I’ve talked extensively about the mechanical nature of the player-game interaction but what is really important, and where games say more than players, is semantics. We consume games very similarly to books and movies. We take a product which contains a number of pages, scenes, or levels and we try to get to the end of it. Games do feature a ton more interactivity than books, and many people have argued that they are the only example of media which not everybody may be skilled enough to experience. But then how many of us fully understood Mrożek’s Tango or Gombrowicz’s Transatlantic the first time we read them? We may be able to finish books, but we need cultural awareness, historical knowledge, life experience, and a lot of time to fully appreciate the most influential works in the canon.
On top of the narrative possibilities of video games, they can also communicate with the player using sound, graphics, mechanics, meta-narratives, and more. Games can be gripping stories of a father looking for his lost child, cathartic outlets of frustration, a means of escapism, commentaries on other games and the industry itself, fourth-wall-breaking attempts of directly communicating with the player, or just cool-looking racing titles. They build worlds for us to explore, give us chances to live out fantasies, immerse us in their narratives, and play with us by using tools only available to games. Who doesn’t remember the Psycho Mantis fight, or eating fish in NiER:Automata?
‘Now you’re speaking my language’
Of course, we don’t have to be aware of anything I’ve just described. The same way we don’t have to know what a cut is in film, why the three-act structure is so prevalent in storytelling, what a hero’s journey is, how we elect members of parliament, or what the English language was before and after Shakespeare went on a lexical rampage. We don’t need any of that and we don’t owe games anything. However, they do surround us and, as I’ve said before, they are not going anywhere. Players, developers, academics, parents, grandparents, journalists, and anyone who wants to talk about video games, write about video games, or even think about video games operates in a limited scope without knowing what goes on under the hood. In order to expand, deepen, and popularise the discourse on video games, we owe it to ourselves to treat them the way we treat anything we deem worthy of our time.
In part two, I will go in-depth into the terminology of video game design, the current state of the market, and the most important divisions present in the industry.