Borut
I finally got around to playing SCMRPG! this week, after reading a couple very good articles on it (Dugan, Gillen).
The strongest thing about this game is that Ledonne (SCMRPG’s creator) is trying to say so many things that the game inspires so much debate and critique. It fails to really deliver any of its messages because they’re all muddled together, and I disagree with a number of them, but this is infinitely preferable to a game that says nothing.
I also disagree with what Ledonne said about it being either ahead of its time or that there would be no time for a game like this. It’s time is now. And we, as game developers, do owe it – not because it shows people that games can explore deeper meanings. The game’s topic is simply too divisive and off-putting for most people to play it for themselves (myself included, for a while). But it has introduced the meme of games as being capable or serious artistic statement to mainstream media and society at large (to some extent). So it is an early step in a long process many of us are working towards. But on to the criticism!
So there are basically three things I want to talk about, and I’ll just cover the first one for now:
- Choice in SCMRPG – looking at what the game says about why Klebold and Harris did what they did.
- SCMRPG as documentary.
- SCMRPG as satire.
Wired writes on Rockstar’s Road to Ruin, and an astute short bit of commentary on it by Simon Carless on GameSetWatch.
So this has sticking in my craw for a while, and was enflamed by Doug Lowenstein’s comments as he left the ESA… I wrote a first draft of a comment for Gamasutra’s Q&A, but it had so many curse words by the point I had found enough time to edit it, the deadline had passed.
I’m not going to talk about the whole affair, I just wanted to point out this one quote in the Wired article (because everyone else on the internet takes quotes out of context, and it looks like so much fun). From Terry Donovan, “childhood friend” to the Housers and one of the cofounders of Rockstar, speaking about games:
“There isn’t some kind of social responsibility to have a redeeming value.”
Wow. Cluuuuuuue-fucking-less. Responsibility isn’t something that’s assigned to you like your goddamn social security number. It’s something you TAKE.
Ok, so maybe Rockstar doesn’t want to take larger social responsibility to make games with arguably more redeeming social values. Alright, fine – in any medium there’s always a place for pure entertainment sans meaning (far too big a place, unfortunately). Still, you’d figure they’d at least take some responsibility for the games they do make.
Now why would it be advantageous for them to take that sort of responsibility? Well, if they don’t defend their own games, there’s no guarantee anybody else will. Well, ok, that’s not exactly true. Somebody will do it eventually (Doug Lowenstein did), the question is what does that lack of responsibility & delay cost Rockstar? You’d figure they’d realize if they backed up their work a little more, they would probably have to withstand fewer lawsuits, for one.
That’s what makes them the worst sort of cowards – it’s not just that they’re not interested in saying anything of much socially redeeming value with their games, it’s that they don’t even have the balls to stand up for the content they make. They can’t even take responsibility for their own actions enough to say, yeah we made these games, we have a right to make ’em, they don’t make people kill each other, so fuck off. I guess they’re too busy finding thickly accented voice acting talent for GTA IV.
Usually that kind of spineless behavior meets its own just reward in the end, I think, over a long enough time period. But that’s the sad part, that’s just as likely to not happen (even with activist investors). The Housers are, admittedly, masters of their chosen form. They execute on their vision, and they are rewarded for it – so I don’t really see the ruin prophesied by the Wired article. The biggest chance for it to come about is not because they’re media shut-ins & have torrents of lawsuits, that’s always been the case. It’s the final hope that they will do what they’re so good at – pissing people off – to the one group they can’t afford to do it to, their fans.
In my last post I mentioned the notion (also mentioned by Will Wright at SxSW) of guilt as a complex emotion games can convey better than other media. I’ve always been surprised that it never seems to come up in the ol’ “games can’t have the emotional impact of film so they shouldn’t bother with being anything other fun, and pass me the wii-mote” discussion.
My own personal anecdote of realizing the power of this was Knights of the Old Republic.
So I had been traipsing through the game, enjoying the story (trying to be a neutral bounty hunter type, which of course was a pain in the ass given the good vs evil force meter). But edging on the side of good, more often that not. So I had characters in my party that I got along with and liked, specifically the Twilek girl Mission Vao, and her Wookie pal.
Periodically, whenever it seemed like I was presented with a key good vs evil branching point, I’d save, and try out both. Many times Bioware just did an awesome job of making me think I had a choice when they usually routed me to the same point (they are masters of this illusion). But towards the end (spoiler alert), you finally choose to be good or bad, and if you’re bad, you can be very bad. I Force-Dominated the Wookie into killing the girl who saved his life, who he was life bonded too. Man, I felt dirty. I just got my friend, to go kill his very best friend, just to see if he’d do it. I mean shut-the-console-off-immediately-because-I-can’t-take-being-reminded-of-my-own-capacity-for-evil dirty (which reminds me of this book, The Lucifer Effect, I should write about, but I digress… where was I? Oh yeah, dirty!).
It’s more than that though. Games can much more easily convey any complex, conflicted, emotion – feeling two or more opposing ways about any particular subject. Because of power of the dilemma – put a player in a situation where they want both of two outcomes (or neither), and they will immediately feel conflicted. Tada! Games with emotional impact.
Now, film on the other hand, you really only see a very small set of movies that convey those sort of emotions (most recent in my mind are some of the movies of Wong Kar Wai – dammit if you don’t want those romances to always work out, but you know they never can and it would only hurt the people involved to try… sigh). Not only are the movies that successfully explore those themes rare, they’re usually relegated to art-house cinemas as being too complex for the average viewer.
But exploring stories with conflicted emotions in games is much more appealing, I’d argue – because displaying that on the movie screen is only ever going to be so compelling. The emotional distance between you, the viewer, and the character is particularly hard to cross for empathy in that case. I suspect that most people typically only see one side of the character’s dilemma, and can’t connect because they don’t understand why he/she acts conflicted or makes the other choice. By putting you directly in the situation and it becomes more compelling simply because it’s easier for a person to understand the complex emotions behind the moment, because it’s happening to them.
Now what in god’s name could we, society at large, be doing that could be framed in a personal context to make a player realize guilt over a what was actually a much larger social issue? Noooooo, nothing would fit that description.
Now, before I start, let me say Will Wright is a really smart guy. Made (and will continue to make) lots of popular, and good, games. I even ostensibly work for the same company he does (although we are many, many degrees separated).
But who the fuck does he think he is coming along taking a shit in my proverbial fucking cereal?
Let me explain – at the South-by-Southwest Festival this year, Wright gave a talk that covered storytelling in games. I can’t even link to proper coverage of it, I can only link to coverage of the coverage. But he goes on about how story in games is flawed, player stories (like the experience one has playing the Sims, or soon, Spore) are much more compelling. How all the traditional stories in games fall flat and the future is, basically, his games. Oh, and the cereal shitting thing is a Kevin Smith reference.
Um, door number 3 please? For starters, looking at storytelling in games at this point and saying, because they suck, a game can’t have use any “traditional” storytelling methods is pretty flawed logic (Raph Koster, this means you too).
There’s sooooo much to be explored in the middle, taking authored storylines and weaving them around players, that to dismiss it simply because you don’t think the mission structure in Grand Theft Auto stacks up… Craziness! Baby, bathwater, you get the idea.
So, ok, he’s entitled to his opinion, and his talent and success also entitle him to more power of broadcasting that opinion. But what sort of ticks me off, is that there are young potential game developers out there now, maybe they’re studying in a game design program, and they think, well gee, Will Wright said stories in game suck, I’m not gonna explore anything having to do with stories in games because he’s smart so obviously he’s (w)right.
Fuck that! Sigh.
He is right about one thing though, an emotion games can convey unlike any other medium is guilt. But we’ll leave that for another time.
I was watching the behind the scenes dvd for God of War 2 (yeah, I’m a total dork when it comes to those things, I always get the collectors edition game if it has interviews with the developers, despite our reputation for not being as photogenic as creators in other entertainment industries).
In it Cory Barlog, director of the game, describes his postion as Game Director at SCEA, and it sounds quite a bit better than this. Basically, he describes it as working with every single person on the team to make sure their work meets the vision for the product and meets the level of quality the he wants to achieve.
Now, some game development studios have this explicit position, others just have people in various roles on the team trying to do the same thing. But it does seem a bit more mature to explicit define one person as having this role.
Or, you could, like EA, have “producers” direct and “directors” produce. We wouldn’t want to use consistent language or anything. I mean, filmmakers have been creatively collaborating in large groups for a century, what-in-god’s-fucking-name could we learn from them?
It does seem very unlike an American studio though, I sort wonder just how much of Sony’s Japanese heritage affects the Santa Monica studio – developer’s in the east seem much more ready to accept the notion of the “director”. Kojima, Itagaki, Mizuguchi, Suzuki, Suda51, Ueda, Mikami, Kamiya, Sakaguchi, Naka, and of course, Miyamoto. And more – that’s off the top of my head. I would have a much harder time naming western developers who would consider themselves “directors”.