Opinion
Rosebud Was His Horse
Steven Poole argues that comparing games with the best of other media is not only illogical, but harmful too.
No; presumably the incantation of this film’s name has just become anxious shorthand for something like “a medium-defining masterpiece”. So we could ask, if you prefer: what is the Battleship Potemkin of videogames? Or: what is the Seventh Seal of videogames? But why stop there, since we are already having so much fun? It must be equally fascinating to ask other cross-medium questions. I hereby demand to know: what is the Wire of popular song? What is the Paradise Lost of television? What is the Smells Like Teen Spirit of classical ballet? What is the Love’s Labour’s Lost of pottery?
Perhaps you think I am being facetious. After all, most earthenware bowls are not trying to be complex romantic comedies, and most classical ballerinas are not straining to produce deafening grunge. But an awful lot of videogames are trying to be films, which is doubtless why the Citizen-Kane-of-games trope has arisen. It has come about because of a reinforced mistake: a mistake made by videogame designers, and then repeated by their uncritical fans as well as their ignorant critics.
In other words, we’re all in this together, as George Osborne would put it in his carefully drilled Estuary-inflected sneer (though we don’t all have a multimillion-pound wallpaper fortune to fall back on). As I write, for example, a normally sceptical technology site has just creamed its metaphorical elasticated cargo pants over Red Dead Redemption, gibbering: “The storytelling rivals cinema.”
Well, sure, Redemption is a teensy bit like the longest and most boring western ever made, except with really ugly digital faces and a psychopathically repetitive emphasis on murdering furry animals. Yet, for all its Morricone-esque whistling and the no-doubt-tremendous efforts of the ‘Senior Ambient Designers’ namechecked in the world’s most tedious credits sequence, to pretend it rivals cinema is to insult even the most workmanlike sub-Leone or sub-Ford genre movie.
Crucially, in Redemption there is no flow, no natural back-and-forth, to the dialogue. As I was playing it, the chasms of time that yawned between one character’s line and the other character’s response forced me to spend what seemed like subjective eternities contemplating the cruel meaninglessness of the cosmos. I was pushed further into melancholy when I learned that I could ‘purchase and rent properties’, because being a pretend buy-to-let entrepreneur is apparently still so enticing even in these straitened economic times. Eventually I was driven to such depths of nihilistic despair that I shot and skinned my own horse. When I then wistfully whistled for my freshly assassinated equine friend, an entirely different horse turned up to take his place, not turning up a nostril at the flayed corpse still steaming on the ground.
The naturalistic illusion is still so easy to break in such games – whether it is Marston’s acute case of Slippy Feet Syndrome; the absurdly belated and stilted exchanges that happen when you bump into someone; a rabbit stuck in a fence, still cycling through its running animation; or the fact that early on in Redemption, a stranger passed a plank of wood right through my legs – that you have to embrace embarrassingly low standards to maintain any kind of competitive comparison with film in the representation and storytelling stakes. And if you are willing to slum it aesthetically in this way, then you can hardly complain when some outsider takes one look and snorts: “Well, if this is the Citizen Kane of videogames, it’s just as I thought: they’re all rubbish.”
The Kane comparison, in sum, is not only stupid but actively harmful, insofar as it might prompt more developers to try to ‘make a Citizen Kane’ rather than making a really good videogame (parts of which are still visible, if sadistically scattered by miles of padding and great log-mountains of wooden speech-acts, in Red Dead Redemption itself). The right way to handle someone posing the Kane question, of course, is to respond, all innocence: what is the Tetris of cinema?