The reviews of the Playstation 3 game at Slate, Wired’s Game|Life blog, and The Onion A.V. Club (all sites I like and regularly read) are curiously and similarly schizophrenic, alternately criticizing a major part of the game (its story) while praising — well, it’s not exactly clear what’s so great about it. That such praise outweighs the ambivalence in each review shows just how far video games still have to go.

All three reviews agree on one thing: Metal Gear Solid 4′s story is as incomprehensible as it is ambitious.

“In the fourth and (presumably) final chapter, Metal Gear Solid 4: Guns Of The Patriots, Solid Snake has to defeat human war machines and thwart the biggest global military conspiracy William Gibson never dreamed of,” Russ Fischer writes at the A.V. Club. “Embedded are ruminations on self-sustaining war economies, privatized military forces, and post-traumatic stress disorder.”

That sounds cool, but apparently the story didn’t turn out so well: “The backstory is almost impenetrably dense,” Fischer writes, with “dozens of overwrought conversations” adding up to “hours of concentrated narrative abuse.”

At Slate, Chris Baker likewise describes “interminable monologues on the evils of war and private military contractors. These play out in ‘cut scenes,’ cinematic sequences that unfold with minimal input from the player. These scenes sometimes spool out for 45 minutes or more. Seriously. Despite (or because of) those huge dollops of plot, I still find the story utterly incomprehensible.”

Game|Life’s Chris Kohler first says that the game’s cut scenes “can be so riveting that you barely notice you haven’t touched your controller.” Then he actually describes them: “The story’s pretty much crazy. … There are so many expository sequences that deliver reams of information about the game’s military-industrial conspiracy theory back story, so many weird characters and so many last-minute twists and turns that it’s difficult to keep up.”

So if hours of the game are taken up by impenetrable narrative sequences that even the game’s admirers can barely take, what makes the rest of the game “as compelling as the very best the medium has to offer,” as Fischer puts it? I’m still not sure.

(Now might be a good time to mention that the Metal Gear Solid series is one of the biggest holes in my gaming experience, along with World of Warcraft and Sim City. I’ve only played a couple hours of the first Metal Gear Solid for the first Playstation. These reviews — and others, like Kyle Orland’s hilarious take on the game’s first hour [minute 32: "The game asks if I want to save. Save what? Nothing has happened!"] — haven’t exactly given me a reason to try part 4, let alone take on the first 3.)

Fischer writes that MGS4′s character movement is “slightly less artificial” than the earlier games; the way your character gets tired “isn’t a great” model but is “a good start”; the boss battles “are fairly routine,” not groundbreaking. He’s most impressed by the different ways you can complete each level. All this somehow balances the narrative shortcomings to push the game into A- territory.

Kohler argues that MGS4, like the recent Grand Theft Auto IV, heralds a new era of video games that focus much more on story than previous games have, even at the expense of interaction. He writes that MGS4 is leading the way by “showing that there can be a whole bunch of non-interactive story in a game, as long as it’s excellent. The stumbling block was never that movies don’t work in a videogame, but that terrible ones don’t.”

A few paragraphs earlier, though, he writes that “the story they’re telling is such a bizarre tale that I couldn’t see recommending it to a random person purely on the strength of its narrative.”

Kohler seems to be separating the technical aspects of the cut scenes — he lauds the quality of the graphics, camerawork, and voice acting — from the narrative aspects. But this amounts to having it both ways: ostensibly highlighting a game’s narrative to show how video games have matured, while actually focusing on the presentation of that narrative (which looks great) instead of the narrative itself (which, as all three critics note, is awful).

For his part, Baker’s loftiest praise goes to Metal Gear’s bizarre surrealism and the game’s creator, Hideo Kojima, who he says “gets the difference between games and movies in a way that many designers never will.” Baker defines that difference as interactivity’s potential for immersion, and notes that the trick with video games is that technical issues and gaming conventions constantly pull gamers out of their virtual worlds. (i.e. when a human character bobs along a street like a poorly animated Shaggy instead of walking realistically, you think “oh yeah, just a game.”)

So you’d think that Kojima getting the difference between games and movies would mean he finds a perfect balance between interactivity, immersion, gaming conventions, and narrative. Baker says no — Kojima is great because he plays up the illusion of immersion: “Kojima continually elbows you in the ribs and reminds you that you’re playing a game, as well as rewards you for doing something ridiculous. He breaks the fourth wall more frequently than the Kool-Aid Man.”

But breaking the fourth wall isn’t particularly original — Super Mario Bros. 3 did it in 1990 by referencing the “Thank you Mario, but our princess is in another castle” line from the first Super Mario Bros. — nor does it inherently make a game good. (Fischer and Kohler also reference the fourth-wall breakage.) It’s how Baker describes the fourth wall being broken that really creates a paradox for game critics, and points to how far video games still have to go:

“For instance, there’s a motion sensor in the PS3 controller. During one of the interminable cut scenes, you might discover that shaking the controller makes a female character’s breasts jiggle. It’s puerile, sexist, and ludicrous, but it makes it hard to take anything about the game for granted.”

Leave aside whether we should be winking at puerile sexism in a video game (particularly a tone-deaf sexism, as Fischer notes: “A conversation will detail the painfully damaged history of a defeated female boss, but only after we check out her tits. At length.”). Baker really seems to be saying that MGS4′s farting-in-the-back-of-the-classroom juvenilia makes it hard to take anything about the game seriously.

For a game with such pretensions, that’s a huge flaw. Combine the lack of seriousness with an incomprehensible story and bad writing, and the game appears to have flopped in every non-game respect.

As I’ve written before about the larger games-as-art discussion, that would be fine if games aspired to nothing more than being fun games. But many game makers and most critics do want games to be something more, as evidenced by Kohler’s persuasive thesis that MSG4 and Grand Theft Auto IV point to a future of movie-game hybrids. If we’re going to place games in the same space as narrative art, we have to start assessing those games — or at least the elements that overlap with narrative art — according to the critical standards of that art.

That means trying to answer the question Dave Itzkoff poses in a New York Times article about Metal Gear Solid 4: Can video games “tell a story as satisfyingly as a work of cinema or literature?” It means an impenetrable, unending story is not something extraneous to shrug off but rather is a central element of the work and deserves a serious critique. It means going beyond the technical aspects of the narrative portions’ presentation and assessing the narrative itself: pointing out specific cliched or original dialogue, calling out unoriginal characters or jarring shifts in tone. It means grappling with a work’s cultural or political arguments — including, yes, a creator’s puerile sexism.

If those elements are so unsophisticated or obtuse as to make such a critique impossible or pointless — if the answer to Itzkoff’s question is a resounding no — then the game has failed as a work of narrative art. No matter how many ways there are to get to the next boss battle.

When I read online, I constantly follow links from one item to the next, often forgetting where I started. Sometimes I backtrack to one content “node” and jump off in different directions. …So doesn’t this make for an incoherent reading experience? Yes, if you’re thinking in a linear fashion. But I find reading on the web is most rewarding when I’m not following a set path but rather trying to “connect the dots,” thinking about ideas and trends and what it all might mean.

His post reminds me a little of the discussion about video games vs. “linear” media. Some video game evangelists argue that games are superior to movies, books, etc. because only games allow players to choose their path and create the narrative and experience themselves. According to this argument, just as Karp finds “reading on the web is most rewarding when I’m not following a set path but rather trying to ‘connect the dots,’” gamers find video games more rewarding than other media because players don’t follow a set path but connect the dots however they want (within the confines of a game’s rules and boundaries).

My general response to that argument is that giving players control isn’t inherently better; it just means players may be looking for something different than movie-goers. I went to Juno to see the story Diablo Cody and Jason Reitman created; allowing me to take part in that or direct some scenes myself would have made it partly my story. As I’ve written,

if you have a story to tell, why would you want to dilute it by making it into a video game where each interaction changes the story you want to tell? That’s what authorial control is: Setting the pace of the story, the speed and manner in which information gets to the reader to move the narrative forward and fill out the dramatic arc; discovering things about the characters while writing the work and incorporating that into the story; not letting the narrative get caught up on conversation asides or thematic tangents.

Thus you can’t defend games against other media by saying “Games make better stories because they give you control and movies and books don’t.” (Michael Chabon is a far better storyteller than I am; I look to him for stories because I can’t write them myself; and telling my on-screen avatar where to go and who to shoot is not a better story than Kavalier and Clay). Instead say “Games are better because they give you control at all and that’s more interesting than being told a story by a talented storyteller.” I disagree with that, but it’s a fair argument.

I think there’s an element of that argument in Scott’s post. And while I’m much more sympathetic to his view of non-linear reading than I am to the superiority of non-linear (or pseudo non-linear) gaming — I am addicted to the Internet, after all — I still sometimes prefer reading a book to reading hyperlinked strands of thought online, for the same reasons I don’t buy the games-are-better argument.

I read a fair number of books, almost exclusively non-fiction. And I read them because when I want to really learn more about a topic, I want to find the expert (loosely defined) who has already “‘connect[ed] the dots,’ [thought] about ideas and trends and what it all might mean.”

For example, I’m currently reading The Omnivore’s Dilemma. Now, to learn and think more about How We Eat, I could have instead gone to The Ethicurean, found their posts on the book, followed links from there, and tried to make sense of it all without certain expertise to guide me. But I prefer to start by learning from someone who’s done all that work already, who has read the scientific studies and industry reports as well as the blog posts, who has conducted interviews and visited the farms himself — and then constructed his argument based on that knowledge and experience. Just because the book is linear doesn’t mean I’m passively absorbing it. While reading, I’m still connecting dots, asking questions, and making mental notes about things to follow-up online later.

Scott asks:

Is there such a thing as networked human thought? Certain there is among a group of people enabled by a network — but what about for an individual, processing information via the web’s network?

I guess I would make the case that reading a good non-fiction book is ultimately tapping into the same network in a different, possibly more effective (if you’re interested in a specific topic), way. Instead of exploring the network yourself, you’re accessing the network as filtered through the expertise of someone who has explored far more of that network than one reader ever could.

Paradoxically, at a moment when technology allows designers to create ever more complex and realistic single-player fantasies, the growth in the now $18 billion gaming market is in simple, user-friendly experiences that families and friends can enjoy together. …Put another way, it may be a sign of the industry’s nascent maturity that as video games become more popular than ever, hard-core gamers and the old-school critics who represent them are becoming an ever smaller part of the audience.

But taking a closer look at the numbers, his argument starts to break down.

Here are the top 10 games of 2007, via Kotaku:

1. Halo 3 (Xbox 360) – 4,820,000
2. Wii Play with Remote (Wii) – 4,120,000
3. Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare (Xbox 360) – 3,040,000
4. Guitar Hero III: Legends of Rock (PS2) – 2,720,000
5. Super Mario Galaxy (Wii) – 2,520,000
6. Pokemon Diamond (DS) – 2,480,000
7. Madden NFL 08 (PS2) – 1,900,000
8. Guitar Hero II (PS2) – 1,890,000
9. Assassin’s Creed (Xbox 360) – 1,870,000
10. Mario Party 8 (Wii) – 1,820,000

Pokemon Diamond doesn’t really apply to his thesis because kids are always nuts for new Pokemon games; likewise with Madden, which is a perennial best-seller (thanks to the Guys Rain Man Gene). Before it was released, Halo 3 — the very top seller, mind you — had hard-core gamers and critics salivating over every screen shot and nugget of information about new weapons. Call of Duty 4 has a Metacritic score of 94 (I’m not a fan of Metacritic, but that’s what Schiesel uses to define what’s “critically acclaimed”), and intense first-person shooters are hardly the stuff of casual and family gamers. Assassin’s Creed, as Schiesel notes, is a one-player adventure game.

So basically he’s talking about Wii Play, Super Mario Galaxy, Guitar Hero II and III, and Mario Party 8. But Mario Galaxy is also a one-player game, and it got a 97 rating on Metacritic. And critics knocked Guitar Hero III for being too difficult — especially given the mass audience it’s attracting — so I’m not even sure that applies.

Right, so now we’re down to Wii Play, Guitar Hero II, and Mario Party 8. Now, the Wii was the top-selling home console of the year, with 6.3 million sold. Plus Wii Play was basically a $10 add-on when you bought an extra Wii controller, which all those millions of people had to do if they wanted to play with their friends and families.

What the top 10 list really seems to show, then, is that hardcore gamers (including Madden fans and Pokemon kiddies) still buy the most games, and that most Wii buyers were content to play Wii Sports, which comes with the system, and Wii Play when they needed a second controller.

Schiesel’s piece has a bigger hole in it. He tries to make the leap that as the mass market takes over, critics are becoming marginalized:

That is not so unusual in other media. In most forms of entertainment there is a divide between what is popular with the masses and what is popular with the critics. Plenty of films get rave reviews but never make it past the art houses. Plenty of blockbusters are panned.

His main support for this is the absence on the top 10 list of atmospheric shooter BioShock, the ambitious sci-fi role-playing-game Mass Effect, and a couple of other “acclaimed” titles. Again, the numbers bely the argument.

Mass Effect sold 1.6 million copies around the world in 2007 (in less than two months!); being conservative, let’s say 800,000 of those were sold in the U.S. BioShock sold 490,000 in its first month, and according to market analysis site Seeking Alpha, it shipped 2 million copies total; again conservatively, let’s say that means 1 million copies sold in the U.S. Sure, they might have missed the top-10 list, but those are pretty strong sales for supposedly “complex” games.

Compare BioShock’s success to an “art house” movie: No Country for Old Men. For the Coen Brothers film to have had the same relative success compared to the top-grossing movie of 2007 — Spider-Man 3, at $337 million — as BioShock had compared to the top-selling game, the movie would had to have grossed $70 million instead of $42 million. There Will Be Blood would needed to have grossed $56 million instead of $22 million to match Mass Effect’s relative success.

So in terms of sales, Schiesel’s critics’ picks are actually doing twice as well as their film counterparts. But even that doesn’t tell the whole story.

Take a look at the 10 best-selling games from 2006:

1. PS2 Madden 07 – 2.8 m
2. NDS New Super Mario Bros. – 2.0 m
3. 360 Gears of War- 1.8 mm
4. PS2 Kingdom Hearts II – 1.7 m
5. PS2 Guitar Hero 2 – 1.3 mm
6. PS2 Final Fantasy XII – 1.3 mm
7. NDS Brain Age – 1.1 m
8. 360 Madden 07 – 1.1mm
9. 360 Ghost Recon – 1.0 m
10. PS2 NCAA Football 07 – 1.0 mm

For one thing, the basic mix is about the same as 2007′s list. Gears of War is like Halo 3, Ghost Recon is like Call of Duty 4; Brain Age and Super Mario Bros. are like Wii Play and Mario Party. But more importantly, maybe BioShock and Mass Effect didn’t make the 2007 list — but they’ve sold as well or nearly as well as half of 2006′s top 10. They didn’t miss 2007′s top 10 because fewer people are buying complex games. They missed out because more people are buying more games of all kinds — including critics favorites.

Schiesel writes, “There is hardly a question that two years ago all of those games [Mass Effect, BioShock, The Orange Box] would have made the list.” But of course that’s in question. Shadow of the Colossus, Psychonauts, Okami — there’s a long list of recent critical darlings that were commercial busts. His art house games are doing so well now because a rising tide is lifting all games.

There’s a more fundamental problem in Schiesel’s attempt to delineate a creative/critical hierarchy of video games. As I’ve argued before, video games have a long way to go before we can truly compare them to movies, TV, books, etc. (Some people argue we shouldn’t compare them to other media at all, but leave that aside for now.) For all their ambition, BioShock and Mass Effect don’t change that reality (exactly how they fall short is a topic for future posts). Moreover, a game like God of War II — another of Schiesel’s poster titles for missing the top 10 — is at best similar to a high-quality B-movie, not equivalent to a P.T. Anderson or Michel Gondry film.

Even as Schiesel is greatly overestimating the “high end” of games, he’s doing something worse to the games at the other end of his imagined hierarchy. He suggests that the success of mass-market titles is a sign that video games are becoming like other media, which have “a highly sophisticated cognoscenti whose tastes have little to do with the mass audiences that still drive those markets.” But there’s a huge difference between lowbrow movies and mass-market video games. Game “critics” don’t like Mario Party 8 because it’s essentially the same as the other seven Mario Parties (never mind that it’ll be new to all those Wii owners who haven’t played video games since Pac-Man or NES). Movie critics hate Meet the Spartans because it’s bad comedy, bad satire, full of bad gay jokes, and otherwise creatively bankrupt.

Mario Party 8 is not Meet the Spartans. Simple, even derivative gameplay in a game that is narrative-free and purely about the experience of playing can’t be compared to lowbrow narrative art. Notice that Schiesel doesn’t address games like Super Mario Galaxy and Rock Band — mass hits that are also critically acclaimed yet have no “high-art” ambition. Or take a game like Uncharted: Drake’s Fortune — a critically hailed action-adventure game. I stopped playing after about half an hour partly because the older explorer guiding me on my jungle trip kept making sexist comments. I’m sure he has a change of heart later in the game after the female reporter character busts some heads, but I didn’t want to hear any more of his nonsense before that change. How does that fit into Schiesel’s hierarchy?

What emerges from his scattershot analysis is the confusion and uncertainty that are part of what’s stunting game criticism — and games themselves. There’s an assumption that all of these games somehow lie on the same spectrum and can be evaluated in the same terms. BioShock and Mass Effect are by default put on one end of the spectrum because of their ambitious worlds and dialogue — regardless of whether the dialogue and ideas are actually well-crafted, unique and intelligent. The quality of their non-gameplay aspects is almost irrelevant; what seems to be important is that those aspects exist at all. Meanwhile games without those qualities, like Mario games, puzzle games, racing games are alternately revered and slimed, depending on — well, it’s not clear on what, exactly.

All the top 10 list really tells us is that lots more people are playing and buying games of all kinds. All Schiesel’s piece really tells us is that we still don’t know exactly how to think about and evaluate the immensely varied world of video games.