As you may know I have been reading the Great Books recently as a personal project to try and learn more about the evolution of Western thought. I thought it would be an interesting project to try and conceive of an equally vital list for the medium of video games.
Wikipedia:
…The process of defining the boundaries of the canon is endless. The philosopher John Searle has said, “In my experience there never was, in fact, a fixed ‘canon’; there was rather a certain set of tentative judgments about what had importance and quality. Such judgments are always subject to revision, and in fact they were constantly being revised.” … “The true University of these days is a Collection of Books”.
[quote]1) The classics are the books of which we usually hear people say: “I am rereading…” and never “I am reading….”
We use the word “classics” for those books that are treasured by those who have read and loved them; but they are treasured no less by those who have the luck to read them for the first time in the best conditions to enjoy them.
The classics are books that exert a peculiar influence, both when they refuse to be eradicated from the mind and when they conceal themselves in the folds of memory, camouflaging themselves as the collective or individual unconscious.
Every rereading of a classic is as much a voyage of discovery as the first reading.
A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.
A classic does not necessarily teach us anything we did not know before. In a classic we sometimes discover something we have always known (or thought we knew), but without knowing that this author said it first, or at least is associated with it in a special way. And this, too, is a surprise that gives a lot of pleasure, such as we always gain from the discovery of an origin, a relationship, an affinity. From all this we may derive a definition of this type:
9) The classics are books that we find all the more new, fresh, and unexpected upon reading, the more we thought we knew them from hearing them talked about.
Your classic author is the one you cannot feel indifferent to, who helps you to define yourself in relation to him, even in dispute with him.
12) A classic is a book that comes before other classics; but anyone who has read the others first, and then reads this one, instantly recognizes its place in the family tree.
A classic is something that tends to relegate the concerns of the moment to the status of background noise, but at the same time this background noise is something we cannot do without.
A classic is something that persists as a background noise even when the most incompatible momentary concerns are in control of the situation.[/quote]
In this same spirit it might be interesting to attempt to develop a canon which will teach one about the history and progression of the medium; the apotheosis of each genre, maybe, to showcase the best and most enduring examples.
My question, therefore, is this: Are there video games that stand up to such standards? What would a canon of video games look like?
I feel like the problem I always run into with these lists is that just assembling a collection of seminal but violently dissimilar works makes it more difficult instead of less to think usefully about each one - the monumental status of the entries smooths over the differences between them, while the fact that each represents the peak of some particular category means they don’t always have a lot to say to each other. And surely any canon represents not just a collection of stuff but also an implied way of thinking about them, as the first X or the pinnacle of Y tendencies or as representing a break from Z, and as different stages of some ultimately unified whole.
So I think a way you could build a vg canon that doesn’t immediately become as dopey and braintape as something like that Smithsonian list would be to pick out from the start a set of productive tensions that come up again and again in the format and then trying to trace the relationships or primacy of each, over both material and formal developments.
poss examples:
VIDEO VS GAME
SLOW VS FAST
DOLLHOUSE VS WORLD
TOY VS NARRATIVE
or whatever
where each can be understood as a different kind of desire facilitated by the form and where the “canon” is the set of most successful, persuasive or inventive efforts to either synthesise or assert value of one over the other.
Possible goofy example: "HOP VS LEAP"
Donkey Kong
Bomb Jack
Castlevania
Legend of Kage
Spelunker
Jet Pac
Bruce Lee
Jumping Flash
Dark Souls
Platform Masters
where the argument about relative jump floatiness also becomes one of open vs linear design and dogged precision vs loose flow; where various established games like Mario (the famous variable gravity) and Tomb Raider can be seen as attempts to combine values from both tendencies; where the two lines split and start to differ tonally as well as mechanically, with the more martial spirit of one hardening against the loose abstraction of the other, so that early combinations (the enormous screen-high jumps in Fist of the North Star, the dogged restrictions of Donkey Kong) seem weirder in retrospect…
just a thought…
This is a huge question. Like, I don’t know if appreciate how much work you’re asking us to do.
I do like the of identifying a series of tensions as in thecatamites’ post and then working out a roughly chronological development series.
Any canon will be limited by scope. It’s harder with videogames because you’d need to decide how long an average person would take to play game x to learn the lesson you’re trying to teach them, and you’d need to leave enough wiggle room for people who are not-average, so that they can join the discussion (assuming you’re trying to create a St. John’s of Videogames).
Ideally this is what videogame academics would actually be spending their time developing instead of writing thesis papers no one will read, but alas.
And from the professional’s perspective, a lot of the experimental results are executed at a low enough quality level that we question whether the results are applicable or if participants are getting fixated on other aspects, you know, the teaching and engaging parts that are so hard to get right in the first place.
And when you start to question the rigor, the work being produced as experimental indies is more radical and questioning than almost all of the academic work.
there’s a podcast called “the canon” where devin faraci and amy nicholson talk about a movie and whether it belongs in “the canon” but they readily admit that the canon is pretty arbitrary and basically every episode they have some sort of debate about what “the canon” even is
any medium spends the first couple of decades emulating other media before finding its own medium-specific voice and running with it, and video games have JUST gotten out of that phase, so a video game canon needs to address how the game in question contributes to the uniqueness of the medium. the context of each work is super important as well, because we just don’t have as big of a body of work
honestly for me a curriculum for video games is basically half film school and the other half is translating the lessons learned about how films cultivate their experiences into a way that makes sense in video games
[quote=“Father.Torque, post:10, topic:2542, full:true”]This is a huge question. Like, I don’t know if appreciate how much work you’re asking us to do.
Ideally this is what videogame academics would actually be spending their time developing instead of writing thesis papers no one will read, but alas.
[/quote]
well, y’know, topic for discussion and all that. my own ‘education’ in videogames is so poor that i’m interested in getting more diverse and in-depth perspectives of what people think matters w.r.t. the medium.
i’m less interested by the amount of time it would take to play a given canon of games – calvino talks about this, in that even if you dedicated the whole of your life to reading ‘the classics’, there would still be shelves and shelves of fundamental works you haven’t read. but it might be interesting to try and classify what is ‘fundamental’ and what isn’t.
in the spirit of the debate i’ll throw out some early video games and let us consider whether, in the modern era, they are instrumental to play to understand the medium.
whether the playing of the game, in the modern era, must be faithful to the experience of playing the original (i.e., same controller, same hardware, or similar)
if there is a ‘canonical’ variant of the game in question (e.g., for tetris, specifying TGM instead of the original. or maybe, specifying the original and TGM as a supplement.)
This thread reminds me of a suspicion I have about academic canons of videogames and that they will tend to gravitate towards games that now would be seen as minimalist in some aesthetic sense because austerity is still a prized quality in the visual arts for its associations with formal and conceptual purity
Naturally, this only happens when a classic really works as such—that is, when it establishes a personal rapport with the reader. If the spark doesn’t come, that’s a pity; but we do not read the classics out of duty or respect, but only out of love. Except at school. And school should enable you to know, either well or badly, a certain number of classics among which—or in reference to which—you can then choose your classics. School is obliged to give you the instruments needed to make a choice, but the choices that count are those that occur outside and after school.
It is only by reading without bias that you might possibly come across the book that becomes your book. … In this way we arrive at a very lofty and demanding notion of what a classic is.
build yr own personal canon imo, the classics you have found to be fundamental
This will be easier to do once we have 2,000+ years of video games IMO
It reminds me of that thing Chuck Klosterman is on about lately, like in 500 years when most people have only ever heard of 1 Rock n Roll musician, who will it be etc.
This seems wrong, like it’s going on how archiving has tended to be done prior to the 20th/21st century. I mean, who knows how information is going to be stored 500 years from now (if we’re still around then), but I think current practices are much more conducive to giving a broader idea of what any given art’s practitioners are than were the practices of 15XX from any given country. There were also way less musicians 500 years ago than there are now
Way less composers anyway, and I am pretty sure that wherever musician was a professional class, it was not a well respected one. However I feel that the average person 500 years ago was more basically musically capable than average folk today.
I know we are talking theory instead of actually trying to come up with a canonical list of games (which I think is way more fun frankly) but the fact that no one has mentioned Doom yet is like, come on guys.