 Videogames began as a few blips and bleeps racing across an oscilloscope screen. They are now possibly the most popular art form in many parts of the world, notably North America and Japan. Along with numerous other memorable titles, games like Pong, Space Invaders, Super Mario Bros, and The Legend of Zelda have pushed videogames to the forefront of modern entertainment. The North American industry, including both console and computer games, is worth about $11 billion, easily surpassing movie box office totals, its closest competitor.
Videogames have grown up, or at least, their audience has. The average videogame player is now 29-years-old. Females currently make up 39% of North American videogame players, largely due to a boom in online puzzle games. On a technological level, while modern games like Grand Theft Auto and Tomb Raider have clear roots in classics like Pac-Man and Pitfall, the difference in graphics, sound, and depth of play is like that between a capgun and an M1-A1 Abrams tank.
But while videogames are becoming economically and technologically more impressive, only a few games show a similar artistic evolution. Such limited progress is not without precedent, however. Movies took years before they made a transition from pure spectacle (look, it's a moving train!) to narrative (look out, a train is going to run over that woman tied to the tracks!) to art (looking at a train as a symbol of patriarchal industrialism).
Videogames made the first transition during the 1980s. Original games like Spacewar and Tank needed no plot because the novelty of manipulating objects on a computer screen was enough to satisfy their audience. Later games like Donkey Kong and Robotron added depth by giving gamers a back story and a purpose, but these were still just variations on saving girls from railroad tracks. Nothing too imaginative.
With the maturation of its technology and its audience, many videogames are reaching for new artistic heights and much grander scope. Narrative games are where most of the new videogame auteurs put their effort (although simulation titles like Will Wright's The Sims or Peter Molyneux's Black and White are perhaps the most experimental and sociologically-interesting). Stylish and mature titles like Keiichuro Toyama's religious horror game Silent Hill and Michael Ancel's political allegory Beyond Good and Evil add layers of meaning and introspection to the videogame form, which is otherwise still dominated by brain-numbing killfests and time-wasting Tetris variations.
For narrative complexity, Hideo Kojima's Metal Gear Solid series and Amy Hennig's Legacy of Kain games offer stories rich with nuance and complicated moral quandaries. Kojima's games pack countless plot twists into stories of government conspiracy, which begin as simple missions to counter a terrorist threat and end with stirring laments for the corruption of the United States and democracy as a whole.
Set in the fantasy world of Nosgoth, Hennig's series drops players into the middle of a war between vampires, humans, and an alien race called the Hylden. The genius of the games is that each title in the series switches you back and forth between characters so that the villain in one game becomes the protagonist of the next, never giving gamers a firm moral leg to stand on.
Other pinnacles of videogame art are Benoit Sokal's Syberia games which tie together art gallery-quality graphics with a beautiful and memorable story that any filmmaker would envy. Whereas the Metal Gear Solid and Legacy of Kain series are frantic and action-oriented, the Syberia games are much more laid-back, using an old-style point-and-click interface that involves no combat (similar to the classic Sierra and LucasArts adventure games of the 80s and 90s). This choice allows Sokal to place emphasis on exploration, character interaction, and solving puzzles. In the process, Sokal, a successful Belgian cartoonist before turning to game design in the late 1990s, has redefined what narrative videogames can do in terms of emotional resonance, intellectual engagement, and visual majesty.
Set amidst a European background spanning the "battle scars of the 20th-century," the Syberia games follow the travels of Kate Walker, a corporate lawyer from the United States. Walker is assigned to the village of Validilene in the French Alps to negotiate the buyout of a local automaton factory for the Universal Toy Company. Her mission is complicated by a missing heir whom Walker must track down in order to complete the deal.
This heir is the enigmatic creative genius Hans Voralberg, and as Walker searches for him across Europe and through Russia by train, she gradually learns the history of the Voralberg family, their automaton factory, and Hans Voralberg's strange obsession with an island called Syberia where wooly mammoths are still said to thrive. Walker is accompanied on her trip by Oscar, an automaton engineer who is something like Data from Star Trek: The Next Generation mixed with the Cowardly Lion from The Wizard of Oz.
Walker comes to doubt her allegiance to her corporate employers while finding much to admire in Voralberg's eccentric genius and his passionate dream of finding the mammoths of Syberia. His quest awakens her to the possibility of a life that is more than just a series of promotions and salary renegotiations. Her struggle resonates with all of us who live in a culture that is similarly attempting to navigate between the worlds of business and humanity, a conflict that is so far defining the 21st-century.
Syberia 's settings illustrate these themes as well, taking Walker away from her old life geographically as well as psychologically. She travels from her New York office to Validilene and its Industrial Revolution architecture, and then further east into the former Soviet Union. Sokal's vision of Russia is of some land that time forgot, featuring a decaying resort spa, an abandoned cosmonaut facility, and empty socialist work camps. The crumbling buildings and withered population appear to be caught between two worlds or two times.
In this way, Walker's journey is a chronological one as well. In Syberia 2, she encounters the Youkol people, an ancient Siberian tribe who don't seem to have changed in thousands of years. Contrasting the technological world that Walker left behind with the "primitivism" of the Youkol, the Syberia games also address the conflict between modernity and the growing human desire to turn the clock backwards and live in a more simple time. Both Voralberg and, eventually, Walker choose to abandon a life built on modern capitalism, with all of its material benefits, to pursue a more profound and spiritual existence. Exploring the tattered remains of the last century with them, it's hard not to get caught up in the wonder and heartache of it all and to question one's own place in this brave new world we have created.
I'm not ashamed to admit that playing both Syberia games brought tears to my eyes. The two titles combine a wondrous aesthetic experience with Sokal's rare feat of creating videogame characters that players will actually care about. The result is a new peak for videogames on their way to becoming a bonafide art. While certainly not flawless, Syberia and its sequel prove what startling potential the videogame form has lurking dormant within it. Let's hope the rest of the industry is paying attention.
**** |
