I just made a game that covers topics like, what happens when military orders conflict with personal beliefs, or when extremism is taken to its, um, extremes, or when family and science comes before humanity. Everyone sure picked up on those themes, particularly reviewers and some fans when they said, “campaign, LOL!!1!” after three missions. And by picking them up I mean no one noticed or cared.
This may be a product of the quality, or a lack thereof, of the work, but it’s not like anyone really mentioned these thematic threads; they just summarize a few plot points, shrug, and move on. Why? Gamers are largely immature when it comes to narrative, and narratives tend to reflect their immaturity. They want big, broad, “epic” and abstract hero journeys. They want comic books about saving the world from an obviously evil thing, not serious meaningful drama. And personal stores? Pfft.
Did anyone ever figure the game was trying to say? I’m still not sure why the game ending in an alien-invested army thing that looked a lot like the Superdome meant.
and also there are : Political Machine or Civ and other interesting games… I would not go to AAA movies for a message (hm… except The Dark Knight), also AAA is always a good sign for being meaningless in any medium (some exceptions to be made).
Here’s a quote from Chris Suellentrop’s piece on the game, which ran in the NYT a few weeks back:
There are limits to the game’s aspirations to realism. I was repeatedly told that Medal of Honor intentionally avoided the subject of politics in favor of “telling the soldier’s story.” Goodrich also told me, “I don’t want to make the bummer game.”
So if anybody’s surprised that the game makers are politically craven, and have nothing to say about the war if Afghanistan… well, why? This is a Medal of Honor game. Their WW2 games were supported by rhetoric as simple as: “Nazis are fucking evil,” and that’s fine – that’s about as complex as that war was. Now they’re trying to make a game about an on-going, ambiguous, polarizing war, and they’re trying to just circle-strafe the whole issue. You don’t want to make a bummer game? IT’S AFGHANISTAN.
But every game has a message, whether or not the creators include one.
I promise you MOH won’t force players to fire on an ambiguously threatening NPC, only to discover that lump under his coat wasn’t an IED but a cake he’d baked for his dear mother, and then show the PC weeping over the kid’s body. PTSD won’t widen your reticle, or leave you so panicked you can’t even shoot. You aren’t going to complete a mission, and then have to redo that mission 12 times because there’s been a resurgence of terrorist activity in the sector.
This game will feature the American military elite blasting RPG-toting terrorists. Though we’ve learned how dubious a claim it is wrt Afghanistan, you’ll complete missions. Maybe for pathos, a few of your NPC comrades won’t make it back. For a game unwilling to engage in politics, focused solely on the ‘soldier’s story,’ the message can be no more complicated than: war’s hell. No shit.
We lose our pride as gamers when people squelch free speech and remove our right to set people on fire (in games) and then put them out with sustained urination (in games or with good excuses).
Oh they are all making a statement, just not the one you want lol. The right wing wet dream that 99.9% of video games are is beyond the statement level. You get the feeling most of these games are part of some propaganda wing that consists of a tin foil grouping of the US military, and Fox “news”.
All you need is the 30 mil or so to make a game, and you can say whatever you want. In that sense free speech still exists, it just happens to be dictated by the almighty dollar.
Sure, but the current example is a good jumping–off point for a discussion of the issue. As a general note, I’m not interested in defending Bogost’s points. People can engage him directly in the Gamasutra comments, he’s actively answering people there.
You’re absolutely right Bioshock should have been mentioned already. There are AAA games making culturally significant statements but we need more of them. As I’m sure has been apparent to any observer, I have been generalising heavily, ignoring the rare outliers in the flood of the average products.
It’s telling that we only have a handful of games made over ten years that always come up when discussing this. We should have so many everyone would be using their own, personally significant examples. Now we all have to heart e.g. Bioshock, Torment and Dreamfall because what else is there? You can probably come up with a few others but how about fifty or one hundred? No problem with novels, feature films, theatre, photography or what have you but not so easy with mainstream games.
Having a message in your game should not be a special occasion and only in the purview of Ah–tistes. It should be the normal byproduct of the story game development process conducted by adult, intelligent people. Why tell a story if it communicates nothing? You can do so much more and it will be so much more satisfying personally, professionally and yes, artistically. It is a wonderful feeling to share your ruminations on and observations of life, the universe and everything through your work with others and thus start an enriching discourse with them. Try it sometime, game makers! What have you got to lose?
Having a message does not suddenly lower your sales. Done right, it is an integrated and internalised piece of the whole. Those who notice it do, others go for the “headshot all poultry”–achievement. It does not suddenly transform your hyper–dyper AAA game into an unsaleable gallery masturbation piece, it just makes it possible to engage your creation on a new level. It gets you critiques in addition to the buyer’s guides.
Except when it doesn’t.
I’m really sorry that happened to you. It’s still early days. It takes a while to educate the audience. If you build it, they will come. You have built it and I predict it will not go unnoticed forever. Many works were discovered only afterwards. Your day in the sun will come. Post mortem if not sooner, to really cheer up your day, there.
The current games and their audience have developed in sync. Another, more sophisticated audience takes time to develop. The indies and folks like you have already been fertilising and watering the ground out of which it will gradually emerge. There is not necessarily a great deal of overlap between the two audiences. The popular will always outnumber the culture.
Notice this does not mean that having a message = smaller audience and lower sales. A fragfest can still make a statement, if the creators care enough about the years they irretrievably spend of their unique lives in making it to include one. That is something to look back on in your golden years and talk about with your grandkids. Not just the way the blood spurts when the roto–rooter hits but the way the sad, confused look in the infected tennis teacher’s eyes and the resentful sigh the player avatar makes trigger a reaction in the player in light of the wistful soliloquy the narrator just delivered about the merry days of sport in the mansion grounds and the regrettable promiscuity and lacking protection–usage of your spouse.
I salute you for your efforts. Please keep plugging away! It’s not easy being a pioneer. It is the future generations of game makers and gamers that will truly reap the benefits of your work. It’s not great but it’s what we have. We can all work together to get the recognition works and creators deserve to them in their lifetime. This discussion is one small act towards that future. I’m impatient to get there, myself.
I don’t want any particular statement, I just want a deliberate, considered one. I’d love to argue against a wilful right–wing “kill 'em all” piece of propaganda—or a wilful left–wing “leave Britney Taliban alone” piece of propaganda. Or a wilful piece of reflection on the way the falling of the glimmering summer light made a teenager visiting her relatives in the countryside feel in the light of the recent death of her pet halibut.
Yeah, for good or ill, they are the ones defining games in the public eye and mind. If they don’t get their act together we’ll never get out of the ghetto e.g. superhero comics already occupy.
Jarmo, here’s something I’ve been thinking about a little.
Games must be fun.
War is hell.
Therefore, games can’t really say anything about war.
Even if they stick in some cutscenes about the horror of it all, the player is still having a great time picking off enemies. (Ludonarrative dissonance?) I think the only way for a game to make a statement about war would be to embed it in the design itself. A game would have to be willing to become unfun. Like if there was no way to beat the singleplayer, you just had to play repetitious missions over and over until you got fed up and withdrew – I mean quit. Or maybe you allow a single playthrough, and if the player dies, that’s it.
Do you think it’s possible to make a statement in a game where all the gameplay carries such a basic, anti-narrative message? (Namely, shooting is fun.)
This has actually been done, witness the first Operation Flashpoint and Arma. You wait or walk in a bush for half an hour seeing nothing, then you get shot and crawl for a while and die.
To be effective, you have to fit your statement to your gameplay. If shooting is only fun, then state that. If kids and other civilians accidentally get the contents of their heads used as art nouveau wall decoration along the way, well that’s another brush you can use. The way games have been made and stories told so far do not have to be a mental prison for later creators. We can discover the way to do new things together.
So yes, I think it is possible to make a statement even there. I haven’t thought it through as to the methods and such and that’s not necessarily my job. I do believe it is not an unsurpassable obstacle for human ingenuity and need for self-expression.
Games can be other things besides fun. Massively popular games, probably not. Comedies are more popular than downer soul-searching dramas.
That said, you can have fun in hell if you’re not very sympathetic and suffer only virtually. War is many things. It is spectacle and pulse-pounding excitement also. It’s a grand, expensive playground for boys with the downside of taking out your best friend, foot and genitals every once in a while.
Player start in nice french town. All people in the town is cute and nice, the whole town is likeable.
After the tutorial level, the town is bombed, totally destroyed, all the civilians you meet are dead. You use some dead bodied as protection while you try to escape the shotting.
Everybody on your group escape and is very happy to have survive.
Incidentally, for people that aren’t intimately familiar with Bogost’s work, he seems to have a very narrow, and fairly literal idea about how games should approach artistic expression, and particularly the interactions with current events. In my experience, he’s much more concerned with the literal narrative content of a game than the experience derived from the mechanics. Allegory does not appear to have a place in his interpretation of the world.
One could easily argue that his point of view has merit from an artistic perspective: games should occupy the current-event direct criticism space, and steps taken to that end are important. But over-emphasizing that aspect ignores the good work being done on other fronts, which I think he’s doing here.
Interesting, I didn’t know that. But I guess that’s the problem right there – I’ve never played either of those games. And while I hypothetically like the idea of it, I bet that if I played it, I’d be bored and frustrated. Which is good, if we’re talking about making a statement on war, but bad if we’re talking about a successful game. A book/movie would do this moment better.
To be effective, you have to fit your statement to your gameplay. If shooting is only fun, then state that. If kids and other civilians accidentally get the contents of their heads used as art nouveau wall decoration along the way, well that’s another brush you can use.
If shooting civilians/kids were associated with in-game punishments, sure. Of course, GTA fans mowed down thousands of digital grannies, and if they’d included kids in that game, I’m sure the kids would have gotten it as well.
And EA is in the business of publishing massively popular games. Which is unfortunate, because they’re the ones with the resources to do an art game properly. This is another problem with the idea of art games. Besides the fact that the medium is so incredibly commercial, there’s such a gap in production value between a AAA game and an indie game, a gap you don’t see with films. This is getting better as indies get access to better dev tools, though.
It’s a grand, expensive playground for boys with the downside of taking out your best friend, foot and genitals every once in a while.
Games have no way of communicating any of that, which leaves just the fun. Maybe if they spent a lot of time developing a comrade, the player would be upset when he died, but I suspect they’d mostly be irritated by the distraction and want to get back to shooting.
That’s a representation of war, yeah – but without the threat of death, the smell of dying people, the terror of being shot at, then you can’t really make the player invest too much in it.
I think he is trying to make a good game. Now if we take that and add in “You find a mech sent from 5,000 years in the future, must use it to escort the survivors to safety and then destroy Cyborg Hitler’s floating fortress” we have the perfect game! I will call it Modern Warfare: When Retreat is NOT an option.
