I’m reading Flicker, a book by psychologist Jeffrey Zacks about what happens in our brains when we watch movies. Haven’t finished yet, so what I have to say is half-baked — suffice it to say I like the book, although I always surprise myself by not liking psychology very much — but it makes an argument that shows itself everywhere around the psychology of movies. Namely, it makes a case that films will sooner or later be usurped by, or otherwise incorporate elements of, video games.
Usually, the bones of this argument are something like:
- For a very long time, movies and video games didn’t exist.
- Then, movies did exist and video games didn’t. Movies became very popular, though they are sometimes criticized as a passive medium.
- Video games revealed new frontiers of interactivity in media, thereby solving the fatal flaw of movie watching.
C. Thi Nguyen, discoverer of the “stupid game” and archpriest of whatever it is I’m doing here, devotes the length of his book Games: Agency as Art (which came in the mail just before Flicker, and which I’m so excited to read) to defining the art form of games. He writes:
Games… are a distinct art form. They offer us access to a unique artistic horizon and a distinctive set of social goods. They are special as an art because they engage with human practicality — with our ability to decide and to do.
What irks me about the “movies will eventually become games” argument is that it assumes either that all art will converge into one perfected art form, or it denies that games are unique as a medium, instead supposing that they exist as some benign growth waiting to be reabsorbed into the body of other media.
Movies are new, but passive forms of engagement are not. Books, plays, operas, ballads, folk songs, water cooler conversations, murals, histories, oral tradition. Video games are new, but our ability to interfere with narratives is hardly new. At a campfire, you could always shout over the storyteller. Games in general are ancient.
Both forms need to exist. One emerges from our trust that other people have stories to tell, and that those stories are functionally or aesthetically useful; the other comes from our need for cognitive enrichment, for fun. Both inscribe some kind of information for posterity. Movies — and books, too, though in different specifics — write down narratives. C. Thi Nguyen argues that games inscribe mindsets, forms of agency, certain methods of engagement. His argument is really persuasive, from what all I’ve read so far.
Anyway, thank you letting me share my befuddlement with this problem. Not all art is either narrative or practical. A lot is neither. A lot is both. None would dominate the culture if they weren’t emerging naturally and, to some extent or another, necessesarily. Which makes it especially funny that, as far as I know, no interactive movie experiment (like Black Mirror: Bandersnatch) ever captured prolonged interest.