Video Game Revolution gets sidetracked. Wheres the art?
Like many gamers I was excited by the prospect of a high-quality two-part documentary series on gaming such as that from American PBS -
The Video Game Revolution. Not simply because it's a topic of interest but, more intrinsically and intimately as a Gamer, such a doco feels very much like a legitimising process that lifts gaming up from out of the quagmire of low and disposable art dismissal.
Certainly the series cannot be faulted on its production values or its methodical and well structured assembly; not adventurous but certainly effectively competent. But at the end of watching I could not help feel a deep sense of missed opportunity and of a documentary that made the mistake of catering to a very narrow and confined perspective.
The series focused exclusively on the cultural and social aspects of gaming, leapfrogging across the easily accessible and obvious lilly pads - Violence, Virtual social interaction, Virtual Lives, Consumerism and Capitalism in Virtual spaces and the mindset of the gaming generation.
Whilst certainly interesting and arguably worthy areas of study, I none the less find it hard not to see these aspects of gaming as just the same old re-hashing of pseudo-issues we've seen trolled out for other techno-cultural mediums in the past. TV was accused of creating addiction, TV was accused of creating social recluses, TV was even accused evoking virtual lives with fictional places and people. But in time we got over these petty concerns and simply accepted TV as a mainstay creative medium with all the low-brow and high-brow pitfalls that come with any art medium - some good some bad. This evolutionary step in popular perspective (a move that simply dispensed with irrational concerns concerns) allowed the analysis of TV to grow into a more articulate discussion of TV as a medium, as an art and as a cultural discourse.
All the criticisms levelled at gaming have been levelled before at other mediums. Frankly I just don't find these issues all that interesting and indeed, even as a life-long gamer, I find 'interactivity' itself the very least interesting aspect of gaming.
Within fifteen years from now, when we have a more complete generational spectrum with gaming as a core pillar across age groups, no one will bother to discuss the importance of 'interactivity' as it will simply be the norm. Even today virtually every moving-image, screen-based form has some level of interactivity already and anybody under the age of 20 does not know a time when the TV couldn't be controlled, changed and manipulated to a greater or lesser degree, whether it be game console control pad or interactive DVD menu remote. In time we'll all get over the shock of the new that interactivity bring and simply stop talking about it - instead letting our discussions roam to more intrinsic and substantial matters.
Thus I cant help but feel that this doco series 'The Video Game Revolution' will very quickly age and become defunct in significance in a very short space of time. With all its focus on the social-cultural issues of gaming it renders itself strictly adhered to the short-term, blinkered and quickly irrelevant concerns of the now, rather than evoking a larger picture of what gaming represents as a communicative medium for the future.
In simple terms what was missing from the series, and indeed what i think is missing for the overwhelming majority of discourse on gaming across the board, is an examination of Gaming as Art; of gaming as a logically evolved and hybridized form of cinema; of gamings visual aesthetics.
To my mind, so long as we continue to treat gaming as somehow unique or outside of the continuum of cinematic forms, and indeed of broader art-forms; so long as we continue to see gaming only from a position of alarmist cultural commentary rather than simply as an Art, we will continue to delay a deeper understanding of the form, a deeper understanding that will allow gaming to really evolve in its ability to communicate and articulate complex ideas, stories, perspectives and narratives.
Sooner or later we will simply accept that Gaming is just another form of Cinema in an ever growing cannon of cinematic forms. Moreover that we will stop lumping gaming into a broader sphere of on-line social networks simply because they share 3D production technologies. Certainly this was one of the great mistakes of The Video Game Revolution as it confused online, task/goal, narrative driven games such as World of Warcraft with on-line graphical social networks such as Entropia. Whilst we continue to dilute what gaming is into a very large cauldron of anything that is virtual and graphical we will continue to fail to understand the significance of both narrative gaming on one side and on-line social network environments on the other. Certainly they share elements - games can be social networks and social networks can have narratives - but this is much like saying Tanks and Ferraris should be in the same category because they both have wheels.
When we can move on from the simplistic and narrow exercise in alarmist conservatism that abounds most gaming discussion and begin an articulate discourse on Gaming as Art we will know that gaming has really come of age.
Posted at 01:00AM Jul 11, 2007
by Mike Jones in 3D graphics & gaming |
