It’s All About the Beat
Earlier today, I had a minor existential crisis where all my assumptions about games were cast aside and laboriously reeled back in. It’s all ’cause of a post on Grand Text Auto that argued that Portal, my game of the year last year, is just product - a great exercise in game design that’ll move copies and influence its descendents but ultimately, be nothing but an “interesting stepping stone.” Nick Montfort wheels out this damning quote from the writer Eric Wolpaw, interviewed by Rock, Paper, Shotgun:
Well, there are lots of message games coming out now. Like they’ve got something really important to get off their chest about the war in Iraq or the player is forced to make some dicey underwater moral choices. Really, just a whole heck of a lot of stuff to think about. With that in mind, at the beginning of the Portal development process, we sat down as a group to decide what philosopher or school of philosophy our game would be based on. That was followed by about fifteen minutes of silence and then someone mentioned that a lot of people like cake.
That same interview contains this dismissal of the whole practice of writing for games:
At strip clubs, there’s a guy whose job is to talk between the strippers. He tries to do a good job and be entertaining and enthusiastic, but everybody’s just there for the nakedness.
I spent all day wracking my brain over this, and came to a conclusion: we’ve just been wrong for so long. We can’t compare games to books or movies. Aside from a few exceptions, we can’t judge them by how well they tell “a story,” a written-on-paper narrative with a beginning, middle and end that sprung from the pen of an author. And we can’t dock a game like Portal for not “having a message.” Games just aren’t meant to work that way.
We’ve been spending all these years comparing games to books, films, even comic books. We screwed up. We should be comparing them to music.
I posted over on the Grand Text Auto thread, getting all huffy and defensive about this Portal thing – and have I mentioned how much I loved that game? How it just grabbed me from the get-go and had me completely immersed in almost every minute of the experience? I mean, sure, the last part leading up to the boss battle goes on for a little too long. But holy crap, that game was everything I’d ever want a game to be. And the defense I tried to mount is that it should be judged the way we’d look at, say, a piece of contemporary music.
I’m a fan of minimalist composer Morton Feldman. His work is informed by his past, his influences, his friends, and many other things – Alex Ross’ profile in the New Yorker can give you a terrific introduction – but when you listen to one of his pieces, you’re not really looking around for a message. Take For Philip Guston, which lasts four hours. It’s slow, pensive, elegant, and non-repetitive. It’s utterly absorbing. You can throw it on as background music – I used to play it while I was working on programming assignments alone in my apartment – yet it’s always gripping part of your mind, a constantly evolving experience with a subliminal tension and a graceful 50-or-so-minute denoument. But I don’t know that it’s about anything, other than itself.
As a piece of excellent game design that also grabs your heart and your nerve endings, Portal could be judged the same way: its formal excellence is the whole point, and the whole thing that makes my eyes light up when I play it. To say it merely has excellent design neglects what excellent design can do to your soul.
But I want to take this further. Music games have seen a spike in popularity, as the Guitar Hero/Rock Band empire takes over the world (I mean jeez, it was on South Park). We’ve been lurching around finding hope in one clunky piece of narrative-based gaming after another, yet music games excel almost effortlessly. And after spending the last month trying to teach myself to play an instrument, I’m even more aware that everything that was hard about learning an instrument – maintaining focus, pacing my energy, screwing up and starting over, and finally performing a series of skilled, practiced actions so well it just feels right and you go “boo-ya” – well, it’s the same stuff I get off on with games.
And of course, the best part of Portal? The reward for all your hard work and skillful playing? It’s not a narrative reward – there’s no final bit of story, no shocking revelation. It’s a song – “Still Alive,” a great piece of pop that ties together the themes and characters of the game and gives your pleasure center the final send-off. What could be more natural?
At the Portal post-mortem at GDC Wolpaw said something else that really shook me. He said that his job as a writer for video games is similar to that of the soundtrack composer for a movie. It’s not vital, but it accentuates the experience. But then just know I played Apollo Justice — which is ALL writing, but equally awesome.
Gus Mastrapa
March 2, 2008 at 1:26 am
I think music is a much better model for games, even beyond the aspects you mention — for instance, creating music is something that works great with a small number of people. Sure, you can have orchestras, but that only works if there’s a composer/conductor, and anyway it’s much different than a few friends forming a band.
Architecture is another really positive role model for games, i think.
Also, I don’t know that it matters what the motivation or direction behind portal was; one of the first things i remember learning in film criticism was that whatever the director says about their film is irrelevant and misleading.. they’re too close to the work. The intentions of the author are irrelevant, what matters is the actual work — of course, this is being taught by critics, so perhaps it’s no surprise that they place the critic in role of all-important meaning-creator
raigan
March 2, 2008 at 11:31 am
Raigan, I completely agree about overruling the author. Both Wolpaw and BioShock’s Ken Levine have downplayed the storytelling in their games, and in both cases I think they’re underselling what made both of those games great: both their fan culture hooks (the Little Sisters, the Weighted Companion Cube), and the more significant and fascinating characters that occupy the game – the indomitable father figure of Andrew Ryan, the complex mother figure of GLaDOS. I mean, that’s about as much as I’ve ever asked from Ronald D. Moore or Joss Whedon. Just because they didn’t dot all the t’s and cross all the i’s (for example, the BioShock endings were both kinda weak) doesn’t mean they didn’t basically ace it.
Gus, I was starting to think I’d turned into a ludologist but I agree, games that really do hinge on the writing are fantastic – two of my favorite games are essentially about the story (Grim Fandango, Planescape: Torment). But in my view, the GTA post put way too much weight on story and message, and too little value on game design.
(Plus, you can have great characters without a great story.)
savetherobot
March 2, 2008 at 2:02 pm
You say that comparing games to books, film, or comic books for all these years has been an error. But I don’t see it. Games have been judged with games as the model this whole time. When you praised Portal for “grabbing you from the get-go and immersing you each minute,” the model there was games, not film or books or whatever, and I don’t think a musical model would help either.
Nick is the one in error here who’s trying to judge a game using the wrong model. While I think having a message is beneficial to a game, as is clever or thoughtful narrative, games should be judged first and foremost on having a satisfying cause-effect-cause relationship between the game and the player. And that’s something you won’t read about in a music critique or review.
scott
March 5, 2008 at 10:29 am
As someone who’s only spent a significant amount of time playing four or five games in his life — Zork, Tetris, Doom, Unreal, and a little Grand Theft Auto — I have to say that I still wish for better writing and more moral ambiguity in games, or else none at all.
Part of the reason I don’t play games much is that as far as simple action/reward modeling goes, I don’t think the original Tetris has ever been — or can be — beaten. Call me crazy, but why would I be interested in learning all kind of complex button-pushing combos or running around trying to put together pieces of a puzzle when I can get off endlessly on left, right, and spin? To use the strip club analogy mentioned in your article, why would I leave my house and fork over all that money to a stripper when there’s porn for free all over the internet?
But even with that, there’s only so much of any game I can play before I begin to feel a little sick. It’s kind of like Cadbury Creme Eggs for dinner. I just feel like I’m wasting my time. When I read a novel or watch a movie, I feel like I might be learning something about life. When I look at art or listen to music, I feel like I might be having my perceptions changed. But in a game, mostly what I do is run around and solve problems that have nothing to do with life, and I’m often too busy blowing things up to have my perceptions much altered.
Sometimes when I was playing Unreal, I’d just stop in a safe place and listen to the sound effects, or look at the textures. Once I put it in god mode and went to the top of a tower and just started flying around the universe to see what there was to see. Not much, once I got away from the main play area. Still, those moments were ultimately more interesting to me than getting to the next level — they’ve stayed with me longer, for sure.
Of all the games you’ve mentioned on this blog, the one I’ve been most curious about was one you gave a fairly mediocre review to — the one where you just swim around the ocean looking at fish. If games can’t deliver the wisdom and moral complexity of literature — and I’m willing to accept your word that that’s not really feasible — then I suppose I want them to be more like music in the sense that they just ARE, without being so goal-directed. I suppose I’d like to see virtual worlds that are interesting in their own right, without requiring me to follow some simplistic narrative, without depending on the stimulation of the reward process you mention.
Seth
March 5, 2008 at 11:35 am
I don’t think games should be seen as music, or writing should be seen as unnecessary, but I think expecting traditional writers to function as game writers is a mistake.
Traditional writers create linear, predictable, heavily structured stories. Games are not linear, predictable or heavily structured, and when developers try to force those qualities upon them, the audience can tell and I for one dislike it.
It seems like the old lessons of story structure and writing will still apply, but the new aspects created by interactivity add a new dimension that shrinks the proportion of what we already understand about the art down by 10 fold.
rockytastic
March 6, 2008 at 4:41 am
Problem is game != game.
Tetris, Portal, MMORPGs don’t tell stories. They are good at gameplay (if they’re good at anything at all) and should be viewed as such. maybe music is the model to go, I honestly don’t know, because I know nothing about music other than that I tend to like to list to it.
However, there are also games that are about narrative. I’d count Bioshock, most JRPGs and Metal Gear Solid as examples.
While they doubtlessly use gameplay as part of their design, it is integral to the story or at least irrelevant to it – the later probably being because our ways of telling stories in games are not yet developed enough in the mojority of cases.
I consider them two separate things, sharing the same medium. Like Jerry Springer and Star Wars both shown on TV, but not even being remotely the same kind of entretainment except for the fact that you watch them through a screen.
Problem is, though, that people don’t make a distinction and we end up with games blurring the line, tacking stories to games that don’t actually need a story.
And while blurring the line in itself is not a bad idea in any art, the way it is currently done hurts the medium as it makes one kind of games indistinguishable from the other.
Just imagine an episode of Oprah with Indiana Jones appearing (not Harrison Ford, Indiane Jones) and you may see what I mean. or maybe not. I understand that this idea is quite alien to some people.
Literature has fiction and non-fiction (or poetry and prose), TV has shows and drama, theater has opera and drama, music has ballad and “pure” music, games are only games.
shadaik
March 10, 2008 at 4:36 am
I think both you and him are taking far too narrow a view of both film and literature in your comparison to gaming. There is a lot of literature (particularly poetry) and a lot of film that isn’t about conveying a message, but simply instead about the beauty of the poem/film in and of itself. Think of a film like Koyaanisqatsi, with its focus on slow, still images, or more abstract poetry where the focus is on the beauty of the words themselves, rather than the content of what they are saying. Whatever weaknesses games may have a narrative platforms, they are perfectly suited for delivering the same sort of non-narrative sublime beauty as any other medium. Messages don’t have to be textual, and narrative isn’t everything.
Bertson
March 10, 2008 at 12:22 pm
This is an outstanding point. I’d seen some other people make the connection between games and music before, particularly an old N’Gai Croal article that I just can’t find at the moment, but none of them really hit a point quite as strongly as you did here. I hope you don’t mind me blowing my own horn (Ha! Music pun!) a bit here, but I’ve published a follow-up on my own site, as it’s a bit long for a blog comment.
http://www.frontal-lobe.net/2008/03/music-to-my-ears.html
Mark
March 10, 2008 at 7:48 pm
Bertson, you definitely make a good point. It’s tough with an argument like this – there are always many exceptions, but I’m hoping that the core examples are clear enough that the argument holds some water.
Hey Mark, thanks for the link and I enjoyed the in-depth post. And you’re dead-on that music is great at telling stories, and as a prog junkie I should’ve spent more time on that angle.
Seth, you make a really good point – I actually like some of the same things in a game. Especialy the downtime. I remember Quentin Tarantino describing “Jackie Brown” as a hangout film – I should try to start a list of hangout games …
savetherobot
March 10, 2008 at 8:50 pm
[...] game. The game in question is Portal (see half-life2.com). The defense is from Gus Mastrapa’s savetherobot.wordpress.com: And the defense I tried to mount is that it should be judged the way we’d look at, say, a piece [...]
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