Lack of Seriousness

By: Derek Yu

On: December 6th, 2007

I realize that some may be irritated that I’m not posting something that’s directly about games, although I think it’s very appropriate. But forgive me if it’s not to your taste.

Dan “Data” Tabar sent me a link to this, a shortened version of Kurt Vonnegut’s final interview, and told me that he found it very much in tune with his experience as a game developer. With that in mind, I read the interview, and was struck by how right he was about that. Though Vonnegut did not mention games once, you can bet that what he says rings just as true for this creative pursuit as any other.

“Iâ€™ve said that to open a novel is to arrive in a music hall and be handed a viola. You have to perform. [Laughs.] To stare at horizontal lines of phonetic symbols and Arabic numbers and to be able to put a show on in your head, it requires the reader to perform. If you can do it, you can go whaling in the South Pacific with Herman Melville, or you can watch Madame Bovary make a mess of her life in Paris. With pictures and movies, all you have to do is sit there and look at them and it happens to you.”

That’s a really interesting analogy. I feel like games, to a certain extent, hand you that viola, but are also there to play with you, and guide you through the music. In essence, it is both happening to you and you are creating it. I wonder what he would have thought of that.

Anyway, I’ve always looked up to Vonnegut. His plain way of writing and speaking, his insight, and his sense of humor have all appealed to me as an artist and a person. I hope you find some inspiration from him, too.

(Photo Source: Grant Delin/Corbis Online)

Posted in Games and Art?

http://joshg.wordpress.com josh g.

While I agree with you, I wonder if Vonnegut would have, given his comparision to pictures and film. Games are a rich visual medium, and (usually) don’t require you to construct your own mental image of the game world. So if he’s highlighting how the low-stimulus nature of reading a novel requires a lot more mental performance to create immersion, then games don’t really fit that category.

On the other hand, novels tell you exactly what actions are taken by the characters within the story, whereas in games you perform and choose at least some of those actions. So, yeah, games are more of a performance of the “reader” than film. They also require you to work harder at mentally constructing a model of how the game world works, whereas a novel world doesn’t require strict cause-and-effect rules to be understood or even to exist.
Smithy

“…you can bet that what he says rings just as true for this creative pursuit as any other.”

Except pictures and movies.
toastie

Why would anyone be irritated? O.o
BigMoose

Thank you, Derek.

So it goes.
toastie

I think the lack of seriousness is what keeps me coming back to games. Well indie games anyway. Their simple honesty and innocence is incredibly powerful when you encounter some truth about life between the lines. Kind of like Vonnegut’s books.
Al King

Sure, you can ‘just watch’ movies, but in the case of any worthwhile ones you’re missing half the picture. Much as I hate postmodernist theory, it’s right – the audience often bring as much to the table as the text itself. I can understand Vonnegut’s sentiment, but I can’t really agree with it.
Eden

In fact, whilst games have aural and visual stimuli, the player has to build up a mental model of the game in their head.
A model of the rules, how everything works, a cause-and-effect type thing based on what the player discovers through playing the game.

So the game is only a model that helps the player understand the model in their head. For example, Chess. Not many people can imagine a game of chess, they need a chess set.

It’s worth pointing out that the visual and aural elements in the game affect the player’s mental model, too.
LurkingCrassZero

It’s interesting that you compare creating games to creating great works of literature, when in truth, even the best example of any game (on any format) barely comes close to the depth of even the most average of novels.

Take the Half-Life series for example, a game ‘franchise’ that is undoubtedly one of the best (I love it anyways!) if not THE best gaming has to offer, yet it is simply an interactive action movie, filled with tired cliches and the same well used plot twists and turns. Games are for the most part made by very ‘skilled’ and talented people, who may be hugely creative in a technical way, but not in the true artistic sense, at least for the most part. Which is why (in my opinion) games are technically superb, but (mostly) artistacally lacking.

Thankfully, indy games, particularly freeware games seem to be addressing this balance (maybe because there free from commercial constraints?) Some games are even far more arty than technical! The recent Rueckblende is a great example of this.
rinkuhero

In college I met a interesting drunk guy from Europe who was passing through and who spoke pretty passable English. We had a conversation or two over the course of about a day, then he had to leave. I remember the last thing he did before he left was scrawl “Breakfast of Champions” on a piece of paper and told me to read it. I haven’t read it yet — but one day!
Smithy

I wasn’t irritated. I was just being a jerk.

Vonnegut was my favorite author!
deadeye

Vonnegut may have appreciated the interactivity of games from a general standpoint, but he *was* an old codger and a bit of a technophobe, so video games specifically would probably have turned him off.
Not Sure

Holy Shit! That was like deep and stuff.
Calanctus

LurkingCrassZero: I don’t disagree with your basic point, but I think Planescape: Torment is a hell of a lot better than any average novel.
Lee-Ham

Video games will never be able to tell stories as well as novels. This is not a failure of games to be art, it is because oddly enough, games and literature are actually different things, each communicating in its own way! :O I know, it’s weird, right?

I’m pretty tired of these comparisons. Saying a game isn’t art because the story is crap (as it usually is) is like saying Monet’s water-lilies aren’t as artistically valid as War and Peace because the writing isn’t as good.
Shih Tzu

Well, a game -can- tell a story as well as a novel. The vast majority of them fail to do so, but many of them succeed as art regardless because they don’t depend on narrative — if present, the narrative is window-dressing for the real ideas. This is what people like Roger Ebert insist on missing because they can’t understand how a game’s ideas can exist independently of its ostensible storyline. The plots of many great operas are also melodramatic garbage, but does anyone care about that when the soprano is completely owning the aria?

That said, there are plenty of games where the ideas are largely wrapped up in the storyline. Interactive fiction does this quite a lot. It’s a tricky balance, though; as IF author Graham Nelson put it, you’re basically setting up “a narrative at war with a crossword”. I don’t subscribe to Ebert’s definition that games are not art because they surrender authorial control, but I do think he has identified a vital difference. The gap between novels and games is greater, I feel, than the gap between novels and films, in that many novels can be retold as films and preserve much of what made the original art special. Try to make a film of a game, and it’s likely you’re only going to be able to preserve some surface trappings. Even if the game has a particularly fleshed-out storyline, whatever you wind up putting in your film is almost guaranteed to be different from what the player experienced in the game, unless the game is a super-linear Final Fantasy-type romp (i.e., a bunch of noninteractive cutscenes interspersed with unrelated gameplay).
Eden

@Lee-Ham

I think it’s how we define story.
If we take away plot, and replace that with interactivity, games can tell stories very well indeed.
They’re just non-linear.
Skaldicpoet9

O_o

Whoa, Vonnegut eh?

Mad props Derek…

Cat’s Cradle is still one of my all time favorite books.

The thing about Vonnegut is…well, he was a sci-fi writer before he started writing his more satirical stuff, my point being is that I think working within a genre such as sci-fi (especially at the time that he was writing it)gives you a lot of insight into how the human mind works due to the fact that all a sci-fi story is (well, a good one at least) is basically an exaggeration of reality which in a lot of ways reflects the real world curiously enough.
Smithy

Um…

I’ve read everything Vonnegut has ever written.

Most if not all of his early short science fiction stories were satirical.

Science fiction is actually a great medium for satire…
Skaldicpoet9

Of course, Player Piano was still very satirical in it’s own respect. What I am talking about is the fact that as time went on the satire became more and more pronounced, I mean just look at Breakfast of Champions :D

And yes, Sci-Fi is an awesome medium for satire…if you haven’t already read “The Transmigration of Souls” by William Barton you should…good, good stuff :)
Al King

rinkuhero, I thought you were saying he told you to read the note he gave you. Made for a bizarre interpretation :P
I Like Cake

Lee-Ham? Are you a Newton, by any chance?

I think it’s vitally important for games to tell stories, even though they can’t be told in the same way as in a novel. Most of the games which I have considered really excellent — Metroid, Shadow of the Colossus, Chrono Trigger — have told only simple stories with elementary themes but have been made more potent by immersion.

I don’t feel games can truly be divorced from their narratives. After all, being put in the place of the protagonist, the story and setting of a game are what give your actions context. Imagine taking a game you enjoy with a compelling narrative and replacing all of the characters with flat-shaded cubes, or something equally silly, and removing all dialog. I highly doubt it would have the same impact.

I also don’t think there’s any necessity to leave complex issues or ideas out of games. I have no problem with some people enjoying or preferring simple games, but I think games can tackle interesting narratives as well. However, the difficulty in analysing a game purely in terms of narrative, or attempting to reproduce a novel perfectly within the context of a game, comes down to the difference between story and experience. Reading a play by play of a Metroid battle would hardly seem as entertaining as playing the actual game, and likewise, sitting through the extended monologues of the baffling legal system of the Trial would be… trying? (Tee hee)

I don’t think there’s a problem with games telling stories, but they should also be games.
Anthony Flack

Remember that the point he was trying to get across was that novels are elitist – in order to make them “work” you require a complex set of skills that not everyone seems to have the hang of. I don’t think he was arguing that they were inherently superior to movies and the like. In fact I almost felt like there was a touch of the opposite message. That movies are more accessible and therefore more universal, in the same way that a CD or mp3 is more accessible than sheet music.
http://akktivecarbon.uw.hu !CE-9

spooky, things fall in place, things get connected. I was missing a connection between Vonnegut (who happened to be my god) & TIGSource. up to now. tick.

I don’t know about this one though. the more of an audiovisual storm a game is, the less space it leaves for _imagination_, that is, the _player_. to _play_, in the true sense of the word. HL2 was a great game, but – for me – it was, to a great extent, thanks to the physics engine and the storyline.
Turgid

“To stare at horizontal lines of phonetic symbols and Arabic numbers and to be able to put a show on in your head, it requires the reader to perform.”

Funny, that’s exactly like playing an ASCII computer game, like Nethack or Dwarf Fortress.