You Wanna Talk About Games? Why the Historical Perspective is Important
After writing my post on the Historical Perspective, I was reading an article about rock guitar, and was noting that, as usual, it was throwing around the usual references to past and modern guitarists and styles. You find the same thing when reading about books or movies in an article intended for a knowledgeable audience. Fiction might be described in terms of Poe, Faulkner, Chandler, Tolkien, Dickenson, or King.

Movies get compared and contrasted with each other. In fact, the movie "The Player" even lampooned this mentality as the studio executive, Griffin Mill, gets bombarded with pitches that all follow the same formula: "movie 1" meets "movie 2." It was like some kind of alchemy that turns fifty words or less into gold.

I don't think these journalists, invoking examples from across the decades, are just being pretentious (most of the time). When invoking names of jazz and blues guitarists in reference to modern rock styles, they aren't just showing off the breadth of their musical knowledge. What happens is that the medium's history forms a vocabulary to describe itself.

Outsiders or newcomers to the medium might find this hard to follow at best, utterly incestuous at worst. Which is why the average three-paragraph newspaper review doesn't delve into such pedegrees - their audience isn't expected to get it. However, if you open up a magazine for cinema fans, you should be prepared to be bombarded with references to past work. If you recognize even half of the references, you'll have far clearer picture of the subject matter.

Video and computer games are no different. We talk about "Diablo-Style" RPGs. For a while we spoke of "Doom Clones," before the category became so crowded we renamed it "First-Person Shooters." From Pac-Man and Space Invaders to World of Warcraft, Civilization, and Resident Evil, we invoke these names to conjure up imagery and ideas that would take paragraphs to describe far less accurately otherwise.

Therein lies my strongest argument for why we need to maintain a historical perspective for the medium of video games. As developers, journalists, and even just gamers - cutting ourselves off from the past cuts out many of the best words in our vocabulary. Not only does it hurt our ability to describe a medium we love to each other, but it may also cut off our ability to understand or even conceive of these concepts in the first place.


(Vaguely) related yammerings:
* The Lack of Historical Perspective in Gaming Media
* Innovation in RPGs?
* Games As Art: Media's Double Standard
* Do Games Matter?

Discussion on the Forums Already in Progress

Labels: Game Design, retro

- posted by The Rampant Coyote @ 5:43 AM (Permalink)