Someday We’ll Treat Video Games Like High Art

I’m regularly impressed with the graphics of video games these days. They may be computed animated, but unlike when I was much younger and playing Starcraft of Warcraft 2 or later on with Zelda on the N64 the design was somewhat lifelike but not lifelike. These days though it often takes me a few seconds to realize that the little cinema episodes in video games are computer animated. This means that for video games to gain greater intellectual appreciation, all that’s left is storyline improvement. The blogger Freddie writes that he found a game that he considers more than just a first-person shooter, Mass Effect 2:

It’s funny; for someone who is as big a reader as I am, I’m often impatient with dialogue or exposition in video games. But in ME2, I found myself compulsively clicking on the dialogue choices that took me deeper into the story– dialogue choices, by the way, that you can safely ignore if you are the impatient type.

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The way that story plays out is famously malleable in the Mass Effect series, and my game experience won’t be exactly like yours– who lives and dies, who you romance, and a huge decision at the very end of the game. That means that you always wonder what happens if you made another choice, but there too I think is a step taken for games as art– ambiguity, though never popular, is an essential element of mature artwork. You can of course always load a saved game and go back and try different choices, but I don’t know if I’ll do that anytime soon. The experience at the end was a little too moving for me to want to cheapen it by running the ending again with different choices. And they are real choices, ones you agonize over, particularly when the can potentially lead to the death of one of the characters you have grown to care about. It’s interesting, when I had to make those choices, I felt a bit annoyed– I didn’t want to care about the characters! I wanted to be able to use them as cannon fodder the way that I have in lesser games. But I also knew that this experience was deeper, richer, more rewarding. It really is a great achievement.

I for one can see how Freddie could be so moved by a video game. They are in fact stories after all, stories with characters and plots and an involved observer (the player), so it’s not really that far fetched that they could be treated as an art form the way movies or music are.

–Daniel Strauss