by Lana Polansky
Not long ago, Matthew S. Burns posted a very succinct, very apt response on his blog, Magical Wasteland, to Taylor Clarke’s now-infamous Kotaku piece, “Most Popular Video Games are Dumb. Can We Stop Apologizing For Them Now.”
As Burns points out in “Dumbness In Games, Or, The Animal As A System,” several of Clark’s general criticisms—largely regarding things like story, characterization and dialogue—of (primarily) blockbuster or mainstream games sort of fall apart on their own without being discussed in the context of what kind of gameplay is being used to demonstrate these other elements. For instance, how do we even begin to acknowledge fine writing in a medium inflated with genre conventions or design possessing questionable moral underpinnings or overwhelming suspensions of disbelief just its own?
As much as I would love to dissect the totality of the piece, one aspect of it struck me as being particularly emblematic of why this critique on thinking about games in terms of their “parts” is so important:
A game is a whole system; the pieces that we like to dissect are its organs. You can take issue with and maybe even improve the components, but what you really want is a brand new animal, a new system where all the parts work together.
Burns’s argument essentially describes some of the sophistication and legitimacy problems games seem to have in terms of the whole systems simply not providing a viable creative space in which to be earnestly resonant. But what I really want to extract from this is the notion that video games should be treated as unified pieces of art, in which story, character, gameplay, level design, sound—all of it—are thought of as inseparable parts of an overall system. What this means is that whenever we think of one element of a game, we must think not only about the singular way in which it contributes to the game, but how it works in harmony with its other parts. It’s not just about having really great gameplay and a lousy story, or vice versa. It’s certainly not about thinking of them as though they’re irreconcilably diametric opposites. Rather, it’s about making sure there’s an aesthetic, conceptual and thematic coherence between the game’s various elements so that they reinforce one another.
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