The Dialectics of Videogames

This is something I've been meaning to post for a while. I've talked briefly about dialectics in video games before, but that was in a sort of different context.

Socrates (Image credit: Eric Gaba)

So, I understand that for most people, the word 'dialectics' is probably big and scary. Let me break this down with a short and oversimplified history of dialectics. Dialectics was allegedly invented by Zeno of Elea (he of the infamous Archer's Paradox), but was really made famous by Plato and Socrates. They gave us what we call (for rather obvious reasons) Socratic Dialogue. In Socratic Dialogue, one party adopts a position, which we call the thesis, while the other adopts the opposite position, which we call the antithesis. There are formal rules for how the dialogue proceeds, but suffice to say it is the goal of the antithesis to find a flaw in the thesis, and the goal of the thesis to defend itself. Socratic Dialogue is, therefore, a means of evaluating the strength of a thesis. If a thesis is strong, the antithesis will fail to find fault with it. If the thesis is weak, the antithesis will defeat it, and you should go and think up another thesis.

We're going to skip over 2000 years of history now and go straight to the 19th century, and the philosopher Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel. Georgie gave us another form of dialectics, which we (again, for obvious reasons) call Hegelian Dialectics. Like Socratic Dialogue, Hegelian Dialectics begins with a thesis and an antithesis, but it's perhaps fair to say that Hegel saw dialectics as more generative than evaluative. Rather than using the tension to test the strength of the thesis, Hegel rather saw the tension between thesis and antithesis as culminating in a process we normally call sublation (although we're talking about Hegelian Dialectics, we actually use a lot of terms where Hegel himself actually used different terms, but they basically mean the same thing). Sublation does not represent the triumph of thesis over antithesis or vice versa, but the creation of a new, third position, called the synthesis.

G.W.F. Hegel

We could also talk about Karl Marx and dialectical materialism, but the difference between dialectical materialism and Hegelian Dialectics isn't really relevant to our purposes.

So what does this have to do with videogames, and why am I writing it on a videogame blog that is especially concerned with stories?

Well, I propose that games qua games are Socratic, and stories are (often) Hegelian, and because of that, they require different methods of resolution.

If we consider a game, where the point is to win, in dialectical terms, it seems obvious to say that the player represents the role of the thesis, and that the opponent or other challenges represents the antithesis. A player wins a game by not allowing the challenges to find flaw with their playing: by not allowing the antithesis to find flaw with the thesis. (This is slightly different from Socratic Dialogue, because the antithesis is often waits for the player to come to it, but whatever. The player can only win the game by facing the antithesis' challenges.) The strength of the thesis is directly correlated to the player's playing ability.

In a story, the story tension is indeed set up by the tension between thesis and antithesis, but is resolved not by the virtues of either side, but by some change to a new position: the synthesis. If one side was inevitably going to win anyway, there is no tension. Now, yes, the protagonist often beats the antagonist in a story, but usually because of some change in the protagonist such that the protagonist is no longer playing by the thesis they presented to begin with. In this case, the protagonist doesn't so much represent the thesis as resolves the story by switching from the thesis to the synthesis. This is pretty much what we mean when we talk about a character arc: the character changes over the course of the story. Here I would say that I think the Socratic-style dialectic of the protagonist merely overcoming the antagonist's challenges without any real change is a perfectly valid story - it is, at the very least, something I would be content to call a story - but I'm not convinced it's often, if ever, a good one.

I don't want to put words in Ernest Adams' mouth, but I get the feeling that, when he talked about the disanalogies between gameplay tension and dramatic tension, this is what he was driving at, particularly when he talks about dramatic novelty and the need for change.

Likewise, with reference to when Jesper Juul talked about the distinction between immediate desires and aesthetic desires, I would propose that our immediate desires are by and large Socratic (in the sense that we want the thesis to win) while our aesthetic desires are more Hegelian (in the sense that we want an interesting resolution).

Inevitably, we're going to have to talk about Mass Effect 3's (pre-extended-cut) ending here. I don't want to get too hung up on what I think about the ending, or why people liked or hated it. The story of the trilogy is, essentially, about cycles, and specifically Hegelian cycles, so it's rather appropriate the the three ending options were the thesis (destroy the Reapers like you set out to do), the antithesis (siding with the Reapers in the hope of controlling them) and the synthesis (which was, helpfully, even called the synthesis ending). To my mind, the thesis and antithesis endings are your typical 'good' and 'bad' game endings. Like in Streets of Rage (or was it Streets of Rage 2?), where, upon meeting Mr. X, you can choose to either beat him up to get the 'good' ending, or join him to get the 'bad' ending. This is complicated a little bit by the fact that the 'good' ending in Mass Effect 3 was portrayed as a Renegade choice, while the 'bad' ending was portrayed as a Paragon choice, but let's discuss that later. Then you have the synthesis ending, where the story is resolved by some change, as stories, as we've established, usually are.

In summary, a win in a game often means the triumph of the thesis, while a resolution in a story often means replacement of the thesis with the synthesis. One of the great challenges for narrative-heavy games is reconciling the two. A good place to start might be Raph Koster's idea that Narrative is not a Game Mechanic.

Is "free" not cheap enough?

This is primarily anecdotal, so it's perhaps not enough to draw any conclusions from, but it does seem in line with some rumblings from other corners of the internet.

The big news is that Christine Love's Analogue: A Hate Story has made its way to Steam. It's a visual novel about stumbling across a Korean colony ship in the far future, and, through interacting with the two AIs who are the only 'living' remnants of the crew, trying to piece together what happened. And it's good. Very good, in fact, but this isn't a review piece. I don't really do them.

It's not an instruction. It's not that kind of visual novel.

Before I even played Analogue, what really struck me was how enthusiastically I accepted the offer that I pay for it. The thing is, I haven't played Digital: A Love Story or Don't take it personally, babe, it just ain't your story, though I was certainly intrigued to read about them. But Christine Love's previous titles were free. Why is it that I never touched the ones I could get for free, but was very happy to get the one I had to pay for?

Perhaps GOG.com's Guillaume Rambourg has the answer. When he spoke to Rock, Paper, Shotgun last month, he made it quite clear that he felt a certain price point was necessary to "preserve the value of games". He kept talking about the value of games, but I think he meant the perception of value, which is a bit different. Nonetheless, as sceptical as I was, I now wonder if there isn't some truth to that. It's a criticism I've heard of pay-what-you-want style bundles, too: that they effectively devalue the games they contain.

Of course, the free-to-play model has been phenomenally successful for bigger publishers, with people paying piecemeal for in-game items and new gameplay. But it's easy to see that they expect (or, at least, hope for) my money at some point. A game that is just free with no strings attached seems to awaken some sort of alarm bell in us. Put into words, it would be something like:-

Why would it be worth my time if it's not worth my money?

This is, perhaps, a vindication of the frequent lament we make to non-gamers that games aren't just for kids. Kids have more time than money, so they worry about how much something costs. We're grown-ups, though (honest we are!): we have more money than time, and while we're glad to spend that money, we want to be sure that what we're spending it on is worth our time.

Part of it is that, as authorware becomes more accessible and more sophisticated, anyone can do it, and not everyone realises that not everyone should. There's no getting around it. If people can make bad games, they will, and over time we've built up this sort of association between 'free' and the baser qualities of amateurism. There's another side to that, too. Back when I was making music, I was all too familiar with the idea that one has to have confidence in one's work before one can justify selling it. I never had that confidence in my music (but if you ever heard it, you'd know why), and so it was always free. But if the creator of a work doesn't think it's worth selling, why should the audience think it's worth anything?

Of course, I don't know if Digital: A Love Story and Don't take it personally, babe were free due to a lack of confidence, but because I don't know, there's nothing really telling me that surmising that would be wrong. (And, oh! How wonderful it would be for a smarter person than I to look at how this phenomenon plays with Barthes' Death of the Author.) But clearly, somewhere along the line, it was decided that Analogue: A Hate Story was worth selling. And that decision made me think (much as I don't want to paint myself as easily manipulated) that it might be worth buying.

An interesting outcome is that I liked Analogue: A Hate Story so much that I definitely will check out Digital: A Love Story and Don't take it personally, babe, it just ain't your story. The game I had to pay for is effectively selling me on games I don't have to pay for. That is so the inverse of everything that is intuitive, it's quite wonderful.

Conclusions, then? Well, as I said at the beginning, this is anecdotal, so my conclusions aren't really anything new. Primarily, it might be crass for an artist to think about filthy lucre, but we live in a world where setting a price point is the best way to communicate to your audience that you think you've done something worthwhile, and if you don't demonstrably think it's worthwhile, neither will they. Secondarily, if you must release free games, try to make them somehow related to a game you're selling. Oh, and tertiarily (is that a word?), if your independent game is bad, don't release it. You're making all the other indies look bad. The hell is wrong with you? Or maybe you should release it so everyone can tell you how bad it is. It sounds like you need that. Who are you, anyway, and why have you made me digress from an otherwise positive post just to tell you how much you suck?

Ahem. It's not exactly a three-step plan to guaranteed success, but what were you expecting?

This is just my opinion.

Leigh Alexander wrote a thing about subjectivity and objectivity in media in general and games in particular on her blog. As someone whose day to day activity involves doing science to stories, I am somewhat horrified by the blanket statement that "objectivity is a ridiculous notion," although I don't deny that it's a difficult question. We need objective measurements because the only way we can get technological or theoretical progress in the medium is if we can (somewhat) objectively justify that the development of that progress is worthwhile.

However, that, I suspect, is the exception that proves the rule (although I think "the exception that proves the rule" is a ridiculous notion, so what does that say?). Technology and theory aside, I do agree with the sentiment.

There is a saying: "There is no accounting for taste." I think that saying has lost its true meaning through overuse as an oblique way of ironically suggesting that someone else's tastes are 'wrong'. But I think we need the unironic meaning of the phrase back. There is no accounting for taste. We need to understand that there is no need to defend liking something, nor is it necessary (or even desirable, since it marks you out as a bit of a fuckwit) to rationalise your dislike of something in an attempt to make it seem more authoritative.

It took me a while to realise I have no need to defend liking Dragon Age II.

I encountered such a person, today, on an internet comment thread. It was the typical kind of thing: presenting a lens of preference and trying to pass it off as an objective truth. A value judgement masquerading as a theoretical concept. When I challenged them on it, by building an argument to the contrary, what followed was a cyclical litany of ever angrier bare assertions, circular logic, red herrings and fifty-foot strawmen. The kind of thing a veteran arguer can spot a mile off, and not something that really lends any credibility to the argument. In the end, I got bored and stopped arguing, because I went in expecting an interesting theoretical discussion, but found myself talking in circles with someone who just wanted to legitimise his own subjective opinion in just about the most pathetic way possible.

That's not to say we shouldn't talk about why we like or dislike something, of course. That discussion is valuable, and the ancillary ideas that come out of such a discussion can be very interesting. But that's only possible if neither party is intent on 'winning'. Other than in certain specific cases, dialogue is not a competition.

Tempting as it is to attribute this concept of "right and wrong" opinions to some innate competitiveness of gamers, though, I think its roots lie in a far uglier side of gamers, a word that people are sick of hearing applied to gamers by now.

Entitlement.

When someone attempts to claim that their personal preference is an objective truth about gaming, what they're really saying is, "Developers should only make games that I like." Aside from the obvious statement that gaming as a medium can and should support a diverse range of experiences enjoyable by a variety of people (seriously, what the hell is wrong with you?), and the slightly-less-obvious statement that restricting the cultural breadth of games can only impoverish the medium, there's also the simpler question of how it looks. Throwing a tantrum because a developer makes a game that someone else likes doesn't really do our image as gamers any favours. Likewise if their resentment of someone else enjoying a game means that they have to loudly complain about how bad the game is (with some of the creakiest rationalisations I've seen this side of Creationism) and call people who like it dumb, well, people are going to think gamers are dumb, but rather than thinking they're dumb for liking that game, people are going to think we're dumb for having huge sticks up our arses about what other people like.

Sure, it happens in other media sometimes, but in no other medium is it as endemic as it is in gaming. This kind of behaviour is part of the reason there is even still a certain shame about being a gamer, and it's really got to stop.

Now, in order to stave off accusations of hypocrisy, I'll have to pretend I don't think there's anything it's not ok to like. No, sorry, I just can't do it.

Twilight: Not ok to like.