Understand Comics – Scott McCloud
Recently on Robert Ashley’s thoroughly marvelous A Life Well Wasted podcast, he mentioned Roger Ebert’s notion that games could not be considered a (high) art form as they don’t have sufficient authorial control. Varying levels of choice are inherent in games, one could theoretically go so far as to play Super Mario Bros. just by jumping up and down over and over again in one place, totally within the bounds of game’s rule-set. Of course they would not be playing ‘properly’ and as intended, but who’s to say they can’t do that? While gaming probably does have less control than other mediums, I found the discussion (and in fact most discussions about this subject) omitted the glaringly obvious fact that books, film and art also need to be consumed ‘properly’.
Take a book. Some people will scan the last page of a book before beginning reading, almost like a superstition, and in fact there’s nothing stopping them reading any page they like and in any order. Though it might sound absurd, this type of behavior is becoming more and more common; when surfing the internet we jump from hyperlink to hyperlink, mid-text and mid-video, consuming only bite-sized, non-sequential chunks of each. A film is in a similar quandary in terms of linear continuity, but also the viewing environment is way outside its control, yet still very important. Why should we create a proper environment on the creator’s behalf for ourselves to consume films in? So we can consume it properly and fully, to allow ourselves enjoy it. What if you only saw a painting out of the corner of your eye, what would you do? You’d go over to get a ‘proper’ look at it of course. My point is that we acknowledge expected ways to consume all these media in which the receiver has to play their part too, so why are games any different? Reading random pages or only watching half the film with the sound off might seem ridiculous or facetious, but no more so than just jumping up and down in the corner in Mario.
Comics have also struggled to be accepted as art, a plight which Scott McCloud’s awesome book Understanding Comics spends a while fighting. These days comics are much more readily permitted, after all they’re passive like books right? Wrong. McCloud devotes a whole chapter to the issue of ‘closure’ – the things that happen between the panels that we subconsciously fill in – revealing audience participation that we did not even realise happened. A comic author only presents to us static images with text and can merely imply what happens in the gaps; it’s the reader’s willing participation that gives the characters life between the panels. Film is somewhat more explicit than comics, but books I think are less explicit and require lots of audience participation. Jumping up and down on the spot will soon get boring, as does looking at just one corner of a painting. It’s easy to deliberately spoil your experience, so the author and audience must meet each other in the middle for real communication to occur.
So authorial control is not complete in any medium. Maybe that’s obvious. But what about the big intentional choices? Well, it then becomes the question of who is setting the level of this arbitrary threshold that games are failing to cross? It sounds to me very much like disqualifying noise metal from being music because it doesn’t have enough melody, something it’s not trying to have. Authorial control is indeed important in the arts, but it is not necessarily integral and defining, which reminds me of McCloud’s point about the frequent mistake of failing to separate the form from the content. Gaming is young and still has a long way to go before it matures and finds its own unique voice, but to renounce player choice is to discard one its greatest strengths. New art forms are not just different presentation methods of the same content; direct audience control is a real option gaming has over other mediums and it should embrace this difference in its continuing search for authenticity, rather than trying to perform other art forms – most commonly film – through a gaming lens.