{"id":354,"date":"2005-03-15T17:55:54","date_gmt":"2005-03-15T22:55:54","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/misc.wordherders.net\/?p=354"},"modified":"2005-03-15T17:55:54","modified_gmt":"2005-03-15T22:55:54","slug":"canon-formation","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/misc.wordherders.net\/?p=354","title":{"rendered":"Canon Formation"},"content":{"rendered":"

Andrew Stern, over at GTA, puts forward a comment made during his panel discussion at GDC this year<\/a>:<\/p>\n

One of the comments that came out during the panel discussion Why Isn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t the Game Industry Making Interactive Stories is that the game industry has yet to reach its “Citizen Kane moment”. This is the idea or hope that at some point someone will finally create a game that uses the medium in such radically new ways that it uncovers a new grammar of expression, and in the process reaches new artistic heights.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Like Andrew, I too have always found the analogy of early Hollywood cinema (CK is no Lumiere Bros production, after all) to games rather suspect, though I suppose useful in its own limited ways. The thing is, I think we *do* have a grammar of game expression and one that specifically incorporates elements of storytelling even (at least, that’s what my dissertation is arguing), but because of bad implementation in a lot of games, the sheer *number* of games, the advances in technology that splits games into very different generations, and an industry that perhaps harbors even more control than early cinema ever did, it’s rather tough to separate the wheat from the chaff. Toss in there the fact that we still operate with fairly limited understanding of game genre<\/a> (or, I should say, genres), and the fact that we tend to view games and stories as binaries rather than components of the same part (when story is involved), and I’d say its not surprising that we find ourselves at a loss for a single defining moment.<\/p>\n

And let us not forget that Citizen Kane enjoys at least part of its enormous prestige because of the multiple academic and popular voices that declare it so. Canon formation, be it in film, literature, or games, for all its limitations and problems, is also a useful filtering process. I suspect that as we all continue to understand, critique, debate, and teach a critical theory of games, we’ll see how the waves (as Andrew so finely put it) crash together to form certain peaks.<\/p>\n

mark’s reference to Fable\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s disappointment as both game and story, despite the hype (in the GTA comments), in fact, reminded me of one of my favorite publication histories, documented by Lawrence Rainey in his article “The Price of Modernism: Reconsidering the Publication of The Waste Land” (The Yale Review 78 Winter 1989: 279-30). T.S. Eliot had already planned to publish The Waste Land in his own Criterion, but he was looking for an American venue as well. Ezra Pound tried to convince The Dial to purchase the poem, and he argued that The Waste Land was \u00e2\u20ac\u0153the justification of \u00e2\u20ac\u02dcthe movement\u00e2\u20ac\u2122 of our modern experiment, since 1900\u00e2\u20ac\u009d (Rainey 282). Initially, the Dial only offered their usual $150, which Eliot thought too little. Eventually, and through no small measure of effort on the part of Pound, The Dial decided that they wanted the poem. In recompense, \u00e2\u20ac\u0153they would offer Eliot the second annual Dial Award in confidence as the price of the poem, while officially they would pay only the $150 which had been their original offer” (Rainey 291). Rainey points out:<\/p>\n

Literary history records few spectacles so curious or so touching as that of the two editors of a major review offering a figure nearly three times the national income per capita\u00e2\u20ac\u201din 1986 terms, the same ratio would yield over $40,000\u00e2\u20ac\u201dfor a poem which neither had seen or read<\/i>. (Rainey 291, emphasis mine)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

After offering such a substantial award for a poem, the editor of the American publishing magazine found it \u00e2\u20ac\u0153disappointing on first reading.\u00e2\u20ac\u009d That\u00e2\u20ac\u2122s right. They paid that much, for something they hadn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t even seen, and, upon reading, didn\u00e2\u20ac\u2122t much care for. Marketing, even in high literary circles, is an amazing thing.<\/p>\n

In any case, this desire for a Citizen Kane moment reminds me too much of the “games that make you cry<\/a>” quest … Interesting, since the sentimental was for many years both feminized and disdained in literary circles (and, one might argue, still often is, despite valid attempts to recoup the term). Aren’t there other ways we can frame successful emotional<\/i> moments in games outside of either some sort of Rosebud moment or an appeal to the Old Yeller factor? Can’t we point to foundational games – ones that really introduced a new element of play, style, or integrated story? I’m pretty sure we could all name a few…. some that even alter the way we encounter some games as stories. I know that some have taken a stab at creating a canon, of sorts (see the attempts by both Costik<\/a> and Juul<\/a>), but I wonder what we’d put together if we did focus on a very limited canon? For the first-person sneaker, would you choose Metal Gear, or Thief, or a later title? Why? Tetris seems an obvious choice over many other games, both for its foundational gameplay and because it’s ‘publication’ history is ripe for discussions of copyright and the industry, but I’m sure arguments could be made for others.<\/p>\n

What would a very narrow canon – say, twenty titles that you would teach in an Introduction to Computer Game Studies class – look like?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[7],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-354","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-games"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/misc.wordherders.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/misc.wordherders.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/misc.wordherders.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/misc.wordherders.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/misc.wordherders.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=354"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"http:\/\/misc.wordherders.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/354\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/misc.wordherders.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=354"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/misc.wordherders.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=354"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/misc.wordherders.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=354"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}