Mr Stout:
Thank you for your thoughtful reply. I should hardly have hoped to disagree with a more civil person. And indeed, there is much credit to your point. It seems the worst form of pandering to disregard all the learning you have done in your own life so as not to frighten the uncultured; I am the first to agree that the artist's first duty is to their message. Here one treads close to label sell-out, rightly considered a stigma. In your response, however, I imagine you have hit on quite the point:
Were I a poet, I would want nothing less than to study and write at Donne's level.
And indeed, Mr. Stout,
were you a poet, it would right and proper to do so. Poetry has had their Donne, and all his predecessors, and successors. The baby steps have been taken, and you may leap-frog along the path to any degree you see fit — but, with due respect and in at least this context, you are not a poet. Though one may easily say that Donne has existed, and his ideas may taken from the culture at will, it seems inconsistent with the evolution of art.
The 20th century has brought us three bold new forms of narrative art — the film, the comic, and the videogame, in approximately that order. These media evolved from having simple tales to increasingly more complex ones. Film came of age in '20s; comics came of age in the '80s; and videogames are coming of age before our very eyes.
The question is not one of the complexity of ideas. Ideas float around in the cultural ether, to be used at will in
any medium. The question is one of our understanding of the capabilities of the artform — of the expectations we have about the medium.
For example, the early silent film
Fire! has an odd chronology. It shows the building catch fire from the outside, its occupants flee in a panic, and the fire brigade arrives. Subsequently, it shows the occupants inside, when the fire starts, and fleeing. Finally, it shows the fire brigade hanging around in their station and being alerted to the fire.
This unconventional narration isn't framed out of some Tarantino-esque desire to subvert the storytelling paradigm. The film is told this way because it was essentially the first film to tie together different narrative threads in this manner. It didn't know how to
handle the chronology! Something that took our conventional intercutting chronology as read, and played games with our expectations (like, for instance,
Memento), wouldn't have made sense to the audience of 1901.
Memento would be subverting an expectation that didn't even exist. But Jonathan Nolan's short story, "Memento Mori", which his brother Chris adapted for the film, would have been very comprehensible to a discerning 1901 reader. Indeed, experimenting with nonlinear storytelling in literature was beginning already in late 19th century. The conventions of chronology in literature existed, and could be toyed with. Not so with film.
But maybe someone in 1901 would have gotten it. Maybe they knew intuitively what would be happening with chronology in film, and they desired to make a film that played with those expectations as they saw them. I want to make films on the level of Woolf!, they declare. They procure their funding, somehow, and a few out-of-work theater actors, and shoot their masterpiece. Upon release, critics — if any such existed in 1901 — pan it as incomprehensible. But later, in the 1950s, their work would be hailed as
ahead of its time!
What could this mean? It means that its creator had advanced into further expectations than their audience — even a film-literate audience — might have had. The film had to wait for the rest of film to catch up — for a whole slew conventional, linear films to firmly establish conventions and expectations.
And here we are. We have thought hard about what we enjoy in the videogames we play, and we find ourselves with a different set of expectations than the rest of the culture. Perhaps, if we have our way, we will later be hailed as ahead of our time.
There is nothing
inherently bad bad about choosing to make our games at the level of Woolf or Donne. But it should be understood that those games will not be received outside the philosophical confines represented by this forum. There is a formal constraint on us, Mr. Stout; it is not sufficient that we desire to play games that evoke the complicated poetry we so admire, even if every other gamer knew this poetry well. The conventions of gaming are not where we need them to be to establish such complicated projects in a widely-comprehensible way. If we skip too many steps, we alienate people who took different branches.
Where this all brings me is this: we are not ignoring Donne. We are merely acknowledging that videogames right now, as a medium, as a culture, isn't ready for him. If he were alive today, right now, and his poetry well-regarded, and he made videogames of comparable depth and complexity — well, it is likely he'd be having this same conversation, right here, right now.
Your idea "'existing games' + 'a world in which Lamb is read'" supposes too much — not because Lamb is not read; it would suppose too much even if he were. For even if he were, one could not translate an essay by Lamb into a videogame. Lamb was a writer — drawing no pictures and creating no music; Lamb's use of language is too nuanced, his craft too exact. It used the tools and conventions of a 2000-year-old tradition of writing. The foundation of videogame expectations is, right now, not as high as the foundation of literature when Lamb was writing. The only way to create a videogame of such complexity as Lamb is to build it out of sand. The state of the art, in its very original sense, is not yet there.
In a way, Lamb's existence
can be taken to aid your game — if you make a game that
plays very much like a normal game but
seems like an essay by Lamb, it will probably be well-received. Hence the relative success of
Dear Esther: expectations for walking and listening in videogames are well-entrenched. But if we desire, as we seem to, to revolutionize the very form of gaming, our ideas will be constrained by the formal conventions of the medium, which have yet to be established in our favor. We must seek to lay a path, stone by stone, from where we are to what we see. Indeed, if we do not, it is possible that no one will.
However, Mr. Stout, if you like, you can be our beacon instead of our foreman.
