Why George RR Martin Is Wrong - (A Defence Of Video Games)

so the other day I was listening to an interview with george RR martin and he was asked for his thoughts on video games whether games are a threat to the written words and his response well it absorbed me ultimately video games are gonna become a new art form i don't think they're there yet they're fun they're not art but they could be art what will happen when this new art form comes along well we'll find out I don't think it's gonna happen in my lifetime Martin said that video games are not art but going forward they have the potential to become it now for clarification when he speaks about them becoming art he's speaking about virtual reality he says that when VR becomes fully fledged and completely immersive to the point where it's similar to depictions in films such as ready player one then it will finally stop being a gimmick and become art and when I first heard him say those words my blood boiled because for many people the piece of fiction has affected them the most it isn't a novel or a movie it's a video game now this isn't a ranting raving how dare he say such a thing kind of video that's 20 minutes of shouting and berating the man for his opinion this is a measured passionate reply to a great man who has achieved great things george RR martin is considerably more in touch with the modern culture than most people of his age are and he really should be commended for that but Before we jump into it this video is not asking the question are video games art the reason why everyone and their mum has been asking that question over the years that argument has been exhausted and it's frankly not a very interesting one because if I did make that video it would go something like this here's an example of good storytelling in a video game it is just as engaging as any movie movies are considered art if video games can do the same thing so movies can do they are there for art there you go thanks for watching and I'll see you guys next time on the closer look it's not exactly a very interesting or to take on the topic so today I want to tackle something different almost everyone who is an avid gamer would agree that games classify as arts that some games are fitting rivals to the greatest films and books of our time but to those people I want to disagree because video games are not just art and they certainly aren't a rival to film because games are a rival to film in the same way that Bob Ross is a rival to Christopher Nolan the same way a canvas painting is different from the movie is the same way the movie is different from the video game and I would passionately argue that there are stories and elements of incredible artistic value that not only can games achieve but only games can achieve so today I want to direct this video essay at george RR martin and others like him not just to convince them that games are art but to convince them that games were of such an incredibly unique value are so unrivaled in the way they can handle specific elements that they deserve the classification and respect of being their own entirely separate art form but that's enough about introductions and grand statements what is an example a standout example of what video games are capable of achieving now this example I'm bringing up it's probably not one you're expecting I bet that if you're a gamer you might expect me to bring up the emotional father-daughter story of the Last of Us the epic space opera of Mass Effect or a creative indie game like buy a watch or journey but if you have played this game before you would immediately understand where I'm coming from because the game that broke me as a person the most and I feel is a stellar example of art in gaming is battlefield one in case you've never picked up this game this entry in the Battlefield franchise is set in World War one and this game has a prologue a single-player prologue where there are no grand goal was a victory it just puts you in the shoes of soldier in the trenches of World War one and this prologue it affected me it wasn't some escapist vapid entertainment that Martin suggests is what current gaming exclusively provides this 10-minute long section of the game I think I've played it three times now and every time I've done it it's broken me down into tears you start by a ruined building a German attack has just begun so you open fire you kill again and again you kill as you defend your position but no matter how good you are no matter how long you last and no matter how many lives you take you are just not good enough you are doomed to die because the enemy just keeps coming and once you die it pans out and Tex comes on screen Curtis Fairfield 1888 to 1918 then the camera troz back to the next line of defense now you're on a Vickers gun repelling the forces that you were unable to hold back before so you open fire again and again you kill and kill taking life after life but your position gets overrun and no matter how many you kill you will fail and you will die and once you die it pans out again and Tex comes on screen julius beautiful 1894 to 1918 then you go back further behind the line to a tank gunner leading the counter-attack then you see through your sights the devastation wounded being taken away on stretchers shell-shocked mens stumbling like drunks Germans burning to death as they run away from a ruin on fire all of these details do a heartbreakingly good job at getting across the pointlessness of World War one and the truly meaningless value the human life had back then but by this point the most powerful moment in the sequence it it hasn't even happened you move along on the counter-attack you shoot all the Germans in the back as they run away in retreat because of course you do it's a video game when you see a person in enemy uniform you shoot them without hesitation because you're supposed to it's just what games are about but then you drive along and you see this the importance of this moment and the effect it had on me cannot be overstated and for me up until this point I had already been watery eyed from this sequence but this was the moment that just broke me as a person more so than the Green Mile or up or any masterfully crafted emotional movie on my first playthrough I was so surprised by the fact this guy wasn't running around or shooting back that I truly thought this was some kind of glitch that the game had malfunctioned because why would a soldier just collapse on the floor like that clearly the designers didn't make their game correctly and then I realized it wasn't a glitch that grown-man was terrified like a lost child crying for his mother and then I had to decide whether I was going to shoot him so a bit of context a close family friend of my father's had an uncle who fought in World War one and I heard this story as a child and it just stuck with me his uncle let's just call him Harry from now on was in the trenches serving under the English army one day a German soldier was alone in no-man's land he had no gun and he was running away from the English trench Harry was directly ordered by his superior to shoot him Harry was ordered to shoot an unarmed man in the back as he ran away Harry dropped his rifle looked his office herb square in the eyes and refused and he spent the rest of the war in military prison for it because he did what he thought was the morally right thing to do in this moment I felt the most authentic empathy for my family friends uncle I had always known the story but I had never in my life been able to appreciate just how powerful it really was because in that moment of me playing this for the first time I understood exactly what was going through Harry's head the confusion the realization the choice and this moment was one of those rare moments in fiction that helped me understand an aspect of humanity that I had never been able to imagine before the effect this had on me you can't achieve that in a movie if this exact thing were depicted in a movie it would go like this we have a camera shot of this German rocking back and forth then we have a shot of the protagonist as his face drops then there is a brief wait as the protagonist makes the decision and then he lowers his gun it would have been powerful but nowhere near as powerful because in the film the viewer is observing a character going through the emotions we are being told what the character feels but in the game you are not witnessing someone feeling emotions you are the one feeling those emotions as you go through the emotional rollercoaster that character or the real people in that situation would have gone through now I didn't actually shoot him alright and in none of my playthroughs there you ever shoot him but the option was there it was an option I had to actively recognize was on the table and then I had to consider the choice and make my moral judgment on it and it broke me down as a person when I did so the prologue of battlefield 1 in my eyes did for World War 1 the same thing that the opening of Saving Private Ryan did for world war 2 this game gave me a more intimate understanding of what a frontline soldier in the trenches felt like more so than any film or any novel had ever done before or since choice can be a devastatingly powerful device and it is a device that exclusively those creating video games can exploit because that's just the nature of the art form now for this next bit I could talk about franchises like Mass Effect where your decisions affect this truly epic scale space opera story where if you're making decision in the first game even in the third game at the end of the series you are still feeling the effects of that decision but instead I want to talk about another aspect where games are suited to trump other mediums that being world-building so last month I was playing the criminally underrated game horizon zero dawn and I was wandering around the main city meridian exploring the streets and alleyways when I noticed that right in the back of the city beside the main Palace were a set of stairs and I had no idea where they led to so I wanted upwards curious about this hidden area and I stumbled across this it was a group of local Sun worshipers singing their daily praise to the Sun and I ended up standing there for a full three minutes until they were done just listening ensnared by the song appreciating this aspect of the local culture that up until this point I had no idea existed now of course this a cappella is well made and quite beautiful in itself but the reason why I bring this up is because this example quite wonderfully encapsulate something video games can do with well building that no other medium can achieve because when you read a novel or watch a film every last viewer has the same experience they all see the same things in terms of the world and sure different viewers can imply their own meanings to the things they see but in terms of what people see everyone gets the same when I came across the Sun priests it didn't feel like the developers threw this in front of my face and made me look at it as part of some planned path it felt like I had been exploring and my tenacious curiosity had been rewarded as I had uncovered a secret in this world one that I wasn't supposed to find and one that is undeniably beautiful [Music] now obviously the developers put that in the game so it could be discovered I mean it's right off the beaten track of the largest city in the game I'm willing to bet that at least half of the players did come across this exact same thing but the point is I felt like I was interacting with the world I wasn't holding the hand of a writer or director a film is like when you go to a new city you've never been to before and the tour guide shows you around he drives the bus and points out all the local curiosity is that he wants to draw to your attention and it can be good fun and quite interesting however you can never leave the tour guides bus but when you're playing a video game there is no tour guide and there is no bus you are on the streets walking whatever way you like you can speak to the locals if you want to go to the market and talk to the traders you can if you want to leave the city and explore somewhere else you can if you want to discover the unexplored regions of the city and see what hidden details this place has to offer you can games are capable of making a world feel truly dynamic and best of all it's easy to miss these little things meaning the experience one player has is different from another's a player who rushes through the city and doesn't bother to explore would have totally missed this hidden gem and another cool aspect of the singing priests is their song changes depending on the time of day that you visit meaning that if you turn up at dawn or in the evening you would hear an entirely different song that serves to make the world feel even more dynamic than it already is I mean good luck achieving that in a movie the truth is a filmmaker has a much harder time creating a true immersive sense of place as they are limited by the constraints of the art form and the fact that they can only spend a specific amount of time in one location in games you can shop midway through the story find newspaper clippings that fill in interesting details of the backstory or you can just stop to admire the view Mass Effect Andromeda was a tremendously flawed game but the scenery was just so beautiful in sub places that I stopped what I was doing and stood in place just so I can soak in and appreciate the jaw-dropping landscapes and that filled me with an equally compelling or as any well world built novel might achieve another great example of well building in games is what I like to call epistolary world building this is where in a given location you have litters and journals scattered around and if you take the time to find them and read them they fill in the law of the locations I think a great example of this epistolary well building is in the Last of Us at one point in this post-apocalyptic story you are sneaking your way through a city that is filled with bandits who are murdering everyone they come across throughout this city you can discover the journals of people who are or used to be in this bandit group and it catalogues their hidden history and you learn that this city was once under martial law so the civilians rose up and fought against the army to secure independence with all the noble intentions any revolution has then as you find further journals you read about how they grew hungry their suppliers run out and they descended from everyday civilians to a gang of murderers who kill every last stranger they see to steal their meager supplies and eats their bodies it's a really cool way of discovering backstory and again is something impossible to achieve in a novel or film because the interactive element of this the fact that it's possible to miss these journals is part of the fun of this kind of storytelling as it has you scouring the area for these hidden documents a famous film critic Roger Ebert once argued that video games are not art and he commented on the element of choice by saying if you can go through every emotional journey available doesn't that devalue each and every one of them art seeks to lead you to an inevitable conclusion not a Swagger's board of choices every medium has a series of elements it can pull off better than other mediums can with film you can convey powerful feelings with just the way you frame your subject take for example the opening montage up so at the start of this montage we get this shot of Carl happy and young with his wife and at the very end of the montage we get this shot of Carl in the very Saint Chapel mourning his wife old and defeated when you compare these two shots you can see the subject is smaller in the last this makes it feel like Carl is lonely while the first know certainly generates a more wholesome feeling this is a technique that is highly effective when used right and it's a technique that is simply impossible to achieve in a novel it can only be pulled off in a visual format and it's one of those elements that film is naturally suited to exploit and to use in the novel the author also has access to some techniques that are exclusive to that form for example internal thoughts in a book you can switch seamlessly from description of a location to what the character is thinking to dialogue and back to internal thoughts in film you simply cannot have internal thought in the same way because on the rare occasion someone does try to do it for example in David Lynch's June it comes across as really quite gimmicky and extremely off-putting because narrated internal thought especially omniscient ones it just doesn't lend itself well to the format of film and this is where we finally come back to Ebert's quote because he correctly identifies that choice is one of the core aspects that makes video games unique but incorrectly believes that because the audience plays a more active role in the story that somehow makes the art form inferior because while film brings camera angles and montage to the table and while prose brings internal thought and point of view video games bring their own values they bring all of the elements of interactivity and unlike what some critics like to think the element of choice does not devalue what video games bring to the table instead that element is the value they bring and if you disagree with me well you clearly haven't played enough video games and if you play games or hell if you don't you live in the digital age an age where your security can be compromised by anyone who knows what they're doing there are many things you can do to secure yourself online but getting a good VPN is quite often equally as important as getting a good antivirus so pretty much if you use the Internet in your life you are someone 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Channel: The Closer Look

Views: 510,475

Rating: 4.9090991 out of 5

Keywords: video games, games, video essay, video, essay, the closer look, closer look, george rr martin, game of thrones, rr martin, martin, art, the closer, the last of us, last of us, battlefield, horizon zero dawn, how to, how, interview, george rr

Id: Xs6qBDuY1ww

Length: 22min 23sec (1343 seconds)

Published: Tue Aug 13 2019