Purple Monkey Dishwasher

Sound and Fury

June 26, 2010 at 6:01 am (Uncategorized)

I have this problem as a gamer (yes, I know I have more than one, but shut up).

In addition to the fact that I waste hours upon hours upon hours engaged in an activity whose only net benefit from my perspective is that it’s given me the World’s Most Powerful Thumbs, I will often go back and replay, from start to finish, old games that I particularly enjoyed.  I feel guilty for doing so (unless there’s achievement points involved), but I still do it.

I mention this because I recently, and for the fourth time, picked The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion back up.  My rationale was that there were still a few achievements I hadn’t unlocked, but though I’ve been playing it heavily for over a week, I haven’t yet sought out a single one of them.  As I’m playing through basically everything this game has to offer, I realize that I’m doing it for the pure love of gaming.

Oblivion isn’t a perfect game, and I’m not going to pretend it is.  They apparently had five voice actors for the entire goddamn thing, it’s buggier than anything not made by Obsidian Entertainment (two days ago I spent three hours in a fight with two separate but consecutive quest-breaking bugs – I eventually won), and all the characters are from the same Uncanny Valley where Alan Wake’s wife grew up, but at least Bethesda gives a shit.  While I’m certainly wasting my time while playing Oblivion, I never feel like I’m wasting my time.  But I had, given its flaws, wondered why.  I mean, goddamn it, I’ve played it mostly through four times now, they must’ve been doing something right.  So what was that something? It took me a while to figure it out, but when I did, it made perfect sense.

It’s the story and the writing.  You never hear it as one of the games mentioned for this, but I think Oblivion proves Roger Ebert wrong when he says video games don’t count as an art form.  I mean, ultimately we shouldn’t care what Roger Ebert has to say on the matter since it’s like listening to a janitor discuss nuclear physics, but still, Oblivion’s story and setting are an excellent refutation.  Fallout 3 is even moreso (there’s going to be an article on here some time soon about games that prove Ebert wrong, and Fallout 3 might head the list), but it’s a post-apocalyptic setting, which is an immediate turn-off for me.  Oblivion’s fantasy universe of Tamriel, though, is just so rich and deep, with not just so much existing and well thought-out backstory but so much potential for further growth, that I can’t help but be riveted every time I find myself once again entering that world.

That’s the thing.  Most video games are, like the Faulkner quote, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.  Sure, there’s pretty explosions and lots of shooting/stabbing/bumfights if you’re playing Condemned/etc, but most video games aren’t art; not in any valid sense, anyway.  From the perspective of a story-driven medium, they’re utter, worthless dreck.

The big franchises are the worst offenders.  There are things I enjoy about the Halo and Gears of War games, but both are ultimately about big muscly guys mowing down legions of beings that look different from them, and the story is there only as a vehicle to let you shoot more dudes.  Sometimes games actually do have an interesting story behind them, but it still serves primarily as a vehicle for shooting aliens, getting shuffled to the side for the vast majority of the game (I’m looking right at you, Half-Life series).  JRPG’s like Final Fantasy and Star Ocean don’t have that issue, but their plots appear to have been written by people under the influence of heavy narcotics, and in the rare case that a game is smart enough to stick to what it is and not cock up its own story (like Skies of Arcadia), the story will be usually functional but inherently simple.  The Metal Gear Solid series cares a great deal about its story, but it gets disqualified because I’m pretty sure it was written by an unfathomably long-winded and self-important chimpanzee.  It’s very rare for a game to have a real, complex, and interesting story as the driving force behind it.

Out of those few occasions, there are also times when a game fails so miserably from the standpoint of being a game that it’s all for naught (Vanguard will forever be the poster child for this) – just like a movie with cinematography and camera work so awful that its wonderful script goes completely to waste.  Worse, sometimes when it’s a great story with an actual good game attached to it, half (or more) of the gaming community just outright rejects it.

Take Psychonauts.  Psychonauts is a game about a psychic adolescent who runs away from the circus (nice twist right off the bat) to join a summer camp for psychic kids.  The game leads you to jump through a series of wildly differing minds in order to ultimately save the camp from the sinister machinations of a dark figure intent on using the campers’ psychic abilities for their own ends.  From a story perspective, it was a work of genius.  The art direction may have been the best of any game I’ve ever seen – different enough to be new and interesting without being so avant garde that it hurt to look at.  I could not possibly have been any happier with the story presentation of that game.  I mean, inside the mind of a giant sentient fish you’re basically Godzilla, for fuck’s sake, and inside the mind of one mental patient (there are several) you encounter a world that I can only describe as M.C. Escher meets suburbia meets paranoid conspiracy theorists.  How the hell do you criticize things like that?

Of course, it didn’t sell well, because despite the fact that game critics lavished it with virtually-universal praise, many gamers complained about the control scheme, the graphics, and virtually every other nitpick they could think of.  The control scheme wasn’t perfect, but it wasn’t a disaster; the early Resident Evil games had far more issues, and I don’t recall anyone throwing a shit fit about them at the time.  Too,  I suspect it wasn’t the graphics that bothered people but the fact that the art style wasn’t the same gritty and realistic shit we’ve become accustomed to (so the very thing I loved about it turned some people off).  I mean, I for one thought it was nice to see a game with more colors than brown, gray, and muzzle flash, but maybe I’m the weird one.

That’s ultimately the issue here.  I don’t blame game companies for churning out games with no plot, because frankly, a good portion of the gaming community doesn’t deserve them.  I don’t care if someone wants to ignore the plot of a good game to their own detriment, but I have an issue when assholes like these are the people that ultimately keep Psychonauts 2 and games like it from ever getting made.

Tell you what, gamers who don’t care about story.  If you just want to fire a gun, go to a shooting range and let loose.  You’ll have your power fantasies satisfied, your tiny penis insecurities temporarily mollified, and you won’t shit on the gaming experience for the rest of us.  I think it’s win-win all around.