I have spent most of this past week at the Game Developer’s Conference, and have realized that the main cultural topic of conversation here is “Dammit, we are not movies, we are games. We are, in our own right, a legitimate part of the means of cultural production!” All this accompanied by much indignity and metaphorical foot stamping.
Which is all fine, I guess. But it leave me wondering why such defensiveness is necessary. After all, people in the movie biz don’t spend a lot of time arguing that movies are not computer games.
The only thing I can conclude, if I can make an analogy, is that computer games are to movies more or less what Canada is to the United States.
Oooh. Snap!
And, we are NOT Americans.
Just saying.
Yes, exactly! 🙂
I have been at GDC since Wednesday and, at least in the sessions I’ve attended, this does seem pretty prevalent. As I understand it, this argument is against what some see as a striving to make movie-like games. The weak version is that games will never be as good at being movies as movies are. The strong version is that games can do things that movies can’t and that is where efforts are best focused. Mixed in here, I think, is some concern over the costs of ever greater photorealism.
I don’t know what the Canadian perspective is, does “Canadians, stop trying to be like USians” enter into it?
In the past two days we’ve also had Eric Zimmerman’s call against “design fundamentalism”, and Dan Pinchbeck also touched on it in his microtalk. In case you didn’t attend that session, here’s a bit Eric said on that point:
“There’s this sort of design fundamentalism, this idea of ‘that’s not what a game is’. It’s as if a designer has a problem, has an issue or a point of view, a sensibility to explore, but has to turn that into a normative statement, a fact about games. We don’t have to do this.”
It is an interesting discussion to witness.
Eric made a very good point that games are beautiful in their own right, without needing to be judged as to their utility toward some other agenda, like raising ecological consciousness or getting kids to pick up a guitar. But he was quite indignant and somewhat defensive about all this — arguably with reason.
I thought Dan was simply over the top in his antagonism toward cinema. To “prove” that movies are all alike (in contrast to the wonderful variation between games — a good point that stands on its own merits), he showed a rapid-fire array of recent Hollywood romantic comedies. This is like “proving” games are all alike by showing only first person shooters.
Worse, the last film on his list was “500 Days of Summer”, which is actually a brilliant and daring deconstruction of RomComs. It’s clear he didn’t think it worthwhile to learn the first thing about what he was trashing.
Maybe I’m reading too much into it, but I’m fairly certain this part of Dan’s talk wasn’t just ‘like “proving” games are all alike by showing only first person shooters’, it was *exactly* that. People within the game industry, who arguably ought to know better, and at whom his complaint was directed, have given presentations that look a lot like that while saying “oh, look at all the innovation in our industry, all these different white men with guns in shooters”. I don’t know that type of game or movie well enough to claim more than the superficial similarities in these arguments.
Oh, I see. I hadn’t understood that Dan was actually parodying such arguments. His choice of “500 Days of Summer” as an example of a typical RomCom threw me off. In that case I agree with his point. 🙂