poetry

I feel that fighting with University Tutors from the Humanities department is difficult, as we are dealing with creative types, and everyone knows that they can be quite temperamental.

I just sent my poetry tutor the third email asking for a little extra feedback on our major poetry assignments, and I’m at that point where I really don’t care what he has to say, I just want to get a decent reply for the sake of it. Not many people in my course thinks much of this tutor, so I’ve turned asking for feedback into an experiment that I can share with my friends, so that a good chortle may be had by all.

This isn’t the first time I’ve had issues with this guy – after completing a very badly explained assignment and doing what he told me to do, I barely passed the bloody thing, so I decided to email him to find out exactly why I’d received the grade, and I got no reply. Apparently, he had fled the country.

Some might call that ‘going on holiday’, but I like to think he was trying to avoid his guilt.

But he’s not getting away this time.

I’ll keep you posted.

One thing I never understand about the artistic community is its constant refusal to accept new mediums.

Maybe I should clarify a bit.

Hundreds of years ago, Shakespeare’s plays were the Transformers films of the day – the standard, lowest common denominator form of entertainment. His great works were considered to be his poetry. His plays are held in the highest of regards when it comes to English literature these days.

When the format of the novel came into existence it was regarded as frivolity; things that shouldn’t be taken seriously, and anyone who is to be held in high esteem would never be caught reading a novel; it was all about poetry. Now it’s the goal of every writer everywhere to write a ground-breaking novel, while the number of serious, professional poets seem to be dwindling. I’m sure you can see the pattern starting to form.

Any time a new medium of creation appears, it’s at first dismissed as a passing fancy, before people start to realise, ‘Holy crap, this could actually be considered high art!’ The same happened with graphic novels and film – people had to fight tooth and nail for them to be considered worthwhile.

My point is, why does this keep happening? Why can’t we accept a new medium without all this incredible fussing and fighting of the old ways?

Why can’t society see video games for what they really are: a new medium for telling stories in a way that no other medium can. Isn’t that all that a novel or a film is? A novel tells a story through words, a film tells a story through images and a video game tells a story through direct audience interaction.

I’ve been thinking about this for a while, but what really made me desperate to write about it was my completion of The Walking Dead video game. I bought it about a week or so ago and was just desperate to get through it – it’s been a while since I’ve had to rush through a game like that, I usually take my time with it. This game contains some of the best writing I’ve ever found in a game, along with some excellent characters and situations.

Video games, in the end, are telling a story, even if it’s as simple as ‘one team wants to kill the other team’ or ‘those suicidal birds are pissed at those pigs’. We take control of a character, or group of characters, and we follow their story through the world presented in front of them, hoping for emotional and physical closure to their tale. What’s so different from reading from the perspective of a narrator, or following a character in a film? The only real difference is that you control the character’s actions, and even they are limited to the story that the developers of the game want to tell.

Video games can tell a story in a way that no other medium can, by making the player directly responsible for a character’s actions. Even if the game forces a person to make that decision, the player is the one who presses the button, or pulls the trigger, or clicks the mouse. There is a direct link between the player performing an action and an event in the story taking place. A link is formed between the player and character, blending the line between the two. How much of a character’s actions are theirs and how much are the players? This is almost impossible to do in novels or films (barring choose-your-own-adventures, the highest of high arts).

But wait, you video game critics all cry out, simultaneously (as that’s how the internet works), what about games that don’t try to tell a story at all, instead focusing on shooting the crap out of whoever the game tells you to? All the Call of Duty’s out there, the bland shooters which focus on multi-player and allows players to tea-bag each other? How can they be considered art?

I respond by saying that we, as humans, judge a medium as art as a whole, not the sum of its parts. There are hundreds and thousands of terrible novels or films out there, but we still consider the medium to be an art form. There are terrible games out there, I’m not going to deny that, but that doesn’t mean that the medium has to suffer because a few games aren’t as good as others. No, not all games treat the story as the most important aspect, but not all movies or novels do either.

Then again, maybe there is a difference between video games and ‘Capital-V’ video games. There are games that push the boundaries of the medium, contain excellent performances and tell compelling stories, and then there are others that put all their effort into having unrealistic spurts of blood as you thrust your hand into your enemies’ guts and pull out their useless appendix. There are the Shakespeares of game makers and then there are the Stephanie Meyers.

I just don’t like the idea that something as powerful as The Walking Dead game, something so well executed and so brilliantly written will be looked down upon simply because it’s a video game.

If something engages me and affects me emotionally, I consider it a success. I consider it art. And I’ve had many emotional experiences whilst playing video games. The first one I remember is the after affects of Cleyra in Final Fantasy 9; I remember having to pause and just take a moment, I was just hit with a wave of sadness, I finished Red Dead Redemption with an air of melancholy, knowing that I’d just completed something incredible, and the final thirty seconds of Portal 2 were simply beautiful. Absolutely beautiful. And I’d add the final moments of The Walking Dead as being one of the most powerful moments I’ve ever experienced in a game.

I am of a generation where video games are par for the course, and I know that in the future, there won’t be any question as to the validity of video games’ status as art, but I just don’t think it’s fair to repeat what happened in the past, when we all know how that worked out.

I do want to go into more detail about how awesome The Walking Dead, and that’ll probably be tomorrow’s blog post. I just loved every instant of it.

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