James Joyce's short story "The Dead" from his collection Dubliners is generally considered one of the finest short stories in the English language, akin to what Shakespeare did with the theatrical form or what Welles did for film. I'd never actually read it before two weeks ago, and the reviews are accurate: it's a brilliant piece of work. The way that Joyce subtly interweaves the theme of paralysis of several different kinds (personal, political, sexual, etc.) with deep characterization and an examination of nothing less than the downfall of humanity and the epiphany that this is what it has come to is astonishing, to say the least. It's fifty pages of dense, rewarding text, and it's canonical for a reason (beyond that Joyce is dead and white, to make a broad generalization about the canon).
After putting down "The Dead," I turned my attention to my DS to continue to play Dragon Quest IX, a gigantic game that I'm still not comfortable reviewing despite the fact that I'm about 25-30 hours in. And to be honest, for the first hour after reading "The Dead" that I played the game, I felt a little bit underwhelmed. I was convinced before then that Dragon Quest IX was one of the greatest RPGs I'd ever played, a genre which is probably one of my favourites in terms of delivering depth of content, and yet, it all of a sudden felt so paltry compared to the greats from other media. If this was the best that gaming had to offer, why bother? Why continue to play games at all?
After that first hour passed, though, I went back to Dragon Quest IX and fell in love with it all over again. The main reason why? It's entertaining.
There's no denying that "The Dead" isn't a great short story, but while I was reading it, I wasn't saying to myself "yes! I'm going to just read James Joyce all summer!" I appreciated it from a distance. I realized all of its intricacies, all of its statements and began grasping with its themes, yet, it was all from an academic distance. It never pulled me into its world. It never made me forget that I was reading a short story. It just offered up a whole lot of meat for critical analysis.
There's been a recent trend in gaming to attempt to move the medium forward with "deep, engaging gameplay and serious themes," but I'm going to make another sweeping generalization: by and large, these games have failed. They haven't done any of these things. A game that outwardly tries to be "deep" generally ends up achieving this by aping the tropes of other media anyways. Think to Mass Effect, a game that essentially trades in film and Choose Your Own Adventure stock, for a "mature, cinematic" experience. Yet, the game, for all of its successes, never touches as deeply on the human experience as a much more simple game. Or take Heavy Rain, which isn't anything so vulgar as a "game;" it's an interactive film, you see, and offers up a supposedly superior narrative to the traditional gaming experience.
The things that developers are focusing on to telegraph their games' "deepness" isn't the game itself. It's done through cutscenes, through static dialog, through datalogs, through "this vs. that" so-called morality choices. Games have always been a hodgepodge of various media as far back as the Atari 2600, but more and more, developers who have the ambition to try and realize their "deep" themes simply don't have the wherewithal to accomplish this without falling back on old standbys. Only in very, very select cases do games that affect through their gameplay exist.
I'd argue that the games that do accomplish this, that do truly affect the player without calling up the tricks from other media, generally grapple with much simpler themes and simpler gameplay. I've found few games as genuinely affecting as Super Mario Galaxy, and that's despite its abstract nature and almost complete lack of context. The game is simply about the joy of movement, and on that level, it succeeds far beyond its intent.
The question of whether games will progress beyond simple themes and simple gameplay being most effective seems to be not if this will happen, but when. It's already started, of course, but the question I would like to pose is: do we want this to happen? Games as they exist now do not have sophisticated enough input to accurately model anything resembling "the human experience." All we can do as gamers is participate in the "action" segments, and watch during the segments that actually delve into the themes of the game (I will, of course, say that there are notable exceptions to this rule). We can't have games that explore complicated themes because we have no way of interacting with those complicated themes.
My final thought is on the concept of games being entertaining. Games don't need to be entertaining to be art. Few people would call Merzbow "entertaining", for instance. But I think it's important for games to be entertaining. What's the point, otherwise? I can appreciate a game for being challenging and artistic, for much the same reason as I can appreciate Merzbow, or can watch Dogville, but at the end of the day, who gives a fuck? Can't a game be both challenging and entertaining? Otherwise, all we're appreciating are the niche, the closed off, and all we're left with then are games that no one knows about or can talk about with other people. Art, to some degree, is community, and while I certainly applaud the experiments that have moved the industry forward, I just don't see the reason to discuss games that basically antagonize the player.
So I've continued with Dragon Quest IX. It's a game that's simple and fun, and it makes no qualms about being anything more than that. It completely lacks pretension. It set up its parameters for success and it has achieved them. That's all I want from a game, to fulfill its aims (both extrinsic and intrinsic) to the highest degree. When we have games that have such lofty ambitions and don't even come close to achieving them, how can one not be left with a sense of disappointment (even as other videogame sites give these games 97% and say, "good try!")? I want the industry to move forward, but not if moving forward means substandard design and execution. If developers keep games simple, challenging, and entertaining, I think that games will finally come out from the shadows and be accepted as not better, but different. Not "The Dead," but Dragon Quest IX.