Meaning In Video Games

I am a bit of a English literature geek. I know, that’s pretty sad, but aside from writing, reading is basically my favourite thing. I like reading the classics, like Nineteen Eighty-Four, or Lord of the Flies. What makes these books awesome is that they say something. George Orwell’s 1984 is a terrifying vision of the future from the perspective of 1949, one in which a small force called “The Party” has taken full control over it’s citizens, using mind control and constant surveillance to keep people in a state of constant obedience.

It was so revolutionary that many phrases from it have bled into popular culture: Big Brother is the practically god like head of The Party; Newspeak is the minimalist language The Party was intending to force on it’s citizens, containing phrases such as Doublethink, which is the act of lying to oneself to such a degree you actually believe the lie; and the adjective Orwellian, which though never used in the book has come to mean any scenario in which a small powerful minority uses extreme censorship and propaganda to control the others.

What is awesome is that back in it’s day, groups of literature nerds used to gather around and say things like “Lol, room 101.” and everyone would laugh at their little inside joke much in the way people nowadays gather around and say “the cake is a lie” and get laughs. To an outside observer, these two gatherings of socially neglected beings would be virtually indistinguishable from each other, except that one would be 80 year-olds, and the other 15.

1984 is heavily satirical, the universe of Big Brother and The Party is a parody of Stalin’s reign and the USSR that was controlling in Russia at the time. Orwell was trying to say something, while Portal was not.

So now I ask, why?

Why is it that no games try to say anything? Why is it that games like Call Of Duty dominate the market, games that serve no other purpose other than to provide mindless massacre of random troops?

Well first, I’m gonna have to correct myself, when I said no games try to say anything, it would have probably been best to say that no good games try to say anything. There are games out there trying to give messages, and most are – frankly – pretentious. Games that go “hey, look at me, I’m so smart! Look at all my metaphor and connection to real life” are NOT GOOD GAMES. They are shit. They are worse than shit. I could feed a turd to the human centipede and the gulch that comes out the other end would still be better than those god-awful excuses for experiences.

Seriously, I hate them.

Now, you might have read my Emotional Intellect article, because I’m gonna do some serious calling back to it right now.

Link: https://indiegraph.wordpress.com/2012/09/20/emotional-intellect/

Now you may have noted that I talked about this before, about I-types and E-types and how the best media outlets will use a lot of both. But meaning and message are a small component of I-types, and are an almost totally-ignored one by games. I would like to see games try to say more, not necessarily about deep political things. Things like “yeah, cats are pretty nice” or “The best method for defeating groups of spherical green pigs in poorly constructed houses is to slingshot birds at them until they are crushed under their own rubble” are perfectly valid – if odd – points.

In some ways, games like COD already do that under the guise of realism. Their message goes something along the lines of:

“Yea, so war is pretty shit”. This is a valid point and it helps increase the strength of the game (Though games like COD almost always totally fail to show war as a gritty and hard thing, as most players end up having quite a lot of fun, and that kind of reduces the strength. A game that would correctly show war in it’s true form would be one in which you only have one life, and if you die, an assassin comes up behind you in real life and slits your throat.)

A good example of this would be Assassin’s Creed. Which while not getting across any particular message, at least attempts to teach its players a bit of history. But more importantly, it doesn’t allow what it wants to teach it’s players get in the way of actually being a good game. AC is fun first, smart second. 1984 is actually quite a powerful book, and under the depressing outer shell is an even more depressing inner meaning about the failure of the human spirit and how humanity is doomed and we’re all so weak and waah I’m George Orwell we’re all gonna die waah waah wahh.

Wait, what, where am I? Right. Ok.

Look, the main point is that there are so many meaningless games out there, and even just a dab of meaning can actually make your game vastly more enjoyable. Meaning isn’t a thing that can only be understood by the smart or pretentious, simple things like messages of friendship or the triumph of the human spirit are there is nearly every single film you watch. Transformers is about the power of good over evil, a Series of Unfortunate Events about the strength of the love between siblings, the Hunger Games about how even after they both saved each others lives and were on the verge of dying for one another, Peeta the baker boy will still be freindzoned (EDITOR’S NOTE: WHAT? WHAT DID HE SAY?) by Katniss.

So, before you go into designing a game, think about what you are trying to say. It doesn’t take much to add a bit of spice. The job of meaning is almost always down to the storyline, (perhaps why media that focuses on story, like films and books, are often rich in themantics.) and a bad story can reduce the richness of a world considerably. People are more committed to a game if they feel it is telling them something, whether they realise it or not. Meaning is not just a nice addition – it vastly improves the quality of your game.

So basically – first of all, make sure that your game has good actual gameplay and make sure that it fun and interesting to play. And then after that take a look at the story, take a look at the world you are set in, think about what you want to say. It might be something small, it might be something big, it might be about friendship or politics or games themselves. If you can, try to allow the gameplay to reflect your meaning in a non-intrusive way, (if your meaning is about friendship, it might be good to make your game more co-operative.) or build the meaning from the gameplay directly (if it’s a cooperative game, make the meaning about friendship) either way works. But the importance is that you are saying something. Because what’s the point if you’re not?

As always, if you have an opinion, comment it!

ABOUT THE AUTHOR: Joseph, or Lawsome, as the internet folk call him. He spends a lot of time making games, most of which fall apart or don’t work and are never published, but the few that survive can be found on his account at Yoyogames – http://sandbox.yoyogames.com/users/Lawsome1997.  He has strong opinions on games and can hold his own in an argument, if you tell him that COD MW3 is the best game ever he may bite your head off.