Thursday, December 3, 2009

Game Law



Lawyers and judges must rely on precedent when making legal arguments and rendering legal decisions.  Once courts decide a law has a certain meaning, that law will always have the same meaning.  Courts may refine things around the edges as they go along, but there's a core idea that doesn't change.  This, I think, would be welcome news to Michael Abbott.

A while back, Mr. Abbott questioned whether critics pay too little attention to what he called "refined games."  Mr. Abbott suggests that examining a fully realized and refined vision can reveal insights about games and game-making that examining a less perfect game cannot, even if the less perfect game is more innovative or interesting.  This is intuitive and works with many other artistic media.  Hamlet's plot isn't particularly bold or innovative, but Shakespeare's execution is masterful.  Bach's chorales can be beautiful even though they are beholden to a very rigid framework.  Trying to analyze refined video games can be frustrating, though.

Think about Zelda games.  These seem like the kind of refined games that Mr. Abbott would love, and in fact, he has said as much.  Twilight Princess in particular seems like an Abbott special.  It is a triumph of iteration and refinement sports a metacritic score roughly equal to a healthy human's body temperature.  This sounds like a great game to learn lessons from.  But what can I say about it?  That is, what can I say about it that I couldn't have said about all or most other Zelda games?  The series may have added a hook shot, bottles, a horse, and z-targeting, but I still hacked up the same moblins and hunted the same triforce and defeated the same Gannon in Twilight Princess that I did in The Legend of Zelda.  (See also, Final Fantasy, Cid, Chocobo, airship, summons, etc.).  What new insight does the refinement offer us?

Mr. Abbott later talked about iteration.  He related iterartion to rehearsal noting that, "[r]ehearsal is a discovery process wherein doing something again reveals new ideas or information that can be useful in the creation of something we collaboratively build."  This is a very important insight.  It forces us to comprehend each sequel to a game as a draft.  In the first draft, Link has a flute.  Later on, someone realizes that it would be much better if Link could actually play the flute, so that gets added to the 5th draft.  Someone else realizes that while one hook shot is great, two hook shots would be even better, so that gets added to the 8th draft.  Now the similarity between Zeldas makes sense.  They're similar because they're reworkings of the same script.  But the rehearsal analogy does more than that.  It suggests that one way to find the meaning in games is to look at what game-makers are rehearsing.  That, in turn, suggests that video games are not artistically driven.

Saying that video games are not artistically driven is different from saying that they are not art (a strange semantic discussion that I have no desire to enter), or that they do not exhibit artistry.  But the best games do not draw their value from aesthetics.  The best games give you new and better things to do and new and better ways to do them.  That's what game designers are rehearsing and perfecting.  Video games are not created as art, they are created as pragmatism. 

Video games are collections of rules.  This, to finally explain my opening sentence, is exactly what written court opinions are.  No one would argue that court opinions are driven by artistry.  This is true even though some opinions contain excellent writing, and would be true even if each opinion were beautifully illustrated.  But a court opinion's meaning can still extend beyond the interpreted statute.  Court opinions can be political touchstones and can reflect beautiful or terrible things about society.  They do this simply by manipulating rules--by telling people what they can and cannot do.  And jurisprudence evolves in the same way games do.

Consider the right to counsel, everyone who's seen Law and Order even once knows about that right.  And, good news, we get explicit wording right in the Sixth Amendment to the Constitution, "In all criminal prosecutions, the accused shall enjoy the right...to have the Assistance of Counsel for his defence."  First draft.  But in 1942, the Supreme Court decided that that only applied in Federal Courts.  If you're getting tried in a State Court, maybe you get counsel, maybe you don't.  Second draft.  In 1963 the Supreme Court changed it's mind: counsel must be provided in state court after all.  Third draft.  Oh, and once you get lawyer you always have the right to her presence, even in things like informal police questioning.  Fourth draft.  And we have to tell you about your rights to counsel.  Fifth draft.  That's a simplified history, of course, but it tracks the development of a series like Zelda pretty well, right down to a sequel no one really wants to talk about. 

The only prerequisite to this process is a good idea.  More specifically, it starts with an idea about actions people can undertake: explore an open world and smack monsters/defend themselves from accusations of the state.  The rehearsals refine the ways in which actors can accomplish those actions as old mechanisms get tested and replaced by new and better ones.  The goals do not change, I want to kill Gannon and get the Triforce; I want to stay out of jail.  But the tools I have at my disposal, and my access to those tools, changes dramatically.  Considering what I can do makes me compare what I should do to what I actually do.

Games can create meaning.  But they should do so by manipulating agency, not by clinging to narrative conventions of other media.  In a future installment, I'll talk about the lessons video games can take from the law on leveraging authority to create meaning.

* For all you law nerds out there:  Yes, I know that Miranda actually deals with the 5th amendment right to counsel and not the 6th amendment right to counsel considered in Gideon. 

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