I attended a thought-provoking presentation by game designer/artist and photographer
Jason Rohrer a week or so ago at
Champlain College in Burlington, Vermont. I’d been eager to meet Rohrer and hear him speak, as I am a big fan of his game
Passage. I’ve heard some of Champlain’s most distinguished electronic game students also praise
Passage, which is noteworthy when considering the simplicity of the game’s narrative and design—a heavily pixilated graphical presentation the likes of which one hasn’t seen since this was the best the available technology could muster.
Rohrer began his presentation with this question, to paraphrase: Can we save electronic games from the fate of television—that is, from the fate of becoming, to quote the artist directly, “mindless entertainment?” I don’t know how much television Rohrer watches these days, but this familiar criticism of television holds true less broadly, in my opinion, than it once did. Even some of
the most “mindless” TV shows on the air and available on DVD today are so well produced, their silly or melodramatic stories so well told, that they compel interest almost in spite of their vapidity. I also had to wonder if Rohrer would be willing to accept a certain degree of mindlessness in electronic games in exchange for, say, the awesome commercial impact and global reach of TV.
Rohrer’s presentation seemed concerned with, among other things, pushing games in a respectable direction, which is to say an artistic direction. While he didn’t define
artistic,
art, or
artful in this context, which would have been helpful, he was unambiguous in asserting that games will probably earn more respect as a medium when they are more worthy of it. He noted the preponderance of games trading in familiar themes and tropes and the relative dearth of anything else in the industry’s mainstream. While game graphics and the resulting sense of immersion advance with technology, he suggested, game narratives have largely failed to mature in concert. He suggested that mainstream media outlets, in turn, might give more attention to electronic games when the games themselves merited it. This comment put me in mind of the few games and game designers about whom I’ve read in mainstream magazines—innovators, all: Rohrer (in
Esquire), Will Wright (in the
New Yorker and in the
New York Times Magazine; pictured below), and Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern and
Façade (in the
Atlantic Monthly).
Rohrer spent a substantial portion of his talk proposing a return to recognizing and cultivating game auteurs as the industry did in its infancy and as the film industry recognizes directors today. Gone from game boxes, Rohrer observed, are the creators’ names. (He failed to note that television directors are perhaps even less familiar to their viewers than game designers are to their players, at least to hardcore players.) He used the examples of the film
Napoleon Dynamite and the electronic game
Braid to illustrate how little respect even the most promising game titles garner in contrast to films. Evidently,
Napoleon Dynamite was a Sundance Film Festival darling in 2004, snaring its director, Jared Hess, a Grand Jury Prize and a two-picture deal (
Nacho Libre, 2006 and
Gentlemen Broncos, 2009) with Fox Searchlight Pictures. Neither
Braid nor its creator,
Jonathan Blow (pictured below), received such support following the game’s splash debut at the 2006 Independent Games Festival, where it won the Innovation in Game Design award. Eventually released through Xbox Live Arcade,
Braid has achieved great critical and commercial success.
Honestly, I was less interested in the Rohrer’s Rodney Dangerfield shtick than in something he said about
Passage in particular and games in general. He noted that perhaps one of the reasons that
Passage has become so popular is that its simple, seemingly anachronistic graphical presentation allows for a symbolic interpretation of game events. The game not so much tells a literal story as conveys a mood through the use of metaphor. If there is a story at work, it is open to interpretation—something about living, connecting with someone, growing old, and dying. I would go so far as to say that there is something profound about
Passage. In contrast, he observed, games that employ state-of-the-art technology to render virtual realities with a high degree of verisimilitude must then meet player expectations of how that reality should operate; events must relate logically to each other, or at least in a clear cause-and-effect manner, just as they do in real life. I think what Rohrer was getting at was a distinction between abstract game expressionism and more representational forms.
This idea that metaphor and symbol allow for a deeper, more resonant player experience than highly actualized virtual reality may hold important implications for game designers and writers interested in creating something truly innovative. Surely, indie designers without a lot of resources at their disposal benefit from the less-is-more approach. At the very least, they might begin to think more intently about how they would like their games to speak to players instead of, as Rohrer noted, how many hours they will take to play, with this number being equated, to some degree, with a game’s value.
I’ve heard it said that some Indian filmgoers gauge the quality of a Bollywood flick, at least in part, according to similar terms—minutes of movie per rupee—with the longer films getting the thumbs-up. Maybe this makes Bollywood cinema the more threatening parallel with the electronic game industry if the latter doesn’t grow up: a lot of colorful costumes and gratuitous singing and dancing—a lot of image and action for its own sake—laid over a story we’ve heard a million times before.
