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| Hearsay: |
Computer games are trying to kill The Story by coming to frag your children’s minds. Run for the hills! And switch from the crowbar to the rocket launcher. You’re going to need it.
Computer games are the devil’s work. But you knew that – it’s one of the reasons they’re so damned fun. The diabolical provenance may also explain why they’re not good, not if story is your business, as it is mine.
Seductive as they are, computer games are anti-story machines, and designed as such. And that matters because apart from that cunning opposable thumb gimmick one of the main features that distinguishes us from the other creatures on the planet is that we are story-telling animals. Story’s important, and it’s of no consequence how and where you get it – books, films, TV, theatre, bible, mosque, synagogue – it’s all story and it’s all crucial in explaining our nature to ourselves.
Stories do this by having beginnings and middles and ends, and protagonists who make significant journeys during which they grow and change and learn and make meaningful sacrifices. Computer games have many distracting and attractive bells and whistles, but other than developing good twitch skills, they don’t really do any of that. And, to be fair, they’re not structured to: they’re play – not story.
I wonder what my friend Clive, who writes about video games in the same way literary critics write about literature, would have to say about this.
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October 26th, 2007 at 12:32 pm
I just got a book contract for a collection of original essays on the ethics of entertainment. Although I made explicit in the call for contributors my wish for a chapter on the ethics of computer games, particularly of the first-person shooter sort, no one volunteered to do one. So, if anyone in the sound of my voice is interested in proposing such a chapter, why don’t you contact me at ?
October 26th, 2007 at 1:48 pm
Flethcer’s article might have had some substance to it had it been published fifteen years ago, bemoaning the growing legions of teenagers lobotomized in the arcade glow of Street Fighter II screens. Today the problem writers should worry about w/r/t video games isn’t that they’re robbing entire generations of kids of the brain food of narrative; they should be worried that today’s savvy game designers are robbing writers of their hegemony over it. Fletcher should sit down with his kids, especially if they have some of the newer RPGs, and see how well some of these cats are doing narrative. That’s something he should be scared about. Plus, the fact that Fletcher keeps calling video games “brain-killing” and “brain-sucking” makes it look like he hasn’t really done the research; a bunch of respected journals over the last couple of years have been publishing serious studies on the positive cognitive effects of playing video games, from the obvious (improved hand-eye coordination, memory, problem-solving skills) to the surprising (improved test-taking ability, reduction in the manifestation of some psychoses, such as Alzheimer’s). Giving it the boogeyman or devil treatment probably doesn’t do much good besides making him sound like a predictably uniformed, stodgy Luddite.
October 26th, 2007 at 2:01 pm
*that should say uninformed, not uniformed. Unless the Guardian makes their technophobic staff write their copy in their Guardian-issued tweed-on-tweed, zeitgeist-repellant suits.