How To Avoid A Catastrophe and Make Beautiful Games
January 13th, 2009 | Written by Daniel Phillips | Topic: Play
Maybe it’s a dead argument for some, but I never tire of dissecting our fair medium and holding her to a harsh lens. I love the industry enough to feel entitled to criticize it–and I’m going to be honest, as visual fidelity increases, as high def spreads, as developers pump up the textures and bump mapping and lighting sources, I feel less and less like I’m being wowed.
The problem with raising a bar is you have to keep raising it, again and again. And the videogame industry is at a critical point where we’ve already done so much technically that it’s coming back (for me, in any case) to an issue of artistry and story. What has always made a game memorable for me is a striking image, an amazingly complex character, an unpredictable storyline. And this is the stuff no publisher can pump enough money in to create–it has to come from a genuine creative spark.
Take Shadow of the Colossus for example. Yeah, yeah, you know all about it. I’m talking about how original this game was, how this team (that was also responsible for the lovely Ico, obviously) remained absolutely true to their vision–it had nothing to do with commercial success. The story is nil, the graphics are pretty rudimentary and desaturated (with, I might add, an amazing draw-distance for PS2) and mostly, you gallop around on your horse, Agro. But something drew a lot of people to that game. Something not easily explained or reproduced. It had an aura of beauty about it, of absolute concept and vision coming together before you on screen. The score was amazing. The colossi were epic, and when you finally killed them and that wave of euphoria vanished, you felt something you never thought you could feel in a videogame–regret. Sadness. Remorse.
What I mean is, creativity gets squashed in the business world. It takes a rare confluence of circumstances to pull off an “indie” game, as it were. And games like Shadow of the Colossus, in my eyes, are what this medium exists for: to push the boundaries of beauty, of art. I’m tired of commercial successes. I want progress. A movement. A new wave of gaming.
LittleBigPlanet is less a step forward than a very cool and well-intentioned side-step. I don’t think user-created content is our future any more than YouTube is the future of the movie industry.
Let me try another angle–movies. Something I know a lot about. I have a huge fucking bone to pick with all the producers who want to turn awesome foreign films into shoddy American remakes. Most of the time, I could care less because the films in question (Asian horror, mostly) aren’t my thing anyhow. But when a movie I really care about gets forced to wear lipstick and walk in a dress to pander to a studio’s demands, I rage. Sure, you want examples–I’m not embarrassed to say my number one gripe is “Shall We Dance?,” an unexpectedly perfect Japanese film with Koji Yakusho (most’ll know him as the father of the naked deaf-mute girl in “Babel”) turned into a pile of sentimental crap and recast with Richard fucking Gere and JENNIFER LOPEZ.
I know I ramble.
But let me impart some straight talk on you folks: the subject at hand is commodification. I’m deathly afraid that as games become more mainstream, they’ll lose their heart–their willingness t put it all on the line, to ignore the numbers and make a beautiful work of interactive art. Can Shadow or ICO be made in these sequel-lapping waters? I dunno.
Yes, there are still Tim Schafers out there. But the proof is in the cancer pudding, and even recent games like Odin Sphere and Okami signaled the death of a genre (hand-drawn 2D games) or developer (Clover Studios). I worry that as we grow up collectively (this is a metaphor, I’m not talking about puberty) and lace up those shoes for work and the morning commute, the industry will turn into a monopoly (cough, EA) where there’s not enough room for creativity, where developers don’t want to take a gamble on the little could-be-monetary-failures. And that’s a bad future.
How do we avoid this digital global warming?
Well, it starts with all of you, I guess. Give the titles you’ve never heard of a chance. There’s a reason they were made and you never heard of them–lack of money. But any game that actually shows on shelves needs one of three things–money, a prequel, or balls. And balls in a creative medium is always good.
And there’s hope, I suppose. Bioshock wowed the hell out of me and still managed to rake in the dough. Alan Wake still looms on the horizon, and may end up being a groundbreaking first–a great game about a book.
One last thing. I was reading a great article in the Wall Street Journal a while back about odd syndromes and I was reminded of Stendhal Syndrome–the literal condition of going dizzy and confused in the presence of a stunningly beautiful piece of art. (I like to think it can happen on occasion with a woman, too…). I was reading this article and I though “what better entertainment medium to fry people’s minds with beauty than the only one that combines three of the five senses?”
Here’s hoping our booming medium doesn’t completely saturate itself in sequels and trash. It’s too easy to be impressed. I want to be stunned.
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