Having been released December 8th of this year, the game's not even a month old and many have expressed that Skyrim is their favorite of 2011. I completely understand.
I'm not just much of a "contemporary" video gamer and so I don't have many other titles to compare it to (take my review with a grain of salt). Let me be clear, though: I play a lot of video games, but the video games I play are retrogames: old school games on the Atari, Nintendo Entertainment System (NES), Super Nintendo (SNES), Sega Genesis, and more.
I plan on spending some time discussing these old school games on this blog. But to inaugurate my commentary on video-gaming, I thought I would start with the most popular game out right now: Skyrim.
Why is Skyrim so great? Let me answer that in an indirect way: it makes me cold. What do I mean by this? Well, the setting of the game is the northern province of a great empire, a kind of Norway, that is a beautiful frozen land; and the richness of the scenery is such that (no exaggeration) as I play the game, I sometime feel a chill as the wind blows and the snow is swept up in clouds. For example, my character--a giant, Conan-like barbarian who wields a two-handed sword and wears platemail--fell into an iceberg filled ocean, and I thought to myself, "Wow. That would be cold as hell."
A reflex thought like this reveals, I think, the degree to which the virtual environment of this game is substantial. Indeed, walking through the wilderness, through towns, over mountains, into swamps, through ancient tombs--one can almost imagine oneself being there. In spite of previous developments in 3D rendering technology in video games, I've rarely, if ever, felt that.
At one point I found myself in a swamp at nighttime. Aurora borealis swirled overhead. Moonlight illuminated the vegetation. Glowing flies buzzed around. And a dragon flew in the distance, howling. It's kind of embarrassing to admit this, but, at that moment, I was gripped by a sense of wonder.
I realize this may sound hyperbolic; it definitely sounds silly to speak of a video game in terms of wonder. And yet--and yet! I can't deny that Skyrim effects me in a way parallel to, say, a beautiful poem or a touching song.
Here's a hunch: Skyrim is a symptom that we may have crossed a boundary. It reveals to us more than most previous video games the capacity of that medium to be art. Video games have a lot to go before their aesthetic worth is comparable to poetry, painting, fiction, drama, music. Nevertheless, playing Skyrim allows me to imagine a day when video games demand a sort of cultural gravitas, when their capacity to stir the soul is on par with a ballet or even *gulp* a production of Hamlet.
This is not to say that previous video games were not art. Paleolithic cave drawings and tribal music have their own unique beauty, but they are of a different nature than the paintings of Leonardo DaVinci and the compositions of Mozart. Nor is this train of thought meant to make aesthetic demands on our current video-gaming culture (any video game that aspired to be Hamlet, I think, would fail miserably. Now, alas, is not the time--a integral element of the medium is its fun, non-serious quality).
But, as far as the history of video-gaming is concerned, Skyrim feels like a moment of critical mass.
Skyrim certainly does indeed showcase how a piece of interactive media qualifies as art. Remember when Roger Ebert made his declaration that 'Video games can never be art', and the gaming community (rightly) got up-in-arms about it? The minute I heard about that I could very quickly conjure a list of titles that instantly refuted his simple-minded claim. That was years ago, and yet he remains steadfast in his arrogance on the matter (http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/04/video_games_can_never_be_art.html). Today, a great many games demonstrate with ease that games are indeed an art form on par with cinema, books and music.
ReplyDeleteIn addition to Skyrim, this past year alone saw a slew of games that I would not hesitate to describe as artistic. Minecraft is an example that comes quickly to mind, and although I've yet to play it, the atmosphere and openness for creativity it provides is obvious. Dark Souls is another example. Also, I should mention Limbo (It was released a year ago on XB360 but only this year on PS3, so it's new to me), as it is a fantastic independent title that has artistry seeping out of its pores. Earlier titles that quickly spring to mind include Braid, the Ico / Shadow of the Colossus saga, Flower, Mass Effect 1 & 2, Red Dead Redemption, Lumines and so on. The list is long. Games are art. Anyone who understands anything about the medium recognizes this.
Speaking of being gripped by awe, I recall a moment in Dead Space 2 that dropped my jaw and set me awash with a genuine feeling of amazement and wonder. The game takes place on a space station on Titan. There's a part where I have to venture out away from the corridors of the station into open space and re-align some reflective dishes, and as I'm floating in freespace I can see in the background Titan's host planet Saturn. I couldn't help but think to myself, 'Holy crap, there it is. I'm actually here, floating in orbit around Saturn itself.' My description is tame compared to the actual experience of course, but I just wanted to mention this example.
Thanks for the link! It's interesting to me that this issue is even being broached. If people are going out of their way to say, "video games aren't art," I think we can take that as a symptom that, heck, they might be approaching that status.
ReplyDeleteRe. Minecraft: Yeah! That's another game that inspires a sense of awe. I remember when I first starting playing it I would just wander around, admiring all the strange "geological" formations.
I've never played Dead Space 2, but I can empathize.