Abstract
The majority of videogames as they are currently constituted seem to display a mechanistic repetitiveness in conception, development and production. A creative shallowness in games, a lack of innovation, and a tendency to clone successful titles, are in part attributable to the hegemonic control exerted by game producers. This situation persists despite the intense frustration from the creative talent within the industry: “design documents are worked out by the marketing department; effectively as an artist or programmer you do what you’re told” (Wade 2007, p.687). This article approaches Fantasy as an underlying structuring element capable of energising the creative evolution of video games. Fantasy is interpreted as persisting throughout all game forms, and not confined to its own recognisable genre.
Highlights
The majority of videogames as they are currently constituted seem to display a mechanistic repetitiveness in conception, development and production
Motifs, images and symbols that recur in anthropology, psychology, folktales and the visual arts have a creative contribution to make in one of the most recently emergent technologies
We are urging an appreciation that Fantasy’s ‘arresting strangeness‘; the antipathy directed towards it by the everyday mind—as Tolkien (2008, p.48) so acutely observed—acts as a blind which conceals its ubiquitous and ever-present nature In Swinfen’s (1984, p.184) study on the place of Fantasy in literature, she contends that ‘some critics and academics condemn the whole genre with a passion that seems less than objectively critical.’
Summary
One of the most difficult tasks people can perform, much others may despise it, is the invention of good games. (C.G. Jung 1936). We take the view that psychological and mythological studies have shown that human wisdom i.e. the ability to make appropriate life choices, is transmissible via customs, ritual, dreams and art forms. This evolutionary knowledge is pre-technological but not necessarily pre-rational. A deeper insight into the creative potential of Fantasy is an approach that makes games better, i.e., more emotional, more meaningful and more engaging In videogames those who worship at the altar of simulation might remind themselves that humans have always been proficient simulators ever since the evolution of the pre-frontal cortex. The consequences are Murray and Maher The Role of Fantasy in Video Games that we become comfortable with our own mundane view of what we take to be real which restricts our capacity for creative and original thinking
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