As I write this, my temples are throbbing, my vision is slightly blurred, and I am jittery enough that my fingers first typed that last word as “blurured.” I am in a Halo haze, brought on by three days of marathon sessions with Halo 3, the video-game phenomenon of the year.
Even before Halo 3 arrived in stores on Tuesday, Microsoft, the game’s publisher, had received advance orders for 1.7 million copies, and gamers are expected to snatch up more than four million copies in all this week. On the first day the game was released, Microsoft reported $170 million in sales, which the company boasted was a record-breaking number for a video game that also tops the biggest opening weekend of any blockbuster movie. Halo 3’s commercial success is matched only by its critical acclaim. Most reviewers have given it near-perfect scores.
Yet some gamers already feel a familiar emptiness, a gnawing suspicion that once Halo 3’s initial thrill wears off we will be left with a vague dissatisfaction, and once again we will ask ourselves, Is this really as good as video games can be?
Thirty-five years after Pong, fans and critics still debate whether video games can legitimately be called art. Certainly, whatever artistic potential that games have, few, if any, have fulfilled it. Halo 3 hasn’t changed that.
Games boast ever richer and more realistic graphics, but this has actually inhibited their artistic growth. The ability to convincingly render any scene or environment has seduced game designers into thinking of visual features as the essence of the gaming experience.
Many games now aspire to be “cinematic” above all else. In Halo 3, as in most games, the plot is conveyed largely through short expositional movies that are interspersed throughout the action. These cut scenes undermine the sense of involvement — of play — that is games’ authentic métier. Games have become a backward-looking medium. Because game designers rely on the language of cinema, they have not sufficiently developed a new form of storytelling based on the language of video games.
Appropriating the language of cinema has made games successful as entertainment. The best video games are more inventive, exciting and rewarding than most summer action movies. Halo’s Master Chief and Splinter Cell’s Sam Fisher can hold their own against the Terminator or James Bond.
But as much as everyone enjoys summer blockbusters, “Transformers” is not what we have in mind when we talk about the art of cinema. Film achieves its artistic potential by offering experiences that are emotionally and aesthetically profound — stories that resonate deep inside us, reveal truths about humanity, and alter our perception of the world. It’s hard to think of a single video game that can match the artistic accomplishments of the most mediocre Oscar bait.
A handful of popular games, like the recently released BioShock, flirt with moral ambiguity or pose questions about the nature of identity. But their ambition has always exceeded the result. The games that come closest to achieving artistry tend to be non-narrative: manipulable abstractions of light and sound, whimsical virtual toys or puzzle adventures that subvert the gamer’s sense of space, time and physics.
If games are to become more than mere entertainment, they will need to use the fundamentals of gameplay — giving players challenges to work through and choices to make — in entirely new ways. The formula followed by virtually all games is a steady progression toward victory: you accomplish tasks until you win. Halo 3, for all its flawless polish, does not aspire to anything more. It does not succeed as a work of art because it does not even try.
Like cinema, games will need to embrace the dynamics of failure, tragedy, comedy and romance. They will need to stop pandering to the player’s desire for mastery in favor of enhancing the player’s emotional and intellectual life.
There is no reason that gorgeous graphics can’t play a role in this task, but the games with the deepest narratives were the text adventures that were developed for personal computers in the 1980s. Using only words, these “interactive fictions” gave players the experience of genuinely living inside a story. The steps required to advance the plot, though often devilishly perplexing, felt like natural behavior rather than arbitrary puzzle-solving. Today’s game designers should study this history as a starting point for an artistic revolution of the future.
Teenage boys (of all ages and genders) need not worry that mindless games will become obsolete. We will always love action movies, and Hollywood blockbusters will always be more popular than quiet, character-driven films. But gamers have a right to expect more than what the medium now has to offer.
Video games are still emerging from their infancy. The first 35 years of motion pictures, from 1895 to 1930, yielded a handful of films that are considered masterpieces for their technical innovations, but the following decade was when cinema first became the art form that we know today. As cinema matured, films developed the power to transform as well as to entertain. Video games are poised to enter a similar golden age. But the first step isn’t Halo 3.
Daniel Radosh, the author of the forthcoming book Rapture Ready.