There was a line in this week’s reading that really stuck out at me. “I think games are much more about theater than they are about film; the possibility space is much more explicit in both, they work live, they have an audience participating, there’s a performative aspect.” When I read this, I found it both striking but also instantly clear and correct.
Video games are often compared to film. As compared to mediums such as literature and music, they are much newer forms of entertainment and art. In their beginning, they were seen as faddish distractions. They both took elements from previous forms of media to create a new art form. As well, there is often work being done to merge these two mediums, to make games “more cinematic”. Obviously, cut scenes come to mind, but also the work of game makers such as Hideo Kojima, with his games often being compared to works of cinema.
But this is such a surface level interpretation of what is really going on when it comes to the dynamic of what makes video games, well, video games. I too was guilty of this kind of thinking in my youth, that games are like “movies you can play”. But there’s so much more to it than that.
Comparing games to theater as an alternative is, in my view, a clear, and well-thought out comparison. The performative nature of the two mediums ties them together strongly. The telling of a story through actions performed in a malleable environment, the “live-ness” of it all. But yet, I feel like nobody ever talks about how “theater-like” a game is, but certainly we hear that certain games are “movielike” all the time.
Of course, games go beyond what theater can provide. Indeed, games do have some elements of cinema, like control, pre-determination of events, special effects, etc. I think a really great video game combines the beauty and craft of what makes film great, the ability to create experiences that simply can’t be done on a physical stage, with the performance and thrill of live theater. This is another facet of what makes games important in their own right.
I sort of wonder why we do not see this theater comparison more often, or perhaps i’m just not looking hard enough. I wonder, if more often games were compared to theater, a very long and historically accepted art form, would games be more accepted as their own important and unique art-form. Nonetheless, I think it is time to stop talking about the cinematic quality of games, on more on the carnivalesque, theatrical quality of them.