Travels from My Armchair

It’s an often acknowledged fact that since the creation of cinema, even more so than literature before it, people have been able to live richer lives and experience places and events they’d only ever be able to dream of. Whilst literature relied on the reader to use their imagination to summon up images of far flung lands described by words, which was difficult if the reader didn’t have a visual frame of reference, cinema transported you there in a darkened room. Video games build on this particular function of art – which some dismiss as escapism, but I prefer to think of as a broadening of experience – by not only allowing you to look out into the world (like the window of cinema), but to interact with it.

In fact games are perhaps closer to animation than traditional film. Within the medium artists and coders build a world from scratch, any way they desire, whereas with cinema (even with the most special FX driven spectacles) there is always an element of truth embedded in the image; something physical that is being shot in front of the camera. Whilst it’s true that games are more about fantasy than reality, it’s the level of interaction the player experiences that adds a layer of truth, or more accurately verisimilitude. In Fallout you can believe you are one of the last remnants of humanity surviving in a post apocalyptic world because the game offers you that context and you use your suspension of disbelief from that point to accept it as your reality. Once this ‘contract’ has been signed and sealed between gamer and game, then the actions you take and the choices you make have a real impact. This is the power of narrative, and a video game’s unique ability to allow the player to invest themselves directly in its unfolding.

People who dismiss video games as an escapist entertainment unworthy of being treated as an artform, will never understand them because they fail to sign that initial contract that is essential for the game to work on any meaningful or creative level. They will always maintain a dispassionate, detached attitude to the game, rather than becoming a part of it. It would be like going to a film and closing your eyes the entire way through (then having the nerve to say the film is bad). Earlier on I suggested that video games required less in the way of imagination than literature when it comes to experiencing the world. Whilst this is true on the visual level, video games are able to operate on an entirely deeper level than any other artform because of the medium’s interactive nature. When you experience the world of a video game and take part in its challenges and moral choices, then you are exercising your imagination on a much deeper level than you are as a largely passive viewer of a film. It’s because of this level of interaction that video games are capable of becoming vehicles of empathy or philosophical enquiries into the nature of self. But we are still in the early stages of games as art and for every Fallout or Deus Ex that engages with these issues a score of other games merely require you to shoot things in the head.

Whilst games still struggle with their philosophic potential one thing that they have successfully achieved without a doubt is building unique worlds into which the player can not only be transported but can become active participants. One of the studios that are undisputed masters of this process is Bethesda. I played Oblivion for months and came away from it with very concrete, emotionally real memories of the landscape and its people. As a consequence the world of Cyrodiil is almost as vivid in my head as the six months I spent in Switzerland with the ERASMUS scheme at university now that both those experiences have been filtered through memory. Other game worlds that have had a similarly immersive, emotional response in me recently have been the old west in Red Dead Redemption with its sweeping plains and forests rich in hunting, the seedy Los Angeles in LA Noire; every bit as potent as its depiction in hundreds of classic film noirs, or Renaissance Rome in Assassin’s Creed (sure you can visit the Colosseum in real life, but can you climb to the top of it and survey the city?). This November I have long trip planned (my longest expedition yet I hope) and although I’ll be gone for months it will only cost me about £40. I’ll be trekking through the mountains of Skyrim in Tamriel, meeting its people, marvelling at its landscapes and immersing myself in its culture and politics. I’ll send you a postcard…