AaltomiesEnglish needs a new word for Play, Play, and Play
I’ve covered this topic before, but I need to expand it a bit. The English language doesn’t have a word making a distinction between playing (a game) and playing (with a toy.) For example, Finnish has two words for these two distinctly different actions: pelata (to play [a game]) and leikkiä (to play.) Arguably, gaming has become an activity of its own, but it applies strictly to video and computer games. It appears mostly in marketing materials and within hobbyist circles. However, whenever the term appears outside these ranges, it’s almost automatically a pejorative, a descriptor for some kind of unwanted person and their interest.
There really aren’t any other hobbyist circles that have the same kind of term. Cinephiles, for example, sometimes embrace the term and it has never seen use as a pejorative. There are other terms that we could use for people who find films as their main passion, but rarely these enter the common lexicon across the globe.
The best examples of gaming and gamer would be from a bit over a decade ago, when numerous media outlets pushed out an agenda about Gamers don’t need to be your customers and began extensively splitting the customers between players and gamers. Of course, this is an artificial split that was driven by then-current messaging, but it made an unintentional point, English language sucks in this regard.
English has also slowly but surely dropped the usage of computer and video game, making little to no distinction between the two. Console games are being called computer games by some older people or media that have no idea what’s the distinction, while the gaming media and consumers themselves call everything video games, more or less. Only when tribal connections are called for, we have people making a difference between PC gaming and console gaming, which naturally would indicate the difference. The now-vanished distinction between the two is mostly a memory, but they still represent a difference between the two hardware formats with their own insider cultures. You can consider one above the other and be that much more a fool.
Even the term game has become a common descriptor solely for electronic games in broad terms. It is the most common form of entertainment after all, so needing to add descriptors like tabletop or similar has become necessary, something a generation or two ago wasn’t necessary. What is a game and what is to play a game has changed, no matter how much people would like to quote Wargames.
I must admit that I dislike the term gaming, but for the sake of being clear I use it. However, I favour playing over gaming wherever plausible for the action, because I want to keep reminding people that video and computer games didn’t just pop up in the arcades and homes out of nowhere, but are a part of play culture that is as old as man itself. The methods and playthings have changed throughout the eras, but the inner drive to play for entertainment and for practice has never gone away. Storytelling is an important part of play, but not in the manner modern gaming wants to present it as. Let’s kick the dead horse once more and remind ourselves that the act of playing a game is to tell its story; the game’s FMV sequences and whatnot are there to justify and frame player actions, not to act as the story itself.
For whatever reason, because computer and video games lay in the lineage of play culture, they are seen as somehow worse in terms of storytelling. Partly because the games industry has been chasing Hollywood in terms of mutilating what a video game’s story is and now seeing the endpoint of the medium as being adapted to the silver screen. I find it odd that a more popular media format would want to turn into a lesser thing, but global culture at large still considers film as the peak when it comes to media. That’s good old-school Hollywood propaganda at work.
Films themselves descend from plays. Plays that people play parts in. That’s another layer of English not exactly distinguishing the term play, but actor at least showcases the major difference between a person playing (a role) and a person playing (a game or with something.) If we approached electronic gaming where the game serves as the stage for the player, and the story as the framing and stage the player acts his role out, we probably would find ourselves in a place where games would improve in quality as this would begin to use video and computer games’ inherent element of interactivity as a strength, not as a weakness.
Fifty years ago, when Atari and Space Invaders reigned supreme, it might’ve been hard to imagine these games telling compelling stories. Hence, PC gaming was the place. Different RPGs and MUDs did what they could, following in the wake made by traditional games. Arguably, these games had more freedom for the players to act out their stories in these early games’ frameworks and systems than what we have nowadays as the framing became increasingly more rigid and directive. Especially in games, where the developers are fearful of players who go off the rails and doing their own things, missing developer intended paths and ways of play.
Game’s framing and game’s play sometimes are in opposition with each other, as seen in e.g. Breath of the Wild. The game’s framing supposes that there is a hurry to beat Ganon, but the game’s play is nothing but. There are no consequences in dilly dallying around. This stands in opposition to Fallout, where the framing has a ticking clock in the background, further justifying player actions and what sort of role they choose to act. This isn’t the only kind of dissonance video and computer games can have. FMV sequences and cutscenes often portray the player character’s competence as opposite, able to take more damage than during play, showcasing actions that game doesn’t allow, or otherwise different enough from the play proper to cause a dissonant effect. An example of this would be Dante getting slashed to hell in cutscenes in Devil May Cry 3 but can’t take the same beating when the player is in control. All this would indicate that the framing of a game is treated and considered almost separate from the play proper.
Perhaps partially because of this chase of out-of-media ways to build up games’ framing, game-like description in modern movie parlance describes inane, long action scenes that don’t really do anything for the movie. From an outsider perspective, video and computer games with action sequences may seem the same, short in story and all mundane hack ‘n’ slashing. Naturally, this is the opposite. A player is in active role in a game (or at least should be) and that action is part of the main story that is being told via decisions the player is actively making. These sequences in film have also been described as the director smashing two toys together. We find the connecting line between the two plays from earlier, and both are considered beneath something more proper.
However, that’s why turning any game into a film will suck whatever value the game had as an action. A player walking an hour through a desert would find value in it as it is they, through the avatar they control, doing the walking. In a movie, this would be boring as the viewer is simply watching someone wading through the desert. Only the action of walking, nothing else. No surprise scorpions or mirages, nothing to pull the viewer in. In a game, the player would be making decisions all the time; Would he walk the shortest route, would he try to veer off to see if there are other things to see, how would the sand dunes change as you walk on them from different angles. The player’s action can make it interesting in the given framework, whereas a film will always be someone walking through the desert.
Despite video and computer games enjoying being at the most popular form of entertainment, they’re overlooked and frowned upon. whether from sports fans, music lovers or cinephiles, the act of playing a game is seen as lesser. It’s immaterial for this conversation why exactly. What matters is that because the games industry chases Hollywood in style and status, it never has tried to justify games as an art by its own merits. When game’s writing becomes more text-heavy, it becomes compared to literary works. The reason games like Metal Gear Solid got compared to movies was their heavy reliance on cutscenes. Interestingly enough, the MGS games also showcase great ways of making the game world tell the story with little details and attention to what players may do outside the intended. When the player agenda is taken into account the game world becomes that much more interesting, even in linear titles. However, these examples are still rare. Instead of moving toward games that would encourage player agenda, we’ve got more games that restrict these and construct games to be Skinner boxes to placate customers like DarkSydePhil, holding players’ hands and constantly reminding them to do X or task Y being a thing. It’s easy to see why supposing games as art gets scoffed at when they’re as subtle as a hammer in a pottery shop.
The discussion was very different in the 1990s and after the change of the millennium. There was a significant movement, for a short while, to use games as interactive spaces for art. It wasn’t games as art per se, but games’ space used for art. A vestige of this is the use of experience with games. (I’m going to write about this more next time.)
Games became experiences, things that have music to awe you, things that will make you feel things and showcase high graphical fidelity, and so on. This in a manner is the games industry justifying how the framing is the work of art that Hollywood and others should admire and see, not the act of playing. The Super Mario movies don’t exactly depict any of the Mario games per se as they are, or even adapt them, but adapt the concept of a Mario game and the property’s concepts. Another example would be Prince of Persia’s movie adaptation, which does what any film adaptation of a game can really do; work with the framing and hint the gameplay with action scenes. The reason why the original Mortal Kombat is/was considered one of the best game-movies is because martial arts tournament is a genre, and Mortal Kombat the movie added more to the story and world of the games. Fighting games would naturally loan their play to the action scenes, but often, these scenes end up being depicted like they’re in the games. This is where the original MK movie walked a good middle line.
Thus, if movies are experiences to behold, then the framing of video and computer games follow the same path; they’re the things to behold. Cinematic sequences and non-interactive plot points follow this same path, forcing the player to experience the game world the exact same way repeatedly rather than allowing the agency for the player to make decisions how to experience it themselves. How much freedom to “experience” a game gives to the player is one good indicator on the quality of the game.
That’s perhaps a key here. A game that you game isn’t about the experience, thus it’s free to get all the flak media can muster. The approved games that aim to deliver some sort of art experience often enjoy high ratings and reviews from the games media. It’s partly because how the review industry works as an extended PR of game publishers, where nepotism and corruption are daily things. The more you have an experience, the less there is game to play.
Computer and video games are a collection of different people working toward one end result. With films, the director is largely credited as the driving force behind the film’s vision despite hundreds or thousands of people working blood and sweat on the production. For literature, it’s often the writer who gets the sole credit even if there are more people behind the scenes giving a helping hand. Video games have a couple of names that can be listed in the superstar status, names that get similar treatment as directors, team leads, or whatever Todd Howard wants to call himself. Gaming has been trying to implement the auteur theory into practice, but rarely it works as consumers recognize how many different visions have to come together in a big budget title. The auteur theory proposes the director has an unbound influence on the project they are working on, imprinting their unique personal vision and focus on every aspect of the finished piece. There are numerous games that we could identify this with. Nintendo specifically wants to sell Shigeru Miyamoto as an auteur director, someone who has a magical touch and is responsible for all great things in gaming. It’s like how Disney used to portray Walt Disney making all the comics over the real authors, like Carl Barks.
Much like films, perhaps even more so, video and computer games are geared toward popular culture. The difference was that being a coder or a director wasn’t exactly cool or a desired position, unlike being a writer or a film director. Companies were afraid of losing their coders. The superstar game developer would come a bit later, perhaps iD being one of the bigger examples of this in the wake of Doom‘s popularity. Nintendo had the aforementioned Shigsy, and Capcom showcased Keiji Inafune as their posterboy for Mega Man. Konami would have Hideo Kojima breaking to the scene with the Metal Gear Solid‘s success. These and numerous more would trickle down the line to the mainstream consciousness. It’s no coincidence that games that were taken in with more artistic value than other had a recognizable name attached to them. The name that delivers that experience has become more important than the play, often cited in a tertiary manner. Framing has become more important as that’s what people who don’t play video and computer games understand. These people don’t realize that the best point of comparison with games isn’t other media, but their own history of playing when they were younger. Starting from there, they might realize that modern electronic gaming has become acting out the worst and the best parts of our imagination rather than just watching things passively.
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