Opinion: Why Raising 'Kane' Won't Help Games' Legitimacy
[In this new editorial, Gamasutra news director Leigh Alexander looks at that ever-ready comparison, Orson Welles' film Citizen Kane, looking at how relevant it is to any argument of games and legitimacy.]
The knell for deeper art, broader sophistication and greater maturity in games just keeps getting louder, but do we really know what we're asking for?
The question of "gaming's Citizen Kane," for example, has become so widely-echoed that it's begun to frustrate fans and industry-watchers alike. Maybe history will show us we've already got our Citizen Kane. Or hey, wait, aren't the cultural and practical differences between film and games so broad that it's useless to analogize?
There's nothing wrong with craving watershed moments for video games, of course. But problem with the Citizen Kane question, as with other similar demands, is that it's begun to reverberate wildly without any practical follow-through on what the answer might look like.
Being dissatisfied with the status quo is easy -- proposing practical alternatives or concrete answers isn't. It's easy to complain about the creative constraints of a hit-driven industry. And it's easy to take issue with the fact that a "recession-resistant", $21 billion industry still serves such a small segment of the market.
Because really, for the purposes of this discussion, it does. It may be fun to point to vague concepts like "casual gaming", "the success of the Wii," or any one of the thousand regular studies that purport that "the average gamer is a 35-year-old woman."
But while there is legitimate progress behind the vagaries -- audiences really are becoming broader, no matter what data you use to back it up. Peggle and Wii Fit don't really fulfill what core fans, bloggers, discussion groups, game critics and industry-watchers are really asking for: artistic legitimacy for games.
"It's a red herring, because we think that having a Citizen Kane will prove our artistic legitimacy, but masterworks are not how artistic legitimacy is proven anymore," says renowned designer and academic Ian Bogost.
If more internet commentators did a quick Wikipedia check before leaping into the debate, they'd see that the Citizen Kane issue is moot, anyway. Although its cinema technique helped movies fully come into their own, films were generally considered "artistically legitimate" right off the bat, so there's really no translatable parallel for games.
"The world doesn't work that way anymore," says Bogost. So as for raising Kane: "We should stop it."
According to Bogost, legitimacy simply can't be judged in the current era in the same way it could when we had few radio stations and fewer television channels, and all art and entertainment existed in individual walled gardens.
"Legitimacy has become distributed, a mesh," says Bogost. "We should all just work on our little vertex of the mesh, like we're weaving a big macrame of legitimacy."
That singular groundbreaking title we crave just won't appear. Rather than expect a Kane-like watershed masterwork, then, Bogost advises people look for multiple individual successes in the broader, evolving landscape.
"Success comes from earnestness, I think," he says. "When we work on ideas that are important to us and make them resound sonorously in our chosen medium, we create little peaks in its topology."
Bogost sees "earnestness" games like Braid, and in the work of Jason Rohrer: "He means it," he says. "It's about things he cares about and expresses well."
Perhaps such "peaks in the topology" indicate that games have not so much answered the legitimacy question -- but rendered it irrelevant.
Just for fun, though -- does Bogost think games have achieved the fabled grail of artistic legitimacy? "The squirrely answer is that I don't think artistic legitimacy exists," he says. "It's a fiction. The simpler answer is no."
Comments
Another issue that I think people don't consider, and that really frustrates me, is that everything from Wii Fit to GOW2 to Pokemon is placed under the one simple category of 'game'.
To me, putting all these different titles under one category is like putting Lord of the Rings, A Jamie Oliver cookbook, and a dictionary all under the category 'book'. Or putting the evening news, Star Wars, and CSI under the category 'screen'.
Putting all games under the broad category 'game' is hazardous and detrimental to any search for 'artistic legitamacy' because Braid and Mario Kart are going to find artistic legitamacy in different ways. GOW2 is going to have raw emotion and pretty graphics, Fallout3 is going to have a living world and gripping(ish) storyline.
I think before any artistic legitamacy can be found in games, people have to stop dumping all games into the one subgroup of 'things interactive and used with a controller'.
That, and I agree with the web of legitamacy theory thing.
Wow, I am still writing.
Posted by: Brendan | April 17, 2009 5:08 PM
Citizen Kane has grown into something of a myth over time, it’s remembered as more than just a good film, or even a great film; it's become a symbol for artistic legitimacy. When gamers ask for "gaming's Citizen Kane" I don't think they're asking for just an artistic game, they're asking for a gaming equivalent of that symbol, a game whose very name is associated with artistic legitimacy not just for gamers but non-gamers as well. They want a game that will convert Roger Ebert. But I agree with Bogost, that’s just not going happen. I really like his metaphor of the mesh, and of creating “little peaks in its topology.”
I really believe that the whole idea of “gaming’s Citizen Kane” is a hindrance. With gamers waiting for that “one game” to prove artistic legitimacy, they miss out on all the stuff that’s right under their noses. There are already plenty of games, indie and mainstream, that can stand up as well as any film to a deep critique of their gameplay and stories. It’s frustrating to see them trivialized because they’re not “Citizen Kane.” Before games can achieve artistic legitimacy with the mainstream, it has to achieve it with us gamers, and how can it achieve artistic legitimacy with us gamers when we’re constantly looking ahead at a myth? In time (and by that I mean just a few years), I think those “little peaks” will become so big and so common that people will realize artistic legitimacy is already here.
Posted by: Nick Dinicola | April 18, 2009 12:45 AM
For me, the idea of a "Citizen Kane" game means something other than a landmark work. The movie is an examination into one man's character; his triumphs and failures, flaws and strengths. It's a movie about ambition and control, how those things can destroy someone's life.
We don't have anything that speaks about topics like this. For me, we will have our Kane when we can address those issues. At that moment, we can say that we have achieved artistic legitimacy.
Posted by: Alex Vostrov | April 22, 2009 7:38 PM