Over the Hump: or, Camel Litearature
There is an old maxim that holds that a camel is a horse designed by a committee. The complexity involved in crafting a game, especially modern video games, is too much for one person to handle.
Does that necessarily mean that games will never reach the same heights or plumb the same depths as a work of text by a single author?
As much as I love film, no film has yet to surpass literature in the realm of crafting experience. The reason for that is the utter lack of interiority of films. A great actor can communicate their internal dialog and emotions through external means, but a book bypasses that entirely and puts us into someone's head.
Games on the other hand, have a shot at achieving that level of interiority. How can works developed by groups of people develop the same consistency of depth of a work developed by a single mind, rewritten or edited until it reflects, however poorly, the intent of the author? Where every single word is there to mold the experience and draw the reader deeper in to the story.
Okay, that doesn't happen for every book, but it does for the great ones. Where are the games that can do that? Braid is the best and closest example that I'm aware of when it comes to games as literature. It is a triumph and that cake is real. The entire game was developed to, dare I say, author's Jonathan Blow's vision. I have no doubt that the rest of the development team contributed significantly to the end result, but Blow's determination and focus is what drove the project.
Braid is a step in the right direction. Not that every game needs to be the singular vision of an author, but that every game needs to strive to be a singular vision. Each piece of the story needs to be embraced, whether by an individual on the team or the totality of the studio. Game designers, indie ones particularly, need to see themselves as storytellers*, as authors*, and as explorers into conveying what lies behind another's eyes.
* Yes, not every game needs to be a story. Gun, Monster, Point, Click... yeah, I get it. Not every book or movie is War and Peace either. In the immortal-ish words of Teddy "Far better it is to dare mighty things, to win glorious triumphs even though checkered by failure, than to rank with those timid spirits who neither enjoy nor suffer much because they live in the gray twilight that knows neither victory nor defeat."**
