This morning I read Alexander Nehamas'
opinion piece about Plato and popular media. The piece was comparing the critical analysis of video games to the same sorts of analysis in ancient times. He lumped in video games with other popular media in a way I found to be typical of someone who doesn't play video games. As analysis by non-game players tends to, it failed to note important differences between video games and other forms of media. The most important of which is, IMHO,
person.
All traditional media no matter how they are painted, written, acted, or performed are actually in the third-person. Only a psychotic person confuses actions written in a novel as "I ran" or "I said" as actions they, the reader, actually took. No matter how you try to frame a book or movie, you are not confused by who actually took the action.
They took the action -- you observed it.
In all video games the opposite is true. No matter how the fiction is presented, it is actually in the first person. Only a psychotic person would say: "And then Pac Man decided to turn left". A rational person says, "I made Pac Man turn left" or more usually, "
I turned left" because Pac Man is not your agent but rather your avatar.
Of course literature, movies, etc. can induce sympathy and strong emotions as if the scene were happening to you. Indeed, they are surprisingly capable of making you feel those emotions more intensely then if the situation had actually happened to you. And conversely, just because some video game is in the first person doesn't mean that you must have a deep emotional connection to it -- many video games try and fail to create such a connection.
But that said, there's a dramatic difference between games and narrative. Analysis that doesn't bother to note that games are
real actions taken in a simulated world while narrative is
simulated action in a simulated world is missing an enormous piece of the critical puzzle. Play is a complicated emotional state where you are taking real (but possibly attenuated) actions while staying aware of the fact that your motivations are pretend.
Regardless of where one stands in terms of video games as art, if one is going to analyze their role in society one one should at least be familiar enough with them to understand that they are a profoundly different form of art. As in the article in question, I find direct comparisons to literature and literary criticism tend to be overly simplistic.
