Thursday, January 17, 2008

Never Read Your Old Posts

Navel gazing with Google Analytics, and I saw that someone had linked to the first (and so far only) part of my Kara guide a few days ago (still far and away my post popular post, once again proving that people don't give a crap about you, they just want useful information dammit). Clicked through to the page by instinct more than anything else and began skimming what I read, and let me say I really really need to stop posting from work where I'm less likely to run things through a spelling/grammer checker. Because good lord is some of that disgusting English.

Games as Art

So around New Year's, Slate had one of their year end wrap up discussions on video games. They usually run these sorts of things, with 3-5 critics having a short posted conversation on their thoughts on the years offerings on music and movies, so I wasn't deeply surprised to see one of games this year.

I'm not a huge Slate fan, I read it fitfully these days mostly out of habit started by a friend from college who used to write the Sunday edition of their today's papers feature. And this set of articles is full of the out of touch attempts to explain 'hip' topics to the unwashed masses and getting most of it wrong that so often annoys me about the magazine/site/thing.

But it brought up something that I've wanted to articulate for a while. The three critics they gotten together has the same 'Games as Art', 'There should be better stories', 'Why should things be hard when this is entertainment' bumpf that seems to soak out of the officially magazine/newspaper critics so often.

And don't get me wrong, I love a good story, and more artistry in games is great. Lord knows I didn't play through that many Final Fantasy games for the gameplay. And I already know that I'll plunk down cash for any game Ragnar Tornquist wants to claim is a sequel because of the artistry I know he and his team are capable of. And lastly I'm haven't been above cheating in order to see the end of a game for a very very long time (i.e. since the internet came around to make it possible). If a game is aiming for that sort of thing, then by all means, the gameplay, and the puzzles, and everything else shouldn't be getting in the way of that goal.

But, invevitably, while making these sorts of points critics feel the need to take a swing as some of the more well known examples of games where the story takes a backseat to other concerns. And here's where there seems to be a disconnect between the officially sanctioned critics (who in fairness, are probably only spending a limited amount of time with many games), and those of us who play this stuff on a more...extensive level. Which is probably why a, say, Tycho or Yahtzee review, reads much much differently than anything written for a print mag.

My point, and I'm getting to it, is that there's different kinds of entertainment, and people expect and demand different things from them. Video games superficially look a lot like movies and tv, so I guess I understand the obvious instinct to examine them within the same framework we used on those mediums (which in turn are mostly carried over wholesale from frameworks used for literature and static visual art like painting/drawing/sculpting). However, the interactive nature of games, and now not just with the code, but as a mode of communication, with other people as well, makes them a different kind of beast. It makes them akin, in some ways, to the many other recreational persuits people pursue, watching sports, personal trials, clubs, etc.

In many ways that's how I see WoW. It's not a game as I've thought of them in the past. I don't play to see what dialogue Illidan has when you down him. It's not art for me, and in many ways, it's not even a game to win or lose, but it's still entertainment. For me, and I suspect for many others with guilds, WoW is a club. It's a social fixture, it's a communal challenge. It pushes a lot of the same buttons for me the rowing club I belonged to in college.

And with that frame of mind, hearing critics poo-poo WoW for not living up to artistic standards, or for being a time sink, feels kind of like an art critic berating you for joining a soccer team because the jerseys are ugly and games are too long.