Life, The Universe And Gaming: So Just WTF Is Wrong With Video Games?

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If there is any single identifier that could be used to classify 2015 in the games press world, it would undoubtedly be: “I don’t like this thing, and that’s a problem.”

I say this as someone who, myself, does not like many things. But also as someone who has the humility to concede that I do not know all things, I am not always correct, and I am not above reproach. And that, I feel, is the most important thing that is lacking in the games press world. As can be seen in Phil Owen’s recently released “booklet” entitled “WTF Is Wrong With Video Games? How A Multi-Billion-Dollar Industry Refuses To Grow Up” — or, more accurately: The thoughts of Phil Owen, as written by Phil Owen for fans of Phil Owen in which Phil Owen saves gaming, by Phil Owen.

Here’s the thing: I really enjoy picking apart videogames. It’s one my favourite things to do in the world, and through EGMR I feel I’ve managed to build a strong passion out of doing just that. Art exists to be critiqued, and videogames form a fascinating new medium that is rife with missteps and majesty all in one. This is why, more than anything else on the internet, I love consuming opinions and critiques of videogames. But recently these critiques have consistently been going too far. To that extent I wanted to address this concept of questioning exactly what videogames are. Because for some reason, that’s necessary…

It’s often argued that people who have been in the gaming industry for very long are too invested in it to see the cracks, and therefore a fresh perspective is needed. This is the first of a series of seemingly level-headed, logical but ultimately misguided assertions prevalent within games press. It’s one of those things that sounds sensible at first, but falls apart in practice. In the creation of art, you wouldn’t trust someone with little to no experience of making movies, to make a great movie. Likewise you wouldn’t trust someone with no knowledge of music to suddenly churn out an orchestral masterpiece. So why do we assert that gaming industry professionals are wrong in what they do (especially given their results), and that fresh faces are needed? Well, the simple answer is because it caters to an agenda.

If we say that professionals are the problem, we open the doors (and revenue streams) to agenda-based critique and mass consumption of that agenda-based critique.

Initially this kind of critique seemed like the growing pains of an industry struggling for maturity, but I now see how it has become intertwined with identity politics, progressive agendas (which I’m actually fine with, if they’d only admit it), and confirmation bias. A necessary step forward for gaming (representation, progressive storytelling, and innovation) has unfortunately become the playground for rampant and flagrant misrepresentation and buzzword-infused conflation. Put simply: Gaming has come under attack by people who wish to police it (further evidenced by critique that could be applied to any form of “mature” media but nonetheless is pointedly and consistently directed at videogames).

The immediate counter-argument I typically see is, “Well they’re just expressing opinions, and it’s the fault of gamers for reacting like they do.” And that’s true, to an extent. We gamers are our own worst enemies sometimes. However it’s when everyone else starts seeing games in ways that belie their true nature that things become a bigger issue — in other words as I previously wrote, no matter how cool gaming is now, gamers are still weird and dangerous freaks to the outside world. Thanks, games press!

In a fascinating twist of logic, the games industry is regularly accused by press of catering to a minority of core gamers, yet the games industry in its current guise is rapidly expanding, yet the games press regularly asserts that a problem exists.

Perhaps this is the biggest problem of videogames finally being legitimised as art: It has come under the radar of those who want to influence it for self-serving reasons.

But what does any of this mean in the context of WTF Is Wrong With Video Games? Well the quick answer is, because videogames are still growing up there are still many points of contention that need to be addressed. However we have to be very careful when addressing these points, because we don’t want to stray into calling something a problem just because we don’t like it. We want to ideally look at issues in games because they are, by virtue of design, still getting to grips with what they’re capable of. Like the Hubble Telescope helped us understand more about our universe, we want to create the tools and methodology that better serves us over previous attempts to explore the space-metaphor that is videogames.

And we do that by looking at what we have and going, “Hmm… what could be done better here?”

Gameplay and narrative can be friends, but not always

It is vitally important to now establish that the simple act of criticising game design is not inherently, or automatically, political. Sometimes, yes that is the case, but there are also occasions when criticisms of game design have nothing to do with agendas or inclusivity. They are simply criticisms of game design, and it’s imperative that we learn the difference between a carefully thought-out, well-researched think-piece on a game’s design, and some politically-influenced, glorified blog post that can be summed up as, “I don’t like this thing, and that’s a problem.”

And this is where I actually agree that WTF Is Wrong With Video Games is onto something. Just, not quite in a way that is helping.

I recently played through the Halo Master Chief Collection and rediscovered the strong criticisms I had for the Halo series. Over and above spending my time hopelessly lost, clumsily tripping over myself through areas until I found the magical invisible progress marker, I spent most of my time doing my absolute best to avoid combat as much as possible. In a Halo game. In Halo 2 specifically, I was so enthralled by the story of the Arbiter that I would do my best to run past as many enemies as possible, actually groaning when I was forced into unskippable combat sections. This was not effective game design.

But does that mean gameplay holds back the story in all cases? Of course not.

Let’s take a few other examples, just to be fair. Games such as BioShock: Infinite and Tomb Raider had fascinating stories, but ultimately were betrayed by their gameplay. The gameplay itself was not necessarily bad, but it did not adequately represent the narrative. In the case of Tomb Raider it was even more apparent, where cutscenes presented a sense of urgency and a level of fear within Lara early on, but gameplay allowed for limitless exploration time and wanton murder sprees. This is not new to us in gaming — the concept of ludonarrative dissonance became synonymous with 2013 releases and is well-known to gamers. As our exposure to games increases, and as we play more and more games, dissonant gameplay becomes the single quickest way to break immersion, and it is therefore an area of concern. Not a political problem but a basic game design problem that needs looking at.

But once again, to assert that gaming has an inherent problem because Tomb Raider has gameplay that doesn’t match its narrative is a bit of a cherry-pick, wouldn’t you say? You can’t paint all games with the same brush, after all.

In his first chapter, as posted on Polygon — a site that makes an income from antagonising gamers — Phil Owen discusses The Last of Us, and he comes to a few points that we absolutely agree on. In fact, this is likely the first time I’ve seen someone else echo some of my own sentiments about a game that is otherwise lauded for being near-perfect in execution. While I certainly do maintain that games exist to be fun, and we shouldn’t be hyper-critical of games that exist for the purposes of entertainment, I would argue that The Last of Us in particular is not a “dumb” game on the level of Call of Duty, or Medal of Honor. In The Last of Us you do expect award-winning writing. In The Last of Us you do expect genre-defining mechanics. Why? Because The Last of Us is game-of-the-year material punted (by the same press, ironically) as something revolutionary… but to tell the truth, for me the draw was the foul-mouthed Ellie and what a refreshingly new character she was to videogames.

Whereas it is unfair to use Tomb Raider to address all videogames, I don’t think it’s cherry-picking to say that The Last of Us has some problems. It’s okay to look at The Last of Us and question why it had seemingly linear levels when so much potential existed for multiple paths through areas. It’s okay to question why apart from the main characters everyone else operated on fundamentally broken AI. It’s even okay to think the story was nothing particularly extraordinary. Unfortunately Mr Owen was not questioning all of that within the context of just The Last of Us but rather comparing it to real-life logic (using shivs as an example), and explaining why it doesn’t work.

I think that’s a very dangerous thing, to compare any form of media to real life. It shouldn’t happen, because media is not bound by real life logic. Have you ever heard someone say, “But in this fantasy game with orcs and elves, why can’t there be this reasonable request?” That was the argument when people wanted black people in The Witcher 3. But if we take the same argument, why do we then criticise characters dressed in skimpy outfits without also resorting to, “But in this fantasy game with orcs and elves, why can’t there be skimpy outfits?” The former is pushing for representation at the expense of creative freedom, while the latter is pushing for decency at the risk of empowerment.

Ultimately the art (and subsequent escapism from real life) suffers for it.

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This is why we must take every precaution not to compare videogames to other forms of media. Because they’re not. They’re videogames.

Unfortunately, and this is a problem that permeates much of humanity, we have difficulty discussing something in a context we don’t fully understand. In this case, videogames. We compare it to movies, to books, to music, but ultimately videogames stand alone as their own medium. And because we grew up with videogames, thinking of them as mixes of other forms of media, we lack the necessary vocabulary to adequately classify the interactive experience. In much the same way that movies are passive experiences where everything must be explicitly communicated to viewers (not outwardly, but intentionally), or books must give adequate background to characters and their surroundings in order to create an investment in not just the story but the location so you can visualise it, games have their own sets of rules to follow. And to hold a movie up to a game and go, “Look at these things the movie does that the game does not,” is invariably unfair to the game. The game is not trying to be a movie, it’s trying to be a game. This is another place where Mr Owen errs, and hopefully a place where others do not.

One final point I’d like to address is the notion that games are power fantasies that exist to cater to the male gamer ego, making them feel insurmountable and all-powerful when really they live in their mothers’ basements but are nonetheless exclusively catered to by the white men who form the majority of the games industry.

I don’t think this is entirely true, and for a myriad reasons. Ironically, this assertion typically comes from white men, but that’s a story for another day. The simple truth is that the games industry is growing and changing along with every other form of industry, as I’ve previously discussed. Games themselves have long moved away from being power fantasies. Indeed there are lots of games that aren’t power fantasies at all, but fall into the, “The hero does not save the day after all…” narrative. These are powerful and moving experiences that are being erased in the minds of gamers every time a critic picks on Mass Effect for example, without remembering that Mass Effect was the story of sacrifice for the betterment of others. Or indeed when a critic attacks Red Dead Redemption for having an admittedly questionable achievement, while not also stopping to consider John Marston’s personal story and how it reached its climax, together with how we felt by having to play through it.

I ask you: Which other medium could have offered that kind of experience to you?

I don’t profess to have all the solutions, and I certainly would never stand on a pedestal and claim to know exactly what is wrong with gaming right now, but at the very least I want to encourage everyone reading this (and if you made it this far, I must sincerely thank you) to empower yourselves to identify the difference between political pandering and sincere game criticism. Every consideration must be given to anything you read on the internet, and then you can decide for yourself whether it’s “SJW bullshit” or a necessary criticism of a game that is scoring alarmingly well given the glaring issues it has. As I said above, nothing fascinates me more than breaking apart a good game and seeing how it ticks. Why does it make gamers do a certain thing, how many gamers did that over something else, what was the motivation for having this, and how could it have been done better? The potential for critique is extensive, but there’s a responsibility attached to criticising games, and that’s not allowing your personal views to cloud your judgement of the game you are playing.

I’d like to leave it at that, because this is quite long already. If I had to answer the titular question, being “So Just WTF Is Wrong With Video Games?” My answer would quite simply be this: Games are progressing in a positive way and have been for a very long time, but the wrong kinds of people are finding problems with it and then taking all the credit when the inevitable positive changes start to show.

Be better than them.

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