PixlBit

Today Jesse Miller posted an article about his view on video games as art. In addition the Hellblock Heroes here at Pixlbit did an excellent Pixltalk podcast episode on the subject. Both sparked a lot of thought and I've spent the last couple hours writing out long obnoxious comments on each thread trying to explain how I feel. I still don't feel like I'm completely done though. This blog here is one that I orginally wrote last year and posted at 1UP.com when I started blogging. I've buttered it up nice, adding things, and made it ready to post up here at Pixlbit. There's a couple older blogs I want to bring over here to Pixlbit in addition to this one because they are very important to me and still relevant regardless of when I posted them. Plus I love Pixlbit and want to share them here with everybody. Before I ramble on more, here is my blog. It explains the time in my life when video games became capable of being more than just a toy to me.

The sex-box of ole'

I was about 7 when I started playing video games, and the piece of work above is where I played my first few games. It was around 1995 and not only had the NES had been out for some time, but its successor, the SNES was already out for some time as well, and the N64 was just on the horizon. For a year or two I was able to play on the NES alone with the Super Mario Bros. trilogy, Paper Boy, Duck Hunt, and the like. Before long, we upgraded to the SNES and for another couple years I played games like Super Mario World, Super Mario Kart, and mostly fighting games like Street Fighter, Mortal Kombat, and odd titles like Mighty Morphin Power Rangers: The Fighting Edition.

During these early young days of my gaming history, my experiences were mostly competitive, social, and co-operative. My cousins, friends, and I would beat each other to death in Mortal Kombat, take turns exploring through Donkey Kong Country, and Super Mario World. These were fun, innocent times, and none of us read any gaming magazines, knew about any industry, had any fanboyisms, berated anybody who had a Sega Saturn, or visa versa. One of us had a Sega and any chance we got we would play some Sonic as well. As long as somebody had some games to play and we were having fun together, the particular platform and company logo couldn't be more irrelevant. As kids, we played anything we could get our hands on. I even had an R-Zone at one point, if anybody out there remembers what those were.

We played our games and had fun together, and these games were pretty great, but none of them really mattered to me much. I wasn't engrossed, taken on a journey, or being shown a reason why the mechanics I was using and battles I was winning mattered. It wasn't until this little boy without a fairy came along that this hobby became a passion for me. I was no longer just Sub-Zero beating the shit out of Scorpion or Mario hopping over turtles in search of coins.

Yea I can go through time, big whup wanna fight about it?

There's plenty of fanboys who can and have gushed about Ocarina of Time (OoT) over the years, so I don't need to do that, and I won't I assure you. What we don't get to hear as much over the fanatic fanboysim and love is a thought out and honest reason to why a person loves a certain game. Well I always want to know the answers to "why".

OoT was the first game that told me a story that mattered to me, one that I could relate to, or feel. The basic premise, characters, and values I interpretted from OoT had a great impact on me in those young formative years of my life. I've always loved the game but as I get older and have time to reflect, I start to understand why.

Not everybody appreciates the silent protagonist model whether in Zelda, Half-Life, Portal, Halo, etc, but I'm one of the people that "gets it". It doesn't work for every situation or game, and it's not suppose to, but done right and put in the right context it can make a great style of storytelling or character development. I am a very introverted and introspective person, I talk to myself all the time, and I'm always analyzing myself whether it be my strengths, weaknesses, goals, memories, philosophies, and ethics, in order to better understand myself, figure out what my past means, as well as figuring out what to do next in everday life. My brain is always loud and on the move, traveling at the speed of light, meanwhile my body moves at the pace of glacial retreat. Basically there is a Cortana in my head analyzing, thinking herself to death, and chatting constantly, except it's not a hot blue lady, it's just me lol.

With all this inner analysis and chatter going on, I don't always need my character in a video game to speak for me. In any video game we are usually playing a role of a character, and sometimes that character is predetermined for us and we have the opportunity to play, progress the plot, and find out more about our character. This is great and works in games like Metal Gear Solid and God Of War. In some other games, like Zelda, the silent protagonist technique allows for somebody like me to play a blank slate and put my own personality into the character. In some games, like Half-Life (one of my favorite franchises), I happen to think the Gordon Freeman silent protagonist model doesn't work well, but that's a whole other can of beans. It works for me in Zelda at least.

OoT doesn't have any dialogue wheels, morality systems, multiple endings, or any other means to make your experience technically different from anyone elses, but OoT allowed me to have a compelling, unique, and life altering experience nonetheless. I bonded emotionally with Link and I used him as my own personal avatar in this fantasy world, and in the end I felt that I had accomplished the task of setting balance back to the world of Hyrule. I didn't have to see Link do things in elaborate cutscenes that I never would be able to do in the game, and I never had to take a back seat and watch as he played the game for me. I became him, and "I" achieved victory.

Link's demeanor was a positive influence on me in that age. Link was a child just like me, and became an extension of myself. I saw myself in Link, I saw Link in me, and I had developed a system of ethics and emotions for us both to act upon.

This picture symbolically defines what Zelda means to me

I liked Link not only because of what he was (or what I made him to be in my head), but also because of what he wasn't. Link was heroic and ready to sacrifice, but he did so humbly. He wasn't on a mission to satisfy his ego, impress anybody, or die in glorious battle. Link woke up as a harmless passive little boy, in a forest, without a fairy, and not a care in the world because at least there was some balance and they lived without tyranny or threat of annihalation. Link awakens to the fact that Ganondorf has unbalanced the world, and plans to destroy much of it and imprison the rest. By now I'm sure most of you already know the gist of the raw Zelda premise and I don't need to go on.

What matters to me is the reason Link goes on his journey is to bring things back to the way they were, with no more and no less motive than that. At the end of every temple and even at the finale of his quest, he doesn't boast, demand payment, or even get the girl. In what epic fantasy adventure has a brave hero not been able to lay with the maiden as a reward of his conquest? Well in OoT, Link doesn't have to. To me it seems like he is doing the right thing because it's the right thing to do, not because he wants possessions or praise out of it. A very noble deed and mindset I would say. Even after saving the world, at the end of the game he just quietly rides off into the forest alone.

What's also special to me is that he's willing to go on his quest, and pick up his sword, regardless of the odds. Link, even in adult form pales in comparison to the monsters he fights. He stands up to monsters and problems that are much bigger and meaner than he could ever be, but he still triumphs. All he needs is the right tools, strategy, and most of all courage. Not only in OoT, but in all the other games I've played in the series, Link has never had to chew bubble gum, kick ass and take names, or adapt to any trends or stereotypes that we see in the action/adventure genres that Link championed. In short, Link has never had to become something he isn't, and I appreciate that. Maybe these days some people are tired of seeing Link's same old silent nobility and world saving scheme that they've been seeing for decades. It's understandable since we live in a world where most of us are custom to chainsawing Locust in half, dismembering Necromorphs with an engineering tool, and having glorious sex with a gentically engineered Cerberus Officer (all three of which I enjoy a great deal myself), but speaking just for myself I still love the formula and tone the Zelda series has always had. Let me make it clear that I'm not complacent with the series. There are plenty things I'd want to explore, experiment with, and change about Zelda games mechanically, but I don't agree when people say that Zelda isn't art, isn't innovative, or is purely generic.

Miranda Lawson is hot, but Link will still be just fine without plowing her at the end of his tale

I don't love Link because he's the biggest, strongest, fastest, smartest, meanest, richest person in the rodeo. I like Link because he's the opposite of all those things. However, this isn't suppose to be all about what Zelda means to me, I just had to get all that off my chest to illustrate when and why I fell in love with video games, OoT just happened to be the game that did it for me.

By playing Zelda I learned at a very early age that video games can be an artform and a trancendent experience, just like reading a great book, seeing a beautiful movie, or marveling at a piece of artwork in a museum. Before Zelda, my video games were just a toy used to pass time. After Zelda I believe that you can create anything in a video game and take any person on an incredible journey, maybe even let them experience an epiphany or some kind of growth. I don't have a definition for art, and I don't exactly know what art means to me. All I know is Zelda transcended everyday life for me. It transcended all the life experience I had at that young age and gave me something different, something new, that I can only describe as art for lack of a better term.

To lay some honesty and sapp on you, when I came to the end of my OoT journey and finally drove my sword through Ganons skull, I cried and felt an overwhelming sense of pride and accomplishment. Like somehow I had orchestrated or at least been an important piece of this epic effort to restore balance back to Hyrule. Real life can rarely make me feel that important, emotional, and accomplished but somehow this piece of software on a cartridge did. It expanded my emotional intelligence and engaged me in ways that other types of art seem to engage other people. If a game can make a person feel that, a game can make a person feel anything. It proves that a game development team can have all the power of a great author, film director, painter, sculptor, songwriter, or poet. Now, I'm not saying video games are universally art. When I say my experience with Zelda was art it doesn't mean everybody else has to have the same experience. Art has no uniform definition, it means something different to everybody, and everybody has the right to their own preferences, emotions, and experiences. We can all explore and attempt to understand each other's differences and similarities, but in the end there's never a right and wrong with this "games as art" subject. Game design itself is an art and creating a video game requires various artistic and technical skills. When it comes to the end product, games, not all of my video games are art, most aren't, but I believe that games can be art and with this blog I just explained to you one reason why they can be for me. When people say games aren't art to them it can make me sad or even angry, but the fact is that they are not wrong. We can't argue preferences, and my anger would be illogical as well as a dead end. The proper response would be to ask them, "Then what is art to you?"

There's no limit to the experiences we can provide and the impact we can have on people. Intellectual and technical boundaries can always be explored and transcended. Gaming can be whatever gaming wants to be, it all depends on what the development team creates and how any given gamer ends up feeling and thinking while experiencing it. Sometimes it's art, sometimes it not. However, nobody should tell you gaming can't be something. Game design is an art form in its infancy and should never be generalized or written off.

With that I'd like to ask you guys a question and feel free to answer if you want to. Take up as much space or as little space as you need:

1) Have any of you had a similar experience or catalyst in your gaming history? Is there anything in particular (a certain game, experience, time in your life, etc.) that "made" you a gamer or made games matter to you more than just a toy? If so, what was the experience?