It seems to me that a lot of gamers, not to mention game journalists, have gotten it into their heads that our chosen form of recreation won’t be taken seriously unless we recognise a landmark achievement within the history of gaming; the video game equivalent to Orson Welles’ Citizen Kane.

Being both a film student and a gamer this is a concept that really speaks to me, but before I go into the basic gist of things I’d like to take a moment to explain what I mean by the Citizen Kane of video games.

Citizen Kane has been lauded by many film critics as the greatest film ever made. It topped the American Film Institute’s Top 100 films list in both 1998 and 2007, and Roger Ebert himself has quipped: “So it’s settled: ‘Citizen Kane’ is the official greatest film of all time”. But what’s so great about Citizen Kane? Allow me to explain.

Citizen Kane was Orson Welles first feature film and released in 1941, the film pioneered a vast number of film and storytelling techniques that we often take for granted today. Both the narrative structure and the style of Kane are very complex.

The film begins with the death of our main character and switches to a newsreel that details his life. A reporter is asked to discover the meaning behind Kane’s last word: “Rosebud”, and a series of interviews with the most important people of Kane’s life reveals a complex and at times contradictory character. This way of structuring a story, slowly revealing bits and pieces of a character’s past and his ever changing person was quite edgy, not to mention different, when compared to its contemporaries.

At the same time Citizen Kane broke new ground in film elements such as cinematography, lighting and sound. Orson Welles pioneered the low-angle shot, making characters appear huge and looming, as well as the deep focus technique, allowing all planes of the film’s image to look equally clear. Welles also incorporated editing and lighting techniques from German expressionism, giving his film an extinct and at times disturbing look.

Whether you consider it the greatest film ever or a load of overrated drivvel, it goes without saying that Citizen Kane did break new ground and showed that films could be more daring in the way they structured their narratives. From a technical standpoint it was truly innovative and more than 50 years down the line it’s still considered a masterpiece.

So how does this relate to video games? In more ways than you might think. It’s going to be difficult to point to a single landmark title like with Citizen Kane. While innovative films seem to come out once in a blue moon (the industry over 100 years old and the classical Hollywood narrative is still the accepted way of structuring narratives), the videogame industry has generated it’s share of innovative titles since it’s inception in the 70′s.

As far as simple storytelling is concerned, you need to look no further than Nintendo’s number one mascot; Mario. His first game appearance was in 1981 in the Donkey Kong arcade game. Before that time very few games had stories and identifiable characters. You were “some guy” or “a spaceship”. Space Invaders is about defending the earth, sure, but as far as story goes it’s difficult to inject much besides “Aliens invade, kill they ass”.

But Donkey Kong was different, having a beginning, a middle and an end in its narrtive. Pauline gets kidnapped, Mario gives chase and rescues the girl. It’s the most basic story you can tell, but it did tell a story, which is more than can be said for Donkey Kong’s predescessors.

Fast forward a decade or two and id Software unleashes Doom upon the world. While many would argue that Doom does little for the “games are art” debate, it was certainly influential. Just look at the massive amounts of shooters and action games that seem to clog up the marketplace. Doom picked up the storytelling ball and wove a narrative with demons, mad scientists, zombies and Big Fucking Guns, but we’re not here to just praise the game’s narrative.

What Doom pioneered was realism. This was the early 90′s, so nothing really looked realistic by today’s standard, but at the time it was quite the slap in the face for a lot of gamers who were tired of stomping Goombas and rescuing princesses. The guns, the gore and the grunts all seemed to scream “REALISM!”, except maybe the parts about interdimensional portals, demons and zombies. Still, it goes without saying that Doom showed that video games could handle more adult, not to mention controversial, subject matter.

These two titles are merely the tip of the iceberg among the vast amounts of influential and groundbreaking video games. Silent Hill 2 in particular wove a rich tapestry of fear, anxiety and mental instabillity through the use of sound effects, heavy symbolism and a thick dense fog that covered the titular town. The feeling of dread wasn’t just projected onto the characters, but also onto the player, just the same as Eternal Darkness: Sanity’s Requiem would a year later with its sanity meter.

The Half Life series also deserves special mention, telling its story entirely through the eyes of the player. GamesRadar has gone as far as saying that Gordon Freeman is the ultimate in player immersion. He never speaks and all his actions are completely controlled by the player. Both Half-Life 1 and 2 told its story through the secondary characters reacting to the player. It also took the time to really get to know the secondary characters, avoiding the cliché of merely having them around to provide exposition. Alyx Vance in particular has been hailed as one of the strongest and best characterised female characters in video games.

What ultimately sets video games apart from books and films is interactivity and immersion. Games are, by definition, interactive and more and more games feature a less linear approach to their way of storytelling. Michael Thomson of IGN claims it’s this interactivity that makes the Metroid Prime Trilogy the definite Citizen Kane of video games

I won’t go into too many specific details, but I’ll try to offer the basic premise of the article. Through player interactions with the environment, more and more of the game’s narrative and backstory is revealed. Our main character doesn’t die in the beginning, but that’s beside the point. The similarities to Citizen Kane are still fairly obvious, but that’s merely saying that Metroid Prime tells its story in the same way Citizen Kane does.

At the heart of it all is a game about running about an alien planet killing space aliens with your arm cannon. Discovering the history and background of everything the player encounters in Metroid Prime is entirely up to the player and can be completely bypassed in every playthrough.

To quote Anthony Burch of Destructoid and “Hey Ash, Watcha Playin’” fame:

“Thomsen compares the two works, and what does he come up with? An argument that can be effectively boiled down to:

- The producers were both really talented and both were almost canceled a few times

- You can see water droplets on her visor

- There aren’t any cut scenes

- Inferring plot stuff from checking out the environment is kind of similar to the reporters in Citizen Kane trying to infer the meaning of Rosebud by exploring Kane’s past

- Both are sort of hard to put into defined genres

- Both weren’t really successful upon initial release.”

Certainly that makes Metroid Prime similar to Citizen Kane, but I wouldn’t go as far as to say it’s the definitive Citizen Kane of video games. There are just too many titles to choose from to point to a definite game. Shadow of the Colossus is equally loaded in narrative and myth as Metroid Prime, a lot of which can be discerned from simple exploration of the environment. Bioshock offers the same background exposition as Metroid Prime through its audio logs and the same can be said about Brütal Legend and its Statues of Legend, which provide exposition into Brütal Legend’s backstory.

Merging story and thematic ideas with gameplay is much more suited for picking out a Citizen Kane of video games, which once again brings me back to Shadow of the Colossus.

I’m not saying SotC is my definite choice, I’m not even sure I have one, but it certainly needs to be added to the list of possible candidates. While the story can be thought of as quite simple there’s always a certain weight to your player character’s actions. Our protagonist is a man with a strong purpose and conviction, going to any means necessary to achieve his goals.

While both games are essentially about killing enemies in a strange and alien land, Shadow of the Colossus always makes you think twice about what you did. There’s no such thing in the Metroid Prime series. Samus is a hunter, a badass; someone who’s about taking names and kicking ass. Wander is simply an ordinary boy, defying the odds and killing the 16 guardians of a sacred land in order to ressurect his girlfriend.

But the wrongness of your actions is always present through the colossi’s reactions to Wander’s presence. One of them doesn’t even attack you, it simply flies around, meagerly trying to shake Wander off as he stabs it to death. It’s visceral, it’s moving and it’s the kind of thing video games need in order to be taken more seriously. Not just as an art form, but as a medium in itself.

Is there a need for video games to be taken more seriously? I think so. Personally I’m fed up with the news media portraying video games as murder simulators that harm children. Video games are more than children’s toys; more than moving pixels on a screen. They can be just as moving as films and literature, even more so, since we’re actively taking part in the experience rather than simply watching it unfold.

As for a definite Citizen Kane of gaming, choosing a single title will be difficult. At the moment I’ve got my hopes up for Heavy Rain, but only time will tell if video games get to be taken as seriously as books or movies.