Television will rot your brain. Heavy metal makes you worship Satan. Dungeons & Dragons will make you a homicidal lunatic. These are all claims I have heard growing up, and the people who said them honestly believed them. Of course, television has also brought us “Sesame Street”, heavy metal has introduced millions to Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Dungeons & Dragons has taught many lonely, lonely young men how to do math. (They’re still lonely, though.)

As Ian Bogost et al note in their article “Documentary”, “[c]ontroversy is nothing new for video games – it is a medium that has been accused of inspiring prurience, brutality, and sloth for decades.” This puts video games in excellent company, particularly as they attempt to make the difficult transition from entertainment to documentary. However, despite all of the strengths that video games bring to the genre, there are certain inherent qualities to video games that have to be taken into consideration along the way, qualities that may be more easily masked than in other mediums.

As N. Katherine Hayles has suggested, “print is flat, code is deep”. This “flatness” applies equally well to film. Video games have an underlying structure that, while they may seem to offer more freedom of control in a given environment, still do not reflect the real world. The programmers make the rules, and those rules can shape the outcome either blatantly (such as with Kuma\War, wherein the player’s actions are tightly constrained to reflect John Kerry’s account of events), or subtlety (such as with JFK Reloaded, wherein the game physics define the possibility of “making the shot”). By shaping the outcome in this way, the programmer has the option of shaping the narrative despite any protestations of objectivity (such as Kuma’s insistence that “the players can decide for themselves”).

Another way that games’ protean nature allows them to differ from more traditional media is in presenting procedural reality. Rather than creating a specific situation with established characters in a linear story, a situation is created with a rule set that players engage with and make their own decisions. This gives the illusion of freedom and a lack of bias, but invokes Noah Wardrip-Fruin’s argument that “we must read both process and data.” How the character interacts with the scenario is dictated by the rules as they are provided, and choices are constrained both by the data given and the processes set forth. As an example, the game Peacemaker involves several sets of variables that include potential points of bias. How each “leader” is programmed to respond to a situation, the resources given to work with, and even the intermediary goals can be opportunities to shape the overall narrative, as well as the fact that the only available solution is a two-state solution.

While video games have great potential as documentary, they are no more or less objective in nature than their predecessors, and it is important to be aware of the ways that they will be manipulated, by their creators, their supporters, and their detractors.

Gilles  Deleuze identifies in his essay “Postscript on the Societies of Control” his vision of the evolution of Foucault’s “disciplinary societies”, defined as the family, the school, the factory, the hospital, and the prison, and particularly focused on the factory. He purports to identify a crisis, in particular as the nebulous and shadowy (though never quite defined) “administrations in charge” demand reforms, and claims we are moving toward “societies of control”. He then proceeds to engage in fairly standard decrying of technological and social advancement, with particular attention being given to capitalism and the old workhorse, the corporation. It would be easier to take his arguments as being less politically motivated and more a matter of serious and immediate concern where it not for two issues: his historical treatment of capitalism and his clearly biased approach to labor unions.

When approaching capitalism, he offers the barest fig leaf of suggesting that capitalism conquers “sometimes by specialization…sometimes by lowering the costs of production”, but more significantly focuses on “nineteenth- century capitalism is a capitalism of concentration, for production and for property… the capitalist being the owner of the means of production but also, progressively, the owner of other spaces conceived through analogy (the worker’s familial house, the school)”. He then goes on to define the new capitalism as a mutation, and the corporation as the embodiment of that mutation, one that is dispersive, wherein “[t]he family, the school, the army, the factory are no longer the distinct analogical spaces that converge towards an  owner-state  or private power-but coded  figures- deformable and  transformable-of a single corporation that now has only stockholders” and “[c]orruption thereby gains a new power”.

Contrasting this is his treatment of unions, “their history of struggle against the disciplines or within the spaces of enclosure, will they be able to adapt themselves or will they give way to new forms of resistance against the societies of control? Can we already grasp the rough outlines of these coming forms, capable of threatening the joys of marketing?” This assumption that unions, which can be argued to be a form of control equivalent to any corporation of their own, as the path to resistance against societal control in the form of corporations, is counter-intuitive. It is also deterministic, which seems to defy the very essence of defying resisting “societies of control”.

Given the decidedly mixed history of unions over the course of labor relations both in the US and abroad, as well as the mixed benefits and tragedies that corporations have brought, it is far from given that capitalism, or corporations, are completely bad, or that unions are unvarnished good. To craft a narrative that casts either in such an absolute light makes it difficult to give anything else he has to say in his article any amount of credibility.

In both “From Additive to Expressive Form” and “Print Is Flat, Code Is Deep: The Importance of Media-Specific Analysis”, Janet H. Murray and N. Katherine Hayles respectively touched on the same point regarding digital storytelling: it is not enough to simply analyze the content of the narrative being presented, we have to consider the capabilities of the medium and how they shape the experience of the story being told.

“From Additive to Expressive Form” focused on the interactive and expressive elements of digital media, both of which brought to mind for me the rise in plot elements of video games over the last thirty years (quite possibly because of the mention of Zork). When video games first came out, something as simple as Space Invaders was sufficient; the bad guys come down, you shoot at them until they finally get you. Now even fighting games like Tekken feel the need for plot lines, and deeper story driven games like Skyrim  are wildly successful. However implicit in each of these narratives is still a particular view of the world; even in games where any path is open to you, some are denoted as “good” and others as “bad”, and there is a defined sense of morality.

An example from “Print Is Flat” that I found particularly notable was the discussion of the historical consideration of what literature was: “Consistently in these discourses, material and economic considerations, although they had force in the real world, were elided or erased in favor of an emphasis on literary property as an intellectual construction that owed nothing to the medium in which it was embodied.” I immediately thought of my mother reading The Hunger Games  in paperback, some person listening to it as read by the author on CD, my wife reading it on her Kindle, and myself seeing the movie. Did we all really experience the same story? Did any of us? Taking it the step further and thinking about the interactive and expressive elements of digital media, what if we got to decide the order in which we experienced the story, or which elements of it? What about a game based in that world? Will it still be the same narrative? Obviously not, so how do we compare it to the original story, or others? What criteria do we use? Or does it become something completely different, like trying to compare a painting to a novel?