Notes from ‘Extra Lives’
No book has managed to surprise me this year like ‘Extra Lives’ by Tom Bissell did. I initially picked it up as someone I follow on Twitter gave it the high praise of being ‘the best book they had ever read about storytelling. As someone who spent a lot of their teenage years playing video games, they still have a massive appeal to me. As I read the book, I felt like someone was reading my mind.
The book begins by talking about Oblivion, a game I spent many hours in myself. Bissell says that these are games that “best rewards full citizenship”, and I couldn’t agree more. He goes on:
The pleasures of the open-world game are ample, complicated, and intensely private; their potency is difficult to explain, sort of like religion, of which these games become, for many, an aspartame form. Because of the freedom they grant gamers, the narrative-and mission-generating manner in which they reward exploration, and their convincing illusion of endlessness, the best open-world games tend to become leisure-time-eating viruses. As incomprehensible as it may seem, I have somehow spent more than two hundred hours playing Oblivion. I know this because the game keeps a running tally of the total time one has spent with it.
Though the author is a massive game player, that doesn’t mean he’s a die-hard fanatic. There’s plenty he dislikes about video games as a format, and he starts by describing the problems with introductory levels:
Imagine that, every time you open a novel, you are forced to suffer through a chapter in which the characters do nothing but talk to one another about the physical mechanics of how one goes about reading a book. Unfortunately, game designers do not really have a choice.
Shifting to Fallout 3, Bissell explains that these open-world games provide both endless space for your imagination and far-too wooden dialogue and narrative:
Allowing your decisions to establish for your character an in-game identity as a skull-crushing monster, a saint of patience, or some mixture thereof is another attractive feature of Fallout 3. These pretensions to morality, though, suddenly bored me, because they were occurring in a universe that had been designed by geniuses and written by Ed Wood Jr.
…so why is it that video game stories are so bad? Well:
I came to accept that games were generally incompetent with almost every aspect of what I would call traditional narrative. In the last few years, however, a dilemma has become obvious. Games have grown immensely sophisticated in any number of ways while at the same time remaining stubbornly attached to aspects of traditional narrative for which they have shown little feeling. Too many games insist on telling stories in a manner in which some facility with plot and character is fundamental to — and often even determinative of — successful storytelling.
Bissell doesn’t think that it has to be this way:
I am uninterested in whether games are better or worse than movies or novels or any other form of entertainment. More interesting to me is what games can do and how they make me feel while they are doing it. Comparing games to other forms of entertainment only serves as a reminder of what games are not. Storytelling, however, does not belong to film any more than it belongs to the novel. Film, novels, and video games are separate economies in which storytelling is the currency. The problem is that video-game storytelling, across a wide spectrum of games, too often feels counterfeit, and it is easy to tire of laundering the bills.
One chapter covers the release of the original Resident Evil. Bissell uses this game as an example of both the power of the format in general, and the sad lack of story in even the best of games:
Great horror movies are almost always subterranean in effect. They are the ultimate compulsion — you must watch — and they transubstantiate social anxieties more sensed than felt. The sensed, rather than the felt, is the essence of the horror film. Another way of saying this is that good horror films are about something not immediately discernible on their surface. On its surface, Resident Evil is about an evil corporation known as Umbrella and a terrible biotoxin known as the T-virus. Beneath that surface is a tour de force of thematic nullity. All the game really wants to do is frighten you silly, and it goes about doing so with considerable skill. Playing it for the first time was easily as scary as any horror movie and frequently much scarier. But was it horrifying? For me, horror is the departure of conscious thought, and Resident Evil collapses wherever thought arrives.
…he goes on to say:
The success of the first Resident Evil established the permissibility of a great game that happened to be stupid. This set the tone for half a decade of savagely unintelligent games and helped to create an unnecessary hostility between the greatness of a game and the sophistication of things such as narrative, dialogue, dramatic motivation, and characterization. In accounting for this state of affairs, many game designers have, over the years, claimed that gamers do not much think about such highfaluting matters. This may or may not be largely true. But most gamers do not care because they have been trained by game designers not to care.
After Resident Evil, Bissell looks at BioShock, a game I remember clearly from its release and the gaming community’s shock at the brilliance of the title. Though I never played it in full (though I played the demo over and over again), Bissell uses its story as an example of both meaningful and unique narrative and something that misses the mark:
On one hand, I love BioShock, which is frequently saluted as one of the first games to tackle what might be considered intellectual subject matter — namely, a gameworld exploration of the social consequences inherent within Ayn Rand’s Objectivism (long story). On the other hand, what passes for intellectual subject matter in a video game is still far from intellectually compelling, at least to me, and I know I was not imagining the feeling of slipping, hourglass loss I experienced when I played BioShock ten hours a day for three days straight. If I really wanted to explore the implications and consequences of Objectivism, there were better, more sophisticated places to look, even if few of them would be as much fun (though getting shot in the knee would be more fun than rereading Atlas Shrugged). When I think about games, here is where I bottom out. Is it okay that they are mostly fun? Am I a philistine or simply a coward? Are games the problem, or am I?
In a later chapter, Bissell recalls a panel he attended where video game creators talked about story, alongside an outsider, Steve Preef (best known for his work on ‘The Curious Case of Benjamin Button’). As Preeg listened on to the state of the video game industry, he seemed less than optimistic:
Preeg then turned philosophical. In Hollywood, he said, “we have very clear goals.” He worked under a director, for instance, had a clear idea of the script, and knew whether sad or happy music would be playing under the scenes he was required to digitally augment. Every eye-widening and face-aging task he was given as an animator had a compelling dramatic context attached to it, which he used to guide his animation decisions. His art was always guided. “Your characters,” he said, turning to the panel, “have to be compelling in very different ways, depending on what the audience wants to do.” Preeg was silent for a moment. Then he said, “You guys are going to have a very, very difficult time.”
I could honestly continue quote another dozen passages from this book, but I’ll refrain. Partially because the content is better read as a whole, but also because something happens in the final chapter that makes the entire book worth reading. If any of this has sounded interesting to you, I urge you to buy this book.
