I
saw this heading Ryan
McCaffrey’s review of
Firewatch on IGN a
while ago:
‘These days I tend to
enjoy games that are
similar to a good book.’
It’s been bothering me
ever since. On the face
of it this sounds like a
very positive comment.
It suggests not only that
Ryan Mccaffrey reads
books, which is good,
but that he looks for
book-like qualities in
games, which is good
also. Isn’t it?
Literature is a highly
regarded art form. A
good book would be
something like Cormac McCarthy’s The
Road, JD Salinger’s
The Catcher in the Rye
or George Orwell’s
1984, or any of the
other trillion amazing
novels that exist – too
many amazing novels
to even look at before
our porn-addled brains
run out of juice.
I’m guessing when
Ryan Mccaffrey said
he likes his games to be
similar to a good book
these days he meant he
likes his games to be
like this; works of genius teaching us about
the seemingly endless
complexity of the human condition. I also
assume that McCaffrey
has read all the novels he likes his games
to be like – all those
‘good books’ – and
can only hope to find
more good-bookness
in games because he’s
run out of good-bookness in books, in which
case I salute him. The
back catalogue of
good books is simply too much for me.
I wish I could read
even half of them, but
I’m too lazy. I’m not
in the mood to read a
good book sometimes.
Sometimes – when I’ve
been reading all week,
say – there’s nothing
I like to do more than
to play a good game.
Because a good game
offers me something
different.
I like my games to be
like good games. They
exist. They’ll give you
something nothing else
can if you’ll just shut
up and let them. I don’t
want games to draw
any nearer to other
well established media. I want them to go
in their own direction,
achieve something new
and exciting on their
own terms. I don’t like
to attack something a
journalist has written –
no doubt as a harmless
piece of rhetoric – but
I’m tired of this mistaken notion of progress.
If reviewers keep on
praising games for being literary rather than
for being gamely it’s
likely that the uniqueness of mainstream
games will be eventually scrubbed off. It has
already happened with
mainstream cinema,
where the storytelling is
done primarily through
dialogue rather than
through camerawork
and lighting. Soon
enough we could be
looking at the same
problem with games,
where instead of saying something new
and interesting about
the world in a way that
doesn’t depend on
words, they start to say
things in the same way
we have been saying
them for thousands of
years, except with less
intellectual rigour, less
linguistic skill, and less
obliqueness of thought.