Can literary criticism be used to judge a video game?

Gaming magazine IGN praises Halo 2 and other video game sequels because they are better than the original versions. and the industry. The result is a list that strongly favours sequels — games which, in the magazine’s own words, “successfully iterated and improved upon an original that broke new ground back when it was originally released.”

As for the question of uncanny startlement versus the fulfilment of expectations, canonical gaming seems to take the matter case by case. To wit: of the top 10 games on IGN’s list, eight are sequels, but the nature of those sequels — the precise virtues that vaulted them to the apex of the ranking — differ wildly. It’s fair to say that Super Mario 64, at least the sixth Super Mario game by the time it was released in 1996, seemed radically unfamiliar even to diehard Mario aficionados, who could hardly have imagined what a longtime twodimensional side-scrolling adventure game might look like stretched out for the first time into three dimensions. That first encounter must have been startling, and the game’s profound ingenuity is central to its position as the 10th best of all time. Whereas, by contrast, Super Mario Bros 3. — number six on the list — was not so different from the original Super Mario Bros, its expanded scope aside. That game’s greatness derives instead from its perfection of an already familiar style.

This distinction is apparent throughout the list. Some video games are flawless iterations of a model that had been slowly polished or fine-tuned: The Witcher 3, Pokemon Yellow, Uncharted 2, Batman: Arkham City, Fallout 3, The Elder Scrolls V, and Mega Man 3, among many, many others on the list, are examples of titles that retained the essential formula of the preceding game in a series, distilled, augmented, elaborated, or otherwise improved upon it, and then materialized as the optimum version of a once-fresh idea that had thus far been merely in chrysalis. Which is to say that these games fulfil expectations. They might fulfil them well — Uncharted 2: Among Thieves is nothing if not an exemplary advancement of the blockbuster brawn of Naughty Dog’s Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune, a sequel that does everything its predecessor did and more. But nothing about the experience feels uncanny. When you play Uncharted 2 for a first time, you don’t encounter a stranger. You encounter an old friend, looking buffed up and much improved.

Video games are unique in this respect. Sequels and series do have their occasional place on lists of the greatest novels and films of all time: The Godfather II is a staple of best movie lists, alongside The Good the Bad and the Ugly, The Empire Strikes Back, Aliens and, more recently, Return of the King, while literature has Updike’s Rabbit books, Durrell’s Alexandria Quartet, Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, and of course In Search of Lost Time.

But nobody seriously believes that, say, American Pastoral “improves” upon The Counterlife in the way that Uncharted 2 improves upon the first Uncharted. What Philip Roth did was return to a character and milieu and, drawing again from his infinite reserves of creative inspiration, write another extraordinary novel, one whose richness and intelligence stand entirely independent of the earlier works. When a cinematic or literary sequel seems to replicate the qualities we admired in the original, only tweaked or embellished, we tend to find them derivative. In gaming the opposite is true: we praise exactly that effort of revision.

The difference may be that in gaming, unlike in other mediums, refinement is a fundamental aspect of design. That is, video games proceed by combining and refining ideas introduced elsewhere, cobbling together conventions from other titles (shooting from Gears of War, parkour from Mirror’s Edge, etc.) and augmenting or enhancing them a little bit. There are games on the IGN list that pioneered certain concepts or devices — Minecraft, for example, or Tetris. But for the most part the games we consider canonical are the games whose improvements or refinements bring their particular iteration close to an ultimate form.

This is why IGN praises Halo 2, Silent Hill 2, Diablo 2, System Shock 2, Street Fighter 2. Played freshly, what these games have in common is not their uncanniness, nor their ability to make you feel strange at home, it is their sense of having been touched up, honed, finished off — made great expressly for being greater than the rough new thing that came before.