Why videogames are stupid

Even the best writers won't be capable of making a game deep, believable, complex or realistic if the gameplay is fighting against that narrative at every turn.

See also: GTA4, in which a touching, sensitively written character in cut-scenes can be transformed into a mass-murdering asshole as soon as the player regains control. Gameplay and narrative shouldn't simply inform each other. They should be inextricable. Games that aspire to being well written can't just plaster story on top of mechanic like wallpaper. It has to be mixed into the mortar, built into the foundations. It doesn't matter whether you're gunning for embedded or emergent story, froth or experiential narrative or whatever — you can't slap it on top of gameplay like an afterthought, because gameplay mediates the entire experience.

If you're playing a different story to the one you're being told, the game can't attain Clark's coveted, if ill-defined, goal of comprehensive intelligence. It'll always be fractured; no matter how carefully the cracks are hidden, it won't ring true.

It'll be dumb. Games blog Games. The families did not own video-game systems, but the parents had been considering buying one for their kids. The children completed intelligence tests as well as reading and writing assessments. In addition, the boys' parents and teachers filled out questionnaires relating to their behavior at home and at school. Half of the families were selected to receive a video-game system along with three, age-appropriate video games immediately, while the remaining families were promised a video-game system four months later, at the end of the experiment.

Over the course of the four months, the parents recorded their children's activities from the end of the school day until bedtime. At the four-month time point, the children repeated the reading and writing assessments and parents and teachers again completed the behavioral questionnaires.

Results showed that the boys who received the video-game system immediately spent more time playing video games and less time engaged in after-school academic activities than boys who received the video-game system at the end of the experiment. Furthermore, the boys who received the video-game system at the beginning of the study had significantly lower reading and writing scores four months later compared with the boys receiving the video-game system later on. I'm not saying that intelligent people should never play intellectually unsophisticated games.

So let's have a word about what I mean when I use this admittedly rather unkind little term. I don't mean that literally everything about them lacks intelligence. It should go without saying that there are countless smart things going on in even the most outwardly silly games, or else they'd have no reason to succeed. To me, the gameplay of the cartoonish gorefest known as Gears of War 3 is as tightly calibrated as a Maserati's suspension system I've written as much , as well , and only a fool could fail to see the beauty of Flower or the devious brilliance of a "social gaming" cash vortex like Farmville.

My issue, then, is with what we might call the intellectual maturity level of mainstream games. It's not the design mechanics under the hood that I find almost excruciatingly sophomoric at this point; it's the elements of these games that bear on human emotion and intellectual sophistication, from narrative and dialogue right on down to their core thematic concepts.

Take the shooter Vanquish , for example. Viewed through the context of pure game design, Vanquish is an absolute triumph; it's a joy to play, it looks fantastic, and it provides a nicely paced, challenging gaming experience.

Yet when we evaluate it on the intellectual maturity scale, the game is an atrocity. Between its senseless plot, silly premise, cornball paint-by-numbers characters, and preposterous dialogue a combination Japanese game creators seem to have perfected , the game is so toxic to the player's intelligence that one can almost feel the brain cells dying with each pointless cutscene and agonizing spoken exchange. Everything other than Vanquish's core gameplay feels as though it was dashed together in an afternoon by a seventh-grade anime fan.

In his excellent book Extra Lives which anyone who cares about games should read immediately , my friend Tom Bissell notes that great art is "comprehensively intelligent," meaning that it's intelligent in every way available to it. A game like Vanquish , on the other hand, shows a fragmentary, schizophrenic intelligence; its gameplay is brilliant, while the rest of it is what Chris Hecker, in my piece, calls "adolescent nonsense.

Of course, this issue might not bother you. You might point out that one shouldn't really expect much brainpower from a bullet hell shooter in which one rocket-slides around battlefields aiming glowing energy balls at flying men in super-suits, which is an argument that would hold more water if the same problem didn't afflict virtually every mainstream game.

It doesn't even strike me as controversial to point out that there is way, way, way too much of this thematic juvenility in games. Vanquish , like so many others, is a product that makes us say, "It's incredibly silly, but hey—it's fun. Yet for gamers to just sweep that important first part under the rug over and over again in favor of brainless, high-octane enjoyment feels like a crime against the medium they love.

To accept childish dreck without protest-or worse, to defend the dreck's obvious dreckiness just because the other parts of a game are cool-is to allow the form to languish forever. Now, I'm not saying that intelligent people should never play intellectually unsophisticated games, or that games aiming at overall smartness can't involve a bit of ridiculousness.

For one thing, "silly" games are frequently quite imaginative and rewarding to play, from the whimsical creativity of LittleBigPlanet to the deranged WTF-ness of something like Shadows of the Damned. For another, we have to make allowances for the fact that virtually any fictional work we experience requires some suspension of disbelief. Any comment you leave below will be added to the feedback on the draft. All Posts. Continued So, you may agree with my argument, but are still looking for further evidence.

Add a Comment Cancel reply Your email address will not be published. Nuismer's Class. Report Abuse. Yes - Report this as abusive. Decline Post By clicking "Decline", this post will be reverted to a draft.