I’ve been thinking what makes Video Games different from other mediums of Art, and I keep coming back to the idea that we, the audience, ask Video Games to lie to us, above any other medium.
For all intents and purposes, when we play a game, we become that character, that’s one of this medium’s strengths. But would you play a video game if the main character was you? With all your strengths and weaknesses, all your faults and foibles? We ask for the lie of being better than ourselves in order to enjoy what the game has to offer. Since we are, in effect, the main character, are all actions made by the player the truth? If I go out of the way to make my Fable character gay, while another player makes them straight, what is the truth there? If characterization is an amalgam of other people’s evaluation of that character, what does that say if in one instance a character is nice and in another he’s evil? When I play Prototype, I go out of my way not to kill civilians. I’m pretty sure I’m one of the few people who do that, especially since there’s a perk that gives you more power if you’ve overfed before battle. Now who is Alex Mercer?
When we watch a play, we know we aren’t the characters on stage. We may identify with them, but we do not control their actions. And if they portray their roles dishonestly we often fault them for it. One of my pet peeve plots are what I call “Body Snatcher” movies, for obvious reasons. If all the characters are all lying to me because in the end they will turn out to be aliens, what do I care about their motivations? If Blorzak as Tim, unbeknownst to me, pretends to fall in love with Sandy then what do I care about that relationship if in the end Blorzak eats Sandy? This is worse with a long running television show because the lie could be told for thirty episodes instead of thirty minutes.
But this is an inherent strength in Video Games. The better the lie, especially in the character I control, the more fun it is to play. Would I rather be myself, who can jump about a foot and a half off the ground, or Mario, who can manage ten times his own height?
As games try to become more Realistic, in at least looks, are they creating a better lie? A lot of discussion gets thrown around about the uncanny valley. Is the main problem not that the characters become unrealistic or robotic, but that the lie becomes too easy to spot? If Art is about expressing some kind of truth, and I’m not saying that it has to be, where does that leave Video Games? The more truthful the game gets, the less fun it will be to play. The Portal Gun is way more interesting than a musket. Halo is more fun than Passage.
And that’s the crux of the matter. Gamers have to decide whether it’s more important for a game to be fun than to be honest. Do we like being lied to? Artists have to decide if it’s possible to be fun and honest, or if they care that bad game mechanics are worth it for expression.
Do we want the lies?