because i'm only into the first chapter and already i believe this could be one of the best books i would have read.
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.
playing video games is not quite like this. the surrender is always partial. you get control and are controlled. games are patently aware of you and have a physical dimension unlike other forms of popular entertainment. on top of that, many require a marathon runner's stamina: certain console games can take as many as forty hours to complete, and unlike books, you cannot bring them along for enjoyment during mass-transit dead time. (rarely has wide-ranging familiarity with a medium so transparently privileged the un-and underemployed.) even though you may be granted lunar influence over a game's narrative tides, the fact that there is any narrative at all reminds you that a presiding intelligence exists within the game along with you, and it is this sensation that invites the otherwise unworkable comparisons between games and other forms of narrative art ... a video game whose outcomeless narrative is wholly determined by my actions - as in, say, World of Warcraft, which is less a video game that a digital board game, and which game i very much dislike - would elevate me into a position of accidental authorship i do not covet and render the game itself a chilly collation of behavior trees and algorithms. i want to be told a story - albeit one i happen to be part of and can affect, even if in small ways. if i wanted to tell a story, i would not be playing video games.
a noisy group of video-game critics and theoreticians laments the rise of story in games. games, in one version of this view, are best exemplified as total play, wherein the player is an immaterial demiurge and the only "narrative" is what is anecdotally generated during play. (Tetris would be the best example of this sort of game.) my suspicion is that this lament comes less from frustration with story qua story than it does from the narrative butterfingers on outstanding display in the vast majority of contemporary video games. i share that frustration. i also love being the agent of chaos in the video-game world. what i want from games - a control as certain and seamless as the means by which i am being controlled - may be impossible, and i am back where i began.
reload.
playing video games is not quite like this. the surrender is always partial. you get control and are controlled. games are patently aware of you and have a physical dimension unlike other forms of popular entertainment. on top of that, many require a marathon runner's stamina: certain console games can take as many as forty hours to complete, and unlike books, you cannot bring them along for enjoyment during mass-transit dead time. (rarely has wide-ranging familiarity with a medium so transparently privileged the un-and underemployed.) even though you may be granted lunar influence over a game's narrative tides, the fact that there is any narrative at all reminds you that a presiding intelligence exists within the game along with you, and it is this sensation that invites the otherwise unworkable comparisons between games and other forms of narrative art ... a video game whose outcomeless narrative is wholly determined by my actions - as in, say, World of Warcraft, which is less a video game that a digital board game, and which game i very much dislike - would elevate me into a position of accidental authorship i do not covet and render the game itself a chilly collation of behavior trees and algorithms. i want to be told a story - albeit one i happen to be part of and can affect, even if in small ways. if i wanted to tell a story, i would not be playing video games.
a noisy group of video-game critics and theoreticians laments the rise of story in games. games, in one version of this view, are best exemplified as total play, wherein the player is an immaterial demiurge and the only "narrative" is what is anecdotally generated during play. (Tetris would be the best example of this sort of game.) my suspicion is that this lament comes less from frustration with story qua story than it does from the narrative butterfingers on outstanding display in the vast majority of contemporary video games. i share that frustration. i also love being the agent of chaos in the video-game world. what i want from games - a control as certain and seamless as the means by which i am being controlled - may be impossible, and i am back where i began.
reload.
