Not just components

The videogame journalism community is broken. It's a hollow, empty shell of a place that congratulates games based on what they do, rather than what they mean. I can't speak from any experience, not knowing any people who actually cover videogames, but from what I've read on the internet and in gaming magazines, it's overrun by (primarily) men peddling juvinilia in place of legitimate critical analysis and debate. To read a website like ign.com or gamespot.com is to be made to believe that games are nothing more than a series of components, each given a fairly arbitrary weight according to the personal preferences of the person writing about them. Some people will reward top marks to a game that's got beautiful graphics, while others are convinced that a game's worth is determined by the number of features it includes.

Precious few places, however, treat the game as a cohesive body of work, a textual whole as my friend (and fellow contributor) John Cameron would put it. What do gameplay or visuals or online connectivity have to do with anything if they're not contributing to what the game means or what its purpose is?

I rented Call of Duty: Modern Warfare (the first one – I'm a Wii-only console owner) recently and a lot of its elements got me to thinking about what I want to do with this website and with my writing on videogames in general. If one is to look at Modern Warfare as its component parts, sure, the game is a success. The controls are tight and responsive, the visuals are pretty good (if you're into the whole "facsimile of real-life" type of visuals, which I'm not particularly), some of the scenes in the single player have some power in terms of the imagery used (I doubt I'll ever forget the level where I had to blow up soldiers from the perspective of the video camera in an AC-130, for instance), and the online play is lag-free and full of other players.

But once you consider the game as a whole, it not only falls apart in and of itself, but also when stacked up against other art on the subject of war comes off as both childish and dangerously propagandizing. When you die, quotations come up, mostly from famous Republicans, but also from Yasser Arafat (as if to say, "look what them terrorists think!") and others. Despite the fact that for a large period of time you play as an American marine in a non-descript Middle Eastern country (because those countries are all the same, apparently), all of the enemies are cast as "terrorists." Not to mention that besides some extremely short "cut-scenes," if you can call them that, the only way the plot is forwarded is by your shooting the enemy, which is a pretty hoary mechanic now that we're thirty-plus years into videogaming.

And the online component only serves to heighten this feeling of arbitrary military tropes being thrown into a blender. See, at least in the single-player campaign, there's some semblance (however vague and poorly laid out) of context, of some sort of "story" to motivate your killing. That's all taken away in the online component though. Here, it's just people shooting each other in the face. There's no context to motivate it, making it even more egregious in its portrayal of "heroes" and "terrorists." It's killing for killing's sake, making war into a game with no consequences. I suspect there's an underlying political implication here, grooming adolescent males for service in the military, or at least desensitizing them. I'm sure that wasn't the aim of the developer, but it's happening nonetheless.

This is what we consider the pinnacle of gaming? The 9.5 out 10? Something that's supposed to represent gaming on a broad, mainstream level (CoD: Modern Warfare 2 grossed over $1 billion dollars in 2009 alone)? I think it makes for a fairly shitty ambassador, personally.

Consider film criticism for a moment. If all the critic did was award top marks for cinematography and acting, while failing to examine the film as a cohesive whole, well, quite a few more movies would be receiving a pass despite perhaps having pernicious effects, or, you know, just being terrible.

We're steering clear of that here. We're going to examine games in the way that they should have been from the start. Perhaps in a small way, we'll start to see some change in the way that games are designed and marketed in our lifetimes, but probably not. So I know that I'm personally going to make it my mission to find and appreciate games that get it right, that have every one of their componenents serving the textual whole. I know that most games won't, and they won't get a pass from me.

I've been gaming since the late 80s. I've played more videogames in my life than I'd care to admit, and as a voracious consumer of culture and things that are perceived as art, videogame criticism is a frontier that hasn't really been broached in any meaningful ways, save for a very small few working in this field. That's really the goal here – to analyze games with the depth that their increasingly sophisticated narrative and interactive form deserves. We're going to accomplish that in a number of ways, be it through editorials like this one, reviews of (mostly) recent releases, although I'm definitely going to dip into the back catalog a bit to discuss games that I feel need to be discussed, and more off-the-cuff blog entries and podcasts. If this seems up your alley (and here comes the shameless promotion bit!), tell your friends. We won't be able to build any sort of meaningful community if there's no one involved, so check back frequently.