Anyone who's been a faithful reader of Level Up knows we have some pet themes to which we keep returning. Among them: 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. This week, we managed to smuggle some of that thinking into the pages of NEWSWEEK by means of a page-long essay on Grand Theft Auto IV, in which we wrote:

When I write a post about videogames on my NEWSWEEK.com blog, Level Up, my target audience is the sizable one that's already knowledgeable about the medium. The real challenge, however, comes when I return to the pages of the magazine. It's not easy to explain a game like Grand Theft Auto IV to an audience that's not native to this art form. Yes, I said art: to draw an analogy or three, Grand Theft Auto is to videogames what "The Sopranos" was to television--a sprawling, operatic crime series that has elevated the genre and made its creator very rich in the process (Rockstar Games took in more than $1 billion in the United States for the last three GTA games alone). But on the TV show, you only watch Tony and his minions kill their enemies. In Grand Theft Auto IV, you also direct and star in a story that unfolds over as many as 100 hours, depending on your skill as a gamer.

The experience is hard enough to sum up that I'm tempted to put novices at ease by writing something like this: a first-person, here's-what-I-did-in-the-game introduction, followed by a colorful précis of the Grand Theft Auto IV story and characters, then a recitation of the numerous landmarks and radio stations that give this skewed facsimile of New York City--called Liberty City in the game--its authentic flavor. The problem with this approach is that it doesn't begin to give you a feel for what it's actually like to play the game. Just as the majority of movie reviewers still struggle to find a meaningful critical and technical language with which to discuss actors' performances, we who write about videogames have yet to find a vocabulary that enables us to thoroughly engage the medium. One that will allow us to examine the mechanics, visuals, sounds and narrative elements of videogames not in isolation, but in concert.

When we wrote those two paragraphs, we did so specifically in response to several reviews of GTA IV that we'd read in the mainstream press, where the need to distill a game's essence for non-initiates is the most acute. Take, for instance, the ecstatic review that ran in the New York Times. Only two almost-throwaway sentences--"The point of the main plot is to guide Niko through the city’s criminal underworld. Gang leaders and thugs set missions for him to complete, and his success moves the story along toward a conclusion that seems as dark as its beginning"--describe the main thrust of the game. The rest of the review, though artfully written, starts with that "here's-some-of-what-I-did" intro we mentioned in our excerpt, and then follows it up with a laundry list of adjectives, characters, locations and narrative elements.

To read the rest of our post, click on the link below.

 Rodin's "The Thinker." Courtesy of innoxiuss; edited by Level Up

The Idea: Who is this Adam Maxwell guy, and why the f--- is he saying that writers don't matter in videogames?

The Thinkers: Zach Schiff-Abrams

The Source: The Cut Scene

The Quote (from Zach Schiff-Abrams): As a film producer I have drawn and quartered many a writer so usually I leap at the chance to jump on any bandwagon that is founded on lynching the writing community. Unfortunately this retard doesn't know his ass from his elbow, so here's my 15 cents:

"When a writer sits down to build a story, they are usually building a plot." Here's what's inherently wrong with this moron's argument. Ask any self-respecting writer (and every f---ing last one of them motherf---ers are self-respecting) what they do when they sit down to build a story and they'll tell you the first thing (and the most important thing) they do is create characters. In fact, most good stories in any medium usually come from a landscape where the writer almost obsessively focuses on creating and developing characters in a vacuum that doesn't rely on any plot. There are no good f---ing plots, there are only interesting characters that inform a plot...

What I have been arguing for years upon years is that videogames desperately need more writing. And now we're finally at a level technologically speaking where we can actually integrate the creation of character into the very fabric of the gameplay experience. You still argue? You think GTA is a successful franchise?  Think how much more successful it would actually be if Alvin Sargent or Jonathan Lethem was taking seriously the creation of character in that world? Then you wouldn't have Fritzy writing about how videogames are challenging movies for the media dollar, then my nerdy friends, then there wouldn't be any more movies.

Instead you have this dweeb and unfortunately way too many of his kind running the videogame industry that think in way too small of a box.

The Reaction: We've been following Maxwell's blog since last year, which means we not only read his original post, but the two other posts he wrote on the subject here and here. The challenge with his series of posts on his topic is that the, ah, writing was not always as clear as it should have been.

To read the rest of today's installment of "The Big Idea," click here. 

 Rodin's "The Thinker." Courtesy of innoxiuss; edited by Level Up

The Idea: It's time to destroy the "cult" of gamers--starting with the term "gamer"

The Thinker: Douglas Wilson, game developer

The Source: GameSetWatch

The Quote: The Church of Gamers is not only morally problematic; it also ends up working against innovation in the medium. Imagine, for example, how ridiculous it would be if all television watchers identified as their own "Tubers" subculture. It’s a humorous hypothetical precisely because a vast majority of first-world citizens watch television, from the romantics who tune in for soap operas and sports fans who catch game highlights over breakfast, to the sci-fi fans addicted to the latest Joss Whedon serial and insomniacs who watch old game show reruns.

To read the rest of this introductory installment of "The Big Idea," click on the link below.

 A cover for the comic book "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen," written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Kevin O'Neill

In Part I of our critique of level designer and blogger Steve Gaynor's assertion that "video games will never become a significant form of cultural discourse the way that novels and film have," we talked about how any medium requires a certain amount of learning in order for it to be approached and engaged. We also suggested that as more people grow up playing videogames, even conventional controllers like those of the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3 become far less of a barrier to entry, to say nothing of newer interfaces such as the Wii. But Gaynor believes that there's something even more essential, even more fundamental about videogames that will forever wall the medium off from truly widespread participation:

[T]he very nature of interactive games bars them from ever truly gaining mass acceptance, and therefore mass cultural relevance. The strength of video games, what makes them unique, interesting, and affecting, is that they engage in a dialogue with each individual player. They ask you to invest yourself in the experience, to explore and understand the logic of their gameworld, and to activate the experience by doing. Video games require you to be involved, to take responsibility for your actions onscreen. They expect more out of you than film, television, the internet or a book does. You get from video games what you're willing to put in. The audience at large only wants to take.

The very thing Gaynor decries--a lack of willingness among the audience to work for their entertainment--isn't inherent in to this medium. It's almost intractable among mass audiences no matter what the medium. Popular fiction generally outsells literary fiction. Summer blockbusters generally out-gross arthouse films. Is this any different from, say, Call of Duty 4: Modern Combat out-NPD-ing BioShock last year, or Madden doing the same to Shadow of the Colossus in 2005? Does it truly matter that in aggregate television is more mass a mass medium than videogames, when on an individual level, its practitioners are faced with the same challenges that plague those who work in other media? The creator of "The Wire," David Simon, in explaining the advantages of working on TV shows for premium cable described the problem as follows:

 A cover of the acclaimed comic book "Planetary." Written by Warren Ellis; illustrated by John Cassaday

The babe in his cradle is closing his eyes
The blossom embraces the bee
But soon says a whisper, arise, arise
Tomorrow belongs to me
--"Tomorrow Belongs to Me" from the musical "Cabaret," music and lyrics by John Kander and Fred Ebb

A bet is a type of game, one with which we here at Level Up have become intimately familiar. So when we got wind of a brand new wager of sorts, between bloggers Borut Pfeifer (at The Plush Apocalypse) and Steve Gaynor (over at Fullbright), our antennae perked up immediately. And what was it that prompted this bout of gambling? It was level designer Gaynor's admittedly pessimistic assertion that "...I'll bet you that video games will never become a significant form of cultural discourse the way that novels and film have. I'll bet you that fifty years from now they'll be just as mature and well-respected as comic books are today." To which the more optimistic Pfeifer, who's working on one of Electronic Arts' Steven Spielberg games, replied, "I’ve certainly had days where I’d agree with most everything he says. I get where it’s coming from. Whether it was a frustrating day at work, or sometimes just going to a particularly rough GDC, I am not immune to that brand of despair. But, overall, I gotta say, games still have much more to achieve as a medium--if I didn’t think so, I wouldn’t be working on them."

One sees the glass as half-empty, the other sees the glass as half-full. But both are largely proceeding from the same set of assumptions when they subject videogames to a close examination--in terms of their accessibility; required level of engagement; maturity of subject matter; visual realism--and find them wanting. Take the issue of accessibility, of which Gaynor says:

Video games are hard for people to get into. The barrier for entry is higher than perhaps any other popular entertainment medium. To read a book, all you need to do is go to a library, pick one up, and start reading (which isn't usually an obstacle considering the high literacy rate in the modern world.) At the advent of popular film, you only needed to walk to a movie theatre and pay your nickel (or nowadays, ten bucks) to see the latest release. Processing the experience isn't an issue: sit, watch, and you've received an experience equal to anyone else in the audience....

Over time, the technical and systemic complexity of video games have increased, while the barriers to entry have largely remained undamaged. Taking inflation into account, the cost of a home console unit has stayed largely constant since the mid-80's (and the price of a competent gaming PC has similarly kept pace;) controllers have sprouted more buttons, gyroscopes, and analogue sticks than ever; and it's still extremely common for games of high quality to be too difficult for a non-gamer to play effectively.

We've long been fans of the site The Smoking Gun, with its troves of mug shots, celebrity riders and other documents of the famous and infamous behaving badly. So it might seem a bit strange for us to accuse these purveyors of sensationalism of being, well, sensationalistic, but that's what we're going to do. A few minutes ago, while scanning the list of stories on The Drudge Report, we came across the following headline "Online shooting game lets kids target presidential candidates..." Intrigued, we clicked on the link, which brought us to The Smoking Gun and the headline "Hey Kids, Shoot Your Favorite Candidate!
Clinton, Obama pace gunners in "Presidential Paintball" online game." The site went on to describe the game as follows:

For the aspiring young assassin, a popular online games site offers kids the opportunity to assume the identity of a leading presidential contender and then shoot their political opponents in a series of armed confrontations in the White House. While the ammo is paintball, the game on the hugely popular miniclip.com site allows kids to train a rifle scope on six presidential aspirants and squeeze off a hail of shots (which are accompanied with a rat-a-tat sound). The game, "Presidential Paintball," features six candidates in the crosshairs: Barack Obama; Hillary Clinton; John Edwards; Mitt Romney; John McCain; and Rudy Giuliani (it seems the game was developed before the ascension of Mike Huckabee). If a candidate wins a head-to-head confrontation, he/she advances to a new shootout, which occurs in various White House settings, including outside the Oval Office. When a candidate gets blown away, bloodlessly, a screen appears noting that they have been "eliminated," not killed. To better direct a fusillade, young gunmen can use their computer's mouse to place a crosshairs on a candidate's head or body. Of course, the imagery of Obama and Clinton, both of whom have been the target of threats and receive Secret Service protection, being targeted in such a manner-by children, no less-might be seen as troubling in some quarters.

Sounds disgusting, doesn't it? Well, we clicked on the link for Presidential Paintball, selected Barack Obama--the candidate and the Level Up staff are both fans of Omar Little on "The Wire," so perhaps our mutual gangsta might give us an edge--and fired up the game.

Regular readers of our daily High Score posts know that GameSetWatch is a blog that we here at Level Up very much enjoy. So it is with something approaching great reluctance that we take issue with its January 2nd post, titled "GameSetChat: How Do Wii Judge Fun For Mainstream Gamers?" In it, site editor and man-of-many-hats Simon Carless (who also serves as the publisher of both Game Developer and Gamasutra, chairman of the Independent Games Festival and organizer of the Independent Games Summit at the Game Developers Conference) shared an IM exchange with Joel Reed Parker of Game Of The Blog discussing the quality of Wii software and the perceived inability of game reviewers to distinguish between good and bad casual games. Here's a snippet of what they said:

Joel Reed Parker: Man, Wii third-party software really is bad...a friend got a Wii and was asking me for advice about party games and good games and such. According to the aggregate scores sites, not much.

Simon Carless: But I will say that conventional reviewers do a poor job of differentiating fun casual games from bad casual games--or just bad games, in my opinion.

JRP: I agree wholeheartedly. Same goes for kids' games also.

SC: Like Mario Party 8 has a 62 average on Metacritic's Wii chart, and so does...Heatseeker? Blimey. OK, we definitely need write something about this.

JRP: I didn't even seen the Rayman Raving Rabbids games as high as I thought they would be. It's all the predictable stuff--Mario, Metroid, Zelda.

SC: There's definitely a problem here--Elebits, Korinrinpa, and Dewy's Adventure are all worth checking out, and are lost in terms of scoring with markedly inferior games--even/especially from a 'mainstream' gamer perspective.

It's understandable that in an IM chat, Carless and Parker would use Metacritic averages as evidence of a disconnect between reviewers and consumers when it comes to non-core games. But how truly make a case without examining the text of the reviews? By our lights, the text of a review is where a writer should, in part, attempt to weigh his or her own experience against that of the game's intended audience, be it tween girls or military shooter fanatics. The score, on the other hand, should measure the game against both others of its ilk and against games in general.

Carless and Parker, however, appear to have assumed that the consumer guide aspect of a review (what does the writer believe a typical player might think of this game?) is more important--or somehow separable--from the critical assessment aspect of a review (what does the writer himself or herself think of this game?) when it comes to casual games.

Martin Sheen in "Apocalypse Now"

I've done questionable things.
--Roy Batty to Eldon Tyrell in "Blade Runner"

You're an errand boy, sent by grocery clerks to collect a bill.
--Col. Kurtz to Capt. Willard in "Apocalypse Now"

Towards the end of our workday, as we scan the contents of our RSS newsreader for the next day's High Score, we make sure that from time to time we read the latest post on Clint Hocking's blog Click Nothing. Hocking, a creative director at Ubisoft, is among a growing number of developers who have taken to this medium in order to express their thoughts about videogames. Between a mainstream media which generally ignores games and an enthusiast press still largely stuck in the preview-feature-review model, the best developer blogs are carving out a space that can enrich our understanding of interactive entertainment and help establish a shared vocabulary for further discussion. It's not easy, because as Hocking rightfully says, "With the 'language of games' being as limited as it is, understanding what I am 'reading' is hard, and trying to articulate it back to people in a useful way is a full order of magnitude harder." So whenever someone steps up to the plate as Hocking is doing on a frequent basis, we are both grateful and thrilled.

Hocking's October 7th post, "Ludonarrative Dissonance in Bioshock: The problem of what the game is about," caught our eye, and not just because of its lengthy Level Up-esque title. In it, Hocking takes a close look at the tension between BioShock's story ("an examination and a criticism of Randian Objectivism") and its gameplay ("seek power and you will progress"), then concludes:

To cut straight to the heart of it, Bioshock seems to suffer from a powerful dissonance between what it is about as a game, and what it is about as a story. By throwing the narrative and ludic elements of the work into opposition, the game seems to openly mock the player for having believed in the fiction of the game at all. The leveraging of the game's narrative structure against its ludic structure all but destroys the player's ability to feel connected to either, forcing the player to either abandon the game in protest (which I almost did) or simply accept that the game cannot be enjoyed as both a game and a story, and to then finish it for the mere sake of finishing it.

The source of Hocking's ire is his belief that while BioShock's gameplay mechanics are perfectly aligned with the theme of Randian objectivism...

 

Having weighed in on the subject of whether or not videogames should be considered art on several occasions, we at Level Up are loath to do so again. But when we read the following story from the Washington Post--our sister publication, for those who like full disclosure--we felt compelled to return to the scene of the crime. In the article, Post tech columnist Mike Musgrove discusses the experience that his colleague, Pulitzer prize-winning book columnist and sci-fi fan Michael Dirda had playing 2K Boston/Australia's recently released BioShock. Implicit in the piece is that Musgrove wanted to see whether the 58-year-old Dirda would consider BioShock to be a work of art. As Musgrove writes:

Given that the game has been widely acclaimed for its stylish setting, its moral complications and its invoking of Ayn Rand, it's entirely understandable that Musgrove would use this game for his experiment. But when he returns to Dirda, having given his fellow Postie a couple of weeks to play the game, he finds that his plans have hit a snag. Dirda is stuck in Neptune's Bounty, the third section of the game, because he keeps getting killed by one of the enemies and he can't figure out how to use the first-aid kit to, uh, save his life.