I've decided to start a blog to record the various weird ideas and rants I subject my friends and family to. Hopefully doing this will make life easier on said friends and family. A lot of these will be about games and gaming, specifically (as the title suggests) videogames as an artistic medium. It's an idea I am a huge proponent of, and one which colors a lot of my opinions on both the characters and politics of the gaming world, to say nothing of the actual games which are released. Other things I like may also slip in there. It's not really a blog "about" anything. I've decided to hit the ground running with my thoughts on Alan Wake.
I've spent the last few weeks talking up Alan Wake to anyone who'll care to listen. Part of my infatuation with it probably has something to do with the fact that it appears to have been custom-made for me. It's a plot-driven survival horror game about a writer's story about another writer. I think. It gets a little Metal Gear Solid 2 on you in the end, to be honest, but it is, none the less, an excellent game.
I say the game is a survival horror, but if I were, as a reviewer might be, judging it based on it's status as an entry to the genre, I would probably be less kind. The fact of the matter is that I call it a survival horror because that's the umbrella it falls under in our pre-designated genre mindset. It would be more accurately described as a suspense thriller of sorts. The story is intriguing and engaging throughout, but it seems to come at the expense of the visceral scares you get from, say, a Silent Hill game. I mention this because, for all the things Alan Wake does extremely well in terms of plot, character development, and even gameplay, it also seems to represent a handicap which is doing the industry, and the art form, a great disservice.
By far the weakest link in Alan Wake is the combat. Unlike other entries into this genre with unimpressive combat, the weakness doesn't stem from the controls, or the camera, or any sort of gameplay-related issue. The problem is, really, in enemy variety. Every enemy is killed the same way, some just easier than others. Bosses are underwhelming to the extent that you don't really know if you've killed one, and the "final boss" is incredibly easy and feels less like a climatic encounter and more like something the developers shoehorned in because "hey, we've got to have a final boss, right?" I'm not, believe it or not, saying that there should be a great deal of enemy variety in a game like this. What holds this game back are the arbitrary "rules" that come from being an entry into a pre-conceived genre, or from being a video game at all, for that matter.
The conventional wisdom of survival horror says that your humanlike zombie opponents need to be overwhelming in number, the conventional wisdom of being a game says that the entire experience needs to focus on combat. For all that Alan Wake does, and it does plenty, to excel in it's own character, and by it's own virtue, it is badly held back by elements which are rapidly becoming outdated. Not to say that there shouldn't be any combat in the game, or any mortal danger, but if this story were told through any other medium, it would be extremely out of place to spend the majority of it mowing down shadow-monsters. On the other hand, the game doesn't have to become a puzzle-based adventure game either. At this point, can we really not have an action game without constant violence? I'm not saying the shadow-monsters shouldn't exist, I'm saying that there should be fewer of them. Especially given the events beginning around the game's halfway point, there's a lot of room to make the game a struggle for survival without having to make the main character kill hundreds of (possible) human beings.
Bringing about mainstream acceptance of video games as an art form is going to require us to change our notions about what a game is, and should entail. I'm not calling for the end of violent games, far from it. I'm not even calling for the end of gratuitous violence. I'm just saying that a high body count should not be a necessity for a mature game. At this point it evidently is, and we are starting to see ourselves the worse for it.
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