[Broco]

So lately I've been watching a great TV show called The Wire. In a nutshell, it's about the war on drugs in the city of Baltimore; it shows both the perspective of the police and the drug dealers as they go about their business. But the show is actually much broader and more ambitious: in later seasons, it expanded to show many other aspects of the city, such as the school system, the political class and in the final, upcoming season, the local media.

What all these groups have in common is that they are large social systems that are irrevocably, self-sustainingly broken. The gangmembers are trapped in a culture of violence that consumes their young. The police and schools are trained to focus entirely on maximizing statistics (of arrests and test scores, respectively) at the expense of actual results. The political class cares only about accumulating money and good press and not a whit about effective policy. The media is focused on sensationalism and pandering to the audience's existing prejudices.

The thing is (and this is arguably the central thing The Wire is about), in all these dysfunctional institutions there are actually intelligent and well-intentioned individuals trying to change things for the better. Invariably, they fail. A gang leader attempts to introduce a more peaceful, cooperative way of doing business, but his actions look like double-dealing to gangsters with a more traditional mindset, and he is brutally murdered. A few police officers attempt to go after top gang members instead of doing endless, futile street-level rips, but their efforts require ignoring orders and going out of the chain of command, and they are demoted to where they can no longer do "harm". A mayor briefly considers a form of drug legalization to reduce gang violence, but is rapidly beaten down by hysterical bad press. These sound like tragic figures but actually they often appear more clownish -- hopelessly quirky and naive and not knowing what's good for them. The entrenched interests, ideology and incentive structure are much larger than any one person -- crucially, even an individual at the top of the hierarchy like a mayor -- and in their struggle against the great beast of their institution's culture, these people amount to nothing and are crushed.


Now the point of all this, if you haven't caught on yet, is to make an analogy with the videogame industry.

The problem, as many of us here at SB agree, is that games, taken as a whole, are hopelessly immature and unsophisticated. They consist largely of teenage power fantasies, movie tie-in merchandise, children's toys, cheap ways of killing time or glorified porn. The problem is not that they are not "Art" -- that is a useless, loaded term that only leads to sterile squabbling about definitions, and please nobody bring it up from now on. The problem is not either that their audience, demographically speaking, isn't wide enough -- I can't see how just getting more middle-aged people and women playing them would help matters (American Idol is watched by plenty of middle-aged people and women). The problem is that so many of them are idiotic, infantile. They can't be taken seriously. Many people of good taste quickly dismiss them as trash without even making the effort to find the nuggets of gold, and who can blame them?

Now what brought me to write this post is the following comment. In the "moe" thread, Toups wrote (after quite a digression):

[Broco]

Hey, I'm glad most people seem to like this post. I ended up obsessively spending until 3 AM yesterday writing and rewriting bits of it, but at the end, rereading it with a critical eye, I could see powerful counterarguments that could be made and I wasn't sure it was that great after all. I decided to post it anyway because there were at least bits of it that I was happy with, and even if the general thesis is wrong it's at least interesting to consider. Anyway, the above certainly isn't the be-all-end-all of my thinking about games, it's just a particular viewpoint I decided to explore.

I agree with everyone who's saying I focused too much on movie-like aspects of games as opposed to other sides of them. That's a pitfall I am completely aware of, and I went ahead and stepped right in it anyway. Actually I myself sometimes think that maybe story is something games shouldn't even be striving for, that things like Tetris and Ikaruga -- and while we're at it, chess! -- represent the pinnacle of the medium. The thing is that, when discussing the potential of games, movies are pretty much the whole motivator; comparing games with them is what gives us the feeling that games are somehow lacking, that we need to do better. So the tendency to over-compare with movies can be hard to avoid. (And then there's the argument that games are just maybe not so bad after all, and it's only the inappropriate comparison with movies and the cultural ghetto games currently find themselves in that leads people like me to think along these pessimistic lines.)

The second thing that really bothers me about my post is that my armchair sociology about the movement of people and ideas in the industry is, well, armchair sociology, and I'm not sure it really holds. I'm generalizing, very possibly overgeneralizing, about a huge and complex group based on my narrow knowledge and experience, and although I'm pretty sure some sort of process like what I described is happening, it's probably a lot more complicated than what I'm saying, and maybe not as immutable as I portrayed it. And in the end, what I'm implicitly doing is predicting the future, and that's always a risky and dubious enterprise.


Okay, so anyway, I just attacked my own post so you don't have to. I would've tried to synthesize the counterarguments in the original post but it was getting late and I couldn't think of an elegant way to do it.

[Broco]

leroyhacker, you make good points and your thinking is actually very much aligned with mine. It's just that the issues you raise didn't come to mind while I was writing all that. It was a sort of outburst in reaction to Toups' comment, quickly molded into a thesis. (Blame the Toups!)

I also often think of games in terms of space and architecture -- I think, in particular, the relationship between overland and levels is frequently crucial. And I would add comic books to your list of mediums to compare to -- another hybrid, ghettoized medium that blossomed into an artistic form only decades after it began to be popular.

I think Bit Generations and Rhythm Tengoku don't get much attention around here mostly because they haven't been released outside of Japan. And actually I really love them: you can see me occasionally raving about Digidrive in the Games You Played Today thread. They didn't occur to me in the context of "great games", though maybe they should've.



SuperWes asked me to consider spending more time fleshing out what I wrote for later publication as an article in the Gamer's Quarter. These would be good topics to address in an expanded version.

[Broco]

Koji, it's worth noting that games are only unpopular in comparison to movies and television. I remember reading somewhere that the videogame industry is larger by money, and possibly audience as well, than the entire written fiction industry. (I read this in the context of the author decrying how few people read instead of doing silly things like playing games.) I don't have numbers to back it up but it sounds plausible.