Works cited (because I know you care):

Bissell, Tom. Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter. New York: Pantheon Books, 2010.
Bookchin, Natalie. “The Intruder.” Frontiers: A Journal of Women Studies 26.1 (2005): 43-47.     Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 9 Dec. 2010.
Hall, Stefan. “Video Games as Collaborative Art.” Phi Kappa Phi Forum 88.1 (2008): 19.     Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 9 Dec. 2010.
Portal. Valve Corporation. 2007.
Sedaris, David. “Me Talk Pretty One Day.” The Norton Mix. Ed. Elizabeth R. Kessler. New York:     W.W. Norton & Company, Inc., 2010. 141-46. Print.
“Violent video games and young people.” Harvard Mental Health Letter 27.4 (2010): 1-3.     Academic Search Complete. EBSCO. Web. 9 Dec. 2010.

As children, we all created little worlds with Legos and toys, filled with variety and life by our imagination. Video games give artists the chance to make those worlds infinitely more complex, externalize the life breathed into them by our imagination, and give others the ability to explore them from within. As we explore, there may be a story put there by the world’s creator, but we do not want it boorishly thrust upon us at regular intervals, breaking the flow of our exploration or immersion in the environment. In Super Mario Bros. we are simply told to go save the princess and occasionally reminded that she is in another castle; the pure joy of exploration is never shaken.
BioShock, Portal, Braid, and Half-Life 2 all, to varying degrees, have plots, but approach them in ways which respect the flow of exploration and mesh pleasantly with gameplay. They all share four crucial features: the plot is subordinate to the world, a specific sequence of events is not the focus, the protagonist is merely a vessel for the player, and control is only very rarely removed from the player.

In BioShock, the player takes the role of a man stranded in the dying dystopia of Rapture, a city built at the bottom of the ocean for the artists and scientists of the world to pursue their work without the binds of governments, censorship, and charity. While there is a plot which gives the game structure, it is rarely brought into the spotlight; the game is about the tragically beautiful world of Rapture. The aquatic city is overflowing with history, secrets, and food for thought (the game was designed as an extrapolation of and response to the philosophy of Ayn Rand). The joy of the game is in exploration and discovering Rapture’s dark past.

In Portal, the player wakes up in a stark, lifeless laboratory called the Aperture Science Enrichment Center with no one but the voice of a mysterious artificial intelligence named GLaDOS for company. GLaDOS puts the player through a series of cognitive tests with the promise of delicious cake. Portal has an incredibly strong narrative, but not in the form of a series of events; it is rather a deep character study and subtle exploration of human isolation. As the game progresses, the player discovers more and darker aspects of GLaDOS — she is a brilliantly developed villain, has an incredibly deep, fascinating personality, and says lines darkly hilarious enough to rival Douglas Adams.
The theme of isolation creeps in when the player starts stumbling upon hidden rooms with the inane scrawling of past subjects who slipped into madness (including the now-iconic warning “The cake is a lie!”). It is brought into sharp focus when, as part of test protocol, GLaDOS gives the player the Weighted Companion Cube, a large box printed with hearts, which the player carries through the tests and uses to hold down switches, climb to higher places, et cetera. The player, strangely enough, comes to subconsciously think of the companion cube as their one friend in the lifeless world of the Enrichment Center; the secret rooms contain drawings of and poems about the companion cubes of past subjects. Of course, players hardly realize how much they’ve emotionally connected to this inanimate object until GLaDOS informs them that, in order to proceed, they must drop the Weighted Companion Cube into an incinerator. Grizzled gamers admit to tearing up at the loss and desperately searching for some other way. One of my friends received a phone call from a girl he had lent the game to; crying, she refused to destroy the cube for thirty minutes. The theme of isolation is handled so deftly that the player actually enters the madness and becomes so deeply connected to a simple box that the idea of burning it seems horrific. And for the one-two emotional punch, once the player finally submits to fate and drops the Weighted Companion Cube into the inferno, GLaDOS chimes, “You euthanized your faithful companion cube more quickly than any test subject on record. Congratulations.”
I

n Braid, a gorgeous, engrossing game which brought the discussion of games as an art form to a new level, the player controls a boy named Tim who travels through a beautiful world, manipulating time itself to try to rescue a princess. As the game progresses, the player is occasionally given vague but deeply emotional prose to consider (or skip — control is never wrested away). Tim is us, the princess is our dearest wishes, and the prose is our own regrets of what we’ve lost. The game is designed not to show an emotional experience like a film, novel, or play, but generate one from the player’s own psyche.

2004’s Half-Life 2 was one of the pioneers of unimpeded player control and cutscene-free storytelling. Players step into the shoes (and armored haz-mat suit) of Gordon Freeman, a scientist-turned-freedom fighter struggling against alien domination of humanity. Scenes in which the plot and characters develop are generally short and the player always retains full control of Freeman. There are no cutscenes or clear distinction between “game time” and “story time.” Story and gameplay flow together seamlessly and whenever characters are talking, the player is free to walk off and explore or listen intently and watch either character’s face. Most gamers do listen to the dialogue, but the freedom to do otherwise — the fact that the player is still immersed in the whole world, not a small, predestined sliver — makes it all the better, like a dog who struggles against a chain but happily stays put when unrestrained.

Art forms usually take a long time to develop. Those such as music and painting often have gaps as long as centuries between major technical developments. Film developed very quickly by comparison: after editing truly legitimized it as an art form, there were a few decades for sound, a few decades for color, a few decades for HD. Video games, however, have progressed at an extraordinarily fast rate (“My god — we’ve gone from petroglyphic rock art to the Sistine Chapel in twenty years” [Bissell 200]!).

Game developers did not have time to truly master their craft as technology moved along. This was not a problem in film; before sound, you have Charlie Chaplin’s masterpieces and before color, you have Orson Welles’s. There were masters who truly understood film every step of the way. Video games as a medium, however progressed so fast that the rules of what makes  some games effective works of art are only vaguely established, those who understand them are few, and those who properly utilize them are fewer. With such fast growth, gamemakers have turned to the conventions of film to handle narrative in games. The awkward adolescent medium grew too fast to get its own clothes and had to resort to hand-me-downs which never fit quite right.

Film’s basic narrative structure is generally founded on delivering a strong plot with well-developed characters to the audience, flavored by dramatic lighting, camera angles, and other filmmaking techniques. The audience watches a series of events play out onscreen in a logical (if not chronological) order.

Video games picked up on this style due to the surface similarities between the mediums. Both are primarily visual, both convey events through images and dialogue, both use music to heighten the emotional experience, et cetera. Games share similarities in development, as their “collaborative process is not unlike the teamwork upon which the majority of film production is predicated” (Hall p.5) Games, however, are based on audience interaction, not observation. While film narrative is based on the forward progression of action, “the language of gameplay is driven by sensation rather than words. Like music, it can have themes and motifs, however distantly apprehended” (Bissell 96). Gamemakers generally do not tie the narrative into the sensation-based nature of gameplay, however, and instead try to make games artistic by telling grand stories, usually through cutscenes which are completely separate from actual play.

This is the reason game stories often feel detached from the game itself. The game-story-game-story progression becomes like watching a stage production of Romeo & Juliet wherein when Romeo and Tybalt duel, the audience’s chairs swivel to face an IMAX screen on which Romeo downs dozens of Tybalt’s minions in spectacular Wachowski Brothers fashion. Even Uncharted 2: Among Thieves and Grand Theft Auto IV, arguably the pinnacle of cinematic game design, with genuinely good dialogue and acting, have a jolting dissonance between game and story. Neither’s story really grips the player like a good book or film and both plots would have been more entertaining as movies.

Video games can, on rare occasion, function well under a film-like direct narrative structure. 1994’s Final Fantasy VI, for example, successfully tells a complex, moving story with deep characters in the direct narrative structure with smooth transitions between gameplay and story (its success may be due in part to the abstract nature of its graphics which is uncommon with today’s technology; it uses film structure but looks nothing like a film). It is possible for immensely skilled artists to break medium structures — 2001: A Space Odyssey is more visual symphony than film — but such works are rare and extraordinary. Video games have artistic capabilities separate from other mediums which must be utilized for the expressive future of the medium.

But when the game’s overarching story shows up, things start to drag. It’s bland and labyrinthine, the characters are uninteresting or annoying, and the acting is merely decent. The story feels like a chore to get through before raining Zeus’s fury upon baddies; it’s a feeling depressingly reminiscent of reality, where one has to mow the lawn and do the dishes before watching cartoons and shooting cans.

Narrative-wise, inFamous is one of the better triple A video games. Many modern video games strive to be cinematic — a word common in ads and back-of-the-box blurbs — but most fail to grip the player with the story, properly develop characters, or make the gameplay and story compliment each other. Most gamers just accept this, as they’ve grown used to the general cheesiness of game narrative and the gameplay it surrounds is often very good. What author Tom Bissell says of Fallout 3, one of the best-designed games of the last decade, applies to the vast majority of major video games: it felt to him like “a universe that had been designed by geniuses and written by Ed Wood Jr.” (10).

Beyond narrative being mishandled in games, creativity is getting muddled. The quintessential bestselling game of the last few years stars a gravely-voiced generic badass gunning his (almost never her) way through a destroyed environment colored chiefly with  gloomy browns, blacks and grays (inFamous is guilty of all of these if guns replace lightening — Cole, a twentysomething delivery boy before getting his powers, sounds like a grizzled military sergeant). Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, which takes place in colorful jungle environments, even satirically includes an unlockable “next-gen filter” which places a layer of drab brown over everything. These games sell like the proverbial hotcakes, developers continue to churn them out, and over the past decade “a commercially ascendant subset of game slowly but surely matured into what might well be the most visually derivative popular art form in history” (Bissell 7).

Popular art forms will always have their second-rate blockbusters — terrible movies have great opening weekends, terrible songs top the charts, terrible teen vampire romance novels fly off shelves — but games are in a worse state than most. Tragically few games work very effectively as artistic expression. Even in creative games, narrative and gameplay often sabotage each other, their dichotomy draining the artistry from both. This is because narrative is generally handled in ways not suited for the video game medium.

Video games are an underdeveloped medium trying to grow in a hostile environment. In his essay “Me Talk Pretty One Day,” David Sedaris recalls trying to learn French in an environment of constant criticism and denigration. He lost his confidence to experiment with and practice the language; as his “fear and discomfort crept beyond the borders of the classroom,” he spoke French only when necessary (and even then reluctantly) and became “convinced that everything [he] said was wrong” (Sedaris 145). Similarly, video game developers are indisposed to experiment with and develop the medium. Increasing costs plague the traditional model for game development and the marketplace has often failed to reward creativity. And while fighting their own industry for their art form, gamemakers must abide the torrent of opprobrium from opportunistic politicians, uninformed parents, and misguided activists trying to break down an entire mode of expression.

In the end, Sedaris found that the malicious nature of his surroundings actually ended up enhancing his understanding of the language. In the middle of being insulted, he realized that “for the first time since arriving in France, [he] could understand every word that someone was saying” and “the world opened up” (Sedaris 146). The question is whether people can achieve such an understanding of video games through the unfortunate circumstances surrounding them. Sedaris’s trials were courtesy of his French professor, someone with a deep understanding of what he was trying to learn. The struggles of video games derive from no one having such an understanding yet; the hostile environment takes the form of confused anger at something so new and strange (as is to be expected — every popular form of music has been called the Devil’s preferred genre in its infancy, it took decades for comic books to gain respect, and many great literary works have been banned and burned) and the hesitance of major game publishers to fund experimentation.

When a new medium arises, it takes many years for its craftsmen to understand and utilize its artistic strengths. Just as video games started with a simple round of Pong, movies started with simple images such as a train moving towards the camera and paintings started with stick men hunting stick buffalo. The extremely fast market penetration and technological advancement of video games (just compare 1985’s Super Mario Bros. and 2007’s Super Mario Galaxy) have brought them to an awkward point of technical sophistication and banal application exemplified in many of today’s most popular games.

As for gameplay, this is Professor Layton. Seriously, it is Professor Layton and nothing but. You go around a strange town, talk to strange people, and are presented with strange situations that are somehow only resolved by solving mind teasers, however tenuous the logical link between the situation and the puzzle may be. You search the environments for bits of ABC gum which you can use to get hints (ew) and you can replay puzzles at your leisure. The puzzles on the whole aren’t quite as high quality as Layton – a few are just silly and several boil down to “arrange these objects so they fit in this space,” which is more of an activity than a puzzle – but hey, Layton is fun so the same gameplay in a new setting isn’t really a bad thing.

And hot diggity, the new setting (from the twisted mind of Graham Annable) is a kick in the proverbial pants. FBI Agent Nelson Tethers is sent to the insular, rural town of Scoggins, Minnesota to investigate a mysterious accident at the local eraser factory. And like any fictional insular, rural town, Scoggins is filled with bizarre inhabitants and unsavory goings-on. Unlike real insular, rural towns, which are just boring. While most of Telltale’s stories are heavy on off-the-wall humor and light on engaging plot, the characters of Nelson Tethers are quietly zany, subtly creepy, and brilliantly voiced. The plot, complete with conspiracies, secret organizations, Nordic folklore, and evil gnomes, is surprisingly gripping. However, with this being but the pilot of a season of episodic games, the plot is left completely open and ends as it really starts building up steam. There’s the risk that Nelson Tethers won’t sell well and the future games will never be made, in which case the plot will be left as unresolved as Shepherd Book’s backstory. And if that happened, I’d be pissed.

Now then, the inevitable question of if you, dear reader, should purchase the game. Well, it’s short. Just four or five hours long. For $9.95, that’s not a lot of bang for your buck, but you could do much worse. The gameplay is traveled ground, and if you didn’t like Professor Layton’s gameplay then you won’t like this. But if you enjoy good old-fashioned puzzle solving and love a brilliant new game world, fantastic art style, and gnomes, support this new IP and give Nelson Tethers: Puzzle Agent a download.

They're watching you.

This is, of course, the title’s first release outside of Japan, and Nintendo decided to go with a total revamp rather than the simpler updates that defined the previous Final Fantasy re-releases. Environments and characters are now rendered in 3D, and it’s wonderful. I think it was a great move to 3D-ify it, but the iffy art direction pulls from the effect. Many of the character models and environments look great, but some are just plain ugly. And the monster design is dismal on the whole. Most monsters look like things a depressed drunkard would design on Spore. At one point an old wizard attacks you, and when it cuts to the battle screen he has inexplicably turned into a monstrous floating brain-thing with one off-center eye and tentacles sprouting from it haphazardly. Um, what?

Now, while the graphics are brand-new, the gameplay is old as dirt. This is both a good and bad thing. There will always be a place in my heart for old school RPGs with simple random encounters, turn-based battles, and not much to do beyond “Fight, Magic, Item, Defend, Run.” If you don’t have any similar love for the RPGs of old, then you will not enjoy this game. There is simply nothing new or interesting here. The thing that makes it stand out is the job system, but this has been done many times since much better. Basically, you can choose different jobs for your four characters that give them vastly different abilities. However, for a job to really be effective, the character must gain job levels in battle. And leveling up one job won’t give you any benefit in the others (unlike Final Fantasy V, which let you transfer abilities between jobs). What this means is that while there’s a huge number of possibilities in theory, in practice you’ll for the most part probably only change classes when you get new ones. And let’s be honest, we all know not to stray from the basic “Physical fighter, White Mage, Black Mage, Wildcard” formation.

But as I said before, this archaic game design has its appeal. And juxtaposing it with 21st century graphics could have had a brilliant effect if not for the lazy presentation. The main problem is the battles. Before a battle starts, there’s one second of transition between screens. Then three seconds of panning across the enemies before it even starts. Then afterwords, about five seconds of just watching your characters stand there – longer if they level up. That’s nine unnecessary, grueling seconds. With how many times you’ll be battling throughout this adventure, those seconds add up and get really, really annoying. Final Fantasy VI streamlined the battle system to take out any unnecessary pauses for great effect, but III has gone in completely the opposite direction. Also, the top screen is rarely used. Other than a world map while in the overworld and some text during cutscenes, it’s pretty much always blank. During battle, stats are scrunched up below the battlers. Why not put the battle on the top screen and commands and stats on the lower screen, like the DS Pokemon games have? Why not have dungeon maps that fill in as you explore like the DS Castlevania games have (this would make dungeons a lot less tedious, by the way)? The whole package screams that barely any thought was put into really utilizing the DS’s hardware. Really, it’s just shameful for a company like Square Enix, who is known for grand production values, to allow a main entry in their flagship franchise to be published in this condition.

Final Fantasy III just needed more love. Square Enix obviously put a lot of resources towards completely revamping the graphics, but the awful production values make it feel like they didn’t really care. It seems Squeenix was aware that this game’s audience would buy it regardless of the effort they put into it. If, like me, you are a huge Final Fantasy fan and a passionate completionist, you have to play this game just because it’s a main series Final Fantasy game. Just don’t expect much. And if you don’t fall into that narrow category, do not spend money on this game.

Then all my hopes and dreams were crushed.

It spat the dollar back in my face. I inserted it again. It spat again. Insert. Spat. Insert. Spat. Inserted a new dollar. Spat that one as well. Insert. Spat. Insert. Spat.

I was at a loss. A kind soul passing by said to me “I feel ya, bro.” Not the warning of impending molestation it sounds like, with this phrase he told me that he had experienced the same pain before. And so an instant bond was formed. I asked if he had some change I could borrow. He most graciously gave me 30¢, which I proceeded to put into the machine.

But to no avail.

The machine simply let the coins slip through to the return coin slot like an otter through a water slide. It was at this point I admitted defeat. I returned the coins to my compatriot and solemnly pressed the coin return button.

But the vending machine was not content to simply best me in a match of wits. No, it was out for blood.

It would not return my dollar. It was all a scam from the very beginning to take my dollar from me. This fiendish vending machine would refuse the four quarters owed to me no matter how I pleaded or how hard I pressed the coin return button. My break spent, I headed to chemistry class, sadder, wiser, and a dollar poorer.

I relay this tragic tale as a warning to all of today’s youth who might find themselves thirsting for that sweet fizzy elixir. Do not use the vending machine on the second floor of H hall at Quad C. It’ll eat your money, along with your optimism, trust, and spirit.

Alright, so that’s not exactly true, but Flight of the Conchords would, for entirely different reasons, make for an amazing Rock Band game. Of course it will never happen, but I would still pawn everything I own (a toothbrush jar and a cameraphone) to play it.

FotC’s music is both uniquely comedic and widely varied, which would both make them excellent game material. Of course, there would be the same problem that The Beatles ran into with the songs not being particularly challenging. But how plain old fun these songs would be would make up for their ease.

The real reason I want this game is that it could act a sort of a third season of the HBO series. The story mode could, in fact, involve a story. The songs could be linked by a narrative – even if it’s skimpy – with band meetings, Mel’s stalking, audience-less gigs, and the occasional leggy blonde. Of course, Bret and Jemaine chose not to write a third season, but that was probably mainly because of the difficulties of quickly writing enough new songs. This wouldn’t need any new songs, however; just some new dialogue. And this whole article is just wondering what if the world was more like in my dreams, so plausibility isn’t really an issue.

Of course, in order for this game to work, Harmonix would have to work very closely with Bret and Jemaine to capture their unique style in the game. Given the proper love and attention, FotC’s subdued folky insanity could overflow through the menus, loading screens, and everything else in the game – just as we saw with them do with The Beatles’ own distinct style.

So please, Universe, let us have The Flight of the Conchords: Rock Band. It’d be a blast, and the perfect game to rock a party. And who likes to rock the party? We like to rock the party.

Also, “Jenny” had damn well better be in this game.

Here to help.

*despite the “I want to stab myself to death with the stylus” quality of the controls