Even in terms of cultural relevance, Steve seems to have artificially narrowed the definition of ‘comic’ to exclude things such as newspaper comic strips, such as, say, Peanuts, and enduring comic stories, such as Herge’s Tintin and Goscinny/Uderzo’s Asterix the Gaul, which have a wider appeal, and more importantly, a much wider cultural footprint than what might be regarded as mainstream comics. You can argue that the later ones are infantile in their subject matter, but not that these foreign cultural imports haven’t made an impression. And that in other cultures, the medium has a far greater impact, such as the cultural significance (and diversity) of comics in Japan. I’m not an expert on manga, and this stuff on comics is going on long enough, but from the outside it seems to be on par with other types of mass media. I mean, take martial arts movies, limited cultural significance in Western cinema culture, but look at Crouching Tiger’s Academy nominations, and impressive box office performance.

I appreciate that Steve’s point is not that games and comics lack the potential to have cultural significance, but that their current thematic limitations and lack of maturity limits the respect and influence of games in general culture, a serious issue for people in the games industry looking to expand the market. (And many comics are a very good example of how to poison your own market by catering to the ‘hardcore’ without having enough titles aimed at bringing in fresh readers.)

I find it a little bit hard to pin down what he actually means by cultural significance. Is it awareness? Sense of identification? Popularity with the unwashed hordes?

From my perspective, the big problem with games and cultural significance is that many games have become stuck in the Science/Magical Fantasy ghetto, or the adjoining but slightly more upscale Crime and Horror sections. It’s an unwillingness to play outside this field, even slightly, that means that games and comics are culturally marginalized. Even the great stuff is often still in that limited arena, which means that most of the D&D, Terry Brooks/X-Men reading rabble don’t get it, and neither do most outsiders. I remember talking to a development team about races for a MMO, and being stunned at how the banal fantasy cliches were slowly winning a war of attrition on original concepts.
There’s nothing stopping sports games, for instance, from achieving mass audiences, provided the hardware support is there and the game design taps into a fairly basic unfulfilled urge.

I suppose the closing point would be that generational shift is possible over the next 50 years, to the extent that games can achieve a cultural significance beyond being ‘for kids’ or ‘young males’. As those kids and young people grow up and have their own families, become teachers and policy makers the culture of acceptance can change, although it’s certainly not a guarantee. (I always find people who seem to have suddenly decided that they’re x age and they now have to be some sort of responsible adult with all the baggage that that entails deeply scary.)

The “game” as imagined exists in at least three forms:

A. The narrative (“New kid in town rises to top of criminal empire”)
B. The scope (“sandbox”)
C. The experience (“stealing cars in ’80s Miami”)

Frankly, the GTA narrative contains every cliché of the “crime film” genre, with a few other ones thrown in for good measure. The developers take a consciously cinematic approach, employing film actors who made their career in the “crime film” genre to reprise in voice their veteran characters. There’s nothing novel or interesting here: it falls into Gaynor’s description of most comics as bad storyboards for movies that would never be greenlighted. Uwe Boll isn’t the only reason why many video game movies suck.
Yet when we try to explain the game to others, the first thing we reach for is this story. A similar phenomenon occurs in popular music, where lazy music reviewers and fans get obsessed with the lyrics to the exclusion of the motive force of the art form, elaborating on the brilliance of using place-names like “The Rotherhithe” instead capturing and dissecting the music, the sound and the feel.

B. GTA gets praised among gamers for its “Sandbox gameplay” (now there are two words, I hope, the RPS folks, with their ties to the Académie Anglaise, banish from the English language). Most gamers believe that the GTA III series creates a world, with toys, where the player can do whatever the hell s/he wants.

Huh? Do people actually play these games? A sandbox implies creativity. GTA III doesn’t provide a sandbox, it provides a themed amusement park. Almost all the “things you can do” are predetermined, and occur in carefully delineated time and space. Just like a theme park, there are those little rides where you play with radio-controlled vehicles (yes, those ‘rides’ are still there). There are races, roller coasters — all sorts of events; but all scripted, and all more or less on the same theme. Step out of the bounds of the “ride”, and you’re free to wander the park. Moreover, since the game is at heart a PS2 game, the things you can do are built around a game controller.

C. But there is something downright cool about the game. For me, it’s the use of art direction and music to create a stylized impression of an environment. Blasting through a pastel city, running over pedestrians, being chased by cops, all while listening through 99 luftballoons – that’s when you appreciate the game for what it has to offer.

But none of these levels are meshed that well. A and B are themed on C, but as the narrative advances, not much happens in the town (other than the training wheels coming off at some point). The amusement park is still static. You’re still a petty thug who’d rather jack a crappy car than pay cab fare.

So GTA as narrative, stands on the level of a bad comic book serialized to conform to an addict-friendly intermittent reinforcement structure . GTA builds a “sandbox” more like an amusement park strained through a PS2 controller. But it excels in the detail of the gamespace it creates.

So no, I don’t find it GTA formally excellent. If anything, it’s formally dull, and materially excellent. GTA would be formally excellent if we didn’t notice that it was an amusement park, or didn’t play the master game segments just to advance the cinematic cutscenes.

(Please note too: many early movies stage plays with a camera in the audience. We still have such films today, but they’re not mass circulation. There’s always room for “aping” another medium, but a sign of a medium’s maturity is when people no longer feel the need to discuss it as existing in comparison to more established media)

Respect is probably the easiest of the three to deal with – it could probably be defined as “something the educated person is broadly expected to be knowledgeable about”. In which case games are very much not there yet. But can never get there? It took novels/romances more than six hundred years to make their way from being something an educated person should ignore to something considered worthy of study (The Decameron was completed in 1353; the English faculty at Oxford University was set up in 1891 – and even then, novels were considered frivolous). Films took fifty years or more before it achieved any widespread intellectual respect.

Gaming is still less than forty years old, and is still something the majority of opinion formers did not grow up with – there’s a generational divide there which will dissipate over the next twenty years. Admittedly comic books have never overcome this, but I think this is largely because there’s an alternative medium – novels – you’re supposed to progress onto; there’s no adult replacement for games.

Popularity as a measure is easy to dismiss as a strike against games in this regard. If you’re admitting novels as being culturally significant – well, in the UK last year 70 million novels were sold, but 78 million games.

Finally, maturity is an difficult quality to define because there’s a few different properties it could refer to. I think we’re probably talking about the degree to which a medium is still defining itself (in terms of techniques, overarching goals etc), which introduces a whole new complication: the underlying platform on which games are based is significantly more open than the platforms supporting novels or film.

As a result, novels and film are relatively homogenous, and different genres broadly share the same techniques and principles (linear narrative, chapters, cuts, etc). Gaming genres are vastly different. Interactivity is the only constant – shooters, RPGs, RTSs have wildly divergent goals, techniques, and means of interactivity, and are as different from each other as novels are from film (in film, The Longest Journey and The Secret of Monkey Island would be considered different genres;in gaming, they’re both in the adventure genre).

In literature and film, narrative quality tends to be the principle standard by which maturity is judged – most other factors (e.g. acting quality) are judged for the contribution they make towards the convincingness of the narrative. And that’s the standard which seems to be applied most often to games, but it’s not how we judge other cultural forms (e.g. music or art), and whilst it might be appropriate for some genres of games, it’s probably not appropriate for others. We haven’t decided what is important for them yet, which is a very strong reason for arguing that these genres (and perhaps games en masse) aren’t a mature cultural form yet; it’s a very weak reason to argue that they will never be mature.

Of course, this is us digressing…

Also, great article by John Walker.

The popular=bad/good argument is a little spurious, simply because popularity happens to a somewhat odd range of things, both good and bad, usually because whatever it is catches a zeitgeist. Such as Wii Sports, or the first Halo. Even if people who just play these don’t think of themselves as “gamers” the fact is that the medium is integrating itself into more and more people’s lives. This is a good thing.

Personally, I think Gaynor is very wise to lay this wager (and it is a wager, note, not a statement). If we – the creators, amateur or professional – carry on as we are his predictions will indeed become the reality. I prefer to solve the problem by doing rather than talking, so I’ll leave my response to the debate at that.

(I don’t read comics, but two anecdotes come to mind related to them. The first happened some time ago when I stumbled over the climax of one of the Civil War issues. One of the leading characters had just been assassinated on the steps of the American senate because of his support for superhero “registration” with the government. This appealed to me as an obviously sophisticated story, but I was put off ever engaging with it because the characters were dressed in skin-tight spandex, called things like “Captain America”, and had lightning bolts stuck on top of their heads. It was a bizarre juxtaposition.

The second happened earlier this morning, before I packed and returned home to write this. I had Chris Ware’s comic page on my screen and was admiring its intelligence when my mother walked by and, unprompted, asked why I was looking at children’s stuff and said that it looked like something my younger brother might have made. We had happily watched Finding Nemo together the previous night.)

EDIT: Not that I’m dismissing your taste. But Halo isn’t games’ equivalent of the Lowbrow Sacharine Pop Trash which people are thinking about when they say “Shit sells”. It’s not Celene Dion or whatever.

(Also, at no point did I say that “Good=Popular” either. The idea that good stuff automatically fails to find an audience is what I’m dismissing.)

KG

If you take your top 5 favourite games, chances are at least 2-3 aren’t super popular. I was not a big Sims fan, I hate Madden, I can’t stand Halo, but I loved Close Combat IV.

I think there’s hyperbole involved, but the idea that popular stuff is bad, while a little too narrow in view, has it’s merits. It does happen to stem from the “I hate what people like” dynamic though.

That’s self-defeating bollocks, and always has been, and confuses uncommercial with good, which is absolutely fatal. They’re separate qualities. Any world where the Beatles were the biggest selling band of all time should make it untenable, but people throw it out there all the same, not realising that what they’re arguing forever damns them to the boundaries of culture. That’s what THEY want you to do. Vibrant art can /engage/.

(I don’t even like the Beatles that much but…)

The Theory which I nurture is where a medium is at its heights, the best stuff will also – as often as not – be the most popular stuff. It’s only when a cultural form has played out that the shit starts to overtake it. For me, I suspect, games are still well in their relevant phase, simply because games like GTA and The Sims are formally brilliant creations and people who think otherwise are primarily snobs.

KG