Getelman/Murray – Ahmad Woods

To make a point on the sameness of new digital media and older media we are familiar with the author says, “To play Mario Brothers or King’s Quest or Myst is to open ourselves to the vision of the shaping author in the same way we open ourselves to the author’s voice in a novel.” To a degree this makes sense but I feel it’s largely a misguided point due to the nature of video games.  Video games are like chairs in the sense that a chair is made for people to sit in them and thus the form of a chair follows the aforementioned function.  Chairs must be comfortable for people to sit in, they can be artistic expressions of its creator but a chair you cannot sit in isn’t a chair anymore and thus its utilitarian purpose shouldn’t be compromised for art.  Similarly with video games they are meant to entertain, to be fun.  They can be artistic expression of its creators but a game that isn’t fun is a bad game or a non-game.  That being said the author’s main point is maximizing what the medium itself inherently offers for storytelling and not how well it mimics existing mediums. Video games being the biggest medium these days will be my focus in addressing that point.  Video games largely has been a synthesis of many different mediums for example the early 8bit final fantasy games used the musical score to constantly direct emotion and modern final fantasy games use what we call cut scenes which are essentially mini movies to tell stories.  These aren’t inherent to video game necessarily especially in the case of cut scenes since they strip the player of control and video game are defined by being interactive so cutscenes aren’t an intrinsic property of gaming.  Largely I agree with the viewpoint that new media intrinsic properties aren’t fully realized.  With gaming most developers insist upon using cutscenes to tell story and refuse to let the games due the talking.  This is thinking is very ingrained because influences of many games are Japanese animation and big time Hollywood films.  However there are games that rely solely on the intrinsic properties and show us the power of interactive mediums.  Shadow of the Colossus is such a game, it has little cutscenes and little dialogue most of the emotion is experienced through battling the games bosses.  New media namely video games aren’t there yet and one way for it to get there is for games to become less expensive to create so people are free to take more chances with them since it’s easy to rely on the Hollywood formula to tell stories with in it.