Not many non-gamers know that Roger Ebert reviewed a video game once – ‘Cosmology of Kyoto’ for Wired.
“The richness is almost overwhelming;” he wrote in 1994.”I have been exploring the ancient city in spare moments for two weeks now, and doubt that I have even begun to scratch the surface.” It was “the most beguiling computer game I have encountered, a seamless blend of information, adventure, humour, and imagination…”
His more recent comments, that games can never be ‘art’ drew significant flak from bloggers, forcing Ebert to clarify his position.As of 2010 it was – games can principally become ‘art’ but never join ‘classical’ ranks (literature, music, painting) as film has.
Ebert isn’t the first to reflect such a perspective. (E.M. Forster refused to let Passage to India be adapted into film as he did not merit it a serious art form.) But other old timers like Rushdie adapted, incorporating gaming elements in his last novel. Then again, Rushdie has children.
Ebert has probably never heard of Hideo Kojima, the greatest auteur in gaming. For the uninitiated, Kojima created the Metal Gear saga; an alternate military history unraveling the complex nature of soldier loyalties to nation-states, with the rise of Private Military Corporations (PMCs) – something ‘classical’ art has never touched upon.But Kojima is miffed about the future.
He went on record once about his generation of designers being the last likely to produce auteurs. “Video games as a medium really haven’t matured very much in the past 25 years. It’s always about killing aliens or zombies – not that I don’t like those kind of games – but I think games have a long way to go before they can mature.” – he said while promoting the upcoming MGS title. “I have tried to work with the Metal Gear series to introduce more mature themes, but compared to movies and books it still has a long way to go.” Kojima made clear his intentions to make a serious game, at the risk of commercial failure. And so far ‘MGS: Ground Zeroes’looks pretty darn grave, dealing with recruitment of child soldiers.
Then there’s Jenova Chen’s Journey, the first game to be nominated for a Grammy. (Journey bagged five video game BAFTAs in March.) Those of us watching the first promos could not wait to ‘touch’ and ‘feel’ this make-believe world… surely, if games could ever be art Journey was the forerunner.
But in a recent interview Chen said: “For adults to enjoy something, they need to have intellectual stimulation, something related to real life. Playing poker teaches you how to deceive people, and that’s relevant to real life. A headshot with a sniper rifle is not. Games have to be relevant intellectually… Can games make you and another human being experience an emotion deep enough to touch adults? I’m working on all that.”
This writer would argue that playing a sniper is much like playing a role on a stage. Perhaps more.
Most action gamers are criticized as mindless. But last year, at Europe’s 8th FENS Forum of Neuroscience, Daphne Bavelier from the University of Geneva presented evidence that they “unwittingly train themselves in a wide range of attentional, cognitive, sensory and spatial skills.”
“Participants were tested on how well they see, make decisions, pay attention, or switch between tasks, using accuracy or reaction time as measures. In all these areas, action gamers outperformed non-action game-playing peers. Action gamers proved better at tracking more objects at once, searching for a target in a cluttered environment more effectively, processing rapidly fleeting images more accurately, discriminating details more quickly, switching between tasks more flexibly… Additionally, their reaction time was far quicker, compared to peers, despite showing similar accuracy.” So an action gamer is far less likely to be in a driving accident.
The above isn’t surprising when considering the military’s long tradition of using combat flight simulators to train fighter pilots.
Something else difficult for non-gamers to grasp is the rising number of people dreaming in video-games. Gamers have more lucid dreams and are far more adept at controlling them,claims LiveScience.
Historically, academia paints the dreamscape as a realm where control is futile, where we are mercy to ‘random’ firings of neural pathways; to the extent that a certain ‘high’ art fetishizes peculiar dreams and consuming nightmares,depicting dreamers as prisoners of their own disordered minds and powerless to affect change. Today’s gamers beg to differ.
A nightmare becomes ‘fun’ for a gamer; because a nightmare is just another game, another level to beat.
Ever tried playing Minesweeper without trying, or while letting the mind wander? It’s actually the best way. Most people similarly play flash games to unwind,but instead of wasting time,they’re developing ‘muscles’ of the unconscious – the seat of dreams and creativity. Game mechanics translating into dreams is really not so strange. In fact, games just might be the evolutionary springboard our brains have been waiting for.
The problem with making creative or intellectual games is your average gamer: drone-like, addicted to repetitive tasks to the point of drooling retardation,pathologically averse to thinking. If not as ‘art’, games will likely survive in a different form.
In 2011 something happened that Ebert may have actually heard of.
Realising people are better than computers at detecting useful patterns, University of Washington scientists collaborated with a designer to create ‘Foldit’, a protein-folding game and released it online. After struggling for a decade to solve the exact sequence of an AIDS virus in rhesus monkeys, they passed the baton to gamers who toiled and eventually provided scientists enough data to solve the structure. In ten days.
Suggesting they did the scientists’ job for them would be incorrect, because they had marginal comprehension of the implications of their efforts. Such was the game designed.
And such has been the nature of games throughout history.
Mythological chess was invented to satisfy a king’s boredom:the prophet Zarathushtra allegedly codified into it cycles of planetary bodies; black versus white to reflect the conscious self’s battle against the Jungian shadow aka unconscious. But few chess experts today vouch for such origins. (Except perhaps Kirsan Ilyumzhinov,the current president of the World Chess Federation, who claims chess was a gift to man from extraterrestrials. He also claims to being abducted and shown around the galaxy.)
It was not uncommon in the ancient world to use boardgames for charting movements of heavenly bodies or for divination. But winners didn’t necessarily make the best astrologers.
Perhaps Zarathushtra’s mythological contributions can be more appreciated by considering The Glass Bead Game, Hermann Hesse’s science fiction novel.(It led to the Nobel in 1946)
In the story, players must master all forms of human knowledge to finally appreciate the intricacies of the Game and one’s rank held within an intellectual order hinges on the level of mastery. But unlike chess, this Game is a strictly artistic pursuit.
Rather, Christine Hoff Kraemer’s description makes it sound like Hesse invented the first video game in his head.
Every move in the Game spawns a counter-move.It “takes place in an auditorium, where the Game player projects a series of symbols (standing for musical themes, lines of poetry, mathematical theorems, etc.) onto a screen for the audience. At the end of a series, the audience and player all sink into a meditative state, where the meaning and effect of the interaction of these symbols is allowed to wash over them.”
Sounds like many people sharing a dream. Now if only we could craft and share dreams at whim. Hardware would become unnecessary.
