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You don't see cats or dogs tell each other stories, but they will play. It could even be argued that games are older than human culture, since even animals play games. How can that be? Well, computer games are games, and games are not new, but very old, probably older than stories. However, if we compare them as cultural traditions, their positions become more equal. No doubt the same can be said for stories. Hence, there is no "computer medium" with one set of fixed capabilities, nor is there "the medium of the computer game." Games are, at best, a somewhat definable cultural genre. It cannot be repeated often enough that the computer is not a medium, but a flexible material technology that will accomodate many very different media.
#Illusion real play problem windows#
From Tetris on a mobile phone to Super Mario on a Gameboy to Everquest on a Midi-tower Windows machine there is a rather large span of different genres, social contexts, and media technologies. You know the kind that goes: "Traditional music is much better than jazz," or "Novels are a higher art form than movies." If we judge individual works on the basis of their genre, we may have lost already.īut what about stories and games? To address computer games as a consistent genre or medium is highly problematic. And in the context of this general story/game discussion, we have the danger of generic criticism. It can be dangerous, especially when one object is cherished and well-known, and the other is marginal and suspect. Perhaps they need a new name - how about "interactive narratives"? Some see it in pessimistic terms in the words of a prominent Scandinavian literary theorist, computer games are a sign of cultural decay. Clearly, when we compare stories to computer games, stories hold a much stronger position, which games cannot dream of reaching in the near future. Computer games, with scarcely forty years of history, represent a mere last few seconds in the long evolutionary history of storytelling. Show me a medium not suited to storytelling: it is probably a completely useless one. In the context of computer games (and in most other contexts as well) stories and storytelling appear to be extremely old phenomena, spanning all of media history, and numerous media technologies. So why should not games also be a type of story? And theories of storytelling are (seemingly) universal: they can be applied to and explain any medium, phenomenon, or culture. Storytelling is a valuable skill, the main mode of successful communication. In stories, meaning can be controlled (despite what those deconstructionists may have claimed). In a (Western) world troubled by addiction, attention deficiency, and random violence, stories are morally and aesthetically acceptable. What better way to map the territory than by using the trusty, dominant paradigm of stories and storytelling? The story perspective has many benefits: it is safe, trendy, and flexible. Computer game studies is virgin soil, ready to be plotted and plowed by the machineries of cultural and textual studies.
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As with any land rush, the respect for local culture and history is minimal, while the belief in one's own tradition, tools, and competence is unfailing. The great stake-claiming race is on, and academics from neighboring fields, such as literature and film studies, are eagerly grasping "the chance to begin again, in a golden land of opportunity and adventure" (to quote from the ad in Blade Runner). In the last few years, games have gone from media non grata to a recognized field of great scholarly potential, a place for academic expansion and recognition. After forty years of fairly quiet evolution, the cultural genre of computer games is finally recognized as a large-scale social and aesthetic phenomenon to be taken seriously. Here we find the political question of genre at play: the fight over the games' generic categorization is a fight for academic influence over what is perhaps the dominant contemporary form of cultural expression. One crucial aspect of this debate is whether games can be said to be "texts," and thereby subject to a textual-hermeneutic approach. One side argues that computer games are media for telling stories, while the opposing side claims that stories and games are different structures that are in effect doing opposite things. Currently in game and digital culture studies, a controversy rages over the relevance of narratology for game aesthetics.