Games

Games

   Video games are a gateway to worlds never before explored. They have reinvented the way stories are told and how people not only interact within those stories, but with each other as well. Their genres span from simple party games to full length cinematic role playing epics and everything in between. Not just for children, video games let people escape to new worlds, become rock stars, improve themselves, or just have fun anytime.   

Eternal competitors to comics, games are actually the offshoot of the military industrial complex where scientists, strategists and soldiers used them to test new weapons and scenarios virtually. Electronic games are about simulation and storytelling with more acute human-computer interactions. But of course, games existed before the military used them to train personnel in the 1950s.

The magic of games is in the interaction with an information system where the user can cast choices and sometimes decide the outcome of a story. This is unlike comics where the interaction the user has with the medium is mostly centered around the pace and progression through a predetermined spatially juxtaposed sequence. Much of the story in comics occurs off-panel in the mind of the reader. With games, a comprehensive story is only available after the fact when the user has made a series of decisions based on her interaction with a system. The mind of the gamer is active and cunning while experiencing the story.

As Marshall McLuhan would have argued, games are very much a hot medium. Many of the gamer’s senses are working overtime to interpret many sources of incomplete information while having to make decisions. The decision-making aspect of game is what distinguishes the user’s interaction. Unlike with comics, the decision-making affect the actual entertainment obtained by the gamer and is at once about the experience but also about what happens next in the story.

Games have changed forms from being hosted on large computers taking up several rooms in a lab to clunky consoles with plasticky parts to touch modality on a smartphone or a tablet. The investment in games is larger than that in the movie industry and umpteenth times larger than the comics industry. Here at ComicBookBin, we have long abandoned any pretensions of being a fully-fledged gaming outlet. But we still like games and still want to tip toe in the genre. Perhaps one day, we’ll figure out is the space between comics and games.

Hervé St-Louis, June 7, 2015