Is the World Ready for Dramatic Video Games? or Do We Already Have Them?

I recently read an opinion piece stating that it may be time to develop a video game based not on the premise of action/adventure, but drama. It's difficult to define drama as genre without saying what it's not: drama is action without action, horror without horror, comedy without the comedy. Drama is the vanilla of the modern entertainment industry.

I think the author of the aforementioned opinion piece was suggesting that you could make a game based on talking to people, exploring complex social interactions and emotional responses, and doing many of the things that are often inserted between gun battles, car chases, and daring escapes in the 'adventure' games. But the idea got me thinking about drama and how much there already is in gaming.

First, the modern gamer is often a performer of sorts, whether he's pumping quarters at the arcade, showing off his skills on his own couch to a room full of friends, or playing online to a thousand pairs of eyes and an all-seeing scoreboard. There's a reason that 'dance', 'play', and 'act' are confounded in many of the world's languages; the talented player taking one half of a fight in Street Fighter or Mortal Kombat is not that far removed from the puppeteer with his hands on the strings of a Punch or Judy. Indeed, an arcade game's cabinet is evocative of the microcosmic stage.

Second, both video games and the theater are representations of real life that face similar limitations. Both have a limit on the number of distinct characters and sets, and resort to creative ways to reuse them. Both have historically had a problem with dialogue, and so both have a rich history of pantomime. The French dramatist Antonin Artaud (1896-1948) argued that language is antithetical to theater, and advocated a return to a violent, ritualistic "theater of cruelty" with an emphasis on gesture, movement, sound, and rhythm: things that video games offer aplenty.

Third, video games and ancient theatre share an obsession with death and resurrection. Every major character from Pac-Man to Master Chief has been conceived in the shadow of death. The avatar you meet at the start of the game may be only seconds from his or her demise. When the end does come, you may witness a glorious resurrection at the cost of an abstract "life", or you may have to intercede on the character's behalf by feeding an expiatory quarter into the slot. Often, the death is irrevocable, and can only be avoided by travelling back in time to the last save point and choosing a less fatal path. The early Greek dramas were concerned with equally miraculous tales of mythological death and rebirth; the Christian passion play and the secular mummer's ball, depicting the death of Saint George at the hands of the Turkish Knight and his subsequent resurrection at the hands of the quacking Doctor were staples through the European Dark Ages. Perhaps in both cases, this cyclic attitude towards birth and death, an atypically Eastern motif, is facilitated by the observation that the stage must always reset, that the players will always resume their original positions and the drama begin anew.

Game designers who feel that their medium is intrinsically inferior to the stage may look to Bertolt Brecht, a German playwright who wrote his greatest works while in exile from Hitler's Germany. He attacked the plays of his time as "culinary art", and believed that true drama should be intellectually captivating, not merely tugging at emotional heartstrings. He pioneered "epic theater", and sculpted historic, didactic "learning pieces" that occupied large swaths of time and space, often substituting an ancient or fantastic locale for the modern world, although satirically or poignantly mirroring current events. It is the multi-player and the massive multi-player online games that have the best change to achieve his lofty aims for the theater.

The world of gaming has absorbed, consciously and unconsciously, a rich tapestry of mythological, dramatic, and artistic conventions. As technological sophistication continues to evolve, both gamers and designers should consider the fact that there is already an extremely dramatic medium, and embrace the drama that they are helping to create.