Twiglight Princess and the Dangers of Wii-mersion
Hello everyone, sorry it's been some time since I posted but the blogger hamster was displeased with me for some reason but I believe all the issues have been worked out. Anyway, I'm sorry I missed the dinner (as you can tell form the timestamp) but I injured my ribs earlier and I'm writing this from the doctor's office.
Anyway, my roommate finally tracked down a Wii over the weekend and me and him played through most of The Legends of Zelda: Twilight Princess. The series is one of the biggest epics in video games - it is known for sweeping visuals and fantastic dungeons. This game, along with perhaps Final Fantasy (which has become steadily more of a steam-punk work over time) are fantasies greatest examples in the field of video games.
Twilight Princess was originally planned for Nintendo's GameCube but was moved to the Wii to push to new console. It worked, as the Wii has become the fastest selling console ever. However, The Wii has never quite sat well with me. I played it over the weekend and found all the elements of past Zelda games, yet something was different. When I stopped playing I realized what it was: the Wii's highly touted "immersion" was ruining the game!
Let's take a quick detour to Berlin in 1930. Bertolt Brecht, one of the greatest playwrights in history responsible for such masterpieces of opera as Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny and Threepenny Opera (which most of you will recognize as the original vehicle for the song "The Ballad of Mack the Knife" later redone by Bobby Darin). In the notes to the former Brecht included an essay, "The Modern Theater is the Epic Theater". In this essay Brecht differentiates his works, which he calls Epic Theater, from the Dramatic Theater - descended from Aristotle and Sophocles. He claimed that while the Dramatic Theater was "culinary" and superficial Epic Theater was designed to focus on narrative and theme rather than on plot. The primary difference that he sets forward is a reformulation of ostranenie as the "alienation effect" (Verfremdungseffekt).
In other words, while most other theatrical efforts had been to make the spectator identify with the characters Brecht sought to distance the spectator from the characters (thus the idea has become known as Brechtian distanciation). This device is aimed at turning the spectator into an observer but arousing his capacity for action. The idea is to keep the spectator from being caught up in the plot and focused on the themes and ideas behind the work. The spectator does not get swept away by a good story but instead can see the nuts and bolts of the piece. Maybe the greatest film director of all time, Jean-Luc Godard, used this theory in his New Wave films which redefined what a film could be.
Now back to Zelda. The idea behind the Wii is that the player be put in a position where he feels the character on the screen to be an extension of himself. The Wii is the exact opposite of Brecht's argument. The player is not allowed to see the nuts and bolts of the game, they cannot separate the narrative from the plot and the game acts as a suggestion rather than an argument. While it is true that games are still a very immature medium and few people have stepped up and contributed a video game worthy of any sort of artistic consideration (at least very few commercially successful games) the potential for that artistic depth is there. However, with the Wii the industry has taken a step backwards, rather than an artful jump-cut or ironic anti-cinematic device we are presented with the 21st century version of 3-d glasses.
Is Zelda fun? Of course it is, but shouldn't video games be something more than that by now? Sartre said that "one is not a writer because one has chosen to say certain things, but because one has chosen to say them in a certain way." If the Wii becomes the success it looks like it will be, then why should people care about the way a message is conveyed, they are too busy swinging a remote. Maybe, I am afraid of new things but I fear that a generation will grow up with the Wii, unable to make that crucial separation of narrative and plot and this will spread to other mediums. Anyway, this is just a thought I had that may have nothing to do with the class but thought I would share.
Anyway, my roommate finally tracked down a Wii over the weekend and me and him played through most of The Legends of Zelda: Twilight Princess. The series is one of the biggest epics in video games - it is known for sweeping visuals and fantastic dungeons. This game, along with perhaps Final Fantasy (which has become steadily more of a steam-punk work over time) are fantasies greatest examples in the field of video games.
Twilight Princess was originally planned for Nintendo's GameCube but was moved to the Wii to push to new console. It worked, as the Wii has become the fastest selling console ever. However, The Wii has never quite sat well with me. I played it over the weekend and found all the elements of past Zelda games, yet something was different. When I stopped playing I realized what it was: the Wii's highly touted "immersion" was ruining the game!
Let's take a quick detour to Berlin in 1930. Bertolt Brecht, one of the greatest playwrights in history responsible for such masterpieces of opera as Aufstieg und Fall der Stadt Mahagonny and Threepenny Opera (which most of you will recognize as the original vehicle for the song "The Ballad of Mack the Knife" later redone by Bobby Darin). In the notes to the former Brecht included an essay, "The Modern Theater is the Epic Theater". In this essay Brecht differentiates his works, which he calls Epic Theater, from the Dramatic Theater - descended from Aristotle and Sophocles. He claimed that while the Dramatic Theater was "culinary" and superficial Epic Theater was designed to focus on narrative and theme rather than on plot. The primary difference that he sets forward is a reformulation of ostranenie as the "alienation effect" (Verfremdungseffekt).
In other words, while most other theatrical efforts had been to make the spectator identify with the characters Brecht sought to distance the spectator from the characters (thus the idea has become known as Brechtian distanciation). This device is aimed at turning the spectator into an observer but arousing his capacity for action. The idea is to keep the spectator from being caught up in the plot and focused on the themes and ideas behind the work. The spectator does not get swept away by a good story but instead can see the nuts and bolts of the piece. Maybe the greatest film director of all time, Jean-Luc Godard, used this theory in his New Wave films which redefined what a film could be.
Now back to Zelda. The idea behind the Wii is that the player be put in a position where he feels the character on the screen to be an extension of himself. The Wii is the exact opposite of Brecht's argument. The player is not allowed to see the nuts and bolts of the game, they cannot separate the narrative from the plot and the game acts as a suggestion rather than an argument. While it is true that games are still a very immature medium and few people have stepped up and contributed a video game worthy of any sort of artistic consideration (at least very few commercially successful games) the potential for that artistic depth is there. However, with the Wii the industry has taken a step backwards, rather than an artful jump-cut or ironic anti-cinematic device we are presented with the 21st century version of 3-d glasses.
Is Zelda fun? Of course it is, but shouldn't video games be something more than that by now? Sartre said that "one is not a writer because one has chosen to say certain things, but because one has chosen to say them in a certain way." If the Wii becomes the success it looks like it will be, then why should people care about the way a message is conveyed, they are too busy swinging a remote. Maybe, I am afraid of new things but I fear that a generation will grow up with the Wii, unable to make that crucial separation of narrative and plot and this will spread to other mediums. Anyway, this is just a thought I had that may have nothing to do with the class but thought I would share.
Labels: brechtian distanciation, overrated consumer electronics, video games
posted by Brian at 2:13 PM
3 Comments:
I agree with you Brian that the wii is a step backwards instead of forwards. Swinging a remote does not seem to me to be any sort of new immersion in a game. Actually, it seems to be a distraction from the games as they were written. There is something to be said for the old WASD. One of the most immersive games, in my opinion, and one of my favorites is Final Fantasy VII. This game has the best elements of both Dramatic Theatre and Epic Theatre. This is one of those games that has all the pretties, but has some meat to back it up. I don't want to get started on a diatribe about FF7, so I'll get down to it. One of the best parts about FF7 is that the player is clearly in control of part of the story yet is forced into certain situations due to the narrative. That was the entire point of cutscenes. The cutscenes, aside from being an outlet by which developers could show off, were created to narrate the story between the times when the player decided what to do.
Just so I'm not railing completely on the Wii, the removal of the "nuts and bolts" is becoming more and more common in the actual gameplay, citing Half-Life 2. There are no cut-scenes, no real points at which the player simply sits and watches. The entire game is played out by the player. The nuts and bolts manifest themselves outside the gameplay, though. Half-Life2:Episode 1 has a feature by which you can see what the developers were thinking or how they did something, etc. So, by removing the nuts and bolts from the gameplay, the developers are providing an entirely separate outlet for the nuts and bolts and providing much more than previously available.
Wow, I really didn't expect to write that much. Sorry.
This may be from a lack of experience with Nintendo consoles and the Zelda games, but I really like the immersion into the gameplay. Twilight Princess is my first Zelda game to actually play (though I've already given it up). I really like how I get to fish and sword fight. To me, this adds a whole other element to the gameplay that makes it worthwhile. (This is also coming from someone who loves larping :D) To me, the immersion of Twilight Princess is bringing us a step closer to virtual reality systems. Now that's what I'm looking forward to: full scale immersion into the video gaming world! Imagine WoW and running back to your corpse after being one-shotted by some mage.
So, my ranting aside, I don't know if the scale of immersion in Twilight Princess ruins it or not; the few cut scenes I've seen have been okay. I'm usually more concerned with gameplay rather backgrond :)
I haven't yet had the chance to play Twilight Princess (though I have played the other various Zelda games), but I did mess around on a Wii at Best Buy a few weeks ago, and I have to admit, I don't particularly like it. The remote aspect seems to take away a lot of the sort of "fine-tuning" manipulation that you get with normal controllers and the wider physical action seems to make it rather awkward (though it could just be that I'm not partucalarly good at it, I don't know). I'm also pretty paranoid about the "remote" aspect dying out at some critical point, but that's probably just me too. Anyway, my actual point is that I wonder if this sort of gaming doesn't decrease the dexterity and hand-eye coordination benefits that one can get from nornal gaming since the movements seem so exaggerated.
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