What’s interesting about games as a medium is that, as I touched on briefly last week, they aren’t a medium in any substantial sense. Yes, there are certain expectations and technical restraints and conventions, but nothing that can’t be easily ignored or subverted. If we were to compare a huge Hollywood tentpole release film to the most dissimilar example of a film we could find, the artiest of art-house films, we could find interesting differences in content, length, tone, theme, editing choices, framing, and so forth – but nothing like the categorical experiential shift of comparing, say, Call of Duty or Tomb Raider to Baba is You or Doki Doki Literature Club. In what meaningful way are these the same medium when, not only the experience, but the very way it is conveyed is so completely different?
In the past I’ve argued that, in comparison to traditional narrative forms, games represent a sort of meta-narrative form. While you can get a story from a book or a film, you can get a set of closely related stories from a game. Every game is Rashomon, a set of perspectives on the same situation, an open-ended understanding. Just as each game is a meta-narrative, games as a medium comprise a meta-medium. Developers, every time they build a game, an experience, navigate the entire possibility-space of this meta-medium to find the configuration that best suits the experience they desire to convey – and this sub-medium that they devise, or that they discover, is what we call the game’s mechanics.
This is not intended to puff games up or to make them sound more innately powerful or interesting than other media! Restraints breed creativity (just ask Houdini), and this vast possibility space is potentially overwhelming or distracting. It’s no wonder that this meta-medium has largely calcified into a few set sub-media, and these have become what ‘genre’ means in the context of video games. If every game is presumed to be some variation of the third/first person stealth/action shooter/brawler with experience/crafting mechanics, then the space for innovation and differentiation in medium narrows to the point where it resembles something more like film, with small but interesting inventions in lighting, editing, and so forth.
There is, again, nothing wrong with this approach – there is, however, with assuming this is the approach, the only one that makes sense or matters, the only serious way to approach game design – which is basically where AAA design is now, and where it likely will stay for some time to come for reasons both creative and fiscal.
“But”, you may be asking, “why does this matter? Isn’t figuring out whether genre or medium or sub-medium is the more appropriate description just a matter of semantics?” Yes, of course it is, and like most semantic matters it’s important because it shapes our understanding. If we acknowledge that each genre is a medium, and each medium a message, then we acknowledge that every game mechanic is in essence an argument towards a worldview – regardless of the surrounding content. If we regard genres as sub-media we suddenly see how absurd it is to rate and evaluate games across genres as though these comparisons have meaning. Finally, if we understand each game as a potential medium unto itself, shaped by its mechanics, we begin to understand the full scope of the worlds we have denied ourselves by assuming we know what a game must be.
At the end of this, you have to wonder how many worlds, altogether, that we’ve denied ourselves under the assumption that we know the what shape the world must take.