by Tom Bissell
“As for video games,” I wrote, “very few people over the age of forty would recognize them as even a lower form of art. I am always wavering as to where I would locate video games along art’s fairly forgiving sliding scale.” Video games are obviously and manifestly a form of popular art, and every form of art, popular or otherwise, has its ghettos, from the crack houses along Michael Bay Avenue to the tubercular prostitutes coughing at the corner of Steele and Patterson. The video game is the youngest and, increasingly, most dominant popular art form of our time. To study the origins of any popular new medium is to become an archaeologist of skeptical opprobrium. It seems to me that anyone passionate about video games has better things to do than walk chin-first into sucker-punch arguments about whether they qualify as art. Those who do not believe video games are or ever will be art deserve nothing more goading or indulgent than a smile.
I think that was what I was trying to say. But I was then and am now routinely torn about whether video games are a worthy way to spend my time and often ask myself why I like them as much as I do, especially when, very often, I hate them. Sometimes I think I hate them because of how purely they bring me back to childhood, when I could only imagine what I would do if I were single-handedly fighting off an alien army or driving down the street in a very fast car while the police try to shoot out my tires or told that I was the ancestral inheritor of some primeval sword and my destiny was to rid the realm of evil. These are very intriguing scenarios if you are twelve years old. They are far less intriguing if you are thirty-five and have a career, friends, a relationship, or children. The problem, however, at least for me, is that they are no less fun. I like fighting aliens and I like driving fast cars. Tell me the secret sword is just over the mountain and I will light off into goblin-haunted territory to claim it. For me, video games often restore an unearned, vaguely loathsome form of innocence—an innocence derived of not knowing anything. For this and all sorts of other complicated historical reasons—starting with the fact that they began as toys directly marketed to children—video games crash any cocktail-party rationale you attempt to formulate as to why, exactly, you love them. More than any other form of entertainment, video games tend to divide rooms into Us and Them. We are, in effect, admitting that we like to spend our time shooting monsters, and They are, not unreasonably, failing to find the value in that.
I wrote in my essay that art is “obligated to address questions allergic to mere entertainment….In my humble estimation, no video game has yet crossed the Rubicon from entertainment to true art.” Here I was trying to say that what distinguishes one work of art from another is primarily intelligence, which is as multivalent as art itself. Artistic or creative intelligence can express itself formally, stylistically, emotionally, thematically, morally, or any number of ways. Works of art we call masterpieces typically run the table on the many forms artistic intelligence can take: They are comprehensively intelligent. This kind of intelligence is most frequently apparent in great works of art created by individuals. Unity of artistic effect is something human beings have learned to respond to, and for obvious reasons this is best achieved by individual artists. Many games—which are, to be sure, corporate entertainments created by dozens of people with a strong expectation of making a lot of money—have more formal and stylistic intelligence than they know what to do with and not even trace amounts of thematic, emotional, or moral intelligence. One could argue that these games succeed as works of art in some ways and either fail or do not attempt to succeed in others. “True” art makes the attempt to succeed in every way available to it. At least, I think so.
My ambivalence goes much deeper, though. A few years ago I was asked by a magazine for my year-end roundup of interesting aesthetic experiences, among which I included 2K Boston’s peerless first-person shooter BioShock, which, I wrote, “I would hesitate to call…a legitimate work of art,” even though “its engrossing and intelligent story line made it the first game to absorb me without also embarrassing me for being so absorbed.” Seeing that halfhearted encomium in print, with my name attached to it, about a game I adored, obsessed over, and thought about for weeks drove home the plunger of a fresh syringe of shame. Was I apologizing to some imaginary cultural arbiter for finding value in a form of creative expression whose considerable deficits I recognize but which I nevertheless believe is important? Or is this evidence of an authentic scruple? On one hand, I love BioShock, which is frequently saluted as one of the first games to tackle what might be considered intellectual subject matter—namely, a gameworld exploration of the social consequences inherent within Ayn Rand’s Objectivism (long story). On the other hand, what passes for intellectual subject matter in a video game is still far from intellectually compelling, at least to me, and I know I was not imagining the feeling of slipping, hourglass loss I experienced when I played BioShock ten hours a day for three days straight. If I really wanted to explore the implications and consequences of Objectivism, there were better, more sophisticated places to look, even if few of them would be as much fun (though getting shot in the knee would be more fun than rereading Atlas Shrugged). When I think about games, here is where I bottom out. Is it okay that they are mostly fun? Am I a philistine or simply a coward? Are games the problem, or am I?
I came to this once-embarrassed, formerly furtive love of games honestly. Because the majority of the games I have enjoyed most as an adult tell stories, I was always comparing those stories with the novels and films I admire. Naturally, I found (and find) most video-game stories wanting. But this may be a flagrant category mistake. For one thing, no one is sure what purpose “story” actually serves in video games. Games with any kind of narrative structure usually employ two kinds of storytelling. One is the framed narrative of the game itself, set in the fictional “present” and traditionally doled out in what are called cut scenes or cinematics, which in most cases take control away from the gamer, who is forced to watch the scene unfold. The other, which some game designers and theoreticians refer to as the “ludonarrative,” is unscripted and gamer-determined—the “fun” portions of the “played” game—and usually amounts to some frenetic reconception of getting from point A to point B. The differences between the framed narrative and the ludonarrative are what make story in games so unmanageable: One is fixed, the other is fluid, and yet they are intended, however notionally, to work together. Their historical inability to do so may be best described as congressional.
An example of such narrative cross-purpose can be found in Infinity Ward’s first-person shooter Call of Duty 4. In one memorable sequence, moving forward the framed narrative requires you and a computer-controlled partner to crawl and sneak your way through the irradiated farmlands of Chernobyl in order to assassinate an arms dealer. The ludonarrative, meanwhile, is the actual (and, as it happens, pretty thrilling) process of getting there. If you choose to be a dick and frag your partner, it has only ludonarrative consequences. At worst, you have to start the mission over. No matter what you do, the framed narrative does not change: You and he need to get there together. Call of Duty 4 is a game with little to no ambition to change the emotional outlook of anyone who plays it. It is a war-porn story of good and evil. All the same, the chasm between its framed narrative and ludonarrative calls attention to the artificiality of both. While the former attempts to be narratively meaningful, the latter is concerned only with being exciting. The former grants the player no agency and thus has no emotional resonance because the latter, with its illusion of agency, does nothing to reinforce what that resonance might be, other than that shooting your friend in the head is bad news. Believing in the game’s fiction often becomes as difficult as obeying orders issued by a world-class hypocrite. For a game of Call of Duty 4’s simplistic themes, this is a problem of glancing consequence. For games of greater ambition, however, the problem becomes exponentially larger. (Call of Duty 4 does offer a couple of formally compelling experiences. One is that it kills off the character you assume you will control
for the duration in a mid-game helicopter crash, but not before allowing you to take a few disoriented steps from the wreckage—altogether an eerie sequence. Another is the game’s opening, which grants the gamer the helpless first-person POV of a man being driven, it becomes increasingly evident, to his execution. This sequence ends with the gamer being shot, jarringly, in the face.)
Several games have lately been experimenting with allowing decisions made during the ludonarrative to alter the framed narrative, most notably in Fallout 3 and Lionhead’s Fable II, but this is mainly expressed in how you are perceived by other characters. Once a game comes along that figures out a way around the technical challenges of allowing a large number of ludonarrative decisions to have framed-narrative-altering consequences—none of which challenges I understand but whose existence several game designers sighingly confirmed for me—an altogether new form of storytelling might be born: stories that, with your help, create themselves. There is, of course, another word for stories that, with your help, create themselves. That word is life. So would this even be a good thing?
I am not so sure. When I am being entertained, I am also being manipulated. I am allowing myself to be manipulated. I am, in other words, surrendering. When I watch television, one of our less exalted forms of popular entertainment, I am surrendering to the inevitability of commercials amid bite-sized narrative blocks. When I watch a film, the most imperial form of popular entertainment—particularly when experienced in a proper movie theater—I am surrendering most humiliatingly, for the film begins at a time I cannot control, has nothing to sell me that I have not already purchased, and goes on whether or not I happen to be in my seat. When I read a novel I am not only surrendering; I am allowing my mind to be occupied by a colonizer of uncertain intent. 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 any other form 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.
Yes, as difficult as it sometimes is to believe, games have authors, however diminutive an aura he or she (or, frequently, they) might exude. What often strikes me whenever I am playing a game is how glad I am of that hovering authorial presence. Although I enjoy the freedom of games, I also appreciate the remindful crack of the narrative whip—to seek entertainment is to seek that whip—and the mixture of the two is what makes games such a seductive, appealingly dyadic form of entertainment. A video game whose outcomeless narrative is wholly determined by my actions—as in, say, World of Warcraft, which is less a video game than 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 to where I began. Reload.
The purpose story serves in video games is complicated, then. Less complicated is how many gamers view story. For many gamers (and, by all evidence, game designers), story is largely a matter of accumulation. The more explanation there is, the thought appears to go, the more story has been generated. This would be a profound misunderstanding of story for any form of narrative art, but it has hobbled the otherwise high creative achievement of any number of games. Frequently in work with any degree of genre loyalty—this would include the vast majority of video games—the more explicit the story becomes, the more silly it will suddenly seem. (Let us call this the Midi-chlorian Error.) The best science fiction is usually densely realistic in quotidian detail but evocatively vague about the bigger questions. Tolkien is all but ruined for me whenever I make the mistake of perusing the Anglo-Saxon Talmudisms of his various appendices: “Among the Eldar the Alphabet of Daeron did not develop true cursive forms”—kill me, please, now—“since for writing the Elves adopted the Fëanorian letters.” As for horror films, the moment I learned Freddy Krueger was “the bastard son of a thousand maniacs” was also the final moment I could envision him without spontaneously laughing. The impulse to explain is the Achilles’ heel of all genre work, and the most sophisticated artists within every genre know better than to expose their worlds to the sharp knife of intellection.
A good example of a game that does not make that mistake is Valve’s cooperative first-person shooter Left 4 Dead, which offers yet another vision of zombie apocalypse. Unlike the Resident Evil series, which goes to great narrative pains to explain what is happening and why (culminating in one of the most ridiculous moments in video-game history, when the hero of Resident Evil 4 discovers an enemy document helpfully titled OUR PLAN), Left 4 Dead abandons every rational pretext and drops you and three other characters into the middle of undead anarchy. Almost nothing is explained; the little characterization there is comes in tantalizing dribs; and all that is expected is survival, which is possible only by constantly working together with your fellow gamers: covering them while they reload, helping them up when they are knocked down, and saving them when they are trapped in the eye of a zombie hurricane. Left 4 Dead is one of the most well-designed and explosively entertaining games ever made. While its purpose is incontinent terror, its point is that teamwork is, by definition, a matter of compulsion, not choice. Left 4 Dead’s designer, Michael Booth, had the maturity to grasp the power that narrative minimalism would provide his game. The speedy and acrobatic zombies of Left 4 Dead have no plan more refined than kicking you to death and sucking the marrow from your femur. As a scenario, it is as ridiculous as any forged by the Vulcans of video-game conceit, and yet, from start to finish, Left 4 Dead is as freefallingly unfamiliar and viscerally convincing as the worst dream you have ever had.
Capturing what playing Left 4 Dead feels like is not easy. But set Left 4 Dead to its highest difficulty level, recruit three of its best players you can find, push your way through one of the game’s four scenarios, and make no mistake: What will go down will be so emotionally grueling, it will feel as though you have spent an hour playing something like full-contact psychic football. The end of the game, however it turns out, will feel epic to no one who did not take part in it, but those who did take part will feel as though they have marched, together, through a gauntlet of the damned.
The game’s refusal to explore the who, what, why, or how of its zombie citizenry is emblematic of the unusually austere
approach to narrative in many Valve games, which the company may not have invented but has certainly come close to perfecting. The four controllable characters in Left 4 Dead are all common video-game types: the girl, the black guy, the biker, the elderly Vietnam vet. They are not, however, blank canvases. (I play as—in order of preference—the girl, the black guy, and the biker. I absolutely refuse to play as the Vietnam vet. For some reason I absolutely hate the guy. Tactics that failed in the jungles and swamps of the Mekong Delta have no place against an army of the undead.) The object of the game is to fight your way through scenarios that are themselves divided into five stages, all of which, but for the scenarios’ finales, conclude with the players’ slamming shut a safe house’s thick red metal door. The problem, of course, is that between these safe houses are devastated locales (a high-rise hospital, a train yard, an airport, a traffic tunnel, among others) filled with literally thousands of zombies looking to attack you—and even, sometimes, one another. (You want a weird video-game experience? Creep around a corner in the sewers adjacent to the hospital, say, and you might find, to your fascinated horror, a couple of unawares zombies casually beating each other up.) These zombies attack singly or in groups or in what the game calls “the horde.” Standing in the middle of a darkened city street while a horde of zombies pours up out of a subway station and clamors over and around parked cars to get to you is about as unnerving as video games get. And these are just the rank-and-file zombies. The far more perilous “special infected” is where Left 4 Dead begins to glitter.
These special infected come in five nightmare flavors: the Hunter (a hoodied zombie who pounces upon and then tears into his prey, rendering the pouncee helpless until a friend comes along to shoot or push the Hunter off); the Smoker (a coughing, shambolic, elastically tongued zombie who operates much like a sniper, extending his tongue to pluck survivors from the pack); the Boomer (an obese and suppurating slob zombie who is as fragile and explosive as a Pinto but whose vomit and bile attract the dreaded horde, and whose vomit, on top of that, is blinding, so that during a well-coordinated attack you cannot see the Hunter tearing to pieces your screaming friend right in front of you); the Tank (as advertised, a steroidally distended zombie as tough as an armored car, but who mercifully appears only a few times a game); and, finally, the Witch (a crying lost-soul zombie who seems the very picture of helplessness, until she is startled by a flashlight or loud noise, upon which she uses her razored manicure to instantly kill the survivor who startled her, and whom you must try to sneak past, and who is as upsetting and inspired a video-game nemesis as any). What is so brilliant about these special infected is the way they tap into distinct types of emotional unease. For the Hunter it is shock and for the Smoker helplessness. For the Boomer it is panic and for the Tank flight. For the Witch it is a strange combination of alarm and paranoia and blame. These emotions, aroused as they are alongside other, living gamers, are part of what makes a game with no traditional narrative to speak of such a dynamically fertile experience to look back on. Left 4 Dead creates, within a structure that is formally storyless but highly controlled, a game that feels to those playing it as harrowingly and expertly designed as a first-rate horror film.