GTA III > Crash, Literacy, Education

Clint posted his essay on authorship last Friday, but it's taken me until now to read it, because, boy, is he wordy! :)

Here's the essential nugget (for me anyway):

Taken as wholes, GTA: San Andreas is a more compelling, meaningful and important work of art than Crash.

Admittedly, not everyone will agree, and admittedly, I have a high level of literacy in reading systems. The point here is not to enter a subjective debate about what is a superior work of art, rather the point is to say that – yes – if a game is offering a smorgasbord of unrelated mechanics that are neither supporting each other nor driving toward a coherent theme, if they are not providing the player with a broad range of perspectives on a specific meaning that the creator is trying to express, then Ebert is right.

But if a game creator does have something specific he is trying to communicate, and he designs his game well, and the mechanics and dynamics are coherently supporting that aesthetic, and providing the player – more or less whatever he does (assuming it is not wilfully nonsensical) – with insight into that meaning, then yeah… it's art.

I happen to agree (if Clint's referring not to Cronenberg's Crash - a creepy meditation on sex and dismemberment - but the other one, a rather insipid and predictable attempt to survey race relations in Los Angeles). Think of how much ink was spilled in dissecting the game, how much people were awed and, in some cases, frightened by it, how people passionately defended their interpretation of it.

But one little phrase of Clint's I'd like to point out - something he tossed out but which to me seems key here. He has a high level of literacy with systems of interaction. This is terribly important. Games speak in their own language, and when you are comfortable with that language, then games can make sense to you, you can process them and absorb them and react to them. It's not just a matter of dextrousness or fingering facility. It's a matter of understanding that the game is built of these blocks of systems.

Just as children are taught to read - narrative is built in blocks of meanings; visual arts, too, are not necessarily intuitively appreciated. The *reason* that so many of what I would have once called low-brow mid-culture consumers appreciate Monet's waterlilies and Handel's Water Music is because those cultural forms, the language of classicism, have been so embedded in the west that we can understand them intuitively. When the Impressionists were first painting plenty of people thought them crazy, or degenerate, or both. Now imitations of their work hang in second-rate hotel rooms everywhere. We've tamed the language of what was once radicalism so that now it seems safe and normal.

Ebert - and not just him, many many people - have yet to learn the language that games employ. Gamers know it instinctively, although few are as self-aware and as articulate about what they know than Clint. but my question now is, ok, we're raising a generation of gamers who understand interactivity and systems; how come we are running out of good programmers then? Shouldn't this generation be ideally suited to become natural programmers? And yet every industry that requires engineers, programmers, or other system-builders is having the toughest time finding talent. Is it just a matter of boom time economy and too much work to go around?

Or is something broken?

Comments

[Jens Alfke]

A few unrelated points:

— And Cronenberg's "Crash" was based on an excellent novel by J.G. Ballard. I really don't think any existing game could come close to equalling that novel, though really that's comparing apples to oranges, because

— I see video games as having far more in common with architecture, and with certain types of performance art like Happenings, than with film or books.

— Speaking of the shock of the new in art: The late medieval shift from Gregorian chant to polyphony was viewed as heretical by some, as was the later innovation of having a piece change key. I'll bet the cave painters in Lascaux were considered degenerate weirdos too.

— The shortage of programmers seems to stem from college students finding the field unattractive. I wrote about this (in particular, the terrible lack of women in the field) a few months ago and got a lot of interesting comments.

[Michael Abbott]

Thanks very much for this thoughtful entry. I posted a lengthier - sorry:-) response on my blog making an analogy to the early days of the cinema. Here's a bit of it:

One more analogy to the cinema might be useful. The question for all the Hollywood studios at the dawn of the sound era was how to find enough people to make the transition quickly and capitalize on the new technology of sound. History suggests that two solutions were identified. If you were a big studio with lots of money (MGM, Paramount....Blizzard?, Valve?) you hired the best people from all over the world and developed your own self-sufficient in-house production systems.

If you were a smaller studio like RKO or Warner Bros. you did one of two things (or sometimes both). You hired a genius and gave him a small amount of money and total control (Orson Welles, Michael Curtiz), or you developed a less costly, more efficient way to make good movies (David Selznick's unit production system).

Looking back on the first decade of the sound era, I think you could make a decent case that RKO and Warner Bros. released just as many truly great films as MGM or Paramount.

Could there be a helpful lesson in this for today's game developers and designers?

Michael
www.brainygamer.com