Wong again, jackass

David Wong wrote another damn thing about video games on Cracked. I have a lot of respect for the guy, and someday I will tell you the secret history of my life and the works of David Wong (hint: dicks are involved) but today is not that day. Today I want to focus on just one thing Wong had to say in this article:

"Don't tell me it's unfair to compare games to movies, either. When even Mario games come with dialogue and cutscenes, it's crystal clear that gaming wants to be a storytelling medium."

Well, I guess. But what does it really mean that Mario games are trying to be "storytelling mediums"? We're humans; we like stories. We are stories: I'm only the person I think I am because my memories tell me a story where I'm a brave, confident, sexy individual who cries when women talk to him. And nothing gets an audience's attention unless there's a narrative attached. You ever watched a commercial for Axe body spray? I have, because I occasionally check out anime on Hulu, and that's a demographic (or "mogra") that advertisers can be certain is failing to get laid.

A commercial that tried to advertise Axe without a narrative would go like this: "Spray Axe on your body and you will smell like cardamom and citrus and anime." Compare that to the way Axe is actually advertised: A moderately muscular guy, alone in his bathroom, looks quizzically at the can of Axe before spraying himself with a great choking cloud of the stuff. As soon as he sets down the can, the room around him begins to shift, forming into row after row of curves, as the walls of his bathroom reveal themselves to be formed entirely out of 19-year-old girls wearing body paint that, when they are in formation, makes them appear to be a solid wall of white brick. Pull back to reveal that the young man's entire apartment building is similarly formed out of women. Pan down to show that the lower levels are made of women further down the evolutionary scale: homo habilis, austrolopithecus, etc. Zoom in to the molecular level to reveal... well, you've all seen the commerical, right?

Anyway, the narrative is this: wear Axe and you will never stop having sex. Lots of other commercials tell the same story. Does that make commercials a "storytelling medium?"

Sure. But it doesn't make their goals all that lofty. And you shouldn't assume that every video game that ever told a story is reaching for the artistic stars. Sometimes the story matters: sometimes the story is merely good on its own, and sometimes it's woven into the gameplay in a way that strengthens the experience of both. But a lot of the time, it's just there to be a story. It's flavor; it's garnish. And this misunderstanding has to be responsible for - at minimum - two hundred and thirty percent of all the go-nowhere "are games art" flamewars on the internet, where people smugly point out that a lot of games don't have terribly good stories.

Mario games, and thousands like them, have who-gives-a-shit stories because the alternatives are:

1. Have literally no story, which is boring, and harder than it sounds, or
2. Have a really good story, which takes time and budget and, when your game is about jumping on platforms and your mogra includes 8-year-olds, usually isn't going to improve the core experience.

Some games do try to live or die by their stories. And, as little story as the Mario games have, the fact that they're about saving a princess from a dragon is not altogether lacking in cultural relevance. But if you're looking for art in the Mario games, it's not in the story. It's literally everywhere but the story: in the art, the music, the flow of the gameplay, the sublime surprise of seeing and understanding and sharing a new, bright world.

So, no: it's not fair to "compare games to movies," because games exist on a broader spectrum than movies. The games that can fairly be compared to movies, because they try to accomplish the same goals, are a relatively small subset of that spectrum. "Having a story" doesn't mean games are trying to be movies. It just means no one wants to play "Green Square Navigates 60 Inventive Arrangements of Black Squares."

As to Wong's point that games have a lot of maturing to do: I agree, of course. And I'll leave the game industry with this tip: you don't need to hypersexualize your characters. Crowdsource that shit, and let the internet hypersexualize them in ways you hoped were never possible. If Bayonetta had been realistically proportioned and modestly dressed in the source material, she'd still be a six-legged centaur with J-cups on Deviantart. And I think that's pretty cool.