"I Don't See Why They Made It A Game"

I was having a conversation recently about interactive fiction, and it went a little something like this:

"I think interactive fiction is cool."

"I think it should just be fiction. Like a book. Or an essay."

Leaving out all the back and forth of the conversation regarding specific examples, I think this brought up a question at the core of this discussion. When critiquing video games, what should we talking about, and more specifically, for the purposes of this blog post, should we even be talking about whether it would be better suited as some other kind of delineated media?

Coming from a cultural studies/English literature/critical analysis/let's talk about books background, this question struck me as fascinating because I feel like I've experienced it bubbling up so much more when talking about games than with any other media that I've encountered. I'm going to talk about literature because that's what I've had the most experience with, and I want to give a disclaimer that I'm mostly talking about discussions around media in a casual setting or in a commercial setting, not through any formal critical analysis.

With that being said, in my experience, a conversation around books usually goes something like:

"I think Giovanni's Room is a really great book because it's so viscerally heartbreaking, it approaches the ideas of love and romance in such a beautiful way, it characterizes people so well, etc."

I've also done work for a literary agent, reading submissions from authors and writing reports about a book's viability. That might look something like:

"I recommend this novel for representation because of its endearing and well-rounded characters, its strong pacing, its snappy and clever dialogue.... etc." You get it.

In other words, never when reading a book have I considered anything like:

"Interesting, but would be better off it had just been a movie."

Certainly there are times when I believe a movie adapted from a book is better than the book, but I would have never read the book and had the thought above: I would have just thought, huh. This is a bad book. Nor while watching a movie have I ever really thought something like, "This would better better as as prose poetry."

So then why when we talk about narrative video games, this always seems to arise as a point of critique? I think there's something interesting here about how we see the genre of video games and also about how we don't. I have some semi-formed thoughts about this:

Talking About Narrative Games Feels Newer

Games with storytelling have been around for forever, but I think narrative-driven video games specifically have been really growing in complexity and popularity as well as interactive stories (I'm thinking of Netflix producing Bandersnatch, which personally I found a bit boring but compelling that they decided to throw money in that direction) have been taking the stage.

I think that since games have such a wide playing field, where Bandersnatch and Tic-Tac-Toe fall under the same media label, there's an immediate urge to associate the newer narrative games with older narrative media like film and literature. In other words, I feel like there's some kind of subconscious childhood sense that we already know what a game is, which we might think of like Space Invaders or Pong, so the new narrative game on the block ends up getting compared to a movie or a book instead of considered in terms of its own affordances. Or maybe this leads into my next thought:

We Don't Know What A Game Is

This isn't really new to people who have thought about games a lot, but so far in my time studying games at Carnegie Mellon University, the one constant in a definition of a game is that there are too many definitions of a game and nobody can really agree. For me, the cultivation of a lusory attitude is the most compelling idea behind attempts to define a game, but that leaves us with such a wide variety of media and so much room to experiment and explore what a game can be. I feel like this attitude of "this game would be better off as x," comes from this tension of a media label pulled across in a array of different directions. And again, let's segue into my final idea:

We Want To Fix Things To Be Good, Quickly

When we arrive at the edge of the definition of a game, specifically at the narrative edge, sometimes the ideas or the story is good, but the mechanics are bad. So then the natural conclusion is that it shouldn't be a game at all--It should just be a story, and then it would be a good story.

I think this point gets at what I'm perhaps trying to pick apart. My qualm is not necessarily that the claim of "better as a movie," is wrong, but that it doesn't challenge us enough as game players and game designers. Maybe I think a lot of the time if we're talking about art as the expression of an idea, the medium through which you express that idea is up to the creator: There's no should or shouldn't when it comes to whether I want to write a short story or a movie or a game about going on a hike and getting an emotional call from my mom (Sorry for A Short Hike spoilers). It comes down to how you use the affordances of each medium in order to express your ideas. If you've poorly used those affordances, then you've simply made a flawed game, movie, or book, not a game that should be a movie, or a book that should be a game.