Can you think of a game that’s really rife with symbolism?
Can you think of a game that makes funny, subtle references to other games through symbolism?
That seemed to be something we saw a lot today in various paintings, and I was wondering – there are probably enough long-term gamers that would actually be able to comprehend the short of emotional/visual “shorthand” that one might create by manipulating things we’ve seen in older games.
Would a certain “boss battle” structure evoke a different feeling, if the player understood that it was a reference to say, something in the original Contra that they’d played many years ago?
What would it mean to run across a crate, in a game, that had a big pixellated question mark on it? Could one use that as shorthand to evoke some inherent Mario-ness? What would that even mean?
I don’t even think that we see much of the traditional symbolism that pervades other media in games – it’s rare, at best. Is that because the interactive nature of things isn’t as condusive to really understand symbolism, or is it because we don’t feel that our audience has the capacity to really understand symbolism and reference unless they’re so brutally obvious that they’re on the level of Final Fantasy X?
?
Maybe not built into games, probably because of licensing issues, but I’ve seen lots of it from screenshots of player mods, especially of first person shooters.
I can’t think of anything. Everything is pretty straightforward. No metaphors, allusions, symbolism. Nada.
I giant barrel throwing gorilla is just a giant barrel throwing gorilla.
How about in something like Shadow of the Colossus? I’m not sure if it’s simply borrowing from religion, or if there are deeper symbols… Haven’t really sat down to pick it apart yet.
Not related to symbolism in gaming, but didn’t feel like creating an entirely new post for just this.
http://xbox360.ign.com/articles/702/702389p1.html
Figured you’d be interested.
is it because we don’t feel that our audience has the capacity to really understand symbolism and reference unless they’re so brutally obvious that they’re on the level of Final Fantasy X?
What does this mean? What’s brutally obvious about Final Fantasy X?
As for the rest of it, it sounds to me like a “can’t see the forest for the trees” situation. Games are all about symbolism, reference, and abstraction. It’s only fairly recently that people got all hung up on making games “realistic” and tried to come up with in-game explanations for everything. Before that, it was all about building up a “language of videogames” with stuff that would seem completely bizarre if it weren’t second nature to us by now.
When you start any PC game with a first-person view, your hand immediately goes to the WASD keys. Because of Wolfenstein and DOOM.
Metal Gear Solid 3 and No One Lives Forever are full of sections where you expect it to follow standard action game conventions, then it throws a curve at you.
White boxes with red crosses on them represent health. When the camera changes in a Final Fantasy game, that represents the start of combat. When a number pops out of a person, that represents a wound. The “1” key is always your fists or melee weapon, “2” is your pistol. The “A” button jumps. When you see a crate in a FPS, that represents the point at which the level designers stop caring.
There’s a game called “The Sims” you may have heard of. It has people jump up and spin around to represent changing clothes. Plus about a billion other abstractions, which you could say are symbolism.
That’s true, that games have a lot of abstraction. I’m talking in some sense about things more like the Psycho Mantis section of MGS, or more sort of subtle references to other narratives, like the references to Moby Dick in Skies of Arcadia.