Little Big Metaphor: On the Promise of Video Games

How are video games actually ‘different’ and why should we care?

Tell me if this sounds familiar: you are reading a newspaper or magazine piece on “contemporary youth” and, as an example of how much things have changed, the writer laments that kids today would rather play football in a videogame than do so in real life. It’s the sort of soundbite that is both pithy and effective: what better way to describe the ill effects of technology than to suggest today’s kids are happy with a digital knock-off of an authentic experience?

Problem is, as comforting as the argument sounds, it’s based on a shoddy bit of reasoning. It rests on the idea that videogames that reference real-life experiences do so in order to replicate that experience, so that, for example, the aim of a driving game is to recreate real-life driving. But video games don’t try and recreate the world we know; they reference it in order to create their own.

To my mind, the recent release of LittleBigPlanet is a good example of the creative core of video gaming. LittleBigPlanet is at heart a modern version of Super Mario Bros; but more importantly, the game allows you to invent your own worlds to play in. Rather than running through someone else’s vision, using the toolset of the game, you can produce your own, and it is for this reason that, upon the title’s release, it had the video game world in a bit of a tizzy.

This emphasis on creation and creativity works as a neat metaphor for why games, even when they try hard to be realistic, aren’t attempting to replicate reality – and also why this is a good thing. But it might first be useful to look at another cultural form as an analogy and, since literature is (ostensibly) my shtick, let’s roll with that.

One of the ways that fiction works is that it refers to ‘the real world’ in order to create a scenario or arena through which to tell stories. Obviously, the plot in The Grapes of Wrath didn’t actually happen. But because the book contains rituals, landmarks and characters that a reader might recognise, we can give ourselves over to the narrative and engage both its plot and the broader implications to the world the novel references.

Many games also create arenas that directly reference the real world – and many do not. But even given radical differences between games that attempt veracity and those that eschew it entirely for the abstract, their mechanics are surprisingly similar, and similarly different from literature and film: make a world, give it rules, give the player some goals and aims, and then ask the player to progress through that world using a system of challenge and reward.

The point is, video games rely on a different set of mechanics than other forms, and to suggest that games are merely attempts to recreate something is like saying that the purpose of film is to document, or that the only thing that literature should do is tell stories that are ‘true’. To think about it in such mechanistic terms is to deny the potential of the form.

Video games can also tell stories, but many people argue that narrative – particularly telling stories, or ‘diegesis’ – isn’t their primary function. Instead of relying on the representation of a world to tell tales, video games rely on simulation, not to recreate the world but in order to create a world as an arena for simulated action. And by collapsing both play and creation into one experience, blurring the distinction between the two, LittleBigPlanet becomes a metaphor for gaming itself in which the uniqueness of games as a cultural form becomes clear.

If literary texts work primarily through representation, and secondly by reader interaction, the inverse is true of video games: even in the most ‘realistic’ games, it is the creative, interactive element that is paramount, and it is through this that players produce their own narratives as they move through a world that references ‘life’ but is neither constrained by it nor bound to its rules.

Every time you start up LittleBigPlanet, you are greeted with a video of people asleep, dreaming. What they dream is a place of creativity, one in which meaning is made through the invention of new worlds replete with their own rules, aesthetics and atmosphere. This is the creative promise of video games, and is also why they have the potential to be the next significant cultural form after film. By producing arenas in which players can act out stories and invent their own, games allow for a degree of empathy and connectedness that, in my mind, will one day exceed film.

And while I myself will always be partial to the intensely interior nature of literature, LittleBigPlanet suggests that, as gaming develops, its potential and power will be found in its capacity to empower players to create worlds never before imagined – and then, as was never possible before, step into them.