Traveling Platypus Show: Platypus Nostalgia

We spent the weekend in Arkansas with friends one of whom is an old sage in the matter of video games and pen and paper RPGs.  Like Gandalf and Bombadill, much of the weekend (when not attending religious services or playing Dominion) was spent in having a good long talk about the state of the field.  I don't get to do this often, and it was a real treat.

During the course of our long jaw, my friend introduced me to two games that have made a splash over the last few years: Dragon Age and BioShock.  Though one takes place in a Tolkienesque lost age and the other in a 1950s dystopia, there was a common thread that impressed me: the emphasis on the power of choice in determining who we are.  The oft repeated refrain of Bioshock is "we make our choices but, in the end, they make us."  Dragon Age offers multiple choices to the player at various points in the game which dramatically affect the path the story takes and its eventual outcome.  Furthermore, these choices can be rolled over into expansions and the sequel.  It may merely be a dressing up of the "choose your own adventure" novels of the 80s, but I think there is something more.

Seeing these games brought to mind something Umberto Eco says in the postscript to his "The Name of the Rose."  In explaining why he decided to write a detective novel, something so middle-class and beneath him, Eco mentions that the irony of the detective story is that the reader is made complicit in the murder: it only takes place because the reader wills it to take place; we want the murder to happen so we may be entertained by it.  By offering players choices that matter, Dragon Age and BioShock draw player's attention to their own complicity in the story.  The characters they end the game with (good, bad, and ugly) are the characters their choices have created; the changes to the game world are exactly those that they have brought about.  A player may choose to demur that it is only a game, but the opportunity for self-examination is presented nonetheless.

Why do I mention this?  I believe that this emphasis on moral culpability is a sign that video games are beginning to come of age (or at least some of their players and creators are).  Sure, they're not high art, but in trying to wrestle with real-world issues (BioShock is an attack on Objectivism), video games are coming to rest firmly in the middlebrow.