After reading Three False Constraints by Danc on Lost Garden, it was easy to jump in and defend what seems/is an attack on current game tenets. Danc essentially argues that by sticking to these three constraints (single player, authored content, high-end platforms), games cannot progress culturally.
While at first I disagreed completely, on reflection and on reading Danc’s rebuttal to the most common defences, I have been somewhat converted. However, I don’t believe these constraints must be over come to make culturally relevant games, i.e. games don’t have to be of the Facebook ilk to have meaningful insights on the human condition. I agree that current single player games are fruitlessly attempting to mimic passive media, most derivatively cinema, when the interactive nature of games means we have to invent new ways to convey meaning. Uncharted 2 stands as the current pinnacle gaming cinema, and although I love it, it delivers no emotional meaning outside of scripted cutscenes and dialogue. This is fine, but games can only compete with cinema by getting enormous art budgets, which we can’t sustain without a much larger audience. We deny it, and desperately hold up examples, like Uncharted, to show we can be as meaningful as cinema. But when even the most brain dead action movie has more emotional impact then our most prized cinematic games, something needs to change.
I suppose this sounds very harsh, but I’m not dismissing these games, in fact the opposite. Half Life showed we can have stories without resorting to cutscenes, then in Episode Two showed us we can feel basic emotion towards on screen characters (and yes, I know they weren’t necessarily the first, but they are the first mainstream games to do so.) The problem is, we have to use new methods to convey meaning. Bioshock used the basic game action of exploration to show a point, the decay of Rapture was experienced directly through its exploration. Jason Rohrer’s games such as Passage and Gravitation, convey insights on the human condition through play mechanics. These, admittedly simple examples, show what can be achieved. Bioshock shows how high-quality art assets can be used beyond ‘looking nice’, while Rohrer’s games show how single player games can still have meaningful insights. Danc argues that in “…very limited situations, in the hands of extraordinarily talented people, (see Gravitation or Passage) a single player game can evoke a glimmer [of emotional insight] from a core group of players who desperately want to believe.” But these games prove what can be done in the future. As Kevin Glover, a commenter on the Lost Garden blog states, “…in one paragraph you’re arguing that although Facebook games are shallow they can grow into something more sophisticated, and in the next paragraph you’re arguing that games like Passage are limited, but that they can’t grow past that.”
Now where I do agree, is that branching out of the single-player mould will allow games to access a deeper well of human emotion, although I’ll elaborate on this perhaps later. Suffice to say that while multiplayer games have not reached beyond the elations and frustrations of competition, we can’t give these as examples as to why multi-player gaming can ‘never’ work. Games like Eve Online, with its politics, or Love, with its communal creation tools, show glimmers of hope that should be experimented with.
Essentially I think Danc’s article is a rather pessimistic look at the future of single-player gaming. I agree that these constraints should be ignored; for games that involve human interactions, go multi-player rather than faking it. But single player games can still be used as tools of expression, perhaps in a different form to multi-player games. What we can be sure of, however, is that we have a long way to go before games can really start making an artistic impact.
