Everyone's a critic...

http://www.lrb.co.uk/v31/n01/lanc01_.html

This article was sent to me by my former high school English teacher Mr. Christian Talbot, a man who will no doubt frown upon that last part of the sentence for being in the passive voice. In this piece, the author John Lanchester shows himself as an anachronism as he writes about video games with the condescending tone of an over-forty-year-old in a piece that only those similarly unfamiliar with the medium (and similarly out of touch with popular culture) could really take seriously.

Lanchester opens the article with the data that in 2008 the video game industry generated more revenue than music and video combined in the UK (the same is true in the US for video games and Hollywood), and then immediately contradicts himself, somehow saying that “from the broader cultural point of view, video games barely exist.” Well, apparently they “exist” more than music and movies to consumers, if one only looks at how much people are willing to spend on them as an indicator.

He then goes on to present his opinion as a fact that is simply incorrect: “There is no other medium that produces so pure a cultural segregation as video games, so clean-cut a division between the audience and the non-audience … Video games have people who play them, and a wider public for whom they simply don’t exist.” Perhaps not to the staff at the London Review of Books. But here at American University alone, it has been my experience that everyone (not just us “gamers”) has at least heard of Halo, or Guitar Hero, or World of Warcraft, or Grand Theft Auto, or Wii Sports, even if they don’t actually play them. Once again, all the numbers suggest this would be the case. Are games on the whole as culturally ubiquitous as Hollywood? No, but they’re obviously (to anyone under 40) well on their way.

Lanchester correctly cites Bioshock as the best example of how video games can reach serious artistic depth (as defined by Lanchester and the rest of the English majors who determine what is in fact art). “The game was a huge hit, and I have yet to encounter anyone who has ever heard of it,” he says, again showing that he probably doesn’t talk to many people who might actually own a 360 or PS3.

To me, the most intellectually fraudulent and insulting part of the article was when Lanchester pretends to be a game critic, knocking Bioshock for containing “the whole package of conventions and codes and how-tos which become second nature to video-game players, but which strike non-gamers as arbitrary and confining and a little bit stupid,” never actually saying what these are. Perhaps I am too submerged in these conventions to be able to spot them, but the only one I could think of was the health system, which I’ll use as an example of how Lanchester doesn’t know what he’s talking about.

In most shooters, you take damage from enemies by being shot or stabbed or otherwise hurt. In many games, you are able to take an unrealistic amount of damage and can be easily healed by picking up “health packs.” Yes, it is a bit silly, and games like Call of Duty that have attempted to do away with a clichéd “health meter” by sticking with visual and aural cues to tell the player they’re taking damage, and letting them heal by taking cover in an equally unrealistic manner.

The reason this convention is in place is because it works. Shooters are fun because they present a challenge; if it was easy for the player to gun down hordes of enemies, there would be no sense of excitement or tension, no sense of accomplishment with success, and no reason to play tactically in a way that maximizes the fun one has with the game. In spite of this, Lanchester criticizes video games for being “a much more resistant, frustrating medium than its cultural competitors. Older media have largely abandoned the idea that difficulty is a virtue; if I had to name one high-cultural notion that had died in my adult lifetime, it would be the idea that difficulty is artistically desirable.” In his failure to understand the necessity of challenge in games, he fails to understand how it is in fact the interactivity of video games that primarily separate them from other media.

He goes on to talk about Shigeru Miyamoto and how the Wii strives for a simpler, more accessible experience, and does so admirably until he makes the following assertion: “Sony’s PS3 is a wonder of the world, with two astounding new technologies inside, the multi-threading Cell computer chip and the new generation Blu-Ray Disc; the Xbox 360 is a powerful computer in its own right; but the much lower-tech Nintendo Wii is a lot more fun than either of them.”

Again, a judgment like that shows that Lanchester has no clue about anything beyond the few games he probably heard about and further researched to write his article. Wii owners would probably agree with him, while PS3 and 360 owners such as myself would strongly disagree. Yet he presents that statement as if it was an undisputed fact. Personally, I find the intense action and extraordinary depth of games on the 360 (like Bioshock, Mass Effect, Oblivion, and Fallout just to name a few of the very many) to surpass the experience of waving around a controller, the most “fun” that is usually to be had on the Wii.

But how should someone like Lanchester who clearly doesn’t play games be expected to understand that? He shouldn’t, and as such he has no justification for writing as if he does.

His next major offense is his assertion that “The medium doesn’t have, and probably never will have, a sense of character to match other forms of narrative; however much it develops, it can’t match the inwardness of the novel or the sweep of film.” Critics the same of cinema in the early 20^th century, only to be proven totally wrong mere decades later, and I see no reason why this won’t be the case with video games.

I’ll skip over some of his other smaller mistakes and inconsistencies to another massive error. He claims that the gamer demographic’s desire for mindless Hollywood-esque bloodbaths is currently holding video games back from reaching their artistic potential, since the bottom line is developers’ primary concern. But the same is true of movies; most of what are considered “art” films come from indie filmmakers, and there is a similar indie scene for video games. Many PC gamers develop mods for current games that often outlive the games they’re based on (obvious examples would be Counter-Strike and Dystopia). And other independent developers create totally new experiences that often find their way into the mainstream, since many gamers are on the lookout for innovative content (meaning there’s money to be made). Braid or Flower would be good modern examples.

I’m sick of reading these articles in high magazines and other publications that attempt to tell the story of the “gamer culture” to people who aren’t aware of it simply due to the generational divide. The condescension in Lanchester’s article is exactly why people who care about the medium go online to read about games; only in the online realm is the medium treated with the level of seriousness given to everything from literature and theater to movies and TV shows in high publications. Lanchester put the nail in his intellectual coffin with his final prediction: “The next decade or so is going to see the world of video games convulsed by battles between the moneymen and the artists; if the good guys win, or win enough of the time, we’re going to have a whole new art form.”

As if that art form isn’t here already. Whether or not games are an art form is a serious topic for discussion and debate (and a later blog post), but not by people who barely know anything about the medium in the first place.