A Wish-Fulfilment Coda

In Michael Chabon’s essay, Trickster in a Suit of Lights: Thoughts on the Modern Short Story, I find that this thoughtful writer, who has been on my reading list for some time, brings into clearer focus some of the things I was talking about in both this post and this one. He deftly separates the issues of marketing andcreation, discusses the ghettoization of genre fiction, and the difference between actual rules and conventions.

I am clearly the audience he is simultaneously writing to and satirizing—anyone who knows me will see how neatly skewered I am by his admonishment to those who disdain entertainment in literature:

Touché, Chabon. But he is actually pushing to expand the definition of entertainment, just as I was suggesting we should endeavor to broaden the focus of our medium of games. He provides a list, which he says is partial, including:

Perhaps some of the types of entertainment to be found in games might be different, but I’d argue they can and should be just as varied.

But Chabon also finds the conventions within genres of fiction are tightly restricted. He finds himself both bored as a reader and bored as an author. Carefully codified, decades-old rules and formulae for how to create works of genre fiction have left them tired and stagnant.

And this was where the essay began to resonate with my thoughts on examining our medium's rules, seeing which ones actually serve us and our audiences, and looking at advancing the form in terms of the ways it can deliver meaning to an audience as well as the types of meaning that can be thus conveyed. Chabon’s and our media have different sets of problems but ultimately these are barriers between creators and audiences, that I compare and contrast here.

In Chabon’s definition, rather than a rule, wish fulfilment can clearly be seen as merely a convention of a certain genre of games. The lack of clarity on this point, coupled with the fact that until quite recently a primarily male, young adult audience was thought of by many as essentially the audience for games, and that this also coincides closely with the marketing of such games, it’s easy to unravel why it came to be held as such a sacred truth. In fact, I don’t want to nullify the idea: if you are trying to make a story-driven action game intended as a power-fantasy for members of this demographic, it is clearly worth consideration. But it's a "rule" only as much as anything in How to Draw Comics the Marvel Way is. I also think that taken to its logical conclusion the result (and one that certainly we see currently) is very limited types of characters, particularly protagonists, being created for games. To draw a parallel to yet another medium, this is what has led to #oscarssowhite in film.

Returning to games for an example, I had to fight hard for the race and gender mix of playable characters in Diablo II: many players and team members said they did not want to play female characters or characters of color. My feeling was that presenting people with a variety of backgrounds and motivations was important to the creation of an expansive, rich, and rounded world, as was a sense of inclusiveness for players. In ChronoBlade, sadly, I lost this fight: Lucas was supposed to be Asian, Thera was supposed to be both brown (Minoan) and a tough warrior; none of this came to pass. Certainly a large number of other factors were involved in the greater success of the former and the lesser of the latter, but I'd argue that this is essentially the first choice the player was presented with in both games, and so of major importance to the the player’s decision to engage with them or not.

Regarding Chabon's feelings of genre stifling, another thing to note is that there are two axes of “growth” in games, one being the content and the other being technology. I think it’s easy to see the technology progress and feel that change is occurring, but this is a trap—using the analogy of literature, moving from a scribal copy of The Canterbury Tales to a Kindle edition changes only thedelivery; the content is essentially unchanged.

Another element of stagnation Chabon finds in his own medium relates to the arbitrary and ossified definition of what is literature, and therefore worthy, versus genre fiction, and so junk. Basically, the powers that be—critics, academicians, etc.—decide what is lauded and what is trash. The forces of marketing reinforce this, leading to what he calls the ghettoization of the bookstore, corresponding to what is labelled literature versus the bookshelf slums that genre fiction are consigned to.

This at least is a problem we don’t have to deal with in games. In brick-and-mortar game stores there has for some time been a shelf war that has denied some games a place, but with online sales, tech-savvy gameplayers generally have no problem finding whatever game they are looking for regardless of where or how it is made available. Players also define the genres themselves on outlets such as Steam.⁵ Indeed, games are one of the more successful categories on crowdfunding venues such as Kickstarter, allowing players to directly influence what gets made.

Another factor that holds back ghettoization in games is the waves of change that keep stagnation from taking hold. Looking back, for example at early game titles any given platform there's very little homogeneity, but later, “best practices” begin to emerge. However, things loosen up again when a new gaming device like the smartphone appear. Although there are occasional changes to film and literature, they are much more incremental (with a few exceptions), and so do less in terms of the freeing up of forms.

Therefore it seems very much up to us as games creators to decide if we want to hew closely to the conventions of whichever genre we are working in, or instead to understand clearly what those rules are and choose instead to break them and transcend the genre. Hybrid games clearly do this and it’s a great luxury—if a novelist writes an SF/ mystery, marketing folks have to choose which bookstore ghetto to put it in, while for us this choice might affect marketability, but not much.

Finally, of his favorite authors, Chabon says that they,