In the circles of analysis, a major game's release is often heralded with the question, "will this be 'Gaming's Citizen Kane?'" The most recently I've seen this frequent question raised is at Michael Abbott's Brainy Gamer - where he concedes that measuring gaming's star chart to that of a much older medium is a flawed comparison.And it is, of course, for all the reasons Abbott cites: It's not 1915. Gaming is young compared to every other entertainment medium. The experience of games and films have never been, and will never be, really comparable. Apples and oranges. But the "Citizen Kane" question, I think, comes out of a larger issue for games that is still worth looking at.
What title, to the game industry, will represent our decades of learning and experimentation? What title, in the macro image, will we look back upon to say, "there - that's when gaming really arrived"?
Because we're not satisfied, not for the long-term. Because we're not really there yet, because we've begun to show we can go there, and we've begun to take our baby steps, but we've still a long way to go. Some titles have opened the door, have pointed the way. I'd say BioShock, which made people outside of game devotees consider a video game as a philosophical tool, was one such title - although I have to agree with Tim Rogers when he says that this is not some singular, great feat, merely the least we should expect.
And I've just gotten done being interviewed by a major media outlet about Metal Gear Solid 4, and that there is an interest level there for its relatively sophisticated themes is significant. I'm in my second playthrough of MGS 4, in part because I want to play a cleaner game the second time through, in part because I need a second look to really chisel in my final critical opinion - and in large part because since finishing it I have missed its characters, I have loved them, and I just need to be with them a little bit more.
This level of love, this emotional familiarity, this reverence for a game is not new to me - but this is a first for me in terms of feeling it to this degree of permanence, strength, a chest-wrenching fondness I still feel even when the sting of newness' spank has faded.
It's the first time something in a game's ending has surprised, delighted and pained me so abruptly that I wept loudly, open-mouthed, when it occurred.
And yet, I must agree with Abbott and some others that Metal Gear Solid 4 is not, alas, "gaming's Citizen Kane" - yes, for the purposes of discussion we are inferring an analogous, if not directly comparable event is possible.
I'll tell you why tomorrow.
24 comments:
I seem to recall reading that Citizen Kane wasn't really recognized as a great and important film until many years after it was released. I wouldn't be surprised if something similar happens for that special game one day.
At the same time, I can't help but feel that the past year of so has been a bit special in gaming. In terms of storytelling, at least, we've gotten closer to really defining our own way of telling and viewing stories in games, distinct from movies and other mediums. I think BioShock, Portal, and Call of Duty 4 really pushed how games can draw players into the story without relying on cutscenes and other traditional forms of videogame storytelling.
The writing of games in general seems to have taken a leap forward with the previously mentioned games, along with Mass Effect and GTA4.
The neat thing is that you can look at many of the games these franchises or from those developers and see the clear progression in quality and technique as they learned from each game they made.
I think we may be looking back at the 2007/2008 timeframe as a milestone in the growth of video games as a storytelling medium.
I think the growing pains that the videogame industry is experiencing now, are comparable to those of the film industry when sound was introduced to motion pictures. At that time, most of the films that Hollywood produced were adaptations of stage plays. The problem there was that filmmakers were only employing a fraction of what their medium was capable of expressing.
Stage plays are a subtextual medium. Everything that a play is about comes down to what is or isn't said. Film has a much larger palette to work with: light and shadow; the movements of the camera; the focusing in or blurring of an object; etc. Those early talking films, with their stagey movements and dialogue, their static camera angles, they missed the mark on what the medium of film could be. And that is what made Citizen Kane such a masterpiece for its time. Orson Welles knew that film could tell a story like no other medium could. He knew how to use a camera to express something that no line of dialogue or block of character movement could express on its own. He understood what "action" meant.
And now we have videogames, which are a medium of interaction. And as great as the MGS series has been (and I am loving MGS4, by the way), it still hasn't broken free of the bonds of its cinematic forbears. As beautiful an experience as MGS4 is, it still doesn't seamlessly blend interaction with theme. It doesn't fully utilize the strengths of its medium to tell a story or express an idea entirely through interaction. It falls back on the tried and true devices of cinema, just as those early talking pictures fell back on the devices of theater. And that's why I don't think MGS4 is the Citizen Kane of videogames.
An addendum: as far as I'm concerned, the closest a videogame has come to giving me a complete, emotional and philosophical experience entirely through interactive gameplay, without employing any of the "tricks" of cinema, was Shadow of the Colossus. I'm not saying it's my favorite game of all time, but I've played through it at least six times, and it still haunts me. And yet, everything that game made me feel, I felt while playing it, not watching it.
You know, I hear this a lot as well, and I have decided that gaming HAS already arrived, and has taken its infant steps, and has moved on.
We are quick to judge all games by the same standards, to say that a game must be thought-provoking is to say it must have philosophy and good dialog... but we miss out on the core of video games, which is input/output. We input commands, and the game output responses.
Perhaps this fundamental feature is hardwired into human brains. People are addicted to gambling, and the rules are simple an essentially the same.
Take a game like Legacy of the Wizard, for example. It is simple on the surface but offers lots of choices for the player to make, is well-designed, etc etc. But it will never be considered the best game ever made (and, obviously, it isn't, despite being a great game).
My point is that people, and critics, don't look at video games hard enough. They don't deconstruct them. We've got a medium that commands more capital that any other in the entertainment industry, yet intelligent discussion and taking games seriously gets one labeled as obsessive. I'm talking about viewing Tetris as a metaphor for life, or interpreting Pac-Man as a literal Nightmare (running from ghosts) and symbolic of the human condition.
So the Citizen Kane of games is probably something of a Red Herring. Either that, or its Final Fantasy VII.
One thing many take for granted is the opening theme song. Just every time you hear it, those chills go down your spine; and you're in that zone.
Although there's been that "Citizen Kane" note going around. I must admit Metal Gear is a candidate for greatness. So there are naysayers.. let them be. For those that indulge in such a story, and enjoy it, it is something worth sharing.
Even though I mostly grew up on platformers during the 8-bit saga. Just enjoying something that requires more than a simple "jump" button, gives it more life. My first hook with MG was on the NES, and later a family friends' MSX (which they let me borrow for a summer). I almost couldn't give up either game, it really sparked my gaming heart.
Even now, seeing S4 branching on what stories are capable of delivering. I seriously can't compare it to anything else out there in the market right now.
I have hope, that maybe we'll see another Metal Gear entry someday. And possibly on even territory with multiple platforms.. why limit? If knowing what such a game can push, let us push.
I think the problem is partly that video gaming is young, but also video games don't have a long shelf life. They age at a geometric rate and are too dependent on specific hardware.
Terry, GameCouch.com
"The Legend of Zelda: Ocarina of Time" already is gamedom's "Citizen Kane." Universally respected if not beloved by all, surpassed in every way by recent works but immortalized for having stomped new ground and left seismic repercussions that will be felt for decades.
I don't think gaming will have its Citizen Kane, for a variety of reasons. As far as I can tell books (and not as appropriately music) don't have their Citizen Kane - which isn't to say that there won't be a gaming equivalent, but it does mean we can't assume there will be.
What Kane did was to introduce several innovative techniques at once, changing and expanding the scope of cinema in the progress. What if a game introduced several new techniques at once? Since you're controlling a game (or at least should be, Mr Kojima!) is it possible that the player might be overwhelmed? Would money men ever option a game that sought to break so far from the rules of convention? I think the generally cautious nature of big game releases will stop radical sweeping changes to the medium, and that gaming progress will be a slow and iterative affair.
Games are built on technology that is ever improving, and we've no idea where it will stop. I think it's fair to say that Citizen Kane wouldn't have been improved had they been able to render a CGI snowglobe - all of the really essential tools of film storytelling were at Welles' disposal at that time. But such a stable set of tools might not be even exist for games. Every time we thought we'd found Citizen Game (ho ho), the technology could take another leap and make everything beforehand seem laughable. Then those games would get toppled by more advanced ones, and on and on. The language of film has, perhaps, plateaued - and man that's a hard word to spell - whereas we have no idea what will be possible in the "language" of games.
I also think the "form" (for want of a better word) of a game is harder to pin down than that of a film. Films are generally stories told in a series of (not necessarily linear) scenes chopped up with editing, usually between one and four hours in length. At the moment games can be pretty much anything. Maybe as the medium ages the scope of what a game can be will narrow. Won't that be a sad thing? I already feel that game genres are becoming very rigid, and that experimentation is increasingly uncommon outside of indie development. The massive budgets of mainstream games (and consequent need to rake in the cash) don't promote risk-taking. If there is to be one game that mixes several ground-breaking techniques at once, then I suspect those techniques will have been tried and tested in indie waters before being hoovered up into a game with top-end production values. Then which one is the fabled Citizen Kane of games? The original, or the newfangled fancy version of it?
I don't mind being proven wrong. Perhaps in the future we'll look back and assign a comparable status to a game, and we'll slap our foreheads and ask why we didn't think of it before. Ceilings on sets! So obvious!
Hmm...I can still watch Citizen Kane. I tried replaying Ocarina of Time a couple months ago, and...yeah...no.
@david
Music and literature existed long before film. You would never say something was the Citizen Kane of literature, because literature had already proven itself to be a viable artform, hundreds of years prior to Citizen Kane being made. It would make no sense to apply the Citizen Kane litmus test to a medium that's older than film.
@justin
Exactly my point. OOT is the somewhat boring, way-dated masterpiece that all the old sit around squawking about in their blogging chairs, guilting the young'ns to play in order to be considered literate.
Justin: I was coming at Citizen Kane more from its technical standpoint than the idea that it proved cinema as an art form - I feel many films before it did that.
I thought I was saying something similar to what you did - I agree with you after all. Perhaps it's not as clear in my post as it is in my mind. Sorry!
It's been established: games cannot be likened to cinema.
With that in mind, my issue with the whole Citizen Kane of gaming is that not every game is the same. The engines are different, the genres are different (in such a way that the way we experience it is different). When we look for a Citizen Kane, that means that we are searching for a game who takes the technical aspects of the medium to use them in a unique way, no? Well, do those aspects refer to the core ones that all games share? I ask because an Half-Life 2 cannot be looked at like StarCraft. The games are radically different due to the manner in which they must be played. That alone makes it hard to have one single game to which all others are compared to.
As far as story, I consider two games to tell their tale in a unique way due to it being a video game. The first is Half-Life 2. Rather, the entirety of the series. The sole fact that the action is always occurring from a first-person perspective and that Gordon never speaks really cement the player as the character. Indeed, it makes the story much more tense as the player is never taken away from the action.
*POSSIBLE SPOILERS*
I'll try to keep this as spoiler-free as possible, but the warning still stands. Consider the endings of both Metal Gear Solid 2 and Half-Life 2: Episode Two. In MGS2's ending, the player is taken out of the action and is privy to a series of cutscenes and whatnot. The player can do nothing, but he is watching the characters acting their parts - the player is simply a viewer. In Episode Two, the player is also a viewer as he cannot do anything but move the camera around as the final scene plays out. For me, Episode Two holds much more emotion because I am still in control of the game in a general sense and I feel as if I have never been taken out of it. I feel so helpless that what is happening is happening and I can do nothing. I'll hit my keyboard, throw my mouse around, cry out - but I can not do anything. I feel truly powerless. MGS2 is simply a movie - you feel the same emotions you do when you see a movie, but that's not unique. I'm repetitive yes, but for a point: MGS2 uses too many conventions from a different medium and doesn't exactly set itself apart. This coming from a lover of movies and Metal Gear! When I'm talking of the unique ways in which a story can be told through the medium of gaming, my first thought would be Half-Life, not Metal Gear.
The other game I hold to a high status is Silent Hill 2. I am not going to compare this to Metal Gear, but rather I'm using it as a showcase for the uniqueness of the medium. The atmosphere of this game left me speechless. The terror swirling around me was amazing. This was possible due to, interestingly enough, the lack of game elements on screen: no hud, no ammo count, etc. The other is that I am the character. True, it's not like Half-Life, but I am still controlling the character and so I feel as if I am the character. I didn't want to continue down the dark hallways nor did I want to enter the rooms - but I did. Mostly because that's the only way to beat the game, but looking at it in another sense, it's similar to what one would feel if they were in that situation. I often told my best friend, "I'd never be able to do what James does. Jumping into deep ass holes like that? Shit, forget that!"
Personally, I find Half-Life 2 and Silent Hill 2 to be perfect evidence of the unique ways in which story and atmosphere can be conveyed through games. Metal Gear, as much as I love it, is too interwoven with the movie medium.
I remember having a conversation with my mom who does not play video games, asking me why PS3 games do not play in a 360. To those in the know that sounds like a pretty dumb question.
When you come from thinking that you can play a DVD in any DVD player then why not? It would be completely hopeless if every DVD player manufacturer had its own format for its own hardware. This is one of many hurdles that the video games industry needs to cross before anything of epic nature is conceived. A one console future. A huge step forwards.
The general perception of a 'video game' itself has to change. Too many times you see video games lumped in the toy category, when they clearly sell mature games. And right there is your problem. "Game". That's right the word game. Y'know what kids play games.
One of the larger issues at hand is our old reliable friend Capitalism. It is fairly logical to assume that big business will not stray from its lucrative path. If it can keep churning out the profits like this ,then why change? Most major video games are made with the bottom line in mind and sadly not artistic value. Whatever developers might like to say.
Anyways I'm rambling here. But you get the point.
@david
I didn't mean for my post to come across as an attack. I get what you were saying, but even from a technical standpoint, the same principle applies. While writers today may still experiment with say, the novel, there were already novels published well before Citizen Kane was committed to celluloid, which showed how malleable and evocative language could be. My point was simply that literature doesn't need its Citizen Kane, because we already know what can be accomplished with the written word. The same goes for music and theater.
@phil
Point taken.
Justin: I definitely agree - sorry if my post reads that I was saying literature needs a Citizen Kane, that wasn't my intention. I was just trying to show that just because it happened in one medium didn't mean its equivalent was guaranteed elsewhere, though I'm afraid the example I tried to use is a bit misleading. And don't worry, I didn't feel like that was an attack at all. Just gentlemanly debate, like fresh mountain air! Ahh!
This has got me thinking about the Shakespeare of games. Hope he starts working during my lifetime.
I think videogames will really hit a cultural high water mark once we stop comparing our medium to movies and stop trying to recreate the same benchmarks that film has achieved.
"It's the first time something in a game's ending has surprised, delighted and pained me so abruptly that I wept loudly, open-mouthed, when it occurred.."
Amen to that! I'm a grown ass man and when I came to a particular, triangle-pressing section towards the end of the final act (I won't get into specifics to avoid spoilage), I was in shambles. Snotty nose and everything.
To join in on the debate, I also believe that gaming's CK has probably already arrived, but fails to be recognized. Out of pure fanboy passion, the choice is clear for me (MGS), but logically I can't even support that desire.
The one that stands out in my mind is ICO: There has not been another game as unique and wonderful since it released all those years ago. Frankly, I'm surprised it hasn't been mention yet here, although it's spiritual successor, prequel, and equally excellent, Shadow of the Colossus, has been.
For those of you that have not played Ico, please do yourself an immense favor and find/purchase that game post-haste.
Hi all,
Well to the first comment about Citizen Cane - it was revealed a few years ago that the film being in the top ten best films of all time was actually a joke. A reviewer (I can’t remember who) thought it would be funny to put it at number one. Other film buffs saw this and followed suite not realizing it was a joke. I can’t remember where I came across this info, but I think it may a have been a TV interview awhile back. I think the joke was the irrelevance of putting a rating on an artistic experience - because it’s an experience!
It should also be mentioned that film, as a medium, was unprecedented in that it only took twenty years for its language to be mastered. No other artistic medium has accomplished this. Before anybody says anything, I’m not saying that film is above all others, just the language of film was formalized faster - that’s all. We are in this period where game makers are trying to figure this language out. Part of the challenge is that video games are inherently connected to technology which is always improving. The other obstacle is pacing - how to communicate information to the player as he or she is playing the game. A lot of game designers have used cut scenes, which is understandable - film is a familiar medium to a majority of us. However what is happening is that one medium is being transplanted into another medium. When I read a novel, more often then not, I expect to read sentences all the way to the end of the book. It would be odd that whenever I get to a really good part, the book changes to a graphic novel for a few pages and then back to using sentences. Or if I was listening to a great song and for a few lyrics it changed to sign language. All communicate information but with a different tool set. I think the challenge for designers is to develop a short hand or language to communicate the narrative as the audience plays the game.
There have already been examples of narrative tools already. Oblivion and its main story acting like an anchor within a sand box experience. Mass Effect with its great dialogue system and well conceived responses. Or the player over hearing a party member’s conversation while in an elevator. Rainbow Six Vegas's use of the cross com to impart objectives to the player. GTA 4 with the cell phone where the player receives and passes on info as Niko drives or walks the streets of Liberty City. Bioshock with its great atmosphere, giving weight to why your in this environment, why the Slicers are attacking you, why you are attacking them - giving meaning and purpose to what I’m doing. A lot of gamers would say that game play is king, and they are right - game play is very important. I liken game play to well written sentences or great camera work - if it’s badly done then I don’t care what you have to say. However if you have great game play but no meaning then what is the point? How is the experience memorable or meaningful?
Right now there is this debate on the value of video games as an artistic medium. Even Roger Ebert has commented on a couple of occasions as to whether video games are fine art. He suggested that video games are closer to sports than fine art. Whether you agree or not, he’s pointed out a problem that video games as a medium have not tackled yet. What is art? Now this is a tough one. Many people probably have different views on the elements that make something a work of art. I’ll give you my point of view and you can decide if you agree or not. I think the main ingredient is us - our humanity. What makes us human. Our feelings and experiences, our beliefs, our relation to the environment we inhabit either through sight, touch, smell, or sound. At least that was one of the lessons that I was taught during three years of Art College. And yes I’m aware that this is dependant on the views that my teachers held - but it made sense to me. This is a main element I see in a majority of art, whether it be artwork from the renaissance period, the impressionists, all the way up to the art of today.
I came across a debate while at Art College over the work produced by the painter Robert Bateman. Name sounds familiar? If you’ve gone into a poster shop in the past thirty or so years you’ve probably seen his paintings. His most popular know works are paintings of nature and wildlife. Now there is no question that his work is very skilled, but many in the art world would label his work as illustration and not fine art. Now before I go any further I want to say I’m using this as an example to suggest a point of view. I’m not making a personal statement about Mr. Bateman’s value to the art world. Anyway, the reasoning for this point of view is that in these paintings there are no human elements depicted that make a statement either strongly or ambiguously about the human experience. It’s just about the beauty of nature. That’s not a bad thing, but it doesn’t go beyond us look at a great depiction of an owl, or a wolf in the snow. Therefore some in the art world would say that yes it is a great illustration of something, but not a work of fine art. Now here is a hard concept that some may have a hard time understanding - a lot of artistic talent can go into something, but that doesn’t necessarily mean that the end product is fine art or a great work of art.
I’ll also mention before I finish this long ramble that the meaning of art in any medium doesn’t have to be an intense issue of some sort. It can be a small personal experience or observation - but it has to go beyond looking super cool and has to have some connection to the human experience in some way. At the end of the day it has to say something about us.
Wow. There's some really great discussion here. It's too bad I don't have the time to read it all in its entirety.
I'm quite abashed at the lukewarm reception of Ocarina of Time here. That was a landmark in 3d gaming that defined the 3rd dimension as much as Mario 64 did. It merits mention in this discussion of the Citizen Kane of gaming. I agree with the mentions of ICO and Shadow of the Colossus as the Citizen Kane of gaming. They create an experience that is completely apart from other media and in many ways so much better. I'm sorry Aeris, but Agro has you beat as the most emotional moment in any game ever.
But for my money, Portal will go down as the Citizen Kane of gaming. You can't do Portal in any other medium. To experience Portal is to experience a game and not a story. That's where I think it has everyone else beat. Even Shadow of the Colossus is too tied to cinema. Portal isn't. Your antagonist is a disembodied floating voice for most of the game. Your only companion is a cube. Your motivation is only what motivation you want to bring into it and these are all things that could only be accomplished in a game.
Either that or Peggle.
Great point about Portal, Alvin.
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