They might become disappointed with the narrative, find the stakes too low, and the story threads too unemotional and unresolved, because they didn’t register things the game was communicating through its mechanics. That person wouldn’t become disappointed that the wilderness lacked a gratuitous amount of collectibles to find, because they’ve never played an open-world RPG. A non-gamer would take Firewatch as presented, learn WASD movement there in Henry’s shoes, and absorb the game’s narrative from the overt text and on-screen events. That’s not because the value isn’t there, it’s because it’s not the art they understand and enjoy, so they’re not receiving the band of data on which it’s trying to communicate.Įngaging with games is always going to be a higher barrier to entry, just because if you don’t play a lot of games, many of the basic mechanical assumptions, systems, and shorthands that games use to onboard the player and convey subtext will be totally opaque to you. Same as someone who likes horror novels will scoff at the happy endings in your adventure stories, someone who likes Michelangelo might have trouble seeing the artistic value in Rothko. I’m willing to bet a lot of both would have been fine with the experience as presented, and willing to look for the artistic value in it, had it conformed somewhat to what they thought they were signing up for. People who wanted the movie sold by the trailers were outraged and horrified. People who wanted Guillermo del Toro’s brand of grotesque beauty didn’t see it in the marketing and might have missed the movie. Remember Pan’s Labyrinth? Remember the marketing campaign that made Guillermo del Toro’s very adult, traditional (in the Grimm sense) fairy tale seem like an ethereal kids’ fantasy movie? Only for thousands of moms and five-year-olds to flee the theater twenty minutes in when a man dies of a graphic broken-bottle face-stabbing? Yeah, that’s what I’m talking about. We’re still debating which kinds of interactivity count as “gameplay,” but if we can set that aside for a moment, we can perceive that the meta-elements of any art determine how we engage with it in a way that deeply affects whether we’ll enjoy it. This only becomes more true when we’re talking about a medium that requires more from the audience to engage with it than any other medium to date. In making purchasing decisions, the meta elements of art are often more impactful than the artistic elements of it. We don’t buy things based on some objective standard of artistic merit, we buy them because something about that meta-experience catches our attention (i.e., the color of the packaging, the person selling it, the item’s immediate utility and price, the novelty or popularity of it). These meta-textual elements do not enhance our interpretation when we’re trying to do a ‘death-of-the-author’ style dissection of the art as presented, but when we’re deciding what art to consume and buy in our daily lives, we’re mostly not analyzing it that way. Art that explores the boundaries of a medium is often hard to parse without stepping back to examine everything about the experience - the framing or presentation of it, the title of the piece, the structure of the text in literature, the casting or marketing in theater or film. This is similar to the way that someone analyzing Mark Rothko’s paintings will understand them much better, having visited, or even heard of, the Rothko Chapel. We don’t consciously register many of the mechanisms by which games convey meaning and narrative, and so we assume they’re not even trying. In most cases, we do not perceive the whole art piece, having started from the assumption that our form and manner of engagement with it are meaningless and aesthetically or narratively pointless. It was then that I understood why we’re having such trouble viewing games as art. I find Firewatch interesting because a majority of players have shared they enjoyed the game for its artistic value and atmosphere but found themselves frustrated with the ending, the game’s world unresponsiveness, and the elements of player choice unrewarding. Firewatch earned tepid praise from the pretentious and buyer’s remorse from the disengaged players of games with more guns. As it stands, the Academy award Oscars for ‘Outstanding Marketing Merit’ in the category of ‘Subject Matter Interesting to White Men.’ Video games, meanwhile, find praise for their consumer value per dollar, if at all. I suppose that might be the case if we were to take the Academy at their word and accept that they award Oscars for outstanding technical or artistic merit. Did you play Firewatch? It had a pretty sexy marketing campaign back in 20, attractive enough to make certain reviewers decry it as the video game equivalent of Oscar-bait.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |