Are videogames growing up?

The year is 1941. Citizen Kane has just been released into cinemas. Despite its lukewarm performance at the time, critics would later revere this moment as a deeply formative one in the history of cinema. It marks, for many, the moment when filmmaking matured into a distinct artistic medium.

Nowadays there’s a new form of media vying for attention. It has only been around for around forty years, but is able to combine some of the most successful elements of literature and film. The way videogames differentiate themselves is in the way they can respond to audience input.

While everyone has their own interpretation after watching a film or reading a book, the fluctuation of experiences is purely on the audience side of the equation. Introduce the unparalleled agency given to audiences of videogames and this becomes an entirely different prospect; each player’s experience is different due to contrasting interpretations, but also through the way every choice they make affects their personal narrative. They literally make their own stories.

Forget all of the preconceptions you might have about videogames. Forget Call of Duty and Fifa and strip the medium down to its most basic level: a videogame is simply an interactive narrative. This is an incredibly potent concept when utilised in the right way. Imagine that two players complete a game separately. At one point there is a (virtual) door marked ‘do not enter’. One player turns away and leaves. The other player opens the door and finds a letter in a desk from one of the central characters of the game asking their spouse for a divorce. Has one player had the same experience as the other? They’ve played the same game, but one has a fundamentally altered understanding of the plot.

Of course, it isn’t quite that simple. There is still a designer at the helm, and constants still rub shoulders with audience-driven variables. So maybe not everyone goes through a specific door, but everyone gets into the final confrontation with the butler. Still, everything the player does outside of previously scripted sequences is effectively of their own design.

Take 1978’s Space Invaders. No two play-throughs of it have ever been the same. The designer gives the player a set of rules: there are aliens. They’re advancing down the screen. The player has a weapon. But even the choice to go left or right at the opening of the game is an example of player agency which alters the narrative: Bruce Willis doesn’t ask the audience which direction he should go to wipe away Alan Rickman’s dastardly grin in Die Hard.

Jump ahead thirty years to 2007. A little game called BioShock has just landed on the small screen. This isn’t Space Invaders. There aren’t even any extraterrestrials to massacre. Instead, BioShock is a thoughtful deconstruction of Ayn Rand’s objectivist philosophies through an intricate and morally ambiguous narrative. It’s essentially a complex rumination on the destructive potential of human nature. Oh, and it also manages to pack in an intensely self-aware meta-fictional critique of its own genre.

The tension between player choice and creator prescription is still at the heart of its narrative. The addition of this choice means that storytelling techniques have limitless possibilities in videogames, and can achieve forms of expression unavailable to any other medium.

So where does this leave us? Well, unfortunately no-one seems to have the answer yet. Shelves are still clogged with countless titles in possession of too few redeeming features to advance the art form. Violence is still a crutch used by many in lieu of solid storytelling, and those which do try something genuinely different often fall by the wayside.

Publishers tend to put their cash behind shallow mainstream successes rather than more satisfying but risky ventures. Experimentation is quashed in pursuit of ‘the next big thing’. Secondly, the most effective way to use videogames hasn’t yet been nailed down; it’s a youthful medium in every way, and it still has a few teething problems.

We’re still waiting for the videogame equivalent of Citizen Kane. Or are we? Citizen Kane’s relevance only came to the forefront of film study years after its initial release. Perhaps BioShock will be held up as the title which signified videogames maturing into a distinct artistic medium. As the industry figures out exactly how best to wield the tremendous power that they offer, videogames will continue to become more and more affecting. Maybe videogames have hit the Kane-esque watershed moment, but no-one really realises it yet.

BioShock has been granted a sequel, subtitled Infinite. The potential of gaming is just that: infinite. All we have to do is figure out how to bottle this particular brand of lightning.