A cover for the comic book "The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen," written by Alan Moore and illustrated by Kevin O'Neill

In Part I of our critique of level designer and blogger Steve Gaynor's assertion that "video games will never become a significant form of cultural discourse the way that novels and film have," we talked about how any medium requires a certain amount of learning in order for it to be approached and engaged. We also suggested that as more people grow up playing videogames, even conventional controllers like those of the Xbox 360 and the Playstation 3 become far less of a barrier to entry, to say nothing of newer interfaces such as the Wii. But Gaynor believes that there's something even more essential, even more fundamental about videogames that will forever wall the medium off from truly widespread participation:

[T]he very nature of interactive games bars them from ever truly gaining mass acceptance, and therefore mass cultural relevance. The strength of video games, what makes them unique, interesting, and affecting, is that they engage in a dialogue with each individual player. They ask you to invest yourself in the experience, to explore and understand the logic of their gameworld, and to activate the experience by doing. Video games require you to be involved, to take responsibility for your actions onscreen. They expect more out of you than film, television, the internet or a book does. You get from video games what you're willing to put in. The audience at large only wants to take.

The very thing Gaynor decries--a lack of willingness among the audience to work for their entertainment--isn't inherent in to this medium. It's almost intractable among mass audiences no matter what the medium. Popular fiction generally outsells literary fiction. Summer blockbusters generally out-gross arthouse films. Is this any different from, say, Call of Duty 4: Modern Combat out-NPD-ing BioShock last year, or Madden doing the same to Shadow of the Colossus in 2005? Does it truly matter that in aggregate television is more mass a mass medium than videogames, when on an individual level, its practitioners are faced with the same challenges that plague those who work in other media? The creator of "The Wire," David Simon, in explaining the advantages of working on TV shows for premium cable described the problem as follows:

Television is a pretty passive experience in American culture. It is a tool not of provocation but of relaxation, and if that’s the nature of it, then nobody’s going to be able to tell an intelligent story, but premium cable has sort of changed the equation. And the other way it’s done that, not just by getting rid of commercials, but you can catch The Wire four or five times a week on HBO. You can catch it on demand at your leisure, in your time, and you can eventually buy the DVDs. At that point, it’s no longer a scheduled event, and if you miss one episode, or if you get a phone call in the middle of one, you are still going to be able to catch up on it if you choose, and that’s revolutionary for television.

What is Simon's solution to this problem? A middle finger, raised, to the inertial forces of the status quo and a doubling down of effort to create the kind of provocative entertainment he wants to make, for precisely the audience willing to accompany him for the ride. As he colorfully puts it:

My standard for verisimilitude is simple and I came to it when I started to write prose narrative: f--k the average reader. I was always told to write for the average reader in my newspaper life. The average reader, as they meant it, was some suburban white subscriber with two-point-whatever kids and three-point-whatever cars and a dog and a cat and lawn furniture. He knows nothing and he needs everything explained to him right away, so that exposition becomes this incredible, story-killing burden. F--k him. F--k him to hell.

Beginning with "Homicide," the book, I decided to write for the people living the event, the people in that very world. I would reserve some of the exposition, assuming the reader/viewer knew more than he did, or could, with a sensible amount of effort, hang around long enough to figure it out. I also realized--and this was more important to me--that I would consider the book or film a failure if people in these worlds took in my story and felt that I did not get their existence, that I had not captured their world in any way that they would respect.

Which brings us back to Average Reader. Because the truth is you can’t write just for people living the event, if the market will not also follow. TV still being something of a mass medium, even with all the fractured cable universe now reducing audience size per channel. Well, here’s a secret that I learned with "Homicide" and have held to: if you write something that is so credible that the insider will stay with you, then the outsider will follow as well. "Homicide," "The Corner," "The Wire," "Generation Kill"--these are travelogues of a kind, allowing Average Reader/Viewer to go where he otherwise would not. He loves being immersed in a new, confusing, and possibly dangerous world that he will never see. He likes not knowing every bit of vernacular or idiom. He likes being trusted to acquire information on his terms, to make connections, to take the journey with only his intelligence to guide him. Most smart people cannot watch most TV, because it has generally been a condescending medium, explaining everything immediately, offering no ambiguities, and using dialogue that simplifies and mitigates against the idiosyncratic ways in which people in different worlds actually communicate. It eventually requires that characters from different places talk the same way as the viewer. This, of course, sucks. 

(Is it possible for a commercial game developer to say "F--k the Average Gamer" and still find a meaningful audience? After all, the audience for "The Wire" was less than half that of David Chase's own middle fingerish suburban gangster epic "The Sopranos," which was in turn less than that for any number sitcoms and reality shows that permeate the airwaves. It's a subject worth considering in a future post.)

Moving right along, the second half of Gaynor's argument anticipates Simon's by saying, pessimistically, that the remainder of the problem lies not with the audience, but with the creators themselves. His indictment?

Comics speak to the viewer through their own complex set of symbols and conventions, born of a marriage between graphic design, illustration, and prose. At their best, comics exploit this mode of communication to its fullest, best demonstrated probably in the work of Chris Ware. He uses his incredibly deep understanding of the language of comics to express human experience in a way that no other medium could, instead of fighting against the constraints of the page. One could similarly say that games are at their best when they demonstrate a deep understanding of how interactive systems communicate with the player, and convey human experience in ways that no other medium could. Also like video games, Wares' comics require physical and mental investment by the reader: one often has to turn the entire book round in circles to view images or text that are oriented at 90 degree angles to one another, track panels that wind around and underneath one another, or lean into a page to decipher minuscule drawings and text.

But comics and video games are alike in another way: they both remain marginalized, infantilized media, where the Wares are the rarest exception and the medium in general holds little to no value outside of very specific circles. The highest ideal of the vast majority of creators is to force the medium into being something it's not, and the largest segment of the audience consists of juveniles, in age or mindset, who haven't "graduated" to more respected forms of entertainment.

But content aside, the majority of both comics and games aim squarely at being something they're not--movies--and become less compelling experiences for the effort. Mainstream comics feature vaguely lifelike renderings of idealized humans in action-packed situations (sound familiar?); they are drawings of movies, instead of being comics for comics' sake. Clearly the same applies to mainstream games, aiming for "realism" in visuals and juvenile coolness in character and story, trying to be "cinematic" without understanding that the real value of a video game comes from being uncinematic, unrealistic; from embracing the otherness of the form and expressing human experience in ways that a movie never could.

Ordinarily, we'd be all too happy to jump aboard the infantilization argument, considering that in other contexts, it's an argument that we've often made ourselves. What's different here is that Gaynor is claiming that juvenilia is responsible for the cultural marginalization of videogames, when in fact, as we pointed out above, juvenilia rules the roost in mass media. Be it the novelistic adventures of Harry Potter or Jack Ryan; whether it's serialized TV dramas like "24" or "Lost"; whether it's "National Treasure: Book of Secrets" or "Ratatouille," no-one would mistake any of these works for the highest forms of human expression. Nor would anyone use them to indict their respective media in toto, not with "What Is the What," "The Wire" and "There Will Be Blood," as recent examples of the heights to which their respective media can aspire.

Still, only a fool would argue that today's videogame industry, even in a banner year like 2007, is producing as many exemplary works as are those of the novel, television and film--if we were judging games purely by their narrative or thematic content. But as we've asserted in the past, videogames are nowhere nearly as good at telling stories as they are at providing us with experiences, at putting us in spaces where narrative(s) can emerge through exploration and gameplay. Here, depth of character and exploration of theme become difficult to achieve--even compared to a comic book. That's in part because, as Will Wright eloquently said, videogames privilege agency over empathy as the primary means by which the individual "interacts" with the medium. So it's no accident that the handful of commercial games that are most often cited when trying to uphold games as art are light on explicit storytelling (where meaning is communicated through dialogue and cutscenes) and heavier on embedded narrative (where the meaning of things is communicated through the world itself, as in Ico and Shadow of the Colossus) or impressionism (the recently re-released Rez). The same could be said of last year's critically acclaimed Portal; here's how we described it in our November Vs. Mode exchange:

I'd be hard pressed to call the events of Portal a story in the traditional sense; it doesn't much resemble a movie, television show, a novel or even a short story. The narrative is more allusive (and elusive, for that matter) than expository and more suggestive than straightforward, thanks in no small part to the maternal, mischievous, malevolent and finally murderous unreliable narrator that is GLaDOS. As a result, Portal is closer to a poem or a song, making the track that wraps up the game wonderfully appropriate. Even better, "Still Alive" is sung in character, like a song from a musical; it reminded me of "Pirate Jenny" from "Threepenny Opera" or "Epiphany" from "Sweeney Todd." (Forget "American Gangster"; I wish that videogames had a sufficiently visible cultural profile that Jay-Z would create an entire album inspired by Portal.)

And:

What's great about Portal's approach is that suggestive spareness of the plot and the absence of characterization leaves us plenty of room to fill in the blanks with our imagination, which, when supported by a framework as precisely and elegantly thought out as it is here, delivers a more powerful final product than many other games that give us plenty of characterization and story but precious little genuine mystery.

By eschewing many of the traditional techniques of commercial narrative entertainment, these four games--Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, Rez and Portal--approximate the mood, texture, emotion, astonishment, mystery and ineffability that generally signal the presence of genuine art. Going back to David Simon's critique of the vast majority of television--"[I]t has generally been a condescending medium, explaining everything immediately, offering no ambiguities, and using dialogue that simplifies and mitigates against the idiosyncratic ways in which people in different worlds actually communicate"--these games manage to avoid those pitfalls. They don't condescend. They don't explain everything. They embrace ambiguity and idiosyncrasy in a variety of ways.

Does this mean that all videogames should toss narrative overboard in favor of pure gameplay, with a sprinkling of enigma on top? We don't think so--though Portal starkly demonstrates that many games can pare back their story elements at least somewhat, while still capably delivering both information and emotion. But we do believe that commercial videogames will have to smuggle in narrative ambition and thematic complexity through the back door, rather than foreground their highbrow aspirations, in order to slowly elevate the mass market side of the industry from its juvenile roots. That's what film noir did--or at least that's what the film critics who came in years after their release and urged that we look at them as art say they did.

Gaynor himself previously penned an intriguing essay where he focused on the low-budget, B-movie nature of film noir movies as a model for developers to model. But that's not the only way to look at these movies. They were clearly meant to entertain, just as were the hard crime novels of Jim Thompson or Chester Himes. In the hands of more ambitious writers and directors, they became something greater--even if they never became blockbuster hits. The same can be said of select extravagant commercial crowd-pleasers, whether it's "Die Hard" (smuggled-in theme: the changing roles of men and women in post-feminist America), "Terminator 2: Judgment Day" (smuggled-in theme: can machine become human, and can a human avoid becoming a machine?) or "The Matrix" (smuggled-in themes: too many to mention.)

The same is true of superhero comic books. Gaynor may dismiss them out of hand for the likes of those written by Chris Ware, but anyone who's read comics written by Grant Morrison ("Animal Man," "New X-Men" and "All-Star Superman"--MTV News' Stephen Totilo would do us grievous bodily harm if we didn't mention Morrison's "Seven Soldiers" as well), Warren Ellis ("The Authority," "Planetary), Alan Moore ("Swamp Thing," "V for Vendetta," "League of Extraordinary Gentlemen") or Neal Gaiman ("Sandman") knows that the best writers of superhero books are constantly smuggling in greater complexity than outsiders would presume. How different are these stories from the legends and fables of Greek, Roman and Viking gods; from novels by Alexandre Dumas or Jules Verne? Just because videogames haven't en masse entered their "literary" phase doesn't necessarily mean that they won't in the future--it may just mean that we can't yet picture it in our mind's eye.

One of the great things about the best superhero comics is the way that over-the-top action can sit alongside thematic and emotional complexity--or complication, at the very least--which is something that writers of modern literary fiction rarely allow themselves to do. That sounds like a good place for commercial videogames to start; we've already seen some games do this, and we're seeing more games do so with every passing year. Manhunt interrogated the designer-as-dominant, player-as-submissive model that characterizes just about every videogame. BioShock wedded its first-person shooter mechanics to a superficially superficial exploration of Ayn Rand's philosophy. Call of Duty 4 took us inside a military coup and subverted our expectations about the life expectancy of the characters we inhabit in a first-person shooter. And given that Will Wright's previous games like SimCity and The Sims incorporated his philosophies and critiques of urban planning and consumerism, respectively, we're curious to see how Spore will engage evolution, intelligent design, expansion, conquest and other subject matter within its toy box design.

So when Gaynor writes that "[L]ike comics, video games are never going to grow up. Some sixty years after the wartime comic book boom, the vast majority of comics are still male wish fulfillment trash sold to children, poor drawings of stills from movies that no one would want to fund or film," we may understand his impatience and sympathize with his despair, but we still say, baby steps. Let the bulk of commercial videogame developers take it one baby step at a time (it's what they're going to do anyway, so there's no use getting worked up about it) while others--including a handful of their peers--take bolder strides.

Next: In which we tackle developer-blogger Borut Pfeifer's suggestion that bridging the uncanny valley will make it easier to engender emotion. For Part I, click here.