The Rocky Mountain Collegian

September 6th, 2007

Condescension and Confusion

I don’t normally write about hugely popular mainstream games on this blog. I won’t really be doing that today, either, but Time Magazine’s Lev Grossman wrote a baffling and condescending article about a <i>very</i> popular mainstream game that I figured I’d talk about a little. The article is titled <i> The Man in the Mask</i>, and it is an embarrassing mess. The subject is the soon-to-be-released Halo 3, a video game sequel for Microsoft’s Xbox 360 game console. Developed by Bungie Studios, its prequels were the most popular games on the original Xbox console by far, and Halo 3 itself will undoubtedly sell millions and millions of copies when it’s released on September 25. Grossman’s article touches on that, but mostly he makes it obvious that he doesn’t know much of anything about video games beyond the same old clichés and generalizations that the high-brow cognoscenti seem to have picked up back in the early 80s . Failing that, he’s some kind of brilliant, sarcastic madman! I’m not about to give him the benefit of the doubt, but it’s possible.

“It’s difficult to explain the story of Halo, but that difficulty is in itself worthy of note. This isn’t Donkey Kong,” writes Grossman. I slap my forehead every time I read that line. If you pay attention to video games at all, you know why it’s insulting: the vast majority of video games released in the past twenty years “aren’t Donkey Kong.”

“The Master Chief is not an Italian plumber whose girlfriend has been kidnapped by a gorilla. His story is rich and complicated in ways that we’re not used to in video games. The Master Chief is a supersoldier, the only one of his kind, equipped with–encased in, really–powerful battle armor. He lives 500 years in the future, at a time when humanity is fighting a group of alien religious zealots known as the Covenant.” Again. Halo’s story is “rich and complicated” in all the ways that <i>we’re used to</i> in video games. Sci-fi supersoldiers battling aliens in the future is <i>par for the course</i> as far as video game stories are concerned.

So what is Grossman talking about? He mentions Halo’s “curiously lyrical quality,” its “literary touches,” its “romantic weather effects and sublime vistas and soaring Gregorian chants,” but pretty much all of these things were present in Halo’s predecessor, the Bungie-developed Marathon series, which was developed over ten years ago. More importantly, the trend in mainstream video games for the past fifteen years or so has been towards the overwrought and the cinematic - Halo is simply the most popular and recognizable purveyor of that trend. Grossman singling out the game’s cinematic qualities as unique betrays his ignorance.

Even more baffling is the way Grossman juxtaposes these seemingly fawning, complimentary paragraphs with the usual condescending chestnuts about video games. “The Bungies bring a grinding, jeweler’s meticulousness to what most people consider an unhealthy amusement for children,” writes Grossman. I’m assuming that he wrote that sentence as an attempt to build credibility with the older and probably more conservative audience that reads Time Magazine, people who probably assume (even now!) that video games are “an unhealthy amusement for children.” But to do so would ignore the industry’s recent growth, the astonishing popularity of the Nintendo Wii in the United States, and the growth and popularity of the casual games market.

There’s a strange contradiction in these paragraphs. A bizarre leap in tone from condescending and ignorant to admiring and bemused. One invariably gets the impression that Grossman was forced to match up his thoroughly antiquated views about video games with the subject he was actually covering. Considering the very real possibility that video games will one day be as ubiquitous to media consumers as film, music or television, I’m forced to wonder why Time settled for such a myopic and misinformed piece of writing on the subject.

Maybe next time.

This entry was posted on Thursday, September 6th, 2007 at 12:21 am and is filed under Game Guy. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.

You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.