What Games Can Be

Video games are a relatively new form of media; it started with text adventures and pong and they were like children making up a play, it grew up a little more with the Playstation and Xbox when game design teams and franchises were introduced, but it is only recently when we have reached a wobbly adolescence where we are testing what we can do and who we want to be and thus the question, “Are video games art?”  Obviously, there are writers and artists, animators, all who fall into the category of  artiist, so I think what is meant when the question is asked is, “Do video games  give us different. deeper perceptions of ourselves and our world?”  What they really want to know is do video games challenge and engage us; the answer is they can, and I have proof.

Silly Frags is starting “Penetration” which takes the tools we use to break down and interpret art, literature and films and apply those tools to video games.  It is a discussion that I hope you will be part of; I hope it is something that lets you see more in the games we love; I hope it encourages a discussion we can have with gamers and nongamers and something that touched us.

 Like literature and film games bring us into a new world, a world that we can interact with, and this opens the possibility of players seeing themselves in how they play, who am I, who do I want to be.  Jane McGonnigal has created a movement (Gameful.org) and written books encouraging us to bring our game traits of courage, persistence, curiousity, altruism, into the real world, and also is finding ways to use game to solve real world problems, poverty, sickness, division.  Game designers themselves are bringing complex themes into their games. 

Bioshock and Bioshock 2 looked at me as a player and made me look at myself as a person.  Spoilers will follow, be warned.  Bioshock takes place in a fallen society.  Instead of a city on a hill we get  one buried in the ocean.  It has dedicated itself to one ideal and was destroyed by it.  You are at first a stranger to Rapture, you’ve arrived a regular guy caught in madness, a magical drug that allows human DNA to be rewritten and restructured that they call Adam.  The drug can cure disease, change or apearence, enhance mind and body, and even give humans what would seem like magical powers, fire control, electricity, and more.  You arrive with nothing and are given your first dose of Adam.   You are told you’ll need it to survive.  You also get to see its effects; the inhabitants of Rapture have become twisted creatures mutated physically and psychically broken.  This could be you.

 Normal gaming tropes have trained us to level up and become more powerful, kill, kill, kill, and you’ll be better- it’s just how it works, but Bioshock makes you shift your view, the monsters are not monsters, they retain part of their humanity, they speak, echoing moments of their former lives.  They speak to themselves and others, and through these bits a player gets to know them and see their tragedy and pain.  Killing isn’t quite as easy when can see the citizens are ill, and we see shadows of who they were.  The city around you is testament to their great minds, we hear their voices in audio diaries.  I didn’t want to kill them, in fact at times I stayed hidden listening to them, watching them.  They can be seen in relaxed mode- they are not always balled fists waiting for a battle.

Then the creators throw in another dilemma, the Big Daddies and Little Sisters.  Big Daddies are huge oafs in diving suits, intimidating and powerful.  They have lost the power of speech and speak in what sounds like whale song.  They protect their Little Sister, a dirty, little girl who moves in optimism and innocence through her grisly harvest of Adam from the bodies of the dead.  The Daddies will not attack unless you attack them or menace their charge.  They are magnificent and frightening, gentle and menacing, loyal and loving.  Do you kill them?  Do you take their Little Sisters?  The game does not force morality on you, in a few cases you are must  kill a Big Daddy, in the rest you are encouraged to kill them and you are offered rationalizations, but  there they are near you and offering no anger, gently following their little girl as fathers do.

The game twists the knife one more time by giving you the option to harvest the Little Sisters for a large Adam bonus or save them for a much smaller one.  The game reminds you that this is not just like opening a chest for your treasure, and it is not looting the corpse of an enemy who tried to kill you, this is a little girl crying next to the body of their protector.  The game even tells you it is looking at you.  The first time you are giving the Little Sister choices you have a witness, a woman who says you can save them, it’s not a dirty murder in a dark corner, the girl cowers and pleads and someone is watching you, someone sane, but Rapture is dangerous and resources are scarce, what will you do?

Bioshock 2 does something outright amazing; it made me put down my controller; it made me responsible for my in game decisions; it blew my mind.  This is a big spoiler, so if you haven’t played the game skip this paragraph.  In Bioshock 2 you are a Big Daddy looking for the girl who was your Little Sister.  She offers what aid she can telepathically.  Fatherhood and family are big themes well explored in this game, and ones I shall get into in another essay, but it is at its clearest when you find Eleanor has been watching you the entire time, learning who she wants to be through your actions, did you harvest the other Little Sisters to get power to save her, did you kill people blocking your path.  Eleanor and the game have watched you and when Eleanor makes her choices at the end of the game you feel powerless.  You were her father, you have created the woman she will become, did you teach her care, did you teach her forgiveness, or did you teach her the powerful survive and everyone else is just a tool to be used and thrown away?  She tells you what you have done and who she is and you are now helpless to change it, you had your chance to shape her, even if you didn’t know it, but your cruelty and kindness were noted.  At this point suddenly I, as a gamer was responsible for what I had done in the game, did I just kill everything in front of me as I do in most games, but in this game I was given choices and I made them and while I believed there were no consequences; there were.  Now when I play games I try to see if there is a way outside of killing to solve my problem.  I even look for games that don’t have killing as their premise.  I am not against killing games, but Bioshock 2 showed me something about parenthood and how kids see what we do and not just what we want them to when we are in lesson and lecture mode- they see how we treat the stranger in the store, our neighbors, the person who cut us off on the highway.  They see who to be by watching who were are, and Bioshock 2 captured that in a game and made me feel it.

Games can be art.  They can be rich and complex and ask us important questions, and in our Penetration segment I will be writing essays and doing interviews about how they are already doing it.  Please join me.