What I dislike in modern video games is their explicitness and their directness. That not only creates stale game environments but also forces developers and audiences to emphasize graphics, visual effects, sensationalism, and with that: hardware requirements.

Modern games and their development lack an understanding of a lesson essential in good literature, song writing, and cinematography: That you leave room for the audience to add their share of imagination and "content" to complete an overall artistic sensation.

Compare the original Half-Life game of 1998 with its remake Black Mesa from 2020. The latter is a flashy thing without wonder, the former a graphically simple game (although technically a milestone of its time) but one still imbueing awe. Black Mesa is a stale game exactly because it lays so much emphasis on graphical details, colours, visual effects, "realism", whereas Half Life, exactly because of its clumsiness, still leaves so much to the player to add to the game experience.

The best example to illustrate the difference in both games is their respective treatment of the alien world Xen. In Black Mesa Xen is an awful nightmare straight from a drug experience gone wrong. The colours are dark and stark, fauna and flora harsh and perplexing. One cannot call this world, stuffed with so many things and light, beautiful.

Xen in Half Life, on the other hand, is a remarkably empty landscape. There are not many creatures or flora, few lighting effects. The world consists of astonishingly empty spaces that become mesmerizing and breathtaking not by their interiors but by the music and "sounddesign" that nudges the player to add his own imaginative content. The landscape in itself is boring but the experience touching.

It is exactly because Half-Life's Xen is so "incomplete" that it makes the player's addition of "content" necessary and a fullfilling experience. The player isn't consuming a cinematographic walking simulator but creates a mesmerizing experience of art via interaction with the game.

The same principle of artistic "ambiguity" or "incompleteness" is at work in the movies of Andrei Tarkovsky which are staged carefully with astonishing concentration on the details to realise and increase ambiguity and metaphors that are then left to the viewer to decipher. Similiar intentional "ambiguity" can be found in the films of Quentin Tarantino, Werner Herzog, Wim Wenders. They all allow for and demand the imaginative participation of the viewer to create an artistic depth which in return birthes meaning.

Compared to these, the usual Hollywood productions, mesmerizing by overstimulation, aim at something different. You get "wowed" and after the sitting you're no longer bothered. Everything is clear, literal, obvious. (And the outer reality is in order again.)

It is this difference that applies to game development as well, and why older games often feel far better than what today's game productions can offer. True, older games didn't have the technical means, and so they used the means at hand and relied on the gamer's imaginative input. But by the same token, modern games have in a sense become victim of today's technical means which constraint their possibilities as they no longer rely on the gamer's input. With that comes a certain direction in which today's games are produced and are mass-marketable accordingly.

All this is less intended as criticism of modern game development and more my take on why older games are often better, and why today's game designs often feel shallow, trite, not worth one's time.

The gamer has to add something to the game or it is neither a game nor an enjoyable experience.

#gaming #art #talkingtomyselflettingyoulisten