Videogames Came of Age in an Anti-Story Era

Happy Holidays all!

This morning I came across an article from the rockin' Adam Bishop on gamasutra:

http://www.gamasutra.com/blogs/AdamBishop/20091212/3800/The_Interrogator_Problem.php

[quote]Dialogue trees are a vital part of many role-playing games, and similar styles of dialogue are used in other games as well, especially adventure games. The primary idea behind dialogue trees is that the player should be allowed to decide who the main character is, rather than the designer. However, there is one major problem that this approach often ends up creating - the resulting characters have no character. [/quote]

Bishop writes,

[quote]What does the player character believe? What do they value? What do they think about? What do they want from the world? From other people? From themself? The lazy answer is "whatever the player decides", from which we get my most hated video game trope: the silent protaganist. But the real, honest answer to all of those questions is nothing. [/quote]

Yes! Just as there is no exalted story, there are no exalted characters in games! Both story and character were two of the most important aspects of Dramatic Art in Aristotle's [i]Poetics[/i]. Epic story always pertains to the rendering of ideals real, such as Odysseus making it home to his family to reclaim his wife and private property, whcih others are coveting and stealing. Although Homer did not know of Moses, and vice versa, Moses wrote, "Thou shalt not covet," and "thou shalt not steal." Because videogames came of age in the era of the federal reserve and the absence of the gold standard, where the highest good was to steal via the inflation tax and transfer debt on down and the rewards on up, the "greatest" games exalted grand theft and the killing of hookers and innocent women.

More and more it seems that the reason games lack heart, soul, story, and character is that they came of age in an age where the greatest good was the very opposite of character--to speak forth one thing, while holding in one's heart another, so as to profit at others' expense.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=8_MLM3uMrPw&feature=related

Because games must lack the classical, epic moral premise to pass the violent religion of the reigning fanmbas; they must therefore lack character, heart, soul, and exalted story. Viscerality is defined not as viscerally real like the characters in great works, but the viscerality of the high-pixel counts of hookers and blood and boobies for the fanboyz, so that they might never man up and find their true fathers--Homer and Moses. "lolz! lolz boobies! lolz! lolz!" they proclaim as they shoot innocent women in theri single mom's basement, drugged up on ritalin and dumbed down in thier schools, as but cogs in the Matrix.

Here is a passage from my upcoming book: [i]The Legend of The Gold 45 Revolver: The Hero's Journey in Arts Entrepreneurship & Technology[/i] characterizing teh decline of story:

[quote]So now, let us turn towards your world. As that higher form of entrepreneur, not only must you focus on the prices of houses, but on that far more precious value of the home—once traditionally defined by loyalty, faith, and honor—between husband and wife—between parents and children. But along came a generation which sacrificed that sanctity upon the Matrix’s altar, so as to place mothers in the service of the corporate-state Matrix and children in the care of the corporate-state daycare, and then proceeded to place the rising generation in massive cultural and spiritual debt. Broken families and debt are the source of a hundred-hundred societal ills—the wellspring of both moral and financial poverty—and yet, the MBA and JD programs refuse to teach Homer’s Odyssey which exalts faith and the family. There is a sad tragedy that men are unable to learn of Noah’s flood by reading about it, but that their homes must be underwater before they begin to believe that virtue and honor must always be held superior to mere money in any sustainable household or civilization.

So come now—opportunity abounds to set the world aright via a renaissance in art and integrity—via a new generation of video games that allows ones to fight for honor and integrity!

In early American history the Constitution figured heavily in political debate. People wanted to know, and politicians needed to justify, where the various schemes they debated in Congress were authorized in the Constitution. In the twenty-first century, by contrast, the Constitution is like the elephant at the tea party that everyone pretends not to notice. —Ron Paul, The Revolution

It should be against the law to break the law. Unfortunately, it is not. In early twenty-first century America, a long-standing dirty little secret still exists among public officials, politicians, judges, prosecutors, and police. The government—federal, state, and local—is not bound to obey its own laws. I know this sounds crazy, but the events recounted in this book prove it true. Constitutional Chaos should be a wake-up call for every American who prizes personal liberty in a free society. –Judge Andrew P. Napolitano, Constitutional Chaos

Videogames lack heart, soul, character, and epic story, and modern movies have followed their lead; along with literature, business, capitalism, the university, and politics. The classic, epic soul is assaulted on all fronts, so as to enrich the doublespeakers at the expense of the honorable man who matches word and deed, and Bogle compares our declining empire with Rome:

As the twentieth century of the Christian Era ended, the United States of America comprehended the most powerful position on the earth and the wealthiest portion of mankind. The frontiers of the nation were guarded by two great oceans, and her values and ideals at once incurred the respect, the envy, and the ill-will of much of the rest of mankind. The gentle but powerful influence of her laws, her property rights, her manners, and her business institutions and financial institutions alike had combined to produce her power. Her peaceful inhabitants enjoyed and abused the advantages of wealth and luxury. Her free constitution had gradually cemented the union of the states and was preserved with decent reverence.(*)
As some readers will recognize, that paragraph, aptly describing our nation as the twenty-first century began on January 1, 2001, is a play on the words of the famous opening paragraph of Edward Gibbon’s 1838 epic, The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire. And yet, Gibbon continued, “the Roman Empire would decline and fall, a revolution which will be ever remembered and is still felt by the nations of the earth.”(1) By the end of his epic, the Roman Empire was no more. Constantinople had fallen, the fruitful provinces overwhelmed by Vandals; Britain was lost; Gaul was overrun; and the brutal Goths had conquered Rome itself, as in 410 A.D. the Imperial City was delivered to the licentious tribes of Germany and Sythia. –Bogle, Battle/Vanguard, Saga of Heroes

When one reads the Great Books, one might conclude that it’s all already been said and done—that the ideals have already been rendered by the masters and we can all go on home now; but in looking at the world, it oft seems we have yet to begin. Yes—we must perpetually perform the classical ideals in the contemporary context. For “the price of freedom is eternal vigilance,” and time and again we find ourselves at the beginning of The Odyssey and Hamlet, with our homes out of order and our fathers displaced, banished, forgotten, and even murdered by the imposter kings who have claimed our very mothers and kingdoms—our very pensions and savings—our very lives and fortunes, but not our sacred honours. Hamlet—the reluctant hero—laments, “How all occasions do inform against me,” and “O’ cursed spite, that I was ever born to set it right.” ‘Tis a “world out of joint” where virtue is “more honor'd in the breach than in the observance,” with financial engineering—the transfer of wealth—trumping physical engineering and entrepreneurship—the creation of wealth. Bogle describes our “ordinary world:”

What caused the mutation from virtuous circle to vicious circle? It's easy to call it a failure of character, a triumph of hubris and greed over honesty and integrity. And it's even easier to lay it all to “just a few bad apples.” But while only a tiny minority of our business and financial leaders have been implicated in criminal behavior, I'm afraid that the barrel itself—the very structure that holds all those apples—is bad. While that may seem a harsh indictment, I believe it is a fair one. . . It is now crystal-clear that our capitalistic system—as all systems sometimes do—has experienced a profound failure, a failure with a whole variety of root causes, each interacting and reinforcing the other: The stock market mania, driven by the idea that we were in a New Era; the notion that our corporations were trees that could grow not only to the sky but beyond; the rise of the imperial chief executive officer; the failure of our gatekeepers—those auditors, regulators, legislators, and boards of directors who forgot to whom they owed their loyalty—the change in our financial institutions from being stock owners to being stock traders; the hype of Wall Street's stock promoters; the frenzied excitement of the media; and of course the eager and sometimes greedy members of the investing public, reveling in the easy wealth that seemed like a cornucopia, at least while it lasted. There is plenty of blame to go around. But even as it drove stock prices up, this happy conspiracy among all of the interested parties drove business standards down. Yes, the victory of investors in the great bull market had a thousand fathers. But the defeat in the great bear market that followed seems to be an orphan. –What Went Wrong in Corporate America? Remarks by John C. Bogle, Founder and Former Chairman, The Vanguard Group
http://www.vanguard.com/bogle_site/sp20030224.html

So we ask, from where did this “failure of character, a triumph of hubris and greed over honesty and integrity” derive? Where did this brave new generation of managers and accountants come from? From our universities. From our law schools and business schools. From our best and brightest. From our MBAs and JDs—from our “masters of the universe,” who take disproportiante compensation for corroding capitalism when times are good, and then get the bailouts after gambling our riches away; as a dumbed-down college degree becomes but the trickster’s ticket to join their soulless ranks. Just what are we teaching them? It cannot be Homer, nor Plato, nor Socrates, nor Shakespeare nor the Bible. Let the titles of the following books begin to address that question:

Excellence Without a Soul: How a Great University Forgot Education, by Harry R. Lewis (former Harvard Dean)
The Western Canon, (opens with An Elegy for the Canon) by Harold Bloom (Yale professor, author, critic)
Who Killed Homer? The Demise of Classical Education and the Recovery of Greek Wisdom by Victor Davis Hanson (recipient of the Award for Excellence in Teaching, the top award in the country for teaching in the field of classics from the American Philological Association) and John Heath
Bonfire of the Humanities: Rescuing the Classics in an Impoverished Age by Victor Davis Hanson, John Heath, and Bruce S. Thornton
Smiling Through the Cultural Catastrophe: Toward the Revival of Higher Education by Jeffrey Hart (Columbia professor)
The Closing of the American Mind, by Allan Bloom (University of Chicago professor)
From Dawn to Decadence: 1500 to the Present: 500 Years of Western Cultural Life (Hardcover), by Jacques Barzun
Are We Rome?: The Fall of an Empire and the Fate of America by Cullen Murphy
Our Underachieving Colleges: A Candid Look at How Much Our Students Learn and Why They Should be Learning More & Are Colleges Failing? by Derek Bok, former President of Harvard University

The remainder of the list of titles, spanning every aspect of the “rotten barrel” of cultural decline; from business, to marriage, to government, to entertainment, would consume the entire length of this chapter. Aristotle wrote, “When storytelling declines, the result is decadence,” and is it any wonder that when the classics are removed from education, the world is impoverished? Videogames lack epic story and soul as films invert Aristotle’s Poetics, placing spectacle first and plot and character last; and as Oscar Wilde reminds us, “life imitates art.” Do not take my word for it:

Our society and our literature and our culture are being dumbed down, and the causes are very complex. I’m 73 years old. In a lifetime of teaching English, I’ve seen the study of literature debased. There’s very little authentic study of the humanities remaining. –Harold Bloom, Dumbing Down American Readers, LA Times, September 24th, 2003

Screenwriting teacher Robert McKee quotes the great poet Yeats, in describing the postmodernized Hollywood.

Flawed and forced storytelling is forced to substitute spectacle for substance, trickery for truth. Weak stories, desperate to hold audience attention, degenerate into multimillion-dollar razzle-dazzle demo reels. In Hollywood imagery becomes more and more extravagant, in Europe more and more decorative. The behavior of actors becomes more histrionic, more and more lewd, more and more violent. Music and sound effects become increasingly tumultuous. The total effect transnudes into the grotesque. A culture cannot evolve without honest, powerful storytelling. When society repeatedly experiences glossy, hollowed-out, pseudo-stories, it degenerates. We need true satires and tragedies, dramas and comedies that shine a clean light into the dingy corners of the human psyche and society. If not, as Yeats warned, ‘…the center cannot hold.’ —Robert Mckee, Story

Man shall not live by bread alone, and nor can circuses of spectacle replace the epic entertainment of the classic poets in any sustainable civilization. Our wealth does not derive from the garish NASDAQ display in time’s square, which our universities have knelt before and foresworn allegiance to in erecting digital stock tickers in their hallways, instead of excerpts with from the Great Books and classics, which would exalt the student’s soul and lessen their debt, unlike the expensive, tacky stock-ticker displays celebrating the university’s postmodern corruption of classical capitalism. For when they replaced the spirit of the Greats with the tacky displays, I noted that all the numbers turned to red, as blood flowed in the street. Did not Moses smash the tablets when he found his people worshipping the golden calf, and did not Circe turn the men into pigs when they ate the golden sun-god’s cattle? Did not Jesus overturn teh money-changers tables when he ofund thenm in the temple? I am embarrassed for my university, for my country, for my fellow academics, and I am proud of the students, and grateful for their fellowship, as they are seeing a better way in the words of Homer and Bogle. For Bogle also laments our “Bread and Circuses.”

Why did the Roman Empire fall? One answer seems to lie in its citizens’ unshaken demand for material goods (“bread”) and the self-indulgence of its civic order (“circuses”); the acceptance of money as the measure of their worth, their wants, and the value of their property; their need for honor and recognition, even as their vision of freedom, liberty, and greatness was fading. As Saint Augustine suggested, it was self-love that led to the fall of the Roman Empire. Gibbon’s conclusion is expressed in this profound warning: “O man! Place not thy confidence in this present world.”(2)
Gibbon’s history reminds us that no nation can take its greatness for granted. There are no exceptions. So I am concerned about the threats we face, not only the external threats to America’s greatness in this present world, but the internal threats we face at home. This book is my attempt to address one of those major threats: the remarkable erosion that has taken place over the past two decades in the conduct and values of our business leaders, our investment bankers, and our money managers. –The Battle for The Soul of Capitalism, John C. Bogle

Victor Davis Hanson and John Heath characterize the shape-shifting temptresses who inhabit modern academia and have done away with the Greek spirit and soul:

Our present generation of Classicists helped to destroy Classical education. While their hypocrisy in living their lives differently from what they advocated, their obscurity in language and expression, their new religion of postmodernism, theory, social construction, and relativism are neither novel nor profound—the next century will scarcely notice their foolishness—they are nevertheless culpable and thus must be cited and condemned. Yes, what these careerists wrote and said was silly, boring, and mostly irrelevant; what they did was unfortunately not. Our generation of Classicists, faced with the rise of Western culture beyond the borders of the West, was challenged to explain the relevance of Greek thought and values in a critical age of information and entertainment. Here they failed utterly, failed to such a degree that the Greeks now play almost no part in discussions of how the West is to evolve in the next millennium. Worse, the dereliction of the academics was not just the usual wage of sloth, complacency, and arrogance, but more often a deliberate desire to adulterate—even destroy—the Greeks, to assure the public that as Classicists they knew best just how sexist, racist, and exploitative the Greeks really were. This was a lie and a treason that brought short-term dividends to their careers but helped destroy a noble profession in the process. So we make no apologies for adapting a populist stance, for attacking the narcissism and self-congratulatory posture of these self-described “theorists” who offered very little for a very few and nothing for everyone else. –Who Killed Homer? The Demise of Classical Education and Recovery of Greek Wisdom

So it is that just like the deconstruction of the dollar and the Constitution, the deconstruction of the classics was accomplished by mediocrities interested in short-term profits at the expense of society’s long-term wealth—at the expense of the freedoms of its creators, workers and idealists—selfish mediocrities who placed future generations in vast and unprecedented monetary and spiritual debt, all for the right to their fiat-funded BMW, by which they deemed themselves wealthy.
Homer celebrates the sanctity of the home and family in The Odyssey, along with the virtues of resisting short-term temptations while voyaging for the sake of long-term ideals; but such sentiments are allowed in neither modern academia nor the all-time bestselling video game Grand Theft Auto IV, which allows you to hire and murder prostitutes, but not to walk through Hell so as to be reunited with Beatrice, nor get married nor render classical Greek justice as Odysseus does, and rid the open-ended gameworld of the false suitors and fanboys in a classic, epic showdown. Grand Theft Auto is afraid of violence—of meaningful violence and exalted, rugged battles. And thus opportunity abounds for games that let one render classical ideals real and fight for the Constitution.
I’ll keep repeating Aristotle—”when storytelling declines, the result is decadence,” as art is culture’s flagship. As society forgets to laud the greater beauty of the soul in its art, character and integrity—freedom’s foundations—become unfashionable. And so, losing trust in the moral soul, whose center no longer holds, society begins to trade freedom for security; and bureaucracies capitalize on this—growing to oppose the truth and freedom that is necessary for the natural, long-term wealth generation that classic capitalism affords. The late Nobel Laureate economist Milton Friedman made note of this in the introduction to the late Nobel Laureate economist F.A. Hayek’s The Road to Serfdom:

I said at the outset that “in some ways” the message of this book “is even more relevant to the United States today than it was when it created a sensation . . . half a century ago.” Intellectual opinion then was far more hostile to its theme than it appears to be now, but practice conformed to it far more than it does today. Government in the post World War II period was smaller and less intrusive than it is today. Johnson’s Great Society programs, including Medicare and Medicaid, and Bush’s Clean Air and Americans with Disabilities Acts, were all still ahead, let alone the numerous other extensions of government that Reagan was only able to slow down, not reverse, in his eight years in office. Total government spending—federal, state, and local—in the United States has gone from 25 percent of national income in 1950 to nearly 45 percent in 1993. –Milton Friedman, introduction to The Road to Serfdom

Nor is it just in government that bureaucracy grows, but in business too:

Over the past century, a gradual move from owner’s capitalism—providing the lion’s share of the rewards of investment to those who put up their own money and risk their own capital—has culminated in an extreme version of manager’s capitalism—providing vastly disproportionate rewards to those whom we have trusted to manage their enterprises in the interests of their owners. –John C. Bogle, The Battle for The Soul of Capitalism[/quote]