Isometrics: What Is Literary Gaming Anyway?

After trying to get around to it for so long, It is time to actually explain what on earth it means to be “literary” about gaming...

Note: This Originally appeared on the website Geek Pride, and I will bring back a selection of my older articles and set up some form of archive. Most of my old articles are very much based on issues current at the time of writing, but this is really my statement of principles on what I feel Literary Gaming is. I will try and get a new article done by the weekend, this is just a stopgap because work has gotten busy the last few days. In the meantime, hope you enjoy!

Welcome to Isometrics, a magnanimous meta-commentary on the synapse-sparking literary world of computer and video games. I have been doing these Isometrics blogs for a while now, and the response has been really rather nice. I've had a little feedback, suggestions and probably a better proof-reading team than most politician, and most importantly to me got people to think about these issues and ideas in gaming that they hadn't before, and for all that I couldn't be more thankful.

Clearly bogus and overwrought pandering aside, there is a point to this, because I kind of have some unfinished business. You see, while I spent the last few weeks talking about Twitterfalls and Grand Theft Auto and games so bad they're brilliant while talking about the aliterative appeal of literary gaming, I've not actually explained what on earth I mean by that phrase.

“Literary Gaming”? Isn't that a contradiction in terms? You can't game with a book, after all. Or can you? I think it's time to settle once and for all what this blog is about – with some video game examples too!

I think the problem is that “Literature” outside of academic circles has a very concrete definition. It has to do with books, specifically, high culture high quality ones. For that matter, the subculture of gaming has a very ludocentric definition; it is the playing of games that matters and anything outside of that is considered ancillary. So by these definitions, “literary gaming” makes absolutely no sense, even less so then gaming literature.

It is at this point I end up going into dissertation mode and lose a lot of readers.

First of all, in the true literary critic spirit of being massively pedantic about everything, including definitions, the definition of literature is “written works”. This does not actually exclude video games, or indeed most art. I will spare you my long digressions into etymology (this time!), but suffice to say a written work can include a theatrical production, a film, a comic or even a video game.

Part of the reason for this is that all these works have written scripts of some kind, something that is doubled for a video game (a narrative script and the game code, itself a form of written script), but that's not entirely the reason. Writing is composition, it is an act of creation, of using a language for a particular purpose. There is nothing to say that this language may necessarily be a printed script, it may well be evocative drawings, vocal evocations, body language, framing, tone, timbre, musical composition, even a reliance on the audience filling in the blanks.

Gaming, despite the vernacular, isn't necessarily about playing a simple game, about interacting with a set of rules to reach a determined outcome. Gaming is about interaction, about experiencing a world, a universe, a story in a way personal (either in subtle or significant ways) to the individual player/reader. It can be about both rules and experience, and it can be about neither, such is the nature of video games. They are in theory all code but this code can be used to create very different effects, like a blank canvas on which anything from tax documents to works of abstract majestic art can be created.

The act of gaming, particularly in a game with a story is to fill in deliberately left blanks, like a version of mad-libs with a physics engine. Consider a game like Mass Effect for example, a great science fiction epic tale (one I've mentioned two weeks in a row!), that makes perfectly clear that you are interacting in the narrative, and that your actions within the game's universe have consequences, some more far reaching than even the game designers realised at first. These things are true of most games, to greater or lesser effect. Pong, for example allows your actions to affect the narrative of getting the score to 21 with the consequence being the end of the game.

And therein lies the way in which the two can coexist. If literature is just writing and gaming is just interaction, than both can easily coexist, given that by this level of abstraction the act of reading is gaming. This obviously is useless to us though, so a different tactic is needed. One that will tragically remove Pong from our venerable list of literary games.

For centuries Literature has concerned itself with the fundamental question of what it is, which has in itself created an incredibly vibrant array of different works, each addressing that question with different frameworks, levels of intensity and outcomes. This tradition has spread to video games, with a lot of games focused self-reflexively on the history of the medium, but also on evolution and progression. One of my favourite games last year was a little indie title called Evoland, which told the technical history of the RPG through the medium of an RPG, each treasure chest opened being a new feature that radically altered and added to the game's world. And of course on top of that you have games like the sensational Papers, Please, a game which demonstrates more powerfully than most the ways in which a game can craft a very unique literary experience. Many great works of fiction have been about dystopian areas and corruption, but Papers, Please took you through the experience of fear, and poverty and destitution and the inevitable corruption that follows is a choice of the player that is never actually made explicit. I won't talk any more about either of these games because I feel there is definitely enough to write full articles.

To point out, a game does not necessarily have to be literary to be of high or worthy quality in order to be good or enjoyable. Literary gaming as an idea, or a descriptor (for lack of a better word), isn't necessarily a barometer of quality. Many terrible books are still literature, and many terrible works are still art. What sets them apart is that literary games can be explored in frameworks similar to ones used in literature, and given the broad schools of thought within the literary world, far more games are included than excluded, and I focus on games with interesting points, not just games of high quality.

To sum up, literary gaming as a concept is an exploration of games as a unique medium for telling stories and presenting experiences, through combinations of narrative, interaction and art. It is a reaction to the increasing criticism among mechanics focused game players that games have to be games first, art second and literature never. It is a celebration of games that explore that particularly strange relationship that the reader and the writer have, unique to any other artistic medium in history. It is a particular focus and school of thought that does justice to an art form, a literary form that can provide experiences, tell stories and evoke theme, ideology and metaphor in a way never seen before.

It is a celebration of video games, video gaming and the great authorial figures behind it.

What is your take? Was my defence spirited or ludicrous? Are games literary? Was this entirely necessary and could I have talked about anything else this week? Drop me a line in the comments before, on the facebook group or on twitter, @HuggyDave. Using the hashtag #isometrics will do nothing, but make a kitten smile. See you next month for a very special Isometrics! Thanks for reading!

Isometrics: Does Violence Really Beget Violence? A Response to Michaël Samyn

DISCLAIMER: This is very long, and really can be summed up with "This article is wrong", but I had a lot to say about this topic. This isn't the Isometrics article for the week, that will come on Friday and be significantly more optimistic in tone. In the meantime, enjoy me spending 3500 words arguing about a 600 word thinkpiece!

Hello, welcome to Isometrics, the oddly confrontational gaze at the literary world of computer and video games. My general philosophy of doing long form writing is that it is primarily about informing, explaining, introducing and expressing a love for the wider world of video games, hoping to try and make the reader think about the games they play. That way players will appreciate them more. I end up slipping into current affairs too, but usually as the framework for a literary idea, and I don't ordinarily respond to other writers. However, what Michaël Samyn, co-founder of independent games companyTale of Tales brings up very much merits serious discussion, and I feel a full response would not only stop a lot of the misconceptions of more controversial aspects of his article, but also very much keep in line with Isometrics' aims to focus on gaming as an art and literary form at the same level as older more established ones.

To offer the slightest scrap of context, Tale of Tales was a company that specialised in very unique games, generally short mood pieces where the key was peace, exploration and the experience and subtleties of the game being their own reward. Their 2009 game The Path was arguably the best example of this working well. There is a stated goal, follow the path, and if you do you will complete the game in about three minutes. However straying away from the path leads to a very interesting, disorienting, dark and melancholic piece. They also had moving experiences like The Graveyard, a very short game about an elderly woman walking through a graveyard to a bench.

That's the entire game.

The difference between the demo and the full version was whether the lady died or not, which sums up in a nutshell what Tale of Tales were trying to achieve. They wanted to create games that could not be summed up by two people the same way and were experienced and thought of differently depending on how willing a player was to operate and interact with the game not just via player input but inner thought. They were thought provoking, interesting as much in concept as in execution, unique for their time (while art games obviously existed before Tale of Tales, they did not quite attempt the same things) and surprisingly influential on the latest wave of literary game developers, such as The Astronauts (The Vanishing of Ethan Carter), The Fulbright Company (Gone Home) and thechineseroom (Dear Esther, Amnesia: A Machine For Pigs).

What they were not was successful.

While their aspirations were laudable, they were ultimately missed by the wider gaming community. Their latest effort, the “Gamer-friendly” Sunset, sold 4000 copies, in part because the advertising was so terrible for it I did not hear about it until the day I decided to start this article. In the end though, while financial success is kind of needed to pay those bills that Kickstarter cannot fill, a game should not be judged on sales, and at some point I will hope to cover it.

In the meantime, Tale of Tales closed down and Samyn started a Patreon to create a blog about video games, which is certainly interesting from a designer's perspective, and the first major article to come out of this endeavour is entitled “Violence Begets Violence”. I apologise that this is generally regarded as bad form in academia, but the best way to cover this and not miss any points is to go paragraph by paragraph, so please click the link and read along will you?

The first paragraph is just setting his intentions to look at the “gigantic elephant in the tiny games room.” Now I am already in two minds about this. What he is referring to of course is the gigantic, medium altering, centre of academic gaming thought which is the issue of violence and gaming. He will get into more specific points later but the notion of this as a colossal entity dwarfing the gaming industry is a fitting metaphor in the sense that violence is an issue bigger than pretty much anything in life itself since it concerns the destruction of life, however we will see going forward that this is somewhat unintentional.

“A Peaceful Oasis” begins the first part, and covers the concept of Tale of Tales' first game, The Endless Forest. TEF was a MMO game where you played as a deer with a human face and explored a forest while interacting non-verbally with other players, identified via pictogram. At one's most generous, it could be described as a deconstruction of the goal-orientated, text heavy, chat heavy complicated MMORPGs which would begin to peak in 2005 with the first few expansion packs of World of Warcraft. As Samya recalls “[t]o avoid behavior (sic) that wouldn’t fit our fantasy we decided not to include combat, competition or even chat. As a result The Endless Forest offers a relaxing experience of friendly contact between complete strangers.” The intent was for it to be a living virtual piece of performance art but there was too much stripped out to make that particularly special.

It continues to claim that the community of the game is a “haven for all.” The issue with this halcyon vision of course is there has been situations where neither the game nor the actions of Samya and Auriea Harvey lived up to the peaceful ambitions. When members of the SomethingAwful forums started playing the game (and bleating forever), this led to one of the most bizarre conflicts between an army of deer who wouldn't shut up and the rulers of this virtual dominion, who destroyed everything and managed to end the Endless Forest, at least temporarily. This entirely baffling scenario does undermine the claim that TEF did not contain “violent interactions” and the atmosphere of friendliness did involve calling other players “penis fawns” and wishing their deer had machine guns so they could kill said phallic baby deer.

There is a point to this reminiscence about a ten year old MMO about nothing, and problems begin to emerge in their argumentation in what is appropriately enough called “A rough environment”. They explain TEF as a reactionary game against the bullying and harassment redolent in gaming communities, which is interesting given that the TEF community and Samya themselves are guilty of this. This then leads to first an implication of the connection between violent games and violent actions which lead to direct accusations of said connection. I will try to avoid belabouring the point about hypocrisy, and instead discuss the question of whether all trolls play Hatred and Call of Duty and all manner of MurderDeathKill-em-ups (except of course MDK 1 and 2. The swines!) that is clearly the thrust of their argument. One would suggest the burden of evidence is on the writer to prove that gaming trolls and bullies all even play those kinds of games before we even get to the point of discussing cultivation theory!

There is also, and admittedly this will sound like nitpicking but is a valid point, not a terribly clear definition of what violence they object to and where they draw the line. Their objection is stated as “antagonistic, aggressively competitive glorifications of violence and gore” which is mildly more helpful, however by this logic Super Meat Boy counts. Think about it, it's aggressively competitive, if you're trying to beat a friend's time it's antagonistic and it glorifies violence and gore by making it really cute! Often you can get away without important distinctions because the nature of the discussion makes it obvious. As much as I disagreed with the Target Australia view of Grand Theft Auto V, they at least made it clear the issues they had with the game, and why they felt it had to be removed from store shelves.

Now we have had some discussions, minor implications and explorations of alternative ways to make games, regardless of the result of said experiments. However paragraph five is basically where any cogent arguments are lost entirely. “We don’t need theories about the correlation between violent games and violent behavior.” Samya cries defiantly from within a homemade sand bunker.

Um, not to nitpick, but the claim you just made is in fact a theory.

Lexical nitpicking aside, there are several theories that have been applied to violent video games. The initial appeal of cultivation theory (the idea that behaviours learned from consistent and lengthy exposure to depictions of said behaviours mean children will internalise them, generally used to explore the issue of Power Rangers and it's “violence is always the answer” attitude early on) was that it provided a way to look at gaming as it related to its influences. These days there are more refined theories based around active viewing and catharsis which suggest that violent gaming has no or a positive reaction on player's behaviour. (http://gamepolitics.com/2014/06/27/research-bad-behavior-games-can-lead-pro-social-behavior-real-life#.VZ8IxvmZJYo) (http://gamepolitics.com/2015/04/16/university-missouri-researchers-find-violent-video-games-do-not-cause-aggression-adults-a) (http://gamepolitics.com/2014/11/05/research-no-correlation-between-violent-media-consumption-and-societal-violence). While there isn't a complete consensus yet to acquit violent media (in part because no research body seems to have found a consensus for doing such a test), to dismiss all of that so bullishly is the pseudoacademic equivalent of sticking your fingers in your ears and screaming that you can't hear anything. Except more arrogant.

The paragraph of course doubles down on this and argues that not only is the issue of whether violent games influence or violent people flock to violent games is irrelevant, but that “[a]nyone who has ever been attacked by a gamer lynch party knows that a certain number of people who play antagonistic and violent games are aggressive, intolerant, reactionary, misogynist, and so on.” I have many problems with this, but what tops the bill must be that classic weaselly appeal to common knowledge to support a rhetoric that in practice means nothing. It's very much true that a “certain number” of people who play violent games are all those nasty things, but at the same time, a “certain number” of said aggressive, intolerant reactionary misogynist hamburger eating monsters do pretty much anything on earth, because a “certain number” is a completely meaningless term. They could be breathing, listening to indie folk, working in an office, playing games where they play as creepy deer then threaten to shoot people who moo. It's the worst, most dangerous kind of rhetoric, because it presents something completely normal as a shocking, horrible thing caused by one specific thing. It's the literary equivalent of those “CONTAINS VITAMINS AND CALCIUM” stickers you see on health bars.

Lynch mobs suck, especially on the internet, since the fear is of how far it will infect and corrode the rest of your life. The people who've been forced to travel with full security teams to engagements because of bomb, gas and other threats on their lives are utterly utterly abominable. It is also fair to say they do not represent all, or even a large amount of video game players. Even so, perhaps this is just a call to avoid overt glorification. Some games like the mildly reprehensible Hatred toe the line between satirically violent and meaning everything they say, and the outcry, while ultimately going too far in getting the game banned, did open a debate about the exact concern people have with violence in gaming and when it moves beyond red pixels animating over a polygonal model that looks like a person and into behaviour that is more concerning. There is a debate to be had and maybe it is ironically enough a passionate plea for diversity in game design that errs too aggressively.

I thought this right up until I read the next paragraph.

“Hypocritical industry” begins by accusing the game industry of creating the horrible violence obsessed players for profit. In pretty much those words:

“The game industry actively breeds a group of belligerent hooligans for profit.”

There is so much to unpackage in that single sentence that it is to a degree absurd. First of all, this goes beyond cultivation theory, this accuses mainstream Triple A developers of brainwashing and creating actively hostile, negative groups of gamers to make money. There are plenty of horrible things the industry has done, including the removal of a sexual relationship for Nilin in Dontnod's fascinating flop Remember Me because it would allegedly scare male gamers to play a sexually active woman. There was also the removal of Elizabeth from Bioshock Infinite boxes because the manly man's cover apparently focus tested better. Also, lest we forget the utterly appalling things said by the project manager of the 2013 remake of Tomb Raider, including that Lara would be nearly raped and that the game is designed to make the player want to coddle and protect her. At the same time however, it is one thing to accuse the game of pandering to a particular audience and quite another to say they breed a particularly hostile one. He goes on to say that it creates a vicious cycle of only violent games selling and being made, a claim that is only credible if you take a very loose definition of violence in games. Would Mario Kart 8 for example, a cutesely fun Kart Racer where you can throw turtle shells at mushrooms be violent for example? Or Hearthstone, an incredibly popular and successful (albeit free to play) game? What about games where the intent is to avoid violence like Thief? Even if we focus on multiplayer games where would the Squid/Kid-based Ink-em-up Splatoon fit? How about Elite Dangerous, a game where you can choose to be completely pacifist? The point is that this is a gigantic claim that hasn't been quantified so we don't even know if it is true.

This isn't helped by the next paragraph which accuses the game industry of hypocrisy if game devs “produce and support entertainment where the killing or wounding of others is central to the amusement.” In a situation like this, where would a game which uses violent action to completely deconstruct the narrative of violent war games fit in this? Because some games do indeed use graphic violence to make particular points such as Spec Ops: The Line, one of the greatest examples of storytelling in video games. Speaking of great literary adaptations, I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream was an intensely gory, horrid, disturbing game, but it used every element of its nightmarish atmosphere and events to make particularly interesting points about the human condition, particularly the human condition in crisis. I would not necessarily describe them as “entertainment where the killing or wounding of others is central to the amusement (emphasis mine).” per se, however they are absolutely vital to the narrative, themes and metaphors being expressed. To remove the violence in those games would remove the entire central point of those games. And yet, despite that, these games read as distinctly pacifist, or at least discretionary in terms of violent content. They are art pieces that use violence as a vital element of their subject matter and to argue these games are creating a culture of culturally-shut out violent sociopaths is completely missing the point and advocating for an incredibly dangerous precedent of censorship: one I would not expect from the developer of The Path.

Samyn does at least note that this probably is not meant to be malicious, despite the particularly hostile wording of the initial claim, however, comparing violent media to weaponry is such false equivalence it is difficult to come up with an appropriate comparison to make. It is like comparing reading a cookbook to eating lunch, in that it is at best tangentially related to any given violent act. Violent media does depict violence, that is a kind of truism, but there are so many steps that go in between a particularly abstract depiction of a violent act and committing a violent act oneself. Samyn follows the standard Thompsonian/Whitehousian argument that a violent game is worse than a violent film because you actually take part in the violence yourself, but at the same time I'd argue the opposite, because the violence would enacts in video games requires inputs far removed from video games.

The final part “We can do better” is difficult to comment on without getting very angry at its patronising, reductionist assumptions about video gamers. However, it is hard to argue about introducing more gamers to games that showcase a beauty in life, a beauty of interaction, of the world, of relationships, of peace. That is very true, and the best start to this sort of dialogue is not to make the assumption your audience is sociopathic. The second step is to make good games with these regards in mind.

The problem with a lot of Tale of Tales games was that they were intentionally niche in design, which mean they were often inpenetrable and difficult to play conventionally on purpose. This includes Sunset, their self proclaimed “gamer friendly” game, which wasn't the easiest thing. I can think of many great games that are both fun to play and present interesting messages about peace, tolerance, respect and other positive themes. Nintendo seems to be very good about creating these sorts of games with interesting ideas, although generally they don't aim for particularly deep meaningful things. There is also the incredibly gorgeous Toren, although that does have sword play at times. We are in the midst of a Kickstarter-powered adventure game boom, Minecraft is still one of the most successful games of all time and that provides so many messages about the importance of observation, the beauty of simplicity and punching trees to collect wood. A bit more of an obscure example, Soleil teaches tolerance and respect, through a deconstruction of the hero's journey.

There are certain loaded terms that cannot be used in the gaming community without ridicule, and one of them is “Murder Simulator.” It is a phrase that has a lot of baggage, needless to say, and I don't recall being used unironically for almost a decade by this point. For younger gamers and those without memories that long, Murder Simulator was a catchphrase used by disbarred Florida lawyer, anti-games advocate and one time GamerGate supporter Jack Thompson, basically implying that games actively teach people to kill. It was hilarious, partly because it was an idea that only made sense if you didn't think about it at all, partly because Jack Thompson was such a cartoon villain of gaming culture but mostly because anyone who has played a “simulator” game knows that they generally aren't programmed well enough to be realistic. We also have a problem once again with criteria, which was Thompson's issue as well. Thompson's targets were typically limited to whichever Rockstar game was out that particular month however Samyn doesn't seem to be very clear with which games are objectionable.

The problem with a lot of this article is that it reads like sour grapes. It is arguably better documented that Sunset was a failure than the game was even advertised, and due to the strong pacifist tones of many of Tale of Tales' games, it is easy to scapegoat their failure as a hunger for violent media brought upon by those eeeeevil major developers and their money and enjoyable games. I do believe it is completely petty and untoward to accuse game developers of criminal negligence vis á vis wrongful death by choosing to make violent media.

It is one thing to find a game like Hatred problematic due to its somewhat questionable depiction of an anti-heroic spree killer, or GTA V's torture scene to be unnecessary in context despite the establishment of your protagonist as a sadistic psychopath. An open debate showcases that there are many ways to create games and how it can progress in all sorts of directions to be even more fun and explore ever deeper themes, and how games can tackle difficult subjects in tactful emotive ways.

It is quite sad reading this, seeing someone with interesting though not perfect ideas be so bitter and blinded by purpose, unaware that the issues surrounding gaming's culture are not merely found within but outside of the games we play. Samyn is absolutely right in that we can be better, and honestly reading this made me feel like I do need to keep writing Isometrics, to showcase a gaming world where this is indeed the case, albeit not always to major critical or commercial success.

I just hope Mr Samyn also opts to channel this apprehension positively as well.

Isometrics: Is There Such a Thing as a Gaming Auteur?

Auteurs: the great powerful entities of the cinematic world, and a theory about how the authorship of a work goes beyond the written word. But does this idea of great artists uniting a team under a singular vision gel with the technical nature of video games? David Rose investigates...

Welcome to Isometrics, the long-dormant look at the literary world of computer and video games. Currently we're in a fairly interesting world of gaming, with lots of interesting news, but right now I want to talk about the Auteur theory. So while there's plenty to talk about with regards to commercial ethics, Steam Refunds, major releases being so buggy on launch they were recalled from entire platforms and the next wave of great Kickstarter games, for now we are going to discuss something that closely approximates literary criticism.

The Auteur Theory, commonly attributed to François Truffaut and the writers of the French periodical Cahiers du Cinéma (Literally translating to “Notebooks on Cinema”), primarily concerns itself with the notion of creation or authorship in a film. Unlike a work of fiction or even a scripted theatrical piece, where there is a clear author and often therefore a person (or small group of people) to ascribe particular stylistic, narrative, metaphorical and other literary quirks to, a film is usually a massive undertaking with a team of dozens, sometimes hundreds working to bring a project to fruition. In that sheer sea of humanity, who is the author? And given the multiple forms the language of cinema takes (photography, performance, framing along with the narrative content of the script), what does it mean to be the creator? This is simplifying, but the Auteur in cinema is the driving creative force, which in many cases is a role the director shoulders. A good director, so it is argued by proponents, unifies the creative process, and ultimately creates a film which has the particular fingerprint of that director.

Segue into the world of film aside, what does this have to do with video games that have evolved from the FMV watchathons of the 1990s? Well video games, much like films fall into that difficult critical territory of being designed by a large swathes of very creative people, and so can any one person really claim to be the captain of a creative vessel, steering the concept through his vision? Besides, given that the main artistic disciplines are so diverse and multi-stranded (A single author must ensure that gameplay, art assets, narrative, music and enough technical capabilities to put them all together work to create a unified whole).

Now before we go any further, I'm not necessarily talking about one man projects, or even projects with teams you can count on one hand, since the author of a one man project is pretty self-evident. The main interrogative thread is that, given the spate of incredibly successful kickstarters by famous video game developers, what the meaning is, if any, of a by-line in a video game. Is it simple marketing, or is there something to be said for the ability of a single artist who can bring these assets together? The best place to start is probably the most obvious.

Hideo Kojima is a name that either you are familiar with, or you haven't played enough games. The ace game designer at Konami and a man who revolutionised gaming in countless ways through game of the year after game of the year after game of the century. He's probably one of the easiest examples of gaming auteur to show in many ways, in part because his style owes at least a little to fellow auteur Quentin Tarrentino. His works are unashamedly postmodern: built on medium bending, genre manipulation and using that fragile nature of the game's reality as a powerful tool. There is a distinct style to his work, and that is what makes a game instantly recognisable as his, despite massive differences in game engines, technical sophistication, gameplay genre, setting, mood, atmosphere and even intent. Pretty much every game he's been involved him has some kind of fingerprint, from the metafictional construct of PT, through the bizarre and highly innovative solutions redolent in games like Snatcher to the delightfully literal solution to the insular nature of gaming found in Boktai.

Kojima is a very obvious case, and were the accusation that he desires to make films more than games actually to come to pass, he would probably be considered an auteur in that as well. But gaming doesn't quite play as simple a game as that, and a designer/director/project lead can show his/her influence in other ways. Roberta Williams' uncompromising attitude manifests very clearly not merely in the brutal and often sadistic levels of death her poor players suffer when playing any given King's Quest, but through a diverse legacy of adventure games that pushed the genre to new heights commercially, creatively and technologically.

On a similar note, Shigeru Miyamoto's fervered belief in “kyokan” (literally “feel-one” but generally refers to empathetic research based around emotional connections) is the emotional heart that Nintendo built its empire around and shows in an astoundingly diverse body of work and his influence will likely live forever in developers he has influenced.

The ever-controversial Peter Molyneux certainly counts as well, with his particular focus being the interaction between the player and the world in which they interact, which manifests in his god games (Populous, Black and White, Godus), his devil games (Dungeon Keeper), is paid particular focus in the Fable series with somewhat mixed results, and even his odd management sims like Theme Hospital. His incredible habit of overpromising on his games sheds even further light into this particular theme.

Finally, there is Kenji Eno, the force behind WARP software, and as interesting as he was when I covered all his US-released games. His distinct desire to not play by the standard rules and conventions of video games and his theories about the future of virtual media led to concepts like the virtual actor, games trying to be films to the point that they have a film-like length, games with invisible monsters and basically every single bizarre thing about D2 that wasn't a direct homage to Hideo Kojima.

So a gaming auteur (what's even the word? A Gáuteur?) can come from many different disciplines and bring a style in different ways. The key to each of these examples, as well as the other (Yu Suzuki, Suda51, Swery65) gaming auteurs out there is that they bring a style, a distinct vision and their own quirks that for better and worse identify them as the driving force behind a particular game. I could probably write a somewhat hefty book if I tried to cover every single gáuteur out there, but here's a small taster of how the Auteur theory applies to gaming, something we will cover in greater detail once I start showcasing the more literary examples mentioned here, along with a bunch of other crazy theories.

This doesn't mean of course that the rest of the team don't matter. Far from it, team management ultimately is the most important weapon in any auteur's arsenal, and it is even more important in gaming with the incredible amount of dependent artistic and technological parts to games. To answer the question more directly if the fact I'm trying to come up with pretentious words doesn't provide enough clarity: Yes, there absolutely is such a thing as a gaming auteur, and the fact that these authorial developers are influential, important and design incredible games in most if not every genre is a rather large smoking gun in any argument that games are a thriving art form.

All the people who bought Metal Gear Solid can't be wrong...

Hello there. Many thanks for reading Isometrics. It's been months since I've had the time and the opportunity to really get back into writing articles about something I love so much in an academic manner. The plan is to do an article a week at first, being put up on a Wednesday, though that may increase if I have time, and I may do some special articles concerning particular issues. The plan is not to cover as many current events and instead focus on gaming's place in wider literary debates. Hope you enjoy, and if you have questions, thoughts or names of Auteurs I missed (I didn't even name ten, and didn't even mention Geoff Crammond or Will Wright), feel free to drop me a line on Twitter @HuggyDave, in a comment below or on Facebook (look up David Rose – Writer).