Extra Lives (12 page)

When I asked Hight about these systemic origins of game design, he added that the governing systems of design have, as time has passed, become less literal and more emotional. “I think,” he said, “the system’s there because too many developers have failed miserably in the chaotic pursuit of something new. They have this fear of failure, so it’s like, ‘Okay, let’s fairly quickly figure out this system.’ We typically call it the ‘game mechanic,’ or the ‘pillars’ of the game. Those are our constraints, and from that we’ll build around it. It’s tens of millions of dollars for people to make a game. You might be the person who wasted twenty million dollars, and this is the end of your career! So you do something that’s based on a proven design or proven gameplay. Why do we have so many first-person military shooters? Because it’s proven those things can sell.”

Video games, I told Hight, are indisputably richer than they have ever been in terms of character and narrative and emotional impact, and anyone who says otherwise has been not playing many games. Unfortunately, they began in a place of minus efficacy
in all of the above, and anyone who says otherwise has probably never done anything but play games. After a kleptomaniacal decade of stealing storytelling cues from Hollywood (many games are pitched to developers in the form of so-called rip-o-matics: spliced-together film scenes that offer a rough representation of what the game’s action will feel and look like), games have only begun to figure out what it is they do and how exactly they do it. Hearteningly, there seems to be some industry awareness that writing has a place in game design: One DICE presentation listed the things the industry needed to do, among them the “deeper involvement of virtual designers (and writers) into the game creative process.” Alack, this banishment of the writer to the parenthetical said perhaps too much about game-industry priorities. As to whether developers could put aside their traditional indifference when it came to writing, I told Hight that I had my doubts. At nearly every DICE presentation, matters of narrative, writing, and story were discussed as though by a robot with a PhD in art semiotics from Brown. Perhaps, though, this was being too hard on the industry, which began as an engineering culture, transformed into a business, and now, like a bright millionaire turning toward poetry, had confident but uncertain aspirations toward art. The part of me that loves video games wants to forgive; the part of me that values art cannot.

Hight agreed that the audience “won’t be forgiving forever,” allowed that the dialogue in many games was “pretty tedious,” and admitted that almost all games’ artificial intelligence mechanisms delivered only half of what that term promised. But what game designers were trying to do was, he reminded me, incredibly difficult and possibly without parallel in the history of entertainment. The “weird artificial setups” of video-game narrative would begin to fade as AI improved, and already he was seeing “more emphasis” put upon writing in games. “But at the same time,” Hight said
finally, “our audience is saying, ‘All right, what else? We’re getting bored.’”

A few nights later, at DICE’s twelfth annual Interactive Achievement Awards, which are the closest equivalent the industry has to the Oscars, several interesting things happened. The first was watching the stars of game design subject themselves to a red-carpet walk, most of them looking as blinkingly baffled as Zelig in the glare of the assembled press corps’s klieg lights. The second was the surprisingly funny performance turned in by the show’s host, Jay Mohr (“There are a lot of horny millionaire men not used to the company of women here. If you’re a woman and you can’t get laid tonight, hang up your vagina and apologize”). The third was the fact that Media Molecule’s
LittleBigPlanet
, a game aimed largely at children, the big selling point of which is its inventive in-game tools that allow gamers to design playable levels and share them with the world, and which has no real narrative to speak of, won nearly every award it was up for, including, to the audible shock of many in the audience, Outstanding Character Performance.

The character in question is a toylike calico gremlin known as Sack Boy. There is no question that Sack Boy is adorable and that
LittleBigPlanet
is a magnificent achievement—weird and funny, with some of the most ingeniously designed levels you will find in any game—but it was also indefatigably familiar in terms of its gameplay, the most interesting feature of which is the application of real-world physics to a world inhabited by wooden giraffes, doll-like banditos, and goofily unscary ghosts.
LittleBigPlanet
’s Mongolian domination of the awards became so absurd that, by show’s end, Alex Evans, Media Molecule’s co-founder, needed a retinue of trophy-shlepping Sherpas to hasten his exit from the stage.

The titles it bested for Console Game of the Year—
Fallout 3, Metal Gear Solid 4, Gears of War 2
, and
Grand Theft Auto IV
—were warheads of thematic grandiosity. The bewitching but more modest
LittleBigPlanet
’s surfeit of awards felt like an intraindustry rebuke of everything games had spent the last decade trying to do and be—and a foreclosure of everything I wanted them to become. The video game, it suddenly felt like, had been searching for a grail that was so hard to find because it did not actually exist.

J
onathan Blow has been described as “the platonic ideal of an indie game developer,” but some consider him to be the industry’s scourge. “I do have criticism that I level at the industry,” he told me, “and if nobody else is going to say it, somebody’s got to.” We met in a diner in San Francisco’s Mission District. Pleasingly, the most intellectually intense figure in video games today looked the part. Not his outfit, certainly—red shirt, gray slacks, blue-striped white socks, and shoes that seemed to be some sort of moccasinized cross trainer. The intensity came from his head, which sat atop shapely trapezius muscles and could have belonged to a Russian sniper: small and pitiless eyes, ghostly eyebrows, and a crew cut that seemed not the usual nuclear response to male-pattern baldness but the result of a grueling wartime imprisonment.

When I brought up his reputation, Blow waved it off. “I do a lot of things that could be seen as only helping the industry,” he said, insistently. One of these was the Experimental Gameplay Workshop he leads every year at the Game Developers Conference. Another was the frequency with which he addressed conferences—and a few of these speeches have become legendary in
terms of both their quality and the sharpness of their criticism. “For some reason,” Blow told me, “in the past year or two, if you go to game conferences, they’re under the impression that writers are good now. But if you look at what they’ve done, it’s just clearly not the case.”

Last year’s GDC Montreal speech, “Conflicts in Game Design,” may be Blow’s finest. To listen to it is to hear the hearts of a thousand zealous game enthusiasts simultaneously implode. In the speech Blow listed the “storytelling techniques we inherently suck at,” among them foreshadowing, justification, body language, and something he called “importance.” By “importance,” Blow meant a specific illusion of importance. One of the modern video game’s most telling weaknesses is its lack of feeling for dramatic proportion—an “importance” gigantism. Why does a medium that frequently takes world-saving as its imperative so often leave one unmoved by having done so? (I know I have saved the world so many times in video games that lately I have felt a kind of resentful Republicanism creep into my game-playing mind:
Can’t these fucking people take care of themselves?)
If a depiction of saving the world again and again, Blow told his audience, “is our core-value proposition, then our core-value proposition kind of sucks. It will make us money, but it will not touch people authentically and deeply.” Other forms of media do not have trouble touching people authentically and deeply, and Blow set out some potential reasons as to why games are so rarely able to do this.

The first possible reason is that game designers are, by and large, unsophisticated about everything
other
than game design. “Any dumb ass can write a story for a game,” Blow told his audience, “and as you have seen from playing our games, a lot of dumb asses do.” A game uniquely superimposes story with what Blow calls “dynamical meaning,” which is to say the meaning that grows
out of exploring a game’s rules and boundaries. While story can provide, in Blow’s words, “interesting mental stuff” such as theme and mood, he argued that this can and should grow out of what makes games unique: play. This has the happy effect of seeming obvious once it has been pointed out, so why has this not happened? Because, Blow argued, “we don’t have a culture of designers paying attention to dynamical meaning.” In other words, game designers are focusing on the wrong provider of meaning, and no one is challenging them to do otherwise.

The second possible reason is that the video-game form is incompatible with traditional concepts of narrative. Stories are about time passing and narrative progression. Games are about challenge, which frustrates the passing of time and impedes narrative progression. The story force wants to go forward and the “friction force” of challenge tries to hold story back. This is the conflict at the heart of the narrative game, one that game designers have thus far imperfectly addressed by making story the reward of a successfully met challenge. According to Blow, this method is “unsound,” because story and challenge “have a structural conflict that’s so deeply ingrained, it’s impossible” to make game stories strong. Can better writing solve this? In Blow’s mind, it cannot. The nature of the medium itself “prevents the stories from being good.”

A good game attracts you with melodrama and hypnotizes you with elegant gameplay. In effect, this turns you into a galley slave who enjoys rowing. For Blow, this approach to game design does not satisfactorily address game interactivity. If story is a stately “presentation of events,” interactivity “directly sabotages…the way that effective stories are told.” According to Blow, games tell us much we do not want or need because they lack the authorial filter of traditional storytelling. Mature mediums deal with such
formal problems as a matter of course. A stage play can use blatantly unconvincing scenery and a film can shoot a night scene implausibly awash with light because both mediums have figured what is formally distracting for an audience and what is not, what an audience needs and what it does not. Games are a long way from that confidence, and as a result their stories have, at best, biplane functionality.

As Blow reminded his audience, many—indeed,
most
—forms of creative expression have no truck with story. (Even forms of creative expression that do include story use it in a way that leaves no doubt that the real art is happening elsewhere, as in, say, opera.) Blow attributes the video game’s umbilical attachment to story to the influence of film. This fatal attraction has caused games to lack what Blow calls “the clarity of consequences.” If a work of art’s conceptual underpinnings are “fake, unimportant, arbitrary, and careless,” it cannot be profound or important or have deep meaning to people. “We have adopted design practices and ways of making games,” Blow told his audience, “that
are
fake, unimportant, arbitrary, and careless.” Blow believes that everyone who plays games can sense these conflicts whether he or she knows it, and they short-circuit every game’s emotional appeal to its audience.

Blow had been on these ideas for several years, but only recently had he been able to find a broad platform for them. Born in 1971, Blow had, by his own admission, worked “nowhere very consistently” for most of his career. After studying computer science and literature at Berkeley—from which he neglected to graduate—he drifted, writing the occasional short story, working the occasional for-hire job in the tech industry, and thinking about video games. The work he did do was almost always as “a consultant and outsider kind of guy” tasked with what he called “hard problems.” None of these gigs lasted more than a few months.

“I have this weird thing,” Blow told me, “where my motivation will just totally flag if I feel like I’m not doing something important.” By twenty-three he had saved up $24,000 (“This is back when $24,000 was real money!”) and with a university friend concocted a grand plan. “He was getting out of grad school, and we were like, ‘Let’s start a game company!’ We didn’t know anything about games. We just started doing it.” The dream lasted for four tractionless years. In the meantime Blow had begun writing a column for
Game Developer
magazine and put himself forward to lead the Experimental Gameplay Workshop at GDC. Throughout this period he started many games but never finished any of them. He also had an office in Oakland, which he shared with some friends, who were busy not finishing any of their games. A few years later, he told me, “I had this really strong idea. As soon as I started doing it I was like, ‘Yeah, this is different from what I was doing. And I see that I can do a lot of things that are different, in different ways.’” For the first time in his professional life, Blow could honestly tell himself, “I care about what I’m doing, and I’m doing things the industry is not going to do if I don’t do them.”