Consider two sorts of familiarity that arise in art.

The first is the familiarity of predictability. Through craft, this sort of work gives us what we expect in a well-conceived fashion. It’s one of the reasons people enjoy television. The sitcom and the procedural tend to be particularly good at giving us what we expect. In twenty minutes, a banal family crisis can flare up and be resolved. In forty, a duo of detectives can track down and book a murderer. Primetime television is a place we can go to be reassured, to avoid surprises.

The second kind of familiarity is that of deep exploration. Less formulaic works embrace uncertainty, taking us through themes or to places we thought we knew well, but which we later realized we hadn’t considered fully.

Novels, feature films, even the intricate story lines of more adventurous television series like The Wire or Lost hope to jostle our minds out of their comfort zone. When done well, this sort of art startles us out of mechanical slumber and shakes us to our core with the astounding novelty of unseen, yet now obvious truths.

We might call the first kind of familiarity the “familiar unfamiliar.” It gives us something we already know in a slightly different form. The second, by contrast, we could call the “unfamiliar familiar,” because it shows us something we didn’t even think to consider about a domain we thought we knew through-and-through.

Video games think they embrace the latter sort of familiarity, but in fact they almost always typify the former. To see why, let’s take a look at two events that took place last month, both of which enjoyed so much publicity that you’ll already be intimately familiar with them, although perhaps not in the way you think.

Read the whole article online at Gamasutra

published June 30, 2010