Well maybe not infinitely so, as this gentleman thinks. I finished Bioshock Infinite a week or so ago and I've been playing Dead Space 3 and the experiences have helped me to understand the greater trajectory the video game industry is taking.
I've been catching up on some video games I've missed and have found myself continuously disappointed. However the bitterness has been taken away by understanding and resignation.
I wrote a few bubbly pieces for a nascent video game media outlet that has since collapsed, and these pieces were bursting with optimism but ultimately naive in their understanding of material reality. Video games are an incredibly complex phenomenon and have evolved far past their original rule-based entertainment iterations. You have basic virtual copies of traditional games, then linear story-telling games that play like an interactive movie, then non-linear (or more accurately branching linear) story-telling games and sandbox games that considerably expand player freedom and give rise to a variety of emergent phenomena within their bounds, simulation games, management games, god games, radically emergent games that give you almost complete freedom, and so on and so on. There is a game for pretty much every mode of interaction we have, so you'd imagine that sooner or later a great human work will be come along in the form of a game.
Roger Ebert made the argument that video games will never be high art, and my essays were a response to that argument, showing the incredible shapes games have taken and that they will achieve high art status. Now it is true that video games have come a long way and they've done some pretty remarkable things, but I'm beginning to think that damn Mr. Ebert might have been right, but not in the way he probably thought.
We have entered an era in which large-scale human projects that are not ultimately conservative or configured towards the purpose of capital accumulation for a small owning class are pretty much no longer possible. Now today's mainstream video game is incredibly complex and a development crew often requires hundreds of people and millions in productive capital. Most productive capital today is owned by people who are really not interested in transformative ideas; they are risk-averse businessmen who wish to stick to tried and true methods that funnel great amounts of money into their gaping maws. Plus, many of these businesssmen have come into contact with such an immense concentration of capital because of the way our society is set up, and because of the underlying ideology that legitimates that arrangement, so anything that threatens that state of affairs is going to be rejected instinctually.
And well who can blame these guys? To be a part of that class, you share the same social platform with bankers, energy barons, defense contractors, and all those other types. You're talking about guys who buy islands and multiple houses and giant cruise yachts. There is immense social pressure to do everything it takes with the economic platform you have to acquire as much capital as you can, because everyone is in competition towards greater private gain. Any sort of national or greater public purpose is gone. The logic of our times necessitates it. Both Hollywood and TV-land suffer from these problems as well, though there are always exceptions that make it through.
So, we arrive at this state of affairs due to the ravages of time and catastrophic mistakes encouraged by human nature. I have plenty to say about all that, but back to the games.
Bioshock Infinite has some incredible artwork. The world is absolutely gorgeous and there is a nice constellation of relevant themes that crop up: the messianism, cultism, and hypocrisy of organized religion, the construction of mythology and the ugliness that writhes beneath pretty images, subterranean racism, the oppression of labor and the political smearing of socialism and communism, the list goes on. The satire of anti-labor propaganda in the factory section of the game was especially delicious. But then all of these themes just hover impotently in the background amidst an ongoing orgy of senseless violence. The game is drowned in it. I was dismayed to find that you suddenly turn against labor and the lower classes for a really ridiculous reason, so you are a given an expanded stable of enemies to shoot, besides the insidious establishment.
These glaring contradictions can be attributed to the tenacity of the first-person shooter mechanic. The mechanic has been refined to perfection due to its popularity and simplicity, and sells a shitload of games. So many of these games you have these simplistic mechanics like shooting, or just general killing (even the cartoon games have a similar mechanic of elimination) with all of the more refined ideas embedded within this banal engine. Because it all has been found to work, and it all sells. Bioshock is one of them. You can tell the writer is trying to say something, but then collapses into frustration upon finding himself shackled to these economic chains.
The ending shows this. After turning against everyone and standing for absolutely nothing, the orgy of violence is ended upon a revelation that you are both the good and the evil emanating from other worlds, and so the whole absurd, sordid journey is ended like a collapsing star: all of the human drama, worthwhile causes, and struggles are sucked back into the ridiculous anti-climax of the life of a single character. The ending shows an incredible fatalism and narcissism, that becomes understandable considering the greater dilemma posed by the video game medium. Dead Space falls into similar traps but I haven't finished it yet.
I still enjoy playing these games. At least the process is often satisfying, and there is great beauty in the constructed worlds: graphics and aesthetics are one aspect of the art form that continue to progress, as they are basically value-free. But I am always plagued with the nagging complaint that they can be so much more.
Some exceptions do get through. You can expect some transformative ideas to come out of the indie sector where financial and social constraints aren't so prevalent. Minecraft is probably one of the great triumphs of the video game world, which came out of the indie sector. Here you have a game that doesn't even have a guiding story, and the market-system is completely eschewed for building your own tools out of resources you gather yourself. It has enjoyed wide success and now capital is behind it of course.
Some games do get through. But high art? I'm not sure. Who knows. There is more to consider, but I've run out of time for now.
