These days, most of my students would probably call me old.
I can’t really say I’d blame them. In 2023 we’re starting to reach a consensus on what makes a gamer “young” or “old.” I remember a time before games were in color, when we lived for a few solitary pixels dancing across a 3 inch screen that fueled us for hours. I remember the awe when we could say “the game is in 3D!” I remember controllers the size of footballs. Nowadays, I stand a little less straight, my hair is a little more gray, and playing anything less than 60 FPS gives me a headache. Those days of yore are long gone, and in their place is me, somehow still trying to catch my breath and wondering what the hell happened.
But I guess somehow that lends me some credibility, since no one has ever questioned my reputation, my knowledge, my title. I earned it. In my gaming experience, my academic experience, my lived experience.
Ten years ago, I played a particular Naughty Dog title called The Last of Us. It was summer, oppressively hot in the Bay Area, especially where I lived at the time, 40 minutes east of San Francisco. We had central AC, but it was crap and barely cooled the hallway of the apartment. So for the most part, I was only able to play at night, long after the sun had gone down and I could open the windows and pray for the slightest breeze. It ended up being one of the hottest weeks that year. But that isn’t the reason I remember it as well as I do.
Over the span of that week, I played the game long into the night. I took my time with it, peeling off down each hall, each room, each lesser path, hungry for lore and story and conversation between Joel and Ellie. I absorbed it with a hunger I hadn’t experienced in a game in years. Nothing could satiate it except more play time. I ran on a couple hours of sleep each night and feverishly watched the clock at my $12/hour job each day until I could head home, wait even longer for the sun to disappear over the hill, and buckle down for another evening of gluttonous consumption. I couldn’t put the game down.
I had a professor once tell me that the best stories are not the ones that end with a bang, but the ones that end with a whisper. When Ellie looks up at Joel, knowing full well that he is lying about what he did to save her, and that there is nothing she can do except to shrug her shoulders and say “Okay,” there is a quiet collapse that comes over the player; the floor coming out from underneath you, with nothing to catch you. Just a free fall, and all the time in the world to reflect.
And that’s what I did, that sweltering hot night in the middle of July. I laid in bed most of the night unable to sleep, the haunting story of Joel and Ellie replaying over and over in my mind. The quiet heartbreak that just seeped into my guts and kept me awake. This is exactly what a good story should do, and I know that because I am myself a storyteller, and happened to spend the better part of my academic career reading from the best of them.
I’ve been telling stories since I was 6 years old, and loved having stories told to me even longer. Humans have been telling stories since we were drawing on caves, and probably even before that. Why? Because we are a communal species. We desire connection with other humans, companionship, camaraderie, love. Humans were never meant to move across the earth alone. Storytelling is our connective tissue, our lifeblood as a species. We share our stories to foster community, to validate our lived experience, and to bridge those experiences with others. The core act of telling a story has been with us throughout human history; it is only the manner in which we tell stories that has evolved. The first thing that comes to mind for most of us when we think of a story, is the written word; but stories are told in song, in movies, in poetic verse, in photographs, in art. And in the last 40-odd years, now we’re telling stories in a new, interactive way; with video games.
Roger Ebert famously stated, “no video gamer now living will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form,” and it’s a shame he did not live to see how wrong he would be not even a decade after writing those words. In my opinion, he was wrong even at the moment he made that statement, but the last decade or so within the gaming industry has produced some of the most memorable and triumphant narrative experiences ever seen in the medium. And there was a part of me, that quiet and hot night in July, that decided I was going to make it my academic career to prove how wrong he was.
Most of my friends that I’d made in college as an English major thought I was crazy when I first approached them with the question: Can video games be considered literature? The scoffs and confusion were readily apparent. The reality is and was, that video games are still stereotyped as mindless brain rot incapable of stimulating the mind in a creative way; all gamers are just addicted nerds living in their mom’s basement shooting aliens day after day. It took a lot of convincing, and I started by asking a few of my academic friends and a few of my gamer friends to play The Last of Us and simultaneously read Cormac McCarthy’s post apocalyptic novel The Road. The Road tells the story of a nameless man and his son slowly working their way towards the coast by following the volatile and dangerous main road. The parallels that exist between both of these stories are both profoundly obvious and extremely subtle. And it was enough to warrant some reflection on the part of my peers. And the rest, as they say, is history.
When I started teaching, I was 26 years old; several of my students were considerably older than me. But it isn’t the grading, the homework, the ego inflation I get from being in front of a classroom that fuels me. It’s the look on a student’s face when the realization hits, that all of the things they love about video games, the things that make them feel something, and fill their heart to bursting, is the lifeblood of the human experience. The very same passion that fueled the great writers and artists and filmmakers. Each time we sit down and pick up a controller, and take on the identity of Link, or Kratos, or Laura Croft, we are not just asked to listen; we are asked to feel. To be. We imbue a piece of ourselves in every piece of art we consume, be it written, visual, or auditory. What makes a video game special, is that it was designed exactly for that purpose. And over the years, as each of my hundreds of students has come to learn this, their energy shifts. Their faces are somehow brighter, their passion is tangible and real and raw.
I don’t know what games will look like a decade from now. I don’t know if my teaching model will hold weight as the medium evolves. But that’s kind of the point. If something stays irreversibly the same, frozen in time, then there is no longer anything left to learn. I teach because I seek to continue learning. Learning doesn’t end when you stand on the other end of the classroom. If anything, it only becomes more earnest. That’s another thing I hope my students take away from my class; to always be desiring to learn, and grow, and challenge their worldview. A game can make you do that.
And Mr. Ebert, if that isn’t the truest definition of art, then I really don’t know what is.
