Games and the Future
At the end of this book, we’re left with almost as many questions as we had at the beginning, aren’t we? Well, I hope so, anyway, as that’s the sign of a good book: complicating things more than clarifiying them.
With your new bedrock of series knowledge and aesthetic consideration, you might be wondering, is this the sum total of the world of games? Have we covered everything there is to cover and exhausted the entire store of video game knowledge? The answer of course is no. In fact, there’s still so much on the table that a conclusion feels indulgent. What we might do in this conclusion, instead of patting ourselves on the back, is to consider a couple of other avenues of analysis that aspiring scholars and gamers alike might pursue.
Before that, though, I want to thank you for being here with me through this text. This concept of a dialectic relationship between audiences and developers is not something I was totally convinced of until I started doing the hard work of writing this book. There are lots of critiques that can be made about the method here, as well as the choices of object and topic. But I remain proud of the energy given to uncovering how games operate in these discursive spaces, not just as economic objects, but as objects that have the potential to attain artistic merit. This relationship between audience and author is one that is often discussed in many literary critical movements, but this is one of the first instances the relationship between gamers and games has been considered outside of the purely transactional. I hope you’ve found it as valuable as I have.
Furthermore, I hope I have convinced you that games have a political potential. There is something about the medium that drives a responsiveness that aligns with progressive and reactionary forces both, a need to produce perfect artificial worlds that engages the most imaginative and fearful parts of our minds. If the right is happy to create paranoid delusions and embody them in shooters or questionable strategy games, then the left must be willing to do so, as well. In the end, there may be potential for political organizing within an RPG or a multiplayer shooter, though not quite as much as traditional routes. If this is true, I think it points to a promising avenue in left thought; if not, then we will have to settle for my favorite: aesthetic insight.
And now, without further ado, I lay out a few new avenues to pursue, some genres to consider, and an inexhaustive account of where games might go to develop further series and further responses in the future.
* * *
The example of Metal Gear in chapter 4 makes clear the value of disrupting an audience-auteur relationship, therefore most of these suggestions revolve around the idea of easy audience response. Stagnancy can set in, as can a sense of expected praise if the artist is the only game in town and especially if the artist feels that he has invested too much to fail and he needs the only audience in town.
That is why, at the top of my list, are visual novels and their somewhat distant cousins, role-playing games (RPGs) made with the publicly available RPGMaker software, essentially a plug-and-play game creator. Both of these genres have been built from the bottom up, which is to say that although some self-made RPGs—the weird and terrifying Mad Father comes to mind—will be remastered and rereleased by major companies, they are mostly handmade by enthusiasts who are unsure if anyone, let alone many, people will play their game. The same goes for visual novels, games that bridge and complicate the barrier between books and video games, interactive stories that sometimes pose choices to the reader and often simply tell compelling stories with engaging visuals. The technical skill and money needed to make a visual novel—a story told with static images, text, and a series of choices—are lower hurdles than the skill and money needed to make, say, a triple-A title. The amount of time and care are often comparable, though again, the labor cost is typically a lot less.
What is exciting about the visual novel (VN) is their popularity. Recent VNs like 428 Shibuya Scramble have audiences clamoring for translations, ports to modern systems, or both. “Amateur”-made games like Higurashi: When They Cry have benefited from word of mouth, organic buzz that leads players to get them however they can. Higurashi, notably, released a remaster recently, and though it has updated art, many players still prefer the somewhat raw, less polished art of the original. Finally, some VNs like the steins;gate series are professionally made with extremely high production value. These may not lead to instant success for their creators in the same way that the “amateur” games that find a market do, but they serve to inspire gamers and, more importantly, to tell stories.
What is notable about both of these genres is that they are not beholden to a single point of view and that they both have a storied tradition that can be drawn upon to produce more compelling work. The low bar for entry can encourage change and audience engagement on the level of creation, not just response. And the connection between these types of games and another kind of emergent game genre, gacha games, tends to be found in the fan art and fan engagement they receive.
To be sure, this is a more popular genre of game that is less difficult to play, offers easier access, and utilizes the same tropes as popular literature, like horror, romance, and so forth. Looking at the success of earnest yet quirky games like Doki Doki Literature Club or Hatoful Boyfriend shows the way that their popularity encourages access. For every arch columnist writing about the “weird” pigeon dating simulation, there are three or four players who see the value of an interactive experience paired with text. And perhaps those players will initiate the loop of interaction that we see between creator and audience.
* * *
One of the places that engagement between audience and author could be explored most fully is in multiplayer games. I touched on this in the introduction and in chapter 2, where I argued that the rise of multiplayer made games less easily politicized from these violent military shooters in a deeply unexpected and strange (if uneven) way. But there are many more online games available, including the extraordinarily popular Among Us.
This game, effectively the schoolyard game of Mafia, involves subterfuge, playacting, arguing, and lying, not to mention a sense of irony and humor in order to put up with your friends trying to get your character killed. But within these spaces, players are able to interact and engage with the game’s core components, finding ways to play that exceed and complement the stated gameplay and new versions of the game to engage with and exploit for their own fun. The mining simulator Deep Rock Galactic is similar in this way; it allows for teamwork on your own terms, multiplayer that has the capacity to make your friend group into a team, again pushing the bounds of the game to find something new within the routinization of work.
Even multiplayer games like GTFO or 7 Days to Die are often played to and for massive audiences who then engage with that play in their own way. Creation doesn’t have to be the end result of audience-creator engagement; indeed, the sociality and convivial nature watching as a group is healthy and offers aesthetic potential. Interpretation can grow from these interactions, too, and this kind of high-level analysis is important to pursue (while we’re having fun, of course).
* * *
Simulations are games that I considered writing about but couldn’t quite find the words. Put it this way: there is a truck-driving simulation called Euro Truck Simulator that allows you to drive a virtual big-rig across the virtual highways of Europe. You must obey the speed limit, you have to get your cargo to the site on time, and you must ensure that you can back a truck into a loading dock. In all ways except the ones that count, it is a job, albeit a simulated one. But it is fun to play and it’s freeing to pretend to do that job.
Karl Marx, that most jovial of souls, posited in his work on capitalism that the labor force was alienated from the products of their labor. Someone else is getting the money, and more importantly, someone else owns the means of you producing any labor, which means they decide when you work and how. The freeing element of simulated games—and the simulations run from trains to planes to entire European societies in the Crusader Kings series—is that you make the choice about how and when your labor is applied. You decide to drive cross-country and enjoy the sights, and you decide when quitting time is called.
What is the potential of such a reworking of work itself? How might we imagine the idea of a job when it is something we choose to do for fun as opposed to something that we are required to do to live? These simulations won’t unfetter the alienation of labor from the means of production, but they present a world where that is not inherently the way things are.
* * *
There’s too much to say about the “genre” of independent games, primarily because the category is vast. The genres, ideas, aesthetics, goals, imagined audiences, and more vary so widely that all these games have in common, really, is the fact that they are not made by big companies.
In some ways this is enough of a connection. These games produce a condition under which money is not the sole determinant of game content, in which profit is secondary due to a far lower bar for the amounts invested. The game Night in the Woods was a massive success, allowing creators Scott Benson and Bethany Hockenberry to start their own collectively governed games studio, but even if it hadn’t, the game remains important on its own terms. The same goes for the brilliant Outer Wilds, a game that won a BAFTA award for its impressive game design and narrative. It would be remarkable all the same had it gone unnoticed by all but a couple of hundred die-hard fans.
This truth of this also extends to expensive games, as well, but the corporate structure of the AAA studio makes the pressure of producing a hit even more critical. And so, designers in the “indie” sphere can take risks, fail, and produce unremarked-on gems without as much fear of failure. Perhaps the close investment in that individualized success between artist and audience can create a more salutary version of what we saw in the Kojima-audience combination, a way of developing and encouraging interest and content in a symbiotic way.
* * *
The truth is I could keep going. There are many more genres of game to consider, including virtual reality gaming, sports gaming, strategy gaming, among others. But I think the point is made—gaming is not a limited commodity at this point. On the contrary, the plenitude of games available for consideration by any number of audiences is terrifyingly vast. This book omits Nintendo games, some of the most popular intellectual property games on earth, and I could write an entire book about them before acknowledging the other games I’ve missed.
In such a landscape, the only way to move forward with our inquiry is to examine the way that we engage with these games as an audience. How does our interaction change these games, make them more than what they are, more capacious? How can it change them in less positive ways? And what of the creators? If we cannot nail down a “canon,” then we must focus on thinking about a method for discussing our relationship with them and how that relationship can change and grow.
Ultimately, we can definitively say that games matter as a cultural medium; we can even go beyond that and argue that they have potential as an art form. Maybe even more than that, they represent an opportunity to think about art and its relationship with culture in more expansive ways than almost any other medium. As we have seen, games demand sociality of a kind, even when they are single-player affairs like Metal Gear, the hand of the director and creative team is more present and demanding of attention than most films. When multiplayer turns a game into a social experiment, the design and aesthetics of the form itself are taken to their limits but are examined less frequently due to poorly funded arts education (though all credit to the teachers and professors fighting the good fight).
Although we can agree that games have merit as cultural objects and artistic, aesthetic forms, the path toward a progressive future or an aesthetically pure future for games is tricky. I’ve suggested some paths forward here, and we’ve done aesthetic work that suggests a cultural path that can be taken: centering the player while emphasizing the hand behind design; taking political issues seriously while mirroring them in game design; and trying to imagine games as their own medium with their own demands and complexities. But in some ways, aesthetics can take us only so far if we want a materially better political future, be it more leftist, more progressive, or simply more “humane.”
We need to see games actively court these issues without giving in to the impulse of “after-school special” logic, of being content with simply presenting a difficult issue without delving into it or considering possible solutions. In order to do this, we need to see more explicit analysis of these issues. But we also need to see games companies follow their own progressive impulses: they need to pay their workers more, work them less, and break free from the idea that good art is determined by good sales. There is aesthetic potential in the games discussed in this book, but there is political potential in the radical organizing of independent game collectives like the Glory Society, founded after the success of the political tour de force indie game Night in the Woods. Indeed, the reason that this conclusion brings to the fore work produced in the margins by people who do not always receive their due as creators, visionaries, and influential artists is that I consider primarily high-profile games in this book. Although that market vanguard sets the tone for the political potential of games, it also opens the door to art that necessarily can build on and even exceed its political horizon.
In the end, the focus must be on a—forgive me—dialectic balance between the art and the world in which it exists. For games in particular this will be difficult to balance: to hold the world with its demands and material conditions in one hand and this massively complex, time-consuming, and labor-intensive process in the other. But games must do this in order to progress. There is a risk that the political stays in games as a kind of marketized mover while the art trickles out. I hope that the more avant-garde games being produced, as well as some of the stalwarts discussed here, continue to push back against the simplification of politics as a selling point and present it as part and parcel of a serious artistic approach that games can and must produce as they grow as a medium.
If there is a progressive future for games, let alone a leftist one, it follows through this messy and productive avenue of interaction. The good news is that the world seems ready for more.