Yesterdaqy’s post made the case that the signature art forms of the 20th century: comic books, television, and movies, have fallen into stagnation. Their cultural moment has passed, and the only way forward is to embrace new forms that take full advantage of 21st-century tools.

Today, let’s follow that line of argument to the next logical step by dissecting a Gen Y sacred cow: video games.

Or perhaps not dissecting video games as dividing them …

Ask the average gamer when video games came of age as an art form, and he’ll point to the mid-to-late 1990s, when polygonal 3D graphics displaced 2D sprites.

That’s the pitch the industry has made for decades: 2D was primitive, 3D is progress.

But that story hides a deeper truth. The change from 2D to 3D didn’t stop at a graphics upgrade. It marked the birth of a wholly new medium.

Related: Burying Dead Media

The truth is that video games before the turn of the millennium were not the same medium as the vast majority of AAA games made since. The former belong to the final flowering of 20th-century arts. The latter represent the first truly new popular art form of the 21st century.

To understand this delineation, we need to revisit Marshall McLuhan’s theory of hot and cool media. A “hot” medium bombards the senses with high-definition information, requiring little imaginative participation. Movies are hot. Radio is hot. A “cool” medium, by contrast, supplies minimal information and demands high audience involvement to fill in the gaps. Comic strips are cool. Television, in its original, low-resolution form, was cool.

Old-school 2D video games like Super Mario Bros., The Legend of Zelda, and Sonic the Hedgehog were quintessential cool media. The pixel art was highly abstract. A bunch of squares stood in for a mushroom, a sword, or a ring. The music came in synthesized loops. And all too often the story, if you could call it that, was scribbled into the manual at the last minute by the guy who fixed the game devs’ copy machine.

Yet these games demanded not just active participation, but imagination, from the player. To turn a handful of sprites into a living world, your creativity had to be firing on all cylinders. In terms of gameplay, you had to master mechanics through memorization, reflex, and good old trial and error. Purposefully leaving out elements so the player could supply them was essential to the 20th century gaming experience.

Contrast that dynamic with 3D games of the past quarter century.

Related: Gaming Ground Zero

Starting with titles like Final Fantasy VII, Metal Gear Solid, and Half-Life, the industry pursued ever-greater fidelity and immersion. The player was no longer staring at crude abstractions, but at cinematic cutscenes, orchestrated soundtracks, and photorealistic characters. Games speciated into interactive movies.

In short, the cool medium of the late 20th century spawned a new hot medium.

But 2D games didn’t follow the same path into that good night as comic books, TV, and film. Instead of running its course, reaching its zenith, and then passing into obsolescence, 2D gaming was killed by top-down fiat. There was still plenty of mileage left in the 2D engine, and the anomolous result has been that more novelty and innovation is coming out of the disproportionately 2D indie scene than 3D-dominated AAA.

Which drives home the point that 3D interactive movies aren’t just the next iteration of the same medium. They’re something fundamentally different.

Related: Game Over for AAA

Not that the move from cool to hot was necessrily degradation. But it was a definite transmutation. Mass Effect and Red Dead Redemption 2 are not “games” in the strict sense. They are scripted narrative experiences that trade interaction for immersion. In essence, they combine the storytelling techniques of film with simulation to yield something totally new.

Unlike films, they let the player make choices that can alter outcomes within limits.
Unlike 2D games, they no longer demand the player’s imagination to patch in abstractions, because the world itself is fully realized.

Again, this synthesis of film and simulation is unprecedented. That fusion of scripting and agency could not have been achieved before the 21st century.

Related: Victory Defeated JRPGs

Where does the bifurcation of video games leave us?

With a double truth:

2D video games were a cool, 20th-century medium. They demanded the player’s imagination and mastery
3D video games are a hot, 21st-century medium. They represent a radical break with the past, a synthesis of older forms into something entirely novel.

That’s why any attempt to compare Super Mario Bros. to Modern Warfare must always fall short. They are not iterations of the same medium. They are different media altogether. One belongs to the last century; the other, to this one.

And that should give artists hope. We don’t need to cling to dying forms like comics, television, or Hollywood blockbusters. The first new art form of the digital age has been right here, hiding in plain sight. And that first mover advantage may be the clue everbody missed that explains why gaming surpassed every other art form in popularity.

3D “video games” are a different beast than original video games. It will be fascinating to see what happens when this new medium truly breaks free of AAA studios blinkered by tunnel vision and comes attains its full flower creatively.

For a unique action-adventure that busts through the dead end of twentieth-century mecha by merging the best of East and West, read my military SF epic Combat Frame XSeed!

Brian Niemeier is a best-selling novelist, editor, and Dragon Award winner with over a decade in newpub. For direct, in-person writing and editing insights, join his Patreon.

Video Games: 2 Centuries; 2 Media

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