I’ve discussed the incongruity of comparing videogames to movies here before, but the discussion about when gaming will receive its “Citizen Kane” has reached new heights, and they are ridiculous. It seems the King, or in this case Queen, has been crowned: Metroid Prime is, apparently, the Citizen Kane of games.
Michael Thomsen of ign.com went on national television to let everyone know. Thanks, Mike.
To take a quick stab at this: is the comparison between Citizen Kane and Metroid Prime really apt? The Metroid experience has been iterated several times over the years. Citizen Kane was the first and last film to feature Kane, and it seems many critics agreed it did so perfectly. Samus has had plenty of adventures before she appeared in the Prime series, and she’s had plenty since, with more to come. What if, down the road, there appears a more definitive version of Metroid than Prime? Whoops.
I could go on about why I don’t think Metroid Prime is a genre-defining candidate capable of speaking for the industry, but it would only belay my point that the comparison doesn’t matter in the first place.
The thing that really grinds my gears about this isn’t that it was Metroid Prime that was chosen to represent the entire medium of gaming; it’s more that I am becoming frustrated and disappointed in the games industry doggedly trying to get approval from people who don’t care about the artistic integrity of games because they simply do not care about games to begin with. The ‘other side’ we are trying to convince doesn’t have a stake in whether or not games are artistic. Proving artistic merit won’t convert some invisible group of would-be gamers that are just waiting for a cue from critics to adopt the hobby. It’s like expecting someone to love a painting on the basis that it is legitimate enough to be shown in an art gallery. Even if we prove that games can be art there will still be people that don’t like games. I wonder sometimes if this search for approval is actually just a desperate bid for validation so that gamers will finally have something to shoot back with when someone tells them “games are for kids.” We shouldn’t be striving to stick it to people that clearly don’t care enough about games to think outside of stereotypes.
Simply put, the search for the Citizen Kane of games is embarrassing. The Citizen Kane of games, when it arrives, won’t be known as “The Citizen Kane of Games” because it will be completely valid in its own right. Citizen Kane isn’t known as the Beowulf of film. The definitive game won’t need to be measured against Citizen Kane, or anything else for that matter. If it is truly the definitive realization of the maturation of games, it will be completely unique to gaming and necessarily incomparable to anything from another medium because what it does wouldn’t be possible in any other medium. It wouldn’t mimic the characteristics of an industry-defining movie, precisely because it would be a game and not a movie. The best point I’ve heard all week to this effect:
“Every now and then someone tries to sell a game by claiming it’s cinematic, meaning that it’s an interactive experience that apes a non-interactive medium. It’s the equivalent of a film consisting entirely of text scrolls in order to be more like a book.” – Ben Croshaw, Zero Punctuation
The validation of games will happen when it is no longer sought after. When we stop attempting to measure games against the successes of other mediums, we might be clear-thinking enough to realize that games aren’t justifiably comparable to other media. There is no one-to-one ratio for games to movies, comic books or anything else. That is why the industry has succeeded and failed in its own right, independent of
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