Low Culture: Is there a Citizen Kane of video games?

New media tends to prove itself with one work. In the 1940s, Citizen Kane proved the merit of film. In the ‘80s, comics proved themselves with Watchmen.

Video games have been around for almost 40 years, and have grown much faster than other media, but can any of us point to one game, one single game, and claim that it's the best the medium has to offer? Well, there's a lot more to that question than we think.

Firstly, how good is Citizen Kane in the first place? Well, I asked around for that. And you get a lot of different answers. Film majors told me that Citizen Kane redefined how movies were made, not that it was the best movie ever. Ok.

Writers told me that Citizen Kane was the first film to take advantage of the unique storytelling tools present in cinema, such as cinematography and editing. Alright.

But the consensus wasn't there. Even Roger Ebert couldn't really articulate why the movie was great, not in any way I could quote or paraphrase.

But perhaps Kane is more about the idea than the reality. This is the best film ever, in total, but trying to explain it won't really work. So, in the same way, what's the best video game ever?

My first inclination is to name Mass Effect 2. This blockbuster title is probably the best game I've ever played, focusing on a human soldier named Shepard as he puts together a team to fight interdimensional, civilization eating machines. Ok, when I explain it that way, how could this compare?

Well, play the game and you might see what I'm talking about. Shepard's team, whose side missions and personalities actually make up most of the game, are incredibly deep and well thought-out moral conflicts in and of themselves.

It's a story of sacrifice and strength. What do you sacrifice to save the galaxy? How strong can you be in the face of total obliteration?

But I know Mass Effect, for all its biblical allusion, all its pioneering hybridization of story and gameplay, falls short.

See, there's a spectrum of written work that every writer needs to see and know and understand. On one side, you have literary work. These are your Henry James, John Steinbeck pieces, built on a certain amount of realism mixed with a strong, character-driven narrative.

On the other side, however, we have genre work, where plot is key and moves everything forward, certain tropes are repeated, creating the genre itself, and typically existing in a more or less surreal version of reality.

Mass Effect falls somewhere in the middle, but that just isn't good enough. In the end, it's a science fiction game, and while that might only be its backdrop, it still alienates those without the taste for science fiction.

That's a very slippery slope. Because, unlike film, television, or even comics, video games are sitting very firmly in the genre-based camp. See, games add an extra element into their experience that all those other media lack: gameplay.

A game is as much about the gameplay as it is about the story. And while a movie has plenty of unique features (cinematography, mise en scene, etc.) those features are built into the storytelling of the medium.

Gameplay, inherently isn't. Gameplay can emphasize and enhance the story, but the two are profoundly different.

A game can be good because its gameplay is good (multiplayer Call of Duty, for instance, has zero story and is all gameplay), but a game can also be good because its story is good even if its gameplay is subpar (Heavy Rain is probably the best example). And this distinction is key because unlike any other medium, games are classified by their gameplay rather than their story.

The video game Mass Effect, for instance, is a science fiction game. But to the gaming world, it's known as a roleplaying game because that's the way the gameplay is built. There's plenty of shooter built in there, but at its heart, Mass Effect, is an RPG.

The same argument is made for Fallout or Oblivion. They're completely different genres of story (post-apocalyptic and high-fantasy, respectively) but they're both classified as RPGs because that's the basis of their gameplay.

What's my point? All video games are genre-based because they all have gameplay that can be seen as a genre (to a certain extent; there are definately outliers).

So, that's out. Well, as some of my film majors said, maybe it's about what redefined games. Huh. Ok. But how do you classify that? Super Mario 64 was the basis for modern 3D gameplay, does that make it the best video game ever? What about Street Fighter and that it redefined fighting games? World of Warcraft is clearly the foundation for most MMORPGS.

The fallacy here is that no game has drastically redefined games for every game thereafter. It's like saying Master of Puppets redefined music. No, it redefined metal and how we view that genre, but it's obviously not the best piece of music that's ever been made. I've spent a lot of time talking about what can't be the best video game ever, but haven't talked about what can.

This, in the end, seems to be the biggest problem. Citizen Kane is the best film ever because someone rated it that way. A bunch of critics and filmmakers got together and they said, Citizen Kane is the best movie of all time.

For video games, that just hasn't happened. Either the surrounding media base isn't strong enough or, more likely, it's not academic enough to get that deep into the game.

Not having a Magnum Opus to look to isn't necessarily because that one game hasn't been produced. Odds are it has. (Remember, games have been around for 40 years, which is approximately the gap between the birth of film and Citizen Kane.)

But having a Citizen Kane to aspire to is more about the medium as a whole.

We don't have it because we've never sat down and figured it out. And that's the thing. Games are getting there, they're deep (Fallout 3), they're artful, (Bioshock) and they're getting better and better every year. But we don't have our Oscars yet. We don't have our Roger Ebert. (Ok, maybe Yahtzee). But most of all, we don't have the academics.

People aren't peeling back the history of games; they're constantly trying to drive them forward.

That's all well and good, but, one day, we're going get an answer to the question. And, hey, it may be some game that we all know and love.

Or it could be something that comes out four years from now. Either way, the industry can only benefit from getting an answer.