Video Gaming: Have we seen it all?

Because for many years, web utopians have been pointing to experiments involving these off the scale neural activity of computer games players as a kind of justification for the idea that the web will breed a race of super geniuses, which has been hard to cop because … you meet computer games players and they’re proverbially dull, inarticulate, social misfits.

—Gideon Haigh, commenting while interviewing Nicholas Carr, author of The Shallows, at the Wheeler Centre; Melbourne, in September 2010

There is a certain ‘things weren’t like this in my day’ quality to the comment above, an echo of those ‘that’s not proper music’ or ‘young people today don’t know they’re born’ sentiments that draw an easy laugh and in this case conjure up the stereotype of game players as nerdy ne’er-do-wells entranced by a flickering screen in a darkened bedroom. The fact that it’s a stereotype should make it easy to dismiss, but to do so would be to ignore the insights that even stereotypes like this can give us into the rapid evolution of games as an economic, cultural and artistic force, how the technology has influenced creators, and what might be in store for a generation born into a world where video games have always existed—a generation just a little behind mine.

I was born in 1977—the year Star Wars was released—and I grew up with video games. I remember a time when they didn’t exist for me. I fought with my parents about pursuing games as a career, but along with books, films, music and magazines, video games defined my sense of cultural belonging, my formative places, experiences and relationships. I remember coming home from school at lunchtime to load up a game from a tape and race around a pirate-filled treasure island. I remember on holiday trying to stretch my daily allowance for as long as I could in the local arcades. I remember eight friends huddled in front of a tiny screen, passing the controller around in an easygoing tournament of Street Fighter. I remember a Star Wars game etched out in glowing green lines and the crackly voice of Alec Guinness telling me to trust the force as I blasted apart TIE Fighters.

Today, video games have become a multibillion-dollar entertainment industry. The 2009 Interactive Australia study undertaken by Bond University revealed that 68 per cent of Australians play video games, that their average age is thirty, and that 46 per cent of them are women. They are now a significant economic and cultural influence and living inside the change it can be hard to register how quickly they have emerged. My first gaming memory is of an old Pong game plugged into a black and white television, both created in the late 1970s. Today I have a massive screen and games that re-create entire worlds and experiences that would have been unthinkable even five years ago. A single generation is all that separates Pong from the PlayStation 3, so it should be no surprise that a slightly older audience might look at the superficial aspects of video games rather than what might be hidden beneath the surface.

In that generation we’ve seen three different versions of the PlayStation, two versions of the Xbox, at least six consoles from Nintendo and entire companies such as Commodore and Atari close down in the face of the personal computer. We’ve seen a digital Wild West played out in front of screens with joysticks and controllers gripped in feverish hands; we’ve seen creators establish the conventions and rules of a new games literacy; we’ve seen developers shamelessly copy and twist games to make something new; we’ve seen entire genres form and disappear; and we’ve seen games creators find new mechanics and new ways to do what had seemed impossible the year before, creating something exciting and wonderful for a slightly awkward kid to lose themselves in.

But that same slightly awkward kid—and those around him—grew up to be slightly less awkward adults whose tastes formed alongside the failed experiments and clear successes of a medium still finding its feet. That kid learned that one of the dangers of growing older is that those tastes will not be shared by everyone.

It may have been weeks, it may have been days. All I know is that the world is in danger and I am the only one who can stop it. The war is brewing, attacks are multiplying, and we have already seen the sordid murder of our king and blame for that crime placed squarely on my shoulders. In escaping, I have been inducted into a mystical order known as the Grey Wardens and sent to unite the various factions across the world into an army that can turn back the blight and bring peace to Ferelden. This quest has taken me everywhere, bringing together the Dalish elves, the Circle of Magi, and the dwarves of Orzammar, convincing them all to join me in the fight.

My tastes have always been for games with strong stories and rich fictional worlds to give context to my actions. I played Star Wars (released in 1983) in that arcade because of my connection to the film that came out the year I was born. I played adventure games such as The Hobbit (1982) and Monkey Island (1990) because they told complex stories that I felt I was part of. I was deeply influenced by a game called Elite (1984), which gave me a spaceship and set me loose in an open-ended universe where I was free to be a pirate or a trader or a mercenary, and in which I felt that I was crafting my own story and experiences. With this background, Dragon Age (2009) should have been a safe bet for me. I had lost long days and weeks to some of the creator’s other games and was intrigued by Dragon Age’s complex story, realistic characters, action, adventure, romance and sex.

My boredom began only a few hours into my life in the game’s fictional land, Ferelden. Despite attempts by the game to reimagine familiar fantasy tropes of kings, elves and dwarves, I felt as though I could see through the world and the characters to the familiar skeleton of the story, leaving little as a surprise. Like clockwork, every turn revealed a fight, every character I encountered asked me to help them out, every completed task led to another, then yet another, leaving me feeling as though I had climbed inside a family of Russian dolls until, cramped and confused, I stopped caring about what was going on. Shouldn’t these characters feel at least some sense of urgency? Hadn’t news of the war found its way to them? Would they really rather indulge in petty bickering until I came along to either placate them with words or knock their heads together? They weren’t fiddling while Rome burned; they were waiting for me to find their fiddle and teach them how to play before asking me to light the match that would set Rome burning.

My initial reaction was that I’d seen all of this before. It was well executed, but too familiar for me to properly lose myself. Still, I pushed through that, hoping for something to engage with, convincing myself that, considering all the awards and accolades this game had received, there must be something beyond the tedium. But it never appeared. I began to wonder if this was my road-to-Damascus moment, not only about this game, but about games in general. Was this the end of my stunted adolescence? Or was it simply that over the years I’d seen too many games similar to Dragon Age and the familiarity had bred a sort of malaise?

So I pushed on with Dragon Age, still bored but continuing to play just in case. And eventually I stumbled across something quite unexpected. After a particularly tedious request to find some lost snuffling, pig-like animals, wandering around the darkened pits, wondering why I was doing it, I began to consider the identity I had adopted in the game. I was an outcast trying to bring together scattered and disparate factions, convincing them through favours and politics. Then it hit me: such a life would be tedium punctuated by the occasional sword fight, wouldn’t it? Wasn’t this politics in a nutshell?

I put my controller down and wondered whether the creators of Dragon Age were doing something avant-garde by putting me in the shoes of a man who refused to give up even in the face of overwhelming apathy. What if boredom was the point?

It’s an idea that flies in the face of gaming orthodoxy. Games are trivialities, trifles, diversions. It’s right there in the name: they are games and games shouldn’t elicit boredom. They should engage us in action and competition, in winning and losing, in agency and achievement, not in questioning our own behaviour. This orthodoxy is clearly present in the early days of gaming arcades, where the goal was to keep players shovelling fistfuls of coins into the machines. To do that, they had to give rewards, goals, audio-visual feedback, a limited number of lives, a clear and focused challenge, and high-score tables, all with the promise of something just over the hill if the player would just keep playing.

But boredom framed correctly can provide a useful counterpoint to action. It can be a tool to be wielded rather than something to avoid. This idea might jar with those who have firm views of what games are and forever will be, but for those who are now thinking critically about games and play and their place in culture, art and education, perhaps boredom could represent the first step towards creating experiences that deal with more than just achievement or mastery and agency, experiences that reflect adult concerns and teach us something about the world and our place in it.

I have returned to Rapture, the underwater city built by the industrialist Andrew Ryan to escape what he saw as the corruption of the American ideal. It has changed since my last visit. Then, I was searching for my parents, but instead I found a lie built shakily on shrugging shoulders. Now I am here, changed, searching for my Little Sister, a girl I have been bonded to through the genetic tweaking and amplification of my paternal instincts. My path to her takes me through memories of my old life while recriminations of the new ruler of the city, Sofia Lamb, ring through the empty hallways, houses and businesses. I am a single-minded Big Daddy bound to a Little Sister, two people chemically altered but growing beyond those limitations in ways neither of us could have predicted.

On the surface, BioShock (2007) and BioShock 2 (2010) are exactly the sorts of games that critics of the medium like to point to. They are both first-person shooters in which you see through the protagonist’s eyes and they are both violent; they both feature drug use; and they both feature child-like characters that the player can either heal or harvest.

Where BioShock and its sequel differ from most of that genre is in their philosophical underpinnings. Both have as their thematic core the relationships between parents and children but they take very different approaches, showing what could happen if they were taken to their natural conclusions. The first game is built on a version of Ayn Rand’s objectivist philosophy, creating a world in which the city’s founder Andrew Ryan constantly asserts over radio announcements and audio diaries that choice is the only thing that matters and that the men who choose are the ones who rule the world. The game exploits this conceit expertly, giving players choices about how to explore and tackle puzzles or enemies, before breaking the fourth wall and revealing that they have been hypnotically implanted with the command to follow any order that begins with the innocuous but omnipresent phrase ‘would you kindly’. Suddenly, both player and avatar realise they are much less than human. They have only ever done what they’ve been told to do. They are a slave to a system much bigger than themselves.

BioShock illustrates that one of the unique strengths of video games as a medium is the way they position you to adopt a specific identity through the meshing of the actions you can perform and the fiction around that. In giving me freedom to make my own choices, BioShock made me feel as if this identity belonged to me, drawing me in before pulling the rug out from under me. My suspension of disbelief was exactly what the game needed to achieve its emotional effect.

BioShock 2 seemed deeply aware of the first game’s emotional manipulation and played its audience’s expectations to its advantage, while at the same time exploring a wider creative palette than video games are given credit for, even going so far as to include not quite boredom but certainly a strong sense of familiarity as part of its experience.

BioShock 2 turns away from the importance of the individual and objectivist philosophy and instead situates the game’s action in a contrasting collectivist philosophy that informs the more personal conflict of the game’s story. It casts the player in the role of one of the significant enemies from the first game: a Big Daddy, one of the hulking protectors bound by genetic manipulation to the city’s scavenging Little Sisters.

Early on I felt as though I’d seen a lot of the tricks the game had to offer. The actions I could take were only a slight extension of the original. The puzzles I encountered were mere variations, the city’s visual design the same, and the texture and aesthetics deeply familiar to me. This sense of having seen so much of the game already, coupled with the constant harassment and taunts from the game’s new antagonist, Sofia Lamb, prompted the questions in me: Why shouldn’t I give up? Why shouldn’t I just stop playing?

I didn’t, both because I hoped the game would eventually reach the heights of the first game and because I wanted to prove my fictional antagonist wrong.

At key moments in the game I was given the choice of killing specific characters. I barely considered it, determined as I was to rail against Sofia’s opposition. I knew that I would be rewarded somehow for my decisions. Sure enough when I finally found my goal, my Little Sister Eleanor Lamb, who was Sofia’s daughter, I discovered she had been watching, learning, figuring out from me how to be human. She had seen me show compassion for those around me and wanted to do the same. At that moment, I found my feelings of the past few hours reframed not as a loss of agency but as an affirmation of it.

Unlike in Dragon Age, the drudgery leading up to this moment felt part of the game’s design, put there to provide context to the game’s cathartic climax and make the relief and pride in my own decisions feel important beyond the confines of the screen.

BioShock and its sequel succeed as well as they do because they understand their audience, grown from awkward children seeking visceral thrills into adults seeking something more. They are a conversation about the state of the medium, their creators, and about expectations formed over the years that they work to undo. They aren’t perfect, but they are games with a unique perspective and voice.

Everything is dark. Shafts of watery light spill down through clouds too high for me to see. It all makes some sort of clockwork sense, but I can’t see enough to figure out how it fits together. Spike-legged insects strike out at me when I draw near. Men throw spears then scurry away. Spikes and traps and spinning saws pierce and cut and slice me as punishment for every mistake, but I am reborn in a cycle of trial and error with nothing to do but push on through puzzles and traps, through endless death and rebirth, trapped in this twilight limbo, searching for my stolen sister.

As gaming arcades lost their dominance and video games moved into the home, they initially carried that same model of play with them. This changed as the technology sitting beneath your TV began to deliver better graphics and better sound than those old games in smoky rooms with sticky carpets. But the technology was only part of the change. As video games no longer needed to keep you paying to play or appeal with flashy graphics or showy controls, developers discovered that games could be smaller, subtler, more experimental while still referencing the core grammar laid down by early gaming experiments.

Limbo (2010) is one such game. It is artistic, stylish and lyrical, contrasting familiar actions with unique aesthetics. At first glance it is a platform game like Super Mario (1985) but behind that facade is a complex puzzle game with a deadly mix of switches, moving platforms, spinning blades and snapping bear traps all working together to trap the player in the familiar video game trope of endlessly dying and trying again. Visually, the game is presented like a shadow play, all hard blacks and bursts of light seen through a gauzy, flickering haze, and it’s in this fusion of light and dark, death and rebirth, trial and error, all against the backdrop of a world that almost makes sense yet doesn’t quite fit together properly, that communicates wordlessly the grey space of the titular limbo.

But for those whose grammar was defined by those early arcade games, it can appear to be less than the sum of its parts. At the Freeplay Independent Games Festival in 2010, a conversation took place between one of the keynote speakers and an audience member about the experience of playing Limbo. ‘It’s just a trial and error platformer,’ suggested the audience member. The speaker thought about it for a moment and replied, ‘Maybe, but no other game has captured that Lord of the Flies feeling as well as Limbo has.’

Superficially, Limbo is just another platformer, and punishing and unforgiving in the same way as those old arcade games. One mistake and you die. But by removing a count of how many lives you have, it changes the experience of death, undermining its power. If I died, I would be reborn. I was punished just enough to want to avoid it, but not enough to stop playing the game. As someone who had grown up with games, the hazy visuals and pared-back, frequently oblique story felt familiar to me. I could name-check tens of games that had influenced it, but it still felt fresh to me. It had enough of the old to be comforting but enough of the new to feel novel.

The certain ‘things weren’t like this in my day’ quality to the comment of the audience member quoted above draws knowing nods and murmurs of agreement. Here, though, the criticism is not from those who may never have played a video game in their life, but from those who have grown up with them. And perhaps we shouldn’t be surprised at that.

The generation who grew up with games are giving way to a new generation of artists and designers whose conception of games is fundamentally different. Video games have moved into the home and into the forefront of our culture. The new generation of designers live in a world where technology enables a much wider range of expression than existed at the inception of the form, enabling a new generation of games that can make us feel apprehension, boredom, melancholy, joy, fear, hope, defeat, life, death, the thrill of a parent teaching a child or the anger at being abandoned—all a far cry from the creative output of proverbially dull, inarticulate misfits. I look forward to playing the work of these designers and I hope I’m able to look past my own prejudices and see them for what they are. But if I can’t, and I start telling them how things were better when I was growing up, I hope they tell me to shut up and point out how far we’ve come and how far we might still be able to go.

© Paul Callaghan