How You Got Videogames Wrong: It's All Consequential

I have a friend who failed Journey.

…Improbable, right? Thatgamecompany’s 2012 critical darling may be known for a lot of things, but failability ain’t one of ’em. Yet still this friend-o’mine–let’s call him Kevin, cuz that’s his name–did just that.

“Yeah it was pretty good but not great, ya know…I ran around and saw a lot of pretty shit but at the end of the day I was just…by myself in the desert. I mean, there were others, sure, but who needs ’em. ”

“Kevin,” I said, shocked, and a little insulted, “the game was designed to promote companionship. I think you may have been playing it wrong.”

“No that’s the game’s fault. If I’m supposed to play with others I should’ve had to play with others. As it was, the game never required it so I never did it. And I’m not too certain ‘game’ is what we should be calling it anyway…Games are about consequences. Where were the consequences?”

Here we go again; same song, different drum: It is my belief that videogames have been erroneously labeled as the “consequences” medium…the way they’ve been labeled the “interactive” medium, “simulation” medium, and “magical-player-agency-better-than-novels-cuz-I-push-X” medium…when in fact games fall into the another or not at all categories of the above. And in the case of consequence, another. In the same way that games are not the only medium that allow us to imbue a text with physicality (though for that we will find games exceedingly capable), nor do other mediums lack the “consequence” of games. Additionally, though we do a helluva lot of jumping, shimmying, and steering in videogames, the bulk of the medium’s consequence could be best described as “inconsequential consequence.” Now don’t lose your shit: I’m not saying videogames aren’t fully capable of great significance. I’m saying the way games get at it is the same way as everything else: By supporting the consequence that players provide.

* * *

Let’s pretend an experiment into being: We have constructed a gaming cell–a room, completely nondescript but for a chair and a screen upon which one might play a game. Now let’s get Kevin in there; lock the door; tell him, “Play, play, play.” So he does. The game, however, has one major flaw: The controller is crap (for this we shop MadCatz). Though the game is relatively simple–say, guiding a man across a 2d landscape peppered with gaps and mines) this controller stresses Kevin’s ability to routinely progress. Yet, occasionally, he does.

Luck, we’ll call it…though “blind luck” would probably be more appropriate. For this gaming cell contains yet another feature: Through the screen upon which Kevin plays lies another room; the screen itself a kind of two-way mirror. And inside this room sits another test subject, me. I’m holding a controller, too, but I don’t see a game through the screen. No, I only see Kevin–staring, considering, sometimes frustrated. And while Kevin has been allowed to assume the role of gaming beast that is natural to him, I have been instructed to perform another task: To assign Kevin’s actions–his blinking, his shifting of weight, his unfettered anger–to buttons on the controller, then to “play” Kevin.

It isn’t long before I begin to recognize a familiar pattern: First, Kevin leaning forward, mouth agape, eyes fixed upon the screen; then leaning back, left, right, as if syncing his physicality with something; then there’s the cold holding of breath at crucial moments; and finally–sometimes one, sometimes the other–Kevin either congratulating himself, or tossing the controller in frustration. Good thing that his controller’s already broken.

And that it was never hooked to the game to begin with. You see, unbeknownst to me, I’ve been the one playing the game on Kevin’s screen. And over time I’ve gotten better at it, to the extent that Kevin believes he is playing the game. Which is to say: We’ve removed Kevin’s agency but not his belief in it…sustained in an act of surreptitious  half-play. Presumably, this game could be perfected, so long as both of us play our parts.

Now we must ask ourselves a question: Given this convincing-enough “game” of Kevin’s, what are we to make of consequence? When his character plummets “inexplicably” into a gap (remember, the controller is malfunctioning); when he soars untouched through the level; whose name belongs into the high-score? Can we call the consequence Kevin’s? for it occurred not within his actions but of them, as I inputted his reactions. Probably not. Yet how can the consequence belong to me, for without Kevin’s reading of the output, I could not progress. Who authors this experience? Kevin, in his agency-faith; or I with my reporting?

Yeah, it’s a dozy. But one for you to mull over in your own time, as the experiment is only to highlight an often overlooked aspect of videogames: If what we call “consequence” has the potential to be, even if in only the minority of instances, an act exclusive to perception, can we truly define games by the oft-snarked “existence of consequences”? I don’t see how. If fish are defined as being exclusively water-breathing and one out of a million breathes something other than water, then we must either redefine that fish or all fish. And since Kevin, under optimal circumstances, will never realize that he’s not playing a game at all (and really he kind of is) I believe we would have to redefine the term “game” itself, since “consequence” can–if only in some cases–exist outside them.

* * *

This is probably a lot to take in at once. So like death let’s do it in stages: First off, let’s handle the implications in regard to our first example…For Kevin, the consequence of Journey was that he is probably–and if so, quite wonderfully–a closet sociopath. Furthermore, the consequence was that–contrary to his everyday self, I assure you–Kevin had been trained by wave after wave of inconsequential games into needing strict guidance for comprehending consequence itself. I find this potential particularly disturbing. For it seems to me that implying agency while at the same time delimiting said agent’s scope of interpretation is a pretty nasty method of control, and one that mega-publishers and propagandists alike would just loooove to get their paws on.

But let’s step away from Journey now, go slipping right into the next stage: We must redefine games. Many the time I have heard (quite intelligent) developers and critics alike utter the mantra, “Does it have consequences? Then it’s a game.” Yet as we’ve just seen consequence can be of games without being in them…Which is to say, consequence can stem more so  from our belief in having modified gamespace than it does from our actual modification of it.  Rather than “does the game have consequence?” we should be asking “is the consequence significant?” What should this new definition be? Well, I say “active criticism,” but I suppose I’ll leave that up to you.

Next stage: And this of more immediate significance to us: We must realize as developers that our role as meaning-makers is not to create systems that generate meaning in a game but to forge a framework in which meaning can exist of a game……just.like.every.other.medium. The surface significance of MacBeth pales in comparison to the client-side significance of Macbeth. And the same on down the ladder, right down to Carly Rae Jepsen. Meaning is all in how one grafts it atop the extant product, no matter the medium…though videogames do allow us to focus more exclusively on physicality, due to the symbiotic relationship of input and active criticism. Our task becomes creating a network of “falling in holes” and “running off courses” and “push X to awesomes” that results in a support system for “Of” Significance.

Ah but we must not skip the last stage…Our goal as good players of physical texts is to train our minds toward “of” meaning, to look beyond the “in”…not only so that we might write clever criticisms of games, but to progress the art-form itself. The meaning in Super Mario Bros. is a drama of physics and mushrooms; but the meaning of Super Mario Bros.  is many things (potentially): The beginning of America’s  recognition of globalism; the propagation and/or criticism of the patriarch; or even this.

If consequences can exist outside of videogames themselves, our primary goal should be to constantly train and challenge our brains into detecting them. We might say that the “game” of games is fine-tuning perception. And thus we make a game of all perception…not just in videogames and other mediums, but the whole of it–in a conversation with a stranger; in our witnessing of a sunset; in this very sentence.

Here’s a mantra for you:  Is it significant? Then it’s a game.