Fly Before Walking?

Birth.

An infant has no knowledge of the outside world; the tiny bundle of wonder is like a hyper-sensitive sponge, soaking up everything in sight.

Soon after birth, the infant learns to crawl. A few months and a year down the road, it will walk. And after walking...running.

It has always been the dream of man to fly. Renaissance inventors were obsessed with the possibility and the ancient Greeks wrote of it in tragedy. To fly is to dream in day; to fly is to become something we are not. The daring required for the Wright brothers to set flight at Kitty Hawk is the same daring that put man on the Moon.

As game designers, we want to fly. We want games that are loaded with emotion and contextual meaning; we want our Godfathers, Citizen Kanes, and Midnight Cowboys, and we want them now. We want mainstream media to take us seriously.

All of us have been guilty of impatience, at one point or another. I heard an argument the other day that equated GTA and Halo to murder simulators - very fun murder simulators. I've had a lot of fun with those games, but look at the ratio of narrative driven content (involved VO on missions, NPC interaction with context, cutscenes, etc) versus empty simulation time.

But where to fill that empty space?

Two answers are given for this question. First, we should crawl - we should get a story down first that isn't confusing or boring, and has a good deal of empathy in cutscenes. GTA IV and MGS IV came very close to establishing this type of pathos, but I found MGS IV long-winded (but Kojima is an auteur, so I take that as part of the amazing whole), and GTA IV's reviews lauded it as a superior triumph in establishing player-character catharsis, but at least for me, it wasn't there in the slightest. GTA IV felt stilted and very stale, when it came to narrative, and the comparisons to some of Scorsese's best were out of line.

After we crawl, we should start walking - adopting more of the Mass Effect style in-engine story telling and keeping the player involved...and then run, etc.

The problem with this 'by-the-bricks' approach is that it's piecemeal. Art is a whole, not parts; placing things in like Lego bricks seems to fail the focus will be lacking in one area or the other. Art is a synthesis of disciplines; in literature it is the crafting of prose sentence mingled with the rhythm of words connecting together; cinema is the camera, acting, formal disciplines, et al; and where do games fit it in? A solution to a problem must be complete.

Therefore, I propose that we fly before we walk. Flying - shooting for the stars - may be a painful process. Millions of dollars could be lost. Careers could be ruined. Reality: games, depicting moving images that include life-like avatars of real-life people cost a lot of money. Mess up trying to fly, without the right parts or people, and the fall is going to be long and hard.

It's not a road that should be tread lightly.

If game designers want to make that Godfather, that Citizen Kane, take notice; those were studio pictures. It is up to the auteur - or team of auteurs - to make the game that they know they can make. It is up to the auteur to shoot for the stars and dream of flight. We went to the moon in a decade. I think that the most powerful avenue of storytelling can be reached quicker - with hard work, diligence, and attention to craft. We need to synthesize our art form; codify it and reproduce exceptional works that are clear and demonstrable products of this process.

It's out there...who's going to claim it?

They're waiting. Can you hear them?

A birth is at hand.