Hitting the Books: Why we haven't made the 'Citizen Kane' of gaming
Hitting the Books: Why we haven't made the 'Citizen Kane' of gaming
Hitting the Books: Why we haven't made the 'Citizen Kane' of gaming
By Andrew Tarantola
August 20, 2023
Summary
In his new book, The Stuff Games Are Made Of, experimental game maker and assistant professor in design and computation arts at Concordia University in Montreal, Pippin Barr deconstructs the game design process using an octet of his own previous projects to shed light on specific aspects of how games could better be put together.
Even video games' contemporary dominance of the revenue competition has not been quite enough to soothe a nagging sense that games just don't measure up.
What if Ebert was right in the sense that video games aren't as good at being art as cinema is? Art has seldom been on game studios' minds in making film adaptations.
So what happened to the "Citizen Kane of video games"? A significant barrier has been game makers' obsession with the audiovisual properties of cinema, the specific techniques, rather than some of the deeply structural or even philosophical opportunities.
As video games have ascended to a position of cultural and economic dominance in the media landscape, there has been a temptation to see film as a toppled Caesar, with video games in the role of a Mark Antony who has "Come to bury cinema, not to praise it." But as game makers, we haven't yet mined the depths offered by cinema's rich history and its exciting contemporary voices.
Early attempts to adapt films into games were perhaps "Notoriously bad", but that approach remains the most direct way for game designers to have a conversation with the cinematic medium and to come to terms with its potential.
Video games are an incredible way to explore not just the spaces we see on-screen, but also "The space of the mind." When a game asks us to act as a character in a cinematic world, it can also ask us to think as that character, to weigh our choices with the same pressures and history they are subject to.
Reference
Tarantola, A. (2023, August 20). Hitting the books: Why we haven’t made the “citizen Kane” of gaming. Engadget. https://www.engadget.com/hitting-the-books-the-stuff-games-are-made-of-pippin-barr-mit-press-143054954.html