Video games are a young medium, though perhaps not that young.
The argument over whether a game can be art or not long ago left the realm of interesting philosophical question and into the realm of tired takes from people who only assume they can't because they didn't have a formative experience with them when they were young.
Indeed, I think that as I've gotten older, even games from a simpler era that were around before I was born are, I would say, still works of art. It's just that we didn't have the context to appreciate them. Consider Super Mario Bros., which came out a year before I was born: in terms of narrative, it's very simple - you're a hero trying to rescue a princess from a monster who captured her. No one is claiming that it's a deep or nuanced story, but what does have depth to it is the way that the design of the levels and the feeling of the momentum in playing it come together to create such an exhilarating experience. Every little block and pipe is laid out to create an experience for the player - like having the first Goomba in World 1-1 walking under a block with a Super Mushroom is there to get the player to hit said block, and that the pipe and the small gap between it and those blocks is to try to get the player to accidentally hit the mushroom and discover it's actually a good thing.
Over time, though, games got better at telling stories - RPGs developed (borrowing heavily from tabletop RPGs like D&D) their own complex narratives.
What I have found, though, is a new kind of obsession: the ambiguous narrative.
When I was 19, a sophomore in college, I watched my first ever David Lynch movie: Mulholland Drive. I was into weird and twisty stories already - I'd discovered Fight Club and Memento already in high school (the former of which I always feel like I need to put an asterisk next to because there are a lot of young men who watched that movie and grossly misinterpreted it as an endorsement of the schlocky fauxlosophy that Tyler Durden spouts) - but I still really felt a story needed to land at something concrete - to hold within it a singular canonical interpretation, which might be obscured but could still ultimately be resolved.
Mulholland Drive... I don't think it has one of those. I didn't like it.
In part, though, this was because it bummed me out. There's one interpretation that a good half of the movie is a character's dying dream before she commits suicide, and I've always felt deeply disturbed by that kind of notion of witnessing the... I guess final hours, the feeling that the end is imminent and unavoidable.
But I also found myself frustrated that I just didn't know what actually happened in the movie.
That was half my life ago.
I can't say that in the time since I've become some sort of David Lynch superfan - in fact, I think I've seen only a little more of his work - Blue Velvet and then all of Twin Peaks (including Fire Walk With me and The Return,) and I guess I tried to watch some of his Dune, but... look, we have the Villeneuve movies now, so we can just pretend like that never happened. Still, I've come to really appreciate his oneiric style.
Indeed, I think that art, in general, is about communicating ideas and emotions that cannot be put into direct words. Yes, direct words, which I'm distinguishing from poetry, fiction, and other word-based art forms. Although...
I think if I were less lazy, I'd be a YouTube essayist. One of my great pleasures is watching someone with something smart to say ramble for a long time about a topic I find interesting.
Most recently, I gladly sat through Monty Zander's 5 hour, 21 minute essay "Beyond the Lake," in which he goes into great depth on Alan Wake 2. I think it speaks to that game's depth and density that someone could be inspired to make an analysis of it that takes about a quarter of the time it takes to beat the game itself. Seriously, if you have the time and mental stamina (don't feel bad if you need to watch it in chunks) and you find Alan Wake 2 as interesting as I do, check it out - this is a video game analysis video with multiple original songs and a modern dance piece, an act of collaboration the likes of which I've never seen before in the YouTube essay medium.
It's funny to me that I only discovered Remedy a little over a year ago, because I feel such a kinship and belonging within their style of storytelling.
Readers of this blog will be well aware of my affection for From Software. No, I haven't beaten the DLC yet. I honestly think I'll be fine if I never do, if only because it will leave me one last thing to do in the game (a bit like how my oldest friend and I used to play Secret of Mana together in middle school and never actually beat the final boss until we were in college).
It's pretty clear to me that the auteurs behind each studio - Hidetaka Miyazaki of From and Sam Lake of Remedy - share a love of lore.
It's funny, because the games from the respective studios are quite different, I think, in structure.
FromSoft's games deeply reward replaying them - your first time through a game like Bloodborne is going to be an endless parade of torment and death, but your second will probably be... not too bad. And you'll be incentivized to play again because there are so many ways to build your character - admittedly, less so with Bloodborne but definitely when it comes to Dark Souls or Elden Ring.
I would have loved a New Game Plus mode, or even just multiple save files, for Control. As it stands, just starting the game over will, as I understand it, reset you to the power level you were on whatever chapter you choose to start from, and if you then go back to the "Endgame," you'll only get what you had when you first beat the game - wiping out anything you acquired in the post-game.
I liked exploring the Oldest House and fighting as Jesse Faden so much that I would still continue starting up Control in a state where basically everything had been done, but I would just wander around, blasting away Hiss because I liked being there.
There's actually no real reason not to replay Alan Wake II, and I did when the NG+ mode, The Final Draft, came out. But maybe I just didn't vibe as much with the survival horror gameplay, or maybe it succeeded in making me feel trepidatious about wandering around Cauldron Lake once more - and maybe it's because the narrative elements of the game, which were so exciting the first time around, created friction on a second play.
Actually, it's interesting: the first time I played the game, I enjoyed Saga's stuff more than Alan's. The second, that flipped - Saga's had so much story, so many characters, and it was really exciting to learn all about them, but having learned them, going through the same mysteries over again was less compelling. (Like, I felt proud that I figured out pretty early on that the Cult of the Tree weren't bad guys, and having that confirmed was really cool, but the tension of that reveal was missing the second go around. In another universe in which Remedy had a way bigger budget, I could have imagined a NG+ that really profoundly shifted the narrative in significant ways... actually not unlike FromSoft's Armored Core VI).
Don't get me wrong: Alan Wake II is one of the most amazing games I've ever played, and will always sit among my top games of all time, but I don't feel the need to replay it over and over. There's plenty of art like that. The Lovely Bones was an amazing movie and I don't think I could stand to put myself through it again.
What ties these together in my mind, and I think the hook that keeps me obsessing over both of them, is that level of ambiguity.
The ambiguity is more total in FromSoft's games - there's an ongoing question when you play a game like Bloodborne or Elden Ring: why am I doing this? Why am I hunting these beasts through the city? Why am I hunting down demigods to kill?
A particularly salient example here, I think, is Malenia. In Elden Ring's base game (pre-DLC) the boss most people generally agree is the hardest is Malenia, a demigod and an empyrean (the latter meaning that she could potentially become a god, and if we are to take official boss titles literally, she does halfway through our fight with her) who sits amongst the roots of the Haligtree - one of two (and as of the DLC, three) divinely important trees in the game. Malenia strikes with insanely high-damaging combos that are really hard to dodge, and worst of all, whenever she damages you (or any summoned spirit or ally) she heals a little, meaning you can't just rely on a high HP bar to win a war of attrition.
You might think, given how deadly she is, that she's a menace and a threat to the world.
But no, when we find her she's reclining in a chair, seemingly overcome with grief and woe over her missing twin brother. No one forced us to come to her, to invade her home, to threaten her.
Does that make us the bad guy? Or are we justified in slaying any demigod who possesses a part of the Elden Ring, the kind of "programming code" or reality, to try to recombine them and bring order back to the world. Is it best that we slay her, as she's a vessel of the Scarlet Rot, which spread across the land of Caelid and turned it into a mutated, post-apocalyptic hellscape?
These kind of moral questions then also sit alongside questions of actual meaning and fact: in Bloodborne, our apparent goal is to "Seek Paleblood to transcend the Hunt" but there are several things that could be this "paleblood" and we never get a straight answer.
Now, I have to be cautious here. Ambiguity does not always mean successful art. I think that the key to ambiguity is to encourage us to set aside our rationality. As I said before, art is different from argument because it's not appealing to us on a rational level. An artist does not need to be able to put into words what they're trying to achieve or communicate with their work of art. The whole point is to communicate something ineffable through the art.
But just making things not really make sense can also be a copout.
In the mid-2000s, I got really into two big genre shows that were popular at the time: Lost and Battlestar Galactica. In both cases, there was a tremendous amount of mystery swirling around the stories of, respectively, a group of plane crash survivors on an uncharted island in the Pacific, and the last survivors of humanity in a futuristic interstellar society that was struck in a surprise nuclear attack by the rebellious robotic Cylons.
Lost had some intriguing plot threads - like a boy who has some kind of mystical connection with animals, seemingly summoning a polar bear on a tropical island - that wound up not actually going anywhere. Battlestar Galactica got some early "big twist" energy by revealing that some of the main characters were secretly Cylons built to seem organic, but after mentioning twelve "models" and revealing seven of them, they made a big ballyhoo about the "Final Five" that ultimately felt weird and irrational - most infamously, the opening recap before each episode showing the machinations of the Cylons ends with "and they have a plan," only for the end of the series to come and it becoming very clear that if the Cylons had a plan, the writers did not.
I think it's fair to worry that folks like Miyazaki and Lake don't necessarily know where they're going with all of this. And the process of crafting a story - especially one in which you aren't releasing it all as one complete unit - does inevitably force you to refine and redefine things.
But I think there's value nevertheless in following the dream-logic path.
In the case of Elden Ring, the game supposedly has a bible created by George R. R. Martin (author of A Song of Ice and Fire, the books that Game of Thrones was based on - and notably a show that went downhill when they surpassed what Martin had already written). So, in theory, there are explicit answers to a lot of the questions the game raises. But Miyazaki has also said that he never wants to publish the "definitive" lore of his games. Philosophically, he prefers giving the final authorship of the story and lore of his games to the players.
I don't know if we're in quite the same world with Remedy and Sam Lake. There's a question that you need to ask yourself as a player - would you be ok if there was no clear explanation?
See, I think that one of the most fascinating and compelling mysteries in Alan Wake II is the character of Tom Zane. Zane is utterly different from his appearance in the original game, and feels like an entirely different character who has just taken this name. The fact that Zane is played both in appearance and voice by Alan Wake's physical performer could be anything from a meta-joke to a deep hint at a connection between the two (and given how Alan Wake is all about stories coming true, a meta-joke can also have a real impact on the story).
Basically, there's a swirling storm cloud of questions surrounding this character. Would it be a betrayal if we were somehow able to hack into Sam Lake's personal computer and read his notes and find out that even he, the closest thing the game has to an auteur, doesn't really know what the hell Tom Zane is?
See, I'm not sure.
Regarding Lost: it was a show created by J. J. Abrams, a figure who has become huge in Hollywood, but whom I have felt less and less impressed by over time. Abrams has long touted the "mystery box" as a style of narrative, saying he prefers to live with the ambiguities in his stories rather than answering them.
I do think that this can be a problem when you're using mysteries to string an audience along - oh, just watch one more episode, one more season, one more movie, and we'll... answer a question you never had (why did Jack Shepherd have tattoos is a question I don't think a single audience member ever asked, the answer clearly being "because Matthew Fox has a tattoo and didn't want to have to cover it up in make-up every single episode") and tease that it'll be the next episode we finally reveal all.
But in a weird way, I guess the problem isn't the mystery persisting. It's the promise that you'll get an answer at all.
We can speculate all we want, but I don't think Alan Wake II ever implies we're going to truly figure out what the fuck Tom Zane is. We can theorize about it, sure. But the plot of the game does not hinge on knowing this.
(As a side note, I think Abram's real problem is that he's unoriginal - he just wants to make the Spielberg movies he grew up with or to just make Star Wars all over again with the same villains and the same basic arc.)
So, I'm pretty far into this post and haven't really gotten to the real question:
Are games particularly well-suited to this kind of ambiguity?
I think one of the reasons why games struggled to earn respect as art is the notion of a game objective. Most games (I won't say all) want you to accomplish something, to "beat the game." There are systems in these games, systems like HP, or resource management, or numerically valuing your various character strengths through a stat system.
Games are very combat-oriented. So many games are about killing your enemies (true in both the FromSoft games I've mentioned and the Remedy ones). It's tempting to dismiss the violence-simulation in games as bypassing any real thoughtfulness and just sending pleasure to our lizard-brains.
But I think that this might actually be what makes games so effective at drawing you through something strange and ambiguous.
In most games, you know what is asked of you - you progress, you open up new areas of the map, you face new foes, meet new people. There's a thread to follow. And with that thread, the game's creators give you momentum to carry you through the mysteries.
You don't need to understand what Mergo's Wet Nurse or the Moon Presence are to beat Bloodborne. On a certain level, a player can engage with and feel a completeness with the game by beating it. It's there for the player to really just decide if they want to delve into those murky waters.
No comments:
Post a Comment