Owen Gleiberman, a “writer” for Entertainment Weekly, just discovered a bit of breaking news from three years ago: the Writers Guild of America actually gives out awards to people who “write” for videogames!

You can imagine his surprise: a union funded by the dues paid by its members would actually open its doors to a multi-billion dollar industry, bestowing honors upon “writers” to encourage storytelling excellence in videogames and also to encourage people to join the union. (You’re not eligible for the award unless you’re a member of the WGA, which even three years later is still relatively rare in the games industry). They actually treat these “writers” as if they were real professionals, almost as if they had real jobs like TV sitcom screenwriters or movie reviewers!

His article — and I use the term generously — focuses on the charming human interest story of li’l Gary Whitta, the screenwriter of The Book of Eli, who in addition to being one of the founders of the cute videogame magazine PC Gamer also “wrote” for videogames like Prey and Gears of War. I sure hope Whitta remembered to put on his big-boy suit when he made it up to the Big Leagues to work in TV and movies!

(Gleiberman, like most highly-paid journalists, investigated the story using Whitta’s wikipedia page. I expected so much more journalistic integrity from the acclaimed writer of “Dumplings of Justice.”)

After being condescending and dismissive of Whitta’s entire career for a paragraph, Gleiberman goes on to break the news:

What I had no idea of, until a press release that literally arrived an hour ago, is that videogame writing has now attained such prominence and prestige that it merits its own award…from the Writers Guild! The WGA nominations for Best Videogame Writing have just been announced: They include Assassin’s Creed I (story by Corey May; script by May, Joshua Rubin, and Jeffry Yohalem), X-Men Origins: Wolverine (script by Marc Guggenheim), and Uncharted 2: Among Thieves (written by Amy Henning). This might be an easy thing to mock, except that it really does make sense.

And you know, actually, Mr. Gleiberman is correct there. The idea that anyone in 2010 could earnestly state that videogame writing only achieved prominence once it merited an award from an organization made up mostly of people who don’t work in videogames — that is a very easy thing to mock.

So easy to mock, in fact, that you needn’t even mention that film criticism is such a widely (albeit unfairly) disregarded and dismissed field that anyone working in film criticism should know full well how ludicrous it is to see his career shown such a lack of respect. No, you can mock it merely by pointing out that the videogame industry has its own organizations with their own awards, and that they don’t need the acknowledgement of unrelated groups to “attain prominence and prestige.”

Or by pointing out that anyone who earned whatever prominence and prestige he has by working at a weekly magazine about pop culture, really should have played at least one videogame by now. Especially if he’s going to use the phrase “videogame writing” as a pejorative:

Why shouldn’t we honor the creators of videogame stories as writers in an entertainment universe where more and more credible Hollywood screenwriters are drawing their aesthetic inspiration from those very same games? And, of course, the standards are shifting even as we speak. Evaluated as a traditional Hollywood screenplay, Avatar, as I have argued on several occasions, is thin, derivative, serviceable, and vaporous. But taken in a different context, as a glorified act of videogame creation, it might well seem downright visionary.

And the frustrating thing about that is that it reveals Gleiberman is so hopelessly out of touch, it deflates any attempts to take it seriously and be offended by it. At least when a real film critic complains about the videogames, he acknowledges his preconceptions, and he demonstrates a real attempt to judge games by what they aspire to do. Gleiberman’s sneering at vapid videogames is so lazy and cliched, he might as well be complaining about the hippity-hop music or the evils of comic books or the dangers of billiards.

Not to mention conclusively proving that he hasn’t played a videogame since Tetris if even that. He uses Avatar as an example of the negative influence videogames have had on Hollywood (when it’s clear that it’s the kind of movie that “gamers” will just love), seemingly unaware that the problem is reversed. It’s because of the influence of James Cameron’s Aliens and Stephen Spielberg’s Saving Private Ryan that videogame players have had to be space marines or had to raid Normandy over and over again for the past twenty years.

Clearly on a roll after his Avatar jab, Gleiberman goes on to point out that he watches real movies, making a weak attempt to disguise his pretentious O What a Cineaste Am I masturbation as a eulogy for Eric Rohmer. And he begins with the supposition “If the videogame mindset represents the most potent threat yet to the rich, classical 20th century ideal of what a screenplay can be….”

The most potent threat to the rich, classical 21st century ideal of what videogame writing (note the lack of sarcastic quotes, you pompous twat) can be is the pretentious sneering of people like Gleiberman, clinging to outdated notions of “high art” and “low art.” Instead of embracing the fact that we’re living in the age of unprecedented access to art and information of all types, available to inspire works of unprecedented richness, depth, scope, and accessibility. (And again: the man works for Entertainment Weekly, the bible of melting-pot pop culture. It boggles the mind).

But even more dangerous than self-satisfied outsiders like Gleiberman are the people within the industry who take attitudes like his seriously. Those self-hating game developers who aspire to other media for recognition and validation, instead of exploring what’s possible in interactive entertainment, simply mimicking what they’ve seen before instead of being truly inspired by it. Or those pretentious and self-serving game developers who assume they have nothing to learn from other media, that vapidity is the property of an entire medium, instead of just being the failing of an individual artist.

Over on his blog, my pretentious and dim colleague Sean Vanaman wrote a post claiming that videogames, like anything else, need to first decide what it is they’re about. It’s a similar sentiment to what Chris Remo posted last November on the Idle Thumbs blog and later revised and expanded on Gamasutra as “Looking for Meaning in Games”. And Chris’s posts were inspired in part by a keynote address by Chris Hecker advising game developers to first take a step back and ask themselves: “why am I doing this?”

It’s not a brand-new topic, and we’re going to be seeing more and more of it. In fact, all of the academic or esoteric or tedious and rambling essays about storytelling, or emergent narrative, or authorial control, or world building — even the ones I disagree with — are all basically getting at the same question: how can we push games forward as a medium?

The Great Debate That Shouldn’t Be

“Pushing games forward as a medium” seems like one of those vague, completely innocuous goals that absolutely nobody could object to. But thanks to the symbiotic (parasitic?) relationship between videogames and the internet, even a goal like that can become bafflingly contentious.

Even taking into account all the varying opinions on how to do that, exactly, there are the people insisting that it’s not even a good idea. “Games are an entirely new thing that operate on an entirely new set of rules.” (Or alternatively, that games predate traditional media and therefore aren’t subject to the same rules). That all leads to a rejection of any mention of Hollywood, followed by comments about “redefining the nature of ‘fun’” and then to a claim as ludicrous as “games are not media.”

Except the problem with that is that games are media. You can go on panels and stamp your feet and insist that the inherent beauty of game design has been corrupted by movies and comics and television, and that everything we need to know we can learn from Chess and Go. That doesn’t change the fact that people have been using games to tell stories ever since Colossal Cave Adventure back in 1976, and people have been buying those games since a few years afterwards. Telling them that they’re doing it all wrong, that the answer is all in enabling the player, or building virtual worlds, or the perennial “if you want to tell stories, you should be making movies, not games:” none of that changes the basic fact that there are plenty of us who want to make and want to play games that “work” like traditional media. It doesn’t add to or promote meaningful discussion; it’s noise. It’s the equivalent of the old joke about the guy who goes to the doctor and says “it hurts when I do this” and the doctor replies “then don’t do that,” except it’s not funny.

On top of that, whenever you talk about “meaning” in videogames, there’s always an outcry from the folks who insist that games don’t need to mean anything. I believe that that’s partly because trying to “redefine the nature of fun” and “develop new models of meaning” so often results in attempts that are dry, tedious, pretentious, and/or amateurish. If they result in anything at all, instead of just existing as pontifications on a blog or message board somewhere. That leads to the response, “what’s wrong with just being fun?”

And the answer is that there’s nothing wrong with that. And “meaning” shouldn’t have to take the form of a tedious high-concept game, or writing that seems pulled straight from a high school poetry journal. But even if it’s not particularly profound, there has to be something else, something that’s currently missing. There are plenty of us who are tired of seeing a medium with the potential of interactive entertainment keep getting relegated to just a “diversion” or “hobby.” As Chris Remo puts it:

[Games] do the “fun” thing well, and they frequently give me a lot to think about, but they rarely speak to me the same way a wonderful novel, film, or album does. I don’t as frequently feel that I’ve genuinely realized something about myself or my world in the same way I do when I read Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, watch “Mad Men,” or listen to The Who’s Quadrophenia.

I’d name-check different works of art, but I’m all on board with the sentiment. I’ve spent hours and hours playing games, and those moments of connection are few and far between. I’ve spent hours playing excellent games that do everything they set out to do, and yet I walk away feeling like I haven’t really accomplished anything, or learned anything. I’ve seen games that come so close to getting it right, but then stumble in one way or another. There’s nothing wrong with a “diversion,” but there has to be a way to make something more.

Intent

Chris ends his post with the conclusion “Intent seems like a great first step,” and I’d agree. I’d disagree with Sean that the question is “what is this game about?” since that’s too easily confused with a plot or story. Is Super Mario Bros “about” a plumber trying to save a princess? Plus it starts to break down when you try to apply it to games that have a consistent vision but don’t try to tell a story: to use Sean’s example, what is Team Fortress 2 about? Or Bejeweled?

The Chris Hecker talk referenced by Chris Remo’s article pulls the question back to “Why are you making this game?” That’s got its own problems, since that’s too easily answered with “because my company is paying me to” or “because the last one made a buttload of money.” That’s not just being flippant, either: that’s a mindset that’s pervasive at game companies, especially as the self-proclaimed “AAA” franchises price themselves out of the range of original IP. It’s also a question that’s so easily-answered a developer can be placated into thinking he’s solved the problem without doing anything. “Why am I making another match-three puzzle game? Because they’re fun, they’re accessible, and this one has [RPG elements/bombs/a wise-cracking companion/tits].”

I think the two questions developers should be asking themselves are:

1. What am I trying to say?
2. Why am I using a game to say it, instead of some other medium?

It’s still not perfect: what is Plants vs Zombies trying to say? But I think it’s pretty close. And I prefer it because it emphasizes a key point that’s not getting enough attention: videogames, like all media, are a form of communication.

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