There was a time when some of the best games around weren't about goring somebody to death with a knife you picked up from the body of the man whose intestines you just ripped out. Let's talk about dreams for a while. They are, perhaps, what I miss most about games today. There seems to be so much that's now off-limits because of the stark realism that every game is trying to portray to us. That's a shame really, as the proliferation of the nightmare scenario in every game has come to terrify my own thoughts.
I wonder at times if game designers honestly want to become death, destroyer of worlds. I say that not because games have become more realistic, but because of what has been done with that realistic tone. At times I imagine a game where the player is a virtual bartender, and people come into the bar and tell you their stories. You are a listener and a provider of the past, a collector of nostalgia and stories untold. But we don't see that, we don't see contemplation within the realism that we now possess. Instead there's a promotion of fear and loathing, a proliferation of a type of hatred that is seeded in a conflicted mindset that hasn't evolved. Perhaps the mind of the modern player has even devolved.
That's what realism has provided us. A hard look at the worst of ourselves, but without a healthy outlet to discuss the worst within us. The stimulating conversation on X-Box Live probably suggests that the conversation doesn't want to go anywhere either. The online forum has become a wind tunnel for shouting matches in virtual ether, with little more than anger to stifle the air. But that's a product only partly of the people participating, and there's a serious issue at hand here. A loss of innocence about the industry in a real way, and a profound sense of entitlement on the part of the player. A virtual nightmare. I might propose that part of the solution can be found in our past, in our dreams.
The industry wasn't always quite so cutthroat. Hopefully we're just going through the stranglehold phase, in much the same way that Hollywood did for a long time. Games and their creative realization seem to have been stunted in the past eras, a problem that relates primarily to games becoming big and thusly their inability to take risks. The indie game scene is equally ineffectual, largely recycling games of the past, poorly polished gemstones that shine only until the nostalgia wears off. Altogether, we have two major scenes and neither of them is learning. Worse still, they are conducive to the horrid wilting in each nightmare scenario thought and propagated by their own industrial complex.
There was a time when the dreams of games were realized, oftentimes, in dreams themselves. Perhaps what made Kirby's Dream Land so successful wasn't just that the gameplay was interesting and varied, but that the game itself was overly full of creativity. A game about saving the galaxy via magical stars and a pink amorphous blob that would save it. There was a whimsy about the strange squeaky sound effects and peppy spritework that made the game seem quite like a dream that one might have.
Little Nemo is a challenging platformer based on the title of the same name. But perhaps what's so daring about it is that it takes on simplicity and requests that you contort reality. You play in a world where you can become a bee or a frog or a mole, and taking the practical reality of these creatures requires placing them effectively throughout to create a consistent and enjoyable experience. The game's ostensibly about a dream that a boy has about trains and magical forests and fairy kingdoms, but it is practically a statement about creativity and experience. The mind of a child is illustrated with candy being fed to frogs and adaptive play to match any number of scenarios. Play here is not so much about reactive understanding and that aids in being adaptable to audiences as well as fitting the dream motif.
These games are two minor examples of games in the past about dreams. Exploring the mind's facets is what ultimately excites me about them though. If one could simply pick one's brain, we end up with Grim Fandango, or Yume Nikki, or Toejam and Earl. But allowing ourselves to map onto reality, we find ourselves in the sea of brown that we have today. Games are illustrative of the modern ecological disaster of our day. Why exactly did we decide that what we wanted from games was to be depressed and downtrodden about the general state of our world? What is it that excites us about murder? My only guess is that what's underlying most of the experience is fear. That there is some underlying tone to all the messages that we see today that we cannot process, and they instead manifest in modern works.
Videogames have become a reflection of that fear. They are a sort of living nightmare, which players actively take part in, and to wake up requires realization. But there's something deeper there, something that has coiled around the mind so tightly that constantly lulls players into slumber, preventing awakening. My honest opinion is that players have manifested the twitch gameplay as enjoyable, the idea of instant reaction as a type of actual control, and conquering as a form of discussion. There's a one-sided, highly empirical point of view which has permeated much, if not all of the player's psyche in some regard. The result is limited perspective, and loss of fascination with the brighter world.
Fascination is something that needs to occur again in games. What that means is interest in the form of a game's content. The color of the sky, or the usage of hues, the purpose of music, lyrical or lurid, needs to be important to an audience. By becoming an audience that accepts their surroundings instead of manipulating them, designers have become lazy. There's a lot of complaints about Final Fantasy XIII's long tunnel gameplay, but the reality is that walking down corridors is the general census of modern games. The dream dies; and when there's only one door, the magic can never happen. There was a time when even the first-person shooter had lots of doors to take, and Durandal wasn't giving you any clues as to which one didn't have the pit.
The dream is also important. Inception is probably the first movie I've seen in a while that, when I think about it, needs a videogame. The idea of twisting oneself through memories and the nooks and crannies of possibility is something that could be taken in a lot of different directions, even directions that the movie simply couldn't realize. But almost all good games that are based on movies already do this, so this is just reinventing (restating?) the wheel. Even so, an interesting idea on a known premise gives rise to the possiblity of new ideas. What we have now are known premises that force the premise on the player.
To take the word of the game as the hand of god is not enough. The game must set out to provide consistency, even if the only constant is inconsistency. Dreams, creativity, and creation, flower in the environment unfettered by practical understanding. The second a game becomes knowable is when that distinction of creativity is lost, and games today seem focused on what is known to an egregious degree. Modern games speak as titans of evolution and change, but the reality is that each nightmare becomes worse than the last, further removed from the dream by simple profligate repetition.