and an ending for the character to follow as if they were reading a book. Making an artistic game requires constructing an open-ended journey for the player which will be powerful no matter how she ends it because of the human characters she meets along the way.
In addition to his position with an independent developer, Matthew is a columnist with Game Developer magazine and runs a blog called Magical Wasteland.
