Is a Game the Journey or the Destination?
This will be a short response to a question posed by YouTube channel / user Extra Credits (2014).
The gist of the discussion surrounding this question is that consumers of games are able to recall less about their gaming experiences, in comparison with how vividly they can recall another form of media, like film. This suggests that games are less valuable because its users seem more likely to ‘tune out’, and be less invested in what is happening in their game world and all of its interactions both micro and major.
For starters, it’s an interesting question, but a wrong one — I find it very wide of the mark. I have mixed feelings with the very idea of comparing all creative media in terms of the value they bring, as if they’re all trying to accomplish the same goal. I’ll agree that sometimes yes, we do need to group all creative media for the sake of discussions encompassing creativity as a whole; however I view placing a value of ‘worth’ on them as going about it the wrong way. The various mediums are surely trying to accomplish different goals in their own respective ways. One doesn’t watch a film to scratch the same itch that playing a game would satisfy. To say one ‘feels’ better than the other is akin to comparing potatoes and tomatoes — the potato doesn’t want to be a damn tomato.
So, we’ll assume that Extra Credits’ findings were true and accurate; that players are in fact less able to recall in detail the events of a game, when compared with a film or book they experienced — thus making it less ‘valuable’, less bang for the buck. I would wager that regardless of the above, the findings don’t correlate with the enjoyment they gained from the media, and surely that fulfillment is the ultimate goal of said media, no? Ergo, the value placed on said media — according to the consumer — should remain unchanged. Sure, if the only outcome that mattered was how much someone can recall from a product they experienced, then this would pose a concern — but this simply isn’t the case. You shouldn’t penalise games for failing to accomplish something that they weren’t necessarily striving to achieve.
The final product that we see in film is often a fairly condensed telling of a larger story, shaved down over and over until it fits within an allotted — relatively brief — time frame. Games however, are not bound to those same constraints; they’re capable of offering many times the hours of entertainment that film is capable of.
Imagine for a moment that a game began skipping all of the moments between key narrative points in your journey in order to save time, you’d probably feel ripped off. The journey from starting point to destination is what makes up many games! While every single aspect may not be memorable or groundbreakingly important; it’s the player’s interactions, their agency in enabling and progressing the game forwards, that is what makes a game what it is (Lebowitz & Klug, 2011).
On the other side of the same coin, imagine if a film began to follow each character and showed their entire — likely uneventful — journey from starting point to destination? Every car ride, even toilet breaks. Chances are you’d stop paying attention and deduce the film to be boring. What you see in a film is essentially the highlights of a story, of course they’re going to be easier to recall. You can see what I’m getting at here.
Point here is, games are a unique medium. They aren’t accomplishing their goals in the same method as other forms of media; this doesn’t devalue the experience they offer. They’re succeeding at doing something different to film, music, TV, art, books — which was their goal from the start.
Bibliography
Extra Credits. (2014). Digging Deeper — Do Games Have Less Value than Other Media? — Extra Credits [Video]. Retrieved from https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7lPUlN0dnKk
Lebowitz, J., & Klug, C. (2011). Interactive storytelling for video games: A player-centered approach to creating memorable characters and stories. Taylor & Francis.
