The Novel City

Ever since I was a kid, five years old, I've pitched my tent on the slopes and in the breezes of the same subculture. And the breeze somehow came down to me from the mountain of elders, even though they don't play games: we see computer games and video games as possibly a little bit different from each other. Whatever name you use for all this stuff, for the larger parasol, interactive media is very ancient indeed, even prehistoric. It isn't unusual to consider all those dicey games of Knucklebones before the invention of writing a prototype of interactive media. And whatever you think/feel about them, digital games are artistically and intellectually new and meaningful (to many, including yours truly), creating a central, though not always recognized or respected, aspect of modern thinking and expression.

As with "comic" versus "graphic novel," or "flick" versus "film," or "pop science" versus "published research," or "porn" versus "erotic art," or "vegging out" versus "watching a historical miniseries," or a hundred other ways we puff ideas up or make them cozy or throw subtle barbs, the words we choose give impressions about status and seriousness that have little bearing on the potentials. It certainly occurs in more fully real, human contexts. For example, we give our judgments with word selections like "lust" versus "love." After all, what is the difference between "infatuation," "obsession," "crush," or "feeling like you're in love"? Not really anything, except the context or judgment you choose to assign. And we do love judging on context. (I recommend checking out the book "Love and Limerence" by Dorothy Tennov for research on the not-quite-universal experience of being in love.)

With games, this is an especially starkly delineated phenomenon, because "game" and "play" are (for most people) more or less dictionary equivalents of "unimportant," "unserious," "unproductive," and "childish." Even worse than that, "video game" today often means "total waste of life." To be fair, I wouldn't deny that games can be intentionally cheap and exploitative. That concerns me a lot. But then so can food or work... Can those not be dangerous? Don't they require good judgment, also? Those also concern me. Just as I don't want my food to kill me, I don't want my games to kill time.

It's difficult to talk about games without full awareness of this social attitude. I don't know if you've ever noticed it, but there are certain words that most people sound awkward and self-conscious saying: "sex" and "money" are at the top of the list. You can hear something in their voice. "Game" is another one. It's loaded with connotations that you don't necessarily want to call up. This affects the way we say the word. With many people, you'll catch a tinge of embarrassment, disapproval, or both‡. Words count, tone counts, but they don't necessarily affect what you use the word for, or even say anything about it.

There is not actually, of course, any real discontinuity between computer game and video game, or for that matter between digital game and board game and sport. But in practice, "computer game" has always said to me that the work may take nature and human experience as questions. Some refer to this category as "serious games," others as "educational games" or "edutainment," or "art games," or "interactive fiction," or even "indie games," but these are all panels on the greater umbrella, which need not, after all, present itself as serious, or have an educational purpose, or look aesthetic, or include characters who develop, or be made by a small team.

Crucially, there is, I still feel, a difference in attitude between most game players and game makers, in one camp, and the few game players and makers who see games not as entertainment or business in particular, but as rebellion, as manifesto, as interstellar ship, as tool, as thought experiment, as high art, as the new speech, as tomorrow. It is easy when adopting this view to become a little aloof, haughty, pretentious. But I think computer games are also very humbling. Even those of us with the basic skills of playing them and making them must admit that the possibilities for complexity and difficulty are staggering, that we ourselves cannot fully handle this, that we are not even close.

Novels are terrific, and the imaginative absorption of a good novel and a good game are, to me, and always have been, extremely similar. It wasn't until I was a teenager that I noticed movies could be as epiphanic as books and games; it took watching some art movies carefully. But a novel is unlike games in one way. A novel, no matter how challenging, is a one-person operation, on both the reading side and the writing side. Of course, the readers will discuss amongst themselves and read reviews, and the writers will get trusted opinions and work with editors, and we can read out loud together if we want. What I'm saying is not perfectly distinct. But a game is almost never the first way, a one-person operation. A game takes a village to make and a village to play.

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‡ Jane Austen wrote about this same social phenomenon around novels in the 19th century, and I'd love to reference that when I find it again. Plays, novels, movies, comics, music, even logic have all been seen, in their time, as dangerous, immoral wastes of potential. This may not be all bad: maybe a few enterprising souls take the challenge to prove otherwise in the best way possible. Maybe Jane Austen's stories benefitted because she didn't want to be seen as immorally wasting lives. Ah, ok, finally! It's in Northanger Abbey and has been dubbed her "Defense of the Novel." Just two lines from it, but there's more:

"And what are you reading, Miss --?"

"Oh! it is only a novel!" replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame.