ESSAY
Lev Grossman
The Art of the Virtual
Are video games starting to—gasp!—mean something?
TEVEN
SPIELBERG
SPOKE
OUT
ON
VIDEO
games last month at the EA Game
Innovation Lab at the University of Southern
California. "I think the real indicator," he said,
"will be when somebody confesses that they cried at
Level 17." Spielberg was talking about video games
and art, and the increasingly less absurd question of
are-they-or-aren't-they. The mere fact that U.S.C.
has a Game Innovation Lab is probably an indicator
that something is afoot, but I'm here to accept
Spielberg's challenge and come clean. A video game
made me cry.
The game is called Halo, and it wasn't actually
Level 17; it was Level 5. I had been slugging it out
for what seemed like — and probably was — hours
with a bunch of aliens in an icy canyon. Just as all
hope was fading, I seized an alien aircraft and made
my escape. I sailed up into the
darkening sky with light snow
sifting down around me. Moody
music, like something from
Carmina Burana, swelled in the
background. The sounds of battle
faded beneath me in the dusk. It
was like the end of Platoon, and I
was Charlie Sheen. Then the
waterworks started.
Listen: I am a grownup, nodorkier-than-average person. I
don't consider myself susceptible
to hysterics (my eyes remained
miraculously dry throughout The
Terminal, Mr. Spielberg). So what happened on
Level 5?
Right now video games are the world's largest
cult phenomenon. Those who play them (fully half
of all Americans ages 6 and up) love them, and those
who don't play them regard them with virulent
distaste. It's time that changed. Those of you in the
latter group, if you have any curiosity about the
future of your own culture, and if you haven't
already put down this magazine in favor of Flaubert
or croquet or whatever, take a look at three new
video games that expand our notions of what a video
game can do.
Grand Theft Auto: San Andreas (for
PlayStation2) sounds like a game that glorifies
delinquency, juvenile and otherwise. And it does.
But it's also an extraordinary experiment in
interactive storytelling. You play a playa, a Snoopstyle gangbanger wandering through a vast, absurdly
detailed virtual version of California. There's no
hard-and-fast narrative. You go where you wish and
do what you like, and the game makes things interesting
accordingly. This is something that's possible in no other
medium. San Andreas combines the richness of art with
the freedom of real life to create something entirely new,
totally unclassifiable and really, really cool.
I've already confessed my unmanly affection for
Halo, which may be the single most perfect video game
ever made. Halo 2 (for Xbox) hits stores Nov. 9, and it
offers more of the same adrenalized, flawlessly
orchestrated, hyper-realistic combat (the new game lets
you rock two weapons simultaneously, John Woo-style,
which is not actually that useful but hella fun), but its real
genius lies in its architecture. It's staged like Wagnerian
opera: you fight through vast, Olympian structures,
combating mind-hurtingly titanic forces, and the effect is
precisely that mixture of awe and terror and wonder that
the philosopher Edmund Burke called the sublime.
The original Half-Life borrowed technology from
hard-core shoot-'em-ups and used it to
spin an absorbing tale about a scientist
on the run from scary-gross
interdimensional aliens. This had
never been done before. Half-Life 2
(PC), which arrives Nov. 16, after six
years of work, is one of the most
frighteningly atmospheric games I've
ever seen. Humanity came out of its
interdimensional scrap holding the
silver medal, and now we live in an
alien-run police state enforced by
collaborationist thugs and towering
three-legged monstrosities. Long,
ringing silences, too bright sunlight and empty streets
deepen the sense of Orwellian despair.
Art is generally supposed to mean something,
although it's not always easy to say what. Whatever these
games "mean" to the people who play them — whom, ah,
ever they may be — they mean a lot. Fifteen years ago,
video games were barely more than a cottage industry, if
by cottage you mean the sticky back corner of a strip-mall
bowling alley. Last year game sales hit $7 billion, in the
same exclusive ballpark as movies (about $9 billion). We
should count ourselves lucky. The video game is a brandnew medium, and we get to see it evolve from the very
beginning.
Are video games art? Nobody knows yet, but the
cool thing is, we're the ones who get to decide. Should
games be like Hollywood? Or like interactive novels? Or
maybe the NBA is the model? China already sponsors a
national video-gaming team, and ESPN is covering the
launch of Halo 2. So grab a joystick, sink back into the
couch, and get in on Level 1. I promise, nobody has to
know. Just keep some tissues handy.
■
TIME, NOVEMBER 8, 2004
ADVOCATES OF THE VIRTUAL WORLD HAVE GONE TOO FAR.
HAPPINESS IS A
WARM AVATAR
BY MALCOLM KING
One expects a little spin in some news
stories and features but the on-line
gamers and the virtual worlders have
gone too far. It’s time to take out this
intellectual trash. The following paragraph
written by Peter Lalor appeared in The
Australian (Sept 15-16, 07) in a feature
article called ‘Game On’. “The growth
experienced by the computer industry
doesn’t seem to be coming at the expense
of book sales in Australia, and that’s
fascinating. I would argue that computer
games, being fairly text-heavy with their
complex plots and instructions require
literacy, traditional literacy,” said Lalor.
So computer games are good for
childhood or teenage literacy because
they have to read the instructions? I would
argue that pigs might fly. The fecund fields
of imagination are greenest when one is
allowed to travel through literature
unguided, rather than be directed by a
computer programmer’s vision, like a rat in
a Skinner Box.
A Sydney ‘cyber academic’, Lauren
Papworth, who was quoted in the same
article, said, “It (on-line game playing) is
an escape born of necessity for the young.
In the modern world, parks and streets are
considered too dangerous for games or
meeting friends and fretting parents insist
their precious offspring spend more time
indoors than out.” Kids are going to be
better off learning to play guitar, lacrosse,
karate, cricket, chess or simply whacking
a stick against a corrugated fence with
mates, than sitting alone in a darkened
bedroom battling god-knows-what coming
at them in 3D through their computer
screen. Let’s cut to the chase. Many
‘cyber academics’ make the astounding
claim that the medium of online virtual
worlds, such as Second Life, is reality. So
virtual worlds are as real as you and me.
That’s right: conception, love, sadness,
ecstasy, reflection, and death. The whole
existential merry-go-round.
One argument goes like this. Cyber worlds
are forms of life just as works of art are
more than the sum of the materials that
comprise them. And here’s where they
introduce the linguistic slight of hand.
Therefore, all consciousness is virtual
because it stands apart from the object in
question.
If all consciousness is virtual then
cyberspace (which is nothing more than a
mass of networks) must also be virtual
and is simply a part, by extension, of
human consciousness. This type of
thinking means that when I go fishing, my
fishing rod and me form an irreducible
bond of ‘oneness’ simply because in order
to go fishing, I need my fishing rod.
There’s nothing about consciousness that
is virtual. One can try describe it in terms
of metaphors such as consciousness
operates like a machine, an organism or a
hologram, but whatever consciousness is
– that most defining mark of the human
race – it isn’t virtual. It’s primary, apparent
and real. The brilliant Scottish philosopher
David Hume, who had problems proving
the existence of reality, admitted that it
‘does seem pretty concrete.’ In Second
Life the players are living in the program
designer’s world. The players are
engaged in what sci-fi novelist William
Gibson called ‘the consensual
hallucination of cyberspace.’
My 10-year-old niece clearly knows the
difference between virtual worlds and the
apparent pressing material world of this.
By switching off her computer I have acted
– if only temporarily – as Kali, destroyer of
virtual worlds. If you don’t have that flow of
electrons, you’re not even history. You’re
nothing. My favourite in-world ‘proof’ for
ontology is nicked from Watson and Crick
(not forgetting Rosalind Franklin either),
the discovers of DNA. Some virtual
worlders say that all life in-world is made
up of mathematical code much the same
as the protein ribbons of the double helix.
Therefore avatars are ‘alive’.
Can happiness be found in the arms of a
warm avatar? I’m feeling the ‘consensual
hallucination of cyberspace’ coming on.
It’s hard to say where or when deduction
went out the window. I used to jokingly
blame Fritjof Capra and The Tao of
Physics who rabbited on about particle
theory being Zen-like in its construction.
He was talking about the Heisenberg’s
Uncertainty Principle. What he was
actually doing was employing a metaphor
to suggest that sub atomic particles/wave
action displayed some Zen-like qualities.
On the other side of the ledger we had the
post structuralists saying that language
was nothing more than the application of
signifiers to objects and further, any
meaning we gave to texts (especially
literary texts although some took this
further to scientific texts) was essentially
subjective.
What it meant was that the social
sciences, while going down some very
bizarre back streets of intellectual thought,
failed to engender in its students a
comprehensive understanding of logic and
argument. Everything was up for grabs.
There can be no doubt that 3D animation
and multimedia in general has been an
incredible tool for medical diagnostics,
architecture and for the computer gaming
industry. A number of surgeons use
electronic 3D models to practise complex
operations online but they also attend real
operations and assist. Academics talk
about the existence of ‘social space’ in
cyberspace. It’s hard to pin them down on
this as there is no syllogism in any social
science or philosophical referenced
journal to support this position.
They need to prove that 3D on-line
communication, without the recognition of
context, voice, scent, touch and body
language, constitutes a ‘social space’. I
believe it’s an electronic phantasmagoria,
which is highly entertaining but a poor
medium to discuss matters of academic
import. It’s the stuff of carnival.
Neil Postman’s central thesis in his book
Amusing Ourselves to Death - Public
Discourse in the World of Show Business
(1985), was right. Very little serious
intellectual exchange has taken place
through a medium, which is more akin to a
fashion show or the intellectual equivalent
of a ‘blue light disco’.