Taking a look at what I wrote the other day, I’m worried that it might sound like I don’t believe that media specificity plays a role in how we interact with video games. In fact, nothing could be further from the truth. The role of medium in determining meaning within any media object cannot be underestimated. At the same time, however, assuming similarities between objects due to medium is faulty logic. As always, these issues become clearer when we look at examples.
Recently, Telltale Games, an adventure game studio that also produces the popular Sam and Max adventure series, released Back to the Future: The Game. In this game, the player solves puzzles to advance a fairly generic rehash of the original movie, though shifted to the Prohibition Era. Inherently, we relate BTTF: TG to the original film, Back to the Future, as well as to its heritage in adventure games, via Sam and Max, the Monkey Island series, King’s Quest, etc. To fully understand the cultural content of the game, we must make these relations, while recognizing that the game is a fully independent artistic object, existing in a radically different plane than the film. To treat the two objects, film and game, as identical, is to commit the fallacy of medium equivocation.
Nevertheless, when we broaden our scope to the entire genre of the video game, we run into the trouble I mentioned earlier. Ironically, we treat video games as if they are necessarily identical because they both are viewed on a screen and manipulated via a controller. If, however, we imagine the mechanics and goals of a game like Halo in comparison to a game like BTTF: TG, we find that the phenomenological experience of each game is radically different, to the point that we cannot even consider them of the same medium, much less genre. To compare them as similar objects would be to compare a cookbook to a book of poetry; some of the aspects are similar, and they are presented in a similar fashion, but the similarities end there.
No comments:
Post a Comment