Why do I love some video games and not others?

A lot of reasons, of course - just like why I love some movies and not others. Pacing, colors, music, story, action, ending… but I think that, above all else, it’s the characters. How strong is my connection to them? How much do I care about what happens to them? And as much as I hate to waste time arguing with ignorant people, I have been thinking a lot about Roger Ebert’s recent BS comments about video games not being considered an art form, and how his nonsense has challenged me to think through HOW and WHY it’s so obvious to me that video games are art.

And it’s this - the characters. Narrative art lives and dies on the strengths of its characters. That’s as true for Oedipus and Anna Karenina as it’s true for Alien and Mega Man.

Ninja Gaiden (1989) was the first video game that I ever formed an emotional connection to - because I was engaged by Ryu’s story. His quest to avenge his father’s death; the mysterious woman who shoots him and then hands him a creepy statue; the CIA agent who contracts him to infiltrate a South American temple where an identical creepy statue is stashed… It was also the first game I had ever seen that intercut story sequences between the action (”cinema display”), which gave a richness and detail that is missing from most of the other video games of the period.

Ryu is not, in the final analysis, a particularly fascinating literary character. He is not complex. He wants to avenge his father’s death; he wants to kill the bad guy; he wants to rescue the girl. But the game’s plot twists are compelling (your father is alive! you have to fight your father! your father sacrifices himself!), and they are happening TO US, and they give us that extra motivation to hassle through ALL THREE LEVELS OF F*CKING ACT SIX FOR THE TENTH TIME, because THIS F*CKING DEMON KILLED ME. AGAIN.

Complex stories and characters developed organically in video games, for the same reason they did in cinema: constant capitalist competition forced developers/authors to create increasingly rich and elaborate video game experiences. Better graphics; bigger worlds; prettier music; actual storylines. I imagine that’s how great art evolved in the first place: the best stories were the ones that people kept on telling, around the campfire, until they became myth, epic poetry, tragedy, religion, opera, play, novel, short story, film, until they helped shape human civilization, until they became the miraculous things that make this life liveable.

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 15th, 2010 at 7:08 pm and is filed under Culture as Resistance, Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.