You Don’t Have To Say Anything: A Comparative Look At Dialogue in Vertov and Video

Games

Paper Proposal for Media, Art, Theory

Tom Breedveld, S1407368

22-10-2018

At this point in time, video games are almost not a ‘new’ medium anymore. Nevertheless,

their practice is still a young one, and as such is still the subject of much scrutiny. A common

consensus amongst critics, such as Roger Ebert in his piece ‘Video Games can never be art’

(2010) is the idea that video games are not art. ‘It can be claimed that video games have not

yet produced a compelling case of an artistic masterpiece,’ writes Grant Tavinor for the

Routledge Companion to Video Game Studies (2014). He argues that one of the reasons this

is the case is because video games ‘involve, first, competition, and second, audience choice,

as neither of these things is seen in genuine art forms such as literature or cinema’ (Tavinor,

61).

Tavinor targets the idea of video games being an interactive experience as a reason for their

status as ‘not quite art’. According to Tavinor, the ruling idea is that art must be seen and

experienced, and an influence by the player creates a situation in which the player is in

control and therefore not reflecting on the situation he is in.

Using the cases of game developer Playdead’s critically lauded pieces of interactive fiction,

video games Limbo (2010) and Inside (2016), this essay wishes to assert two things: that

interactivity does not separate games from other professed art forms, such as films and

literature, by showing that in these more ‘passive’ mediums this interactivity is also present,

and that interactivity in games is represented not by that which makes a game a ‘game’ in the

eyes of most viewers – its gameplay, the fact that progression requires manual input from an
external source – but rather by the form of interpretation that comes from digesting the

narrative contents of a game, like with a film or a book.

To make the case for this connection, this essay wishes to focus on a specific part of the

videogames chosen: their lack of narration. Debunking another of Tavinor’s arguments from

his text, that script wise a lot of games are evidently ‘B grade’ (a term Tavinor uses to imply

video games read like a cheesy B-movie), a video game that eschews narration (in both

games, the only text ever on screen are the titles, which exist to elucidate only what location

the player is in) that is nonetheless considered a masterpiece should lend credence to the fact

that scripts are not necessarily a part of artistic merit. Therefore, a video game without

dialogue is not necessarily B-grade and contains other forms of narrative that apparently

make it culturally significant. These other forms of narrative can be seen in films without

dialogue as well, making the case that across these media there is a certain audience

engagement at play, a Brechtian interactivity that requires participation from the spectator.

We must therefore turn to silent films, part of a medium that according to scholars like

Tavinor produces more artistic works. Dialogue free by necessity, there is nevertheless a lot

of text in the form of intertitles that elucidates the goings on and attempts to describe the

situation. When we look at a filmmaker like Dziga Vertov, however, who was employed as a

Communist propagandist, and who used his work to experiment with the basis of film, we see

a more symbolic approach to the idea of conveying through film.

“The goal for Vertov was to produce through cinema […] a “counter public-

sphere,” a coherent context of living in which those aspects of concrete,

everyday experience that had been de-realized and rendered unintelligible

under the rule of bourgeois rationalism could once again be made

comprehensible and communicable, and through this reconfiguration of

 empirical experience, to establish the foundation for “solidarity that can be

grasped with the senses.” (Fore, 2013, 4)

Devin Fore posited this in his article “The Metabiotic State: Dziga Vertov’s The Eleventh

Year”, and his point is in interesting one when we want to look at the way information is

brought over to an audience which necessarily must derive the same conclusions as their

fellow audience members for the film to have a solidifying effect. Vertov’s avant-garde style

of editing also noticeable in his other works becomes interesting when, for example, a hydro-

electric dam being built is represented as a valley being flooded (a necessary step in hydro-

electric dam building), which to modern audiences, or those unaware of the intended goal,

seems to be a dangerous omen of progress destroying nature.

We see, then, that a form of interactivity becomes necessitated as soon as certain edifying

elements (like text and dialogue) are not as available as can reasonably be expected. We

therefore interpret things through the lens of our knowledge and societal situation, and,

according to Vertov at least, seem in this way able to connect through wordless

communication. In the same way, Limbo and Inside, while only playable a certain way,

makes sure that the interpretation of events is a symbolic one that is up to the imagination of

the player. In this way considered to be an indie-game, developer Playdead, like Vertov,

experiments with its chosen medium to comment on the nature of this medium. The titles of

their games, being our only guidance, seem to present an overarching theme which makes

some conclusions more likely than others, but there is not necessarily a good answer.

In summary, this essay wishes to compare Vertov’s modes of editing with Playdead’s choice

to have their games be exempt of dialogue or text. The idea is to show that lack of dialogue

forces a certain engagement with the audience and underscores Vertov’s idea of a ‘world of

naked truth’ that can be discovered through a form of engaged interpretation. The end goal of
this essay is therefore to discredit Grant Tavinor’s notion of interactivity being exclusively

game-related and an example of a lack of artistic merit.

Sources

Adorno, Theodor. “The Culture Industry Reconsidered.” The Culture Industry. London:

Routledge, 1991. 98-106.

Ross, Steven J. Working-class Hollywood: Silent film and the shaping of class in America.

Princeton University Press, 1999.

Benjamin, Walter. “The Work of Art in the Age of Its Technological Reproducibility”

[1936]. Walter Benjamin: Selected Writings. Vol. 3. Cambridge: Mass. Harvard University

Press, 2002. 101-33.

Tavinor, Grant. The art of videogames. John Wiley & Sons, 2009.

Fore, Devin. “The Metabiotic State: Dziga Vertov’s The Eleventh Year.” October145

(Summer 2013): 3-37.

Wolf, Mark JP, and Bernard Perron, eds. The Routledge companion to video game studies.

Routledge, 2014.