Game Theory: Video Games Are More Like Ballet Than Movies

Javier Cebollada/European Pressphoto Agency Gamers and dancers may have more in common than they commonly think.

Like Lucy, when I write and think about video games, I try to focus on what the medium can do that the canonical arts - books, movies, theater, dance, music, television, painting, sculpture, comics, whatever - cannot. But I think it's also worth emphasizing how video games resemble the culturally accepted arts. They're more alike than different.  In 2012, I started reading a couple of books - one new, the other newish - about the history of other art forms, and their infancies would be very familiar to gamers.

The first book is David Thomson's history of the movies, “The Big Screen,” published this fall. Film is the preferred, go-to analogy for video-game players and writers about games, so much so that critics have begun trying to avoid making movie references and comparisons when talking about games.

But the connections to games in Thomson's prose suggest themselves: “The cameraman was a small god with a machine no one else understood”; “If film is going to be an art - and some of us have longed for that - don't we need an artist?”; “American business power was determining the character of the new show (and promoting America to the rest of the world)”; early filmmakers feared that “American pictures remained crass, industrialized and trashy, and lagging behind the other art s”; and in my favorite parallel with early video games, Thomson writes of the silent picture “Sunrise”: “Nothing as rich as this had been done before in American film. But the backgrounds are subtler than the interaction between the couple.”

The second book is “Apollo's Angels,” Jennifer Homans's history of ballet. I turned to it in part because my elder daughter is tutu-besotted, but also because I wondered if it would provide insights into the crucial role that movement plays in the enjoyment of video games. Whether waving ones' arms about in front of a Wii or a Kinect, moving a mouse across a screen, or engaging in the small, precise thumb-and-finger movements one makes on a gamepad, playing games is as much about motion and gesture as it is about witnessing what occurs on a screen.

Ballet is, in the words of Homans, “full of emotions and the feelings that come with music and movement.” And so are games. Ballet straddles the world of music, literature, art and performance. And so do games. And much like the way video games have struggled to separate themselves from sports, board games and toys, early ballet struggled to separate itself from music-dance was not seen as a distinct art form. Yet its earliest practitioners hoped to “create a new kind of spectacle,” one that “would harmonize dance, music, and language into a measured whole.” Replace dance with “movement,” sprinkle in a dash of cinematography, and that sounds a lot like some game developers I've met.

Ballet is “an art of memory,” Homans writes. “No wonder dancers obsessively memorize everything: steps, gestures, combinations variations, whole ballets.” She continues, “These are physical memories; when dancers know a dance, they know it in their muscles and bones.” And so do gamers, when they know a vide o game. The players of Call of Duty and Halo have more in common with ballerinas than either might like to admit.

I mention all this in part to remind everyone that every new medium goes through growing pains. But I also think that if video games are going to, in Lucy's words, “take their rightful place among other creative works,” they must prove themselves capable of achievements that the other arts have already mastered. And so, on the second day of Christmas, I want to offer the current - and future - game designers who are reading this a challenge.

Beyond the Gospel stories, the holidays are awash with Messiahs, Nutcrackers, Christmas Carols, Charlie Browns and Wonderful Lives. And the list of classics is not static: Mariah Carey's “All I Want for Christmas Is You” is now so canonical that it seems like a bonus track on the Phil Spector Christmas album. Where is the Christmas game to match the texts, songs, dances, plays and movies that bring in the season every year?

I can't name a single video game that even attempts to grapple - directly - with any element of these holidays, from travel nightmares to family squabbles to religious rebirth to peace on earth and good will toward men. Journey, the game Lucy rightly praises as a landmark, makes a transcendental and universally popular holiday game seem possible. But I'm not asking for that much. I'd take the equivalent of a “Die Hard” or even a “Home Alone.”

I'm not saying making such a game will be easy. But if video games are to fulfill the potential that I, and everyone in this discussion, thinks they possess, it ought to be possible. All I want for Christmas is that.

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