Rambly Thoughts: Video Games as Art
Jul. 12th, 2012 07:51 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
queenluaI recently got into an interesting e-mail discussion about games as an art form with a friend, and this entry is a result of that discussion. I know a lot's been said on the subject before, but I'm hoping at least I have a bit of something new to contribute (even though my thoughts are still a bit scattered and sparse).
So let's start with this: I don't think there's an exemplary example of a video game that I would (a) count as a piece of art, and (b) effectively utilizes the tools of its medium.
Or at least, I don't think there's a great example of this yet. Think of early cinema: it took early filmmakers a long time to realize, wait, we're doing this all with cameras now, so we should stop acting like this is just a play. Nowadays, movies are really distinct from plays; there are things filmmakers do in movies that wouldn't be possible in plays, and vice versa. But movies are older than games by a fair margin.
I think games are still suffering from that—game designers are taking their storytelling/art cues from cinema and novels and whatever, but they haven't quite figured out what it is that makes their medium unique.
The two types of games.
Narrative-as-window-dressing. This category includes the Final Fantasy games, Assassin's Creed, Metal Gear Solid, and so on. In these games, the story's generally told via cutscenes, and what happens in those cutscenes has little effect on the gameplay itself. The story told in those cutscenes can be really engaging and powerful (hi hello do you want to hear about the FFX fangirling spree I went on last night), but that story doesn't feel very integrated with the gameplay. It's taking all its storytelling cues from cinema and novels, rather than taking advantage of the merits of the medium (i.e. interactivity). I mean, consider how plenty of folks will watch the "movie" version of a game (a copypasta of all the game's cutscenes) rather than bother actually playing the game—that tells you that the "game" part of the game is not very important to the narrative.
Gameplay-as-page-turning. This includes the Choice of Games games, Digital: A Love Story, Radical Dreamers... These games are essentially audiovisual choose-your-own-adventure books. I think these are undoubtedly art, and undoubtedly interactive, but I don't quite count them as "games" since the gameplay is essentially equivalent to turning a page in many cases.
Integrating story and gameplay.
The question, then, is: how do you integrate story seamlessly with gameplay? How do you turn the player's interactions with the game into something that's integral to the story itself? This is a really hard problem. I'm not sure of the answer. With certain types of gameplay, I'm not sure if it's possible at all—I'm not sure, for example, how you could integrate a first-person shooter's twitchy-hit-everything-that-moves gameplay into a story.
I think puzzle-based gameplay holds the most promise, if executed well. The best example I know of this is maybe make some change, a very short (~15 minutes) little web-browser based game that packs a surprising punch. I very much recommend playing it, though I'll try to discuss it without spoilers here.
The point is, when you do solve the main "puzzle" in that game, it's not just "oh I pushed this crate into this hole and now I get to proceed to the next room." The puzzle is linked with the game's storyline, such that solving the puzzle means you're solving something about the narrative itself.
When I think about it, reminds me a bit of the feeling of finally coming up with a good math proof—you've been thinking really hard about a bunch of vaguely related concepts, trying to figure out some clever way to combine them, and when you finally arrive at a solution, you gain not only a solution, but also a deeper understanding of how those things connect. And seeing as lots of math folk draw comparisons between math and art, it seems to me that working through a (well-designed) puzzle in a game may be a bit similar. (amielleon, you should feel free to comment if I'm totally talking out my ass here; my math experience is enthusiastic but amateurish.)
What I'd like to see more of in games (i.e., what I perceive as some of the distinct advantages of video games as a medium).
Uncomfortable moments. I like the idea of using games to force people to make uncomfortable choices, or to put people in uncomfortable positions. For example, Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn does this.
In the beginning, the game's a pretty straightforward yay-let's-liberate-our-oppressed-country narrative. The Begnion occupiers are pretty clearly bad dudes, and though Daein's racist tendencies are mentioned in passing, our heroes are all shiny good people, so it's not really an issue.
But then part three hits, and now Daein seems much less shiny. You're forced to fight for decidedly less-shiny reasons, and Daein's race issues can no longer be ignored:
Then the clencher comes when Ike et al. come to personally take you out—you've played as them before, so you have an intimate knowledge of just how OP they are, and you get this gut oh fuck shit just got real feeling. It's an impressive bit of storytelling.
And games are really well-suited for that sort of discomfort—because when you're playing a game, to some extent you own your actions, in a way that feels very different than reading about those actions, or watching a movie, or whatever.
Experiencing "the other." This is stretching a bit, but...
Back when I was doing play-by-post RPGs, once of the earliest things I discovered was how hard it was for me to hate my own characters. I was like, eleven when I started playing on these games, and I'd decide I was going to make a total asshat jerk villain or whatever—but inevitably, as I got more skilled in writing characters, I found myself sympathizing with and understanding all my characters, jerkasses included. By the act of adopting that role, and forcing myself to think the way that character thought, I gained a deep understanding of why they did what they did.
Sometimes I'd still think they were a despicable person. But at least I understood why they were that way.
Now, play-by-post RPGs are rather different from video games. It's much closer to writing a story than it is playing a game. But, I do think that something similar could be achieved with games.
There's usually a lot of to-do about maximizing player choice in games. Games like Skyrim love to boast about how customizable your character is, how many different roles they can take on, how many different places they can go, and so on. But I think by constraining a player's choices in very specific ways, some interesting new experience could come about. Such constraints could force a player to experience a role they're not used to, put themselves in a position that they're unfamiliar with.
The hard thing to do with this, though, is making the gameplay more about understanding/empathizing with your PC's position, rather than encouraging the player to try and cut corners or figure out clever ways to overcome that position. There was this game that came out a while ago, Spent—it was well-intentioned, though preachy. The idea was, you're put in the role of someone trying to take care of a family while earning minimum wage, which is really hard to do in the game (just like it is in real life)—but the discussion thread I saw about the game had a lot of people gloating "oh, well, I managed to do it," and saying things like "well clearly this game doesn't actually represent the plight of poor people because what are the odds that you would have a car wreck and a major illness and a work injury all in the same month." The game was encouraging you to think with your head and outsmart it, but what you really needed for that game to be successful was to somehow force the players to feel/empathize with their PC's position. In this case, the game-y mechanics actively worked against the message it was trying to convey.
So let's start with this: I don't think there's an exemplary example of a video game that I would (a) count as a piece of art, and (b) effectively utilizes the tools of its medium.
Or at least, I don't think there's a great example of this yet. Think of early cinema: it took early filmmakers a long time to realize, wait, we're doing this all with cameras now, so we should stop acting like this is just a play. Nowadays, movies are really distinct from plays; there are things filmmakers do in movies that wouldn't be possible in plays, and vice versa. But movies are older than games by a fair margin.
I think games are still suffering from that—game designers are taking their storytelling/art cues from cinema and novels and whatever, but they haven't quite figured out what it is that makes their medium unique.
The two types of games.
Narrative-as-window-dressing. This category includes the Final Fantasy games, Assassin's Creed, Metal Gear Solid, and so on. In these games, the story's generally told via cutscenes, and what happens in those cutscenes has little effect on the gameplay itself. The story told in those cutscenes can be really engaging and powerful (hi hello do you want to hear about the FFX fangirling spree I went on last night), but that story doesn't feel very integrated with the gameplay. It's taking all its storytelling cues from cinema and novels, rather than taking advantage of the merits of the medium (i.e. interactivity). I mean, consider how plenty of folks will watch the "movie" version of a game (a copypasta of all the game's cutscenes) rather than bother actually playing the game—that tells you that the "game" part of the game is not very important to the narrative.
Gameplay-as-page-turning. This includes the Choice of Games games, Digital: A Love Story, Radical Dreamers... These games are essentially audiovisual choose-your-own-adventure books. I think these are undoubtedly art, and undoubtedly interactive, but I don't quite count them as "games" since the gameplay is essentially equivalent to turning a page in many cases.
Integrating story and gameplay.
The question, then, is: how do you integrate story seamlessly with gameplay? How do you turn the player's interactions with the game into something that's integral to the story itself? This is a really hard problem. I'm not sure of the answer. With certain types of gameplay, I'm not sure if it's possible at all—I'm not sure, for example, how you could integrate a first-person shooter's twitchy-hit-everything-that-moves gameplay into a story.
I think puzzle-based gameplay holds the most promise, if executed well. The best example I know of this is maybe make some change, a very short (~15 minutes) little web-browser based game that packs a surprising punch. I very much recommend playing it, though I'll try to discuss it without spoilers here.
The point is, when you do solve the main "puzzle" in that game, it's not just "oh I pushed this crate into this hole and now I get to proceed to the next room." The puzzle is linked with the game's storyline, such that solving the puzzle means you're solving something about the narrative itself.
When I think about it, reminds me a bit of the feeling of finally coming up with a good math proof—you've been thinking really hard about a bunch of vaguely related concepts, trying to figure out some clever way to combine them, and when you finally arrive at a solution, you gain not only a solution, but also a deeper understanding of how those things connect. And seeing as lots of math folk draw comparisons between math and art, it seems to me that working through a (well-designed) puzzle in a game may be a bit similar. (
amielleon, you should feel free to comment if I'm totally talking out my ass here; my math experience is enthusiastic but amateurish.)What I'd like to see more of in games (i.e., what I perceive as some of the distinct advantages of video games as a medium).
Uncomfortable moments. I like the idea of using games to force people to make uncomfortable choices, or to put people in uncomfortable positions. For example, Fire Emblem: Radiant Dawn does this.
In the beginning, the game's a pretty straightforward yay-let's-liberate-our-oppressed-country narrative. The Begnion occupiers are pretty clearly bad dudes, and though Daein's racist tendencies are mentioned in passing, our heroes are all shiny good people, so it's not really an issue.
But then part three hits, and now Daein seems much less shiny. You're forced to fight for decidedly less-shiny reasons, and Daein's race issues can no longer be ignored:
Micaiah: Well, with a few exceptions, the soldiers are excited about hunting down the laguz... They've been promised a large bounty for each one they kill. It's certainly raised morale....and damn do you ever feel what Micaiah's feeling. Maybe I was just hyperinvolved in the game, but during the part 3 Dawn Brigade battles, I felt legitimately uncomfortable—I was not okay with slaughtering half of the Laguz Alliance's forces or slaughtering Sanaki's troops, but like Micaiah, it wasn't like I had much of a choice
Sothe: Listen to yourself! Laguz hunting?! That's just great. We've gone from being freedom fighters to bigots in the blink of an eye. I can't believe you'd go along with such a murderous plan. How do you feel about this, Micaiah? Tell me the truth.
Micaiah: ...I don't want to fight.
Then the clencher comes when Ike et al. come to personally take you out—you've played as them before, so you have an intimate knowledge of just how OP they are, and you get this gut oh fuck shit just got real feeling. It's an impressive bit of storytelling.
And games are really well-suited for that sort of discomfort—because when you're playing a game, to some extent you own your actions, in a way that feels very different than reading about those actions, or watching a movie, or whatever.
Experiencing "the other." This is stretching a bit, but...
Back when I was doing play-by-post RPGs, once of the earliest things I discovered was how hard it was for me to hate my own characters. I was like, eleven when I started playing on these games, and I'd decide I was going to make a total asshat jerk villain or whatever—but inevitably, as I got more skilled in writing characters, I found myself sympathizing with and understanding all my characters, jerkasses included. By the act of adopting that role, and forcing myself to think the way that character thought, I gained a deep understanding of why they did what they did.
Sometimes I'd still think they were a despicable person. But at least I understood why they were that way.
Now, play-by-post RPGs are rather different from video games. It's much closer to writing a story than it is playing a game. But, I do think that something similar could be achieved with games.
There's usually a lot of to-do about maximizing player choice in games. Games like Skyrim love to boast about how customizable your character is, how many different roles they can take on, how many different places they can go, and so on. But I think by constraining a player's choices in very specific ways, some interesting new experience could come about. Such constraints could force a player to experience a role they're not used to, put themselves in a position that they're unfamiliar with.
The hard thing to do with this, though, is making the gameplay more about understanding/empathizing with your PC's position, rather than encouraging the player to try and cut corners or figure out clever ways to overcome that position. There was this game that came out a while ago, Spent—it was well-intentioned, though preachy. The idea was, you're put in the role of someone trying to take care of a family while earning minimum wage, which is really hard to do in the game (just like it is in real life)—but the discussion thread I saw about the game had a lot of people gloating "oh, well, I managed to do it," and saying things like "well clearly this game doesn't actually represent the plight of poor people because what are the odds that you would have a car wreck and a major illness and a work injury all in the same month." The game was encouraging you to think with your head and outsmart it, but what you really needed for that game to be successful was to somehow force the players to feel/empathize with their PC's position. In this case, the game-y mechanics actively worked against the message it was trying to convey.
no subject
Date: 2012-07-13 02:13 pm (UTC)I think that should video games be able to attain some status as high art, it won't be judged in the same ways that narrative art would be judged, just as we don't (entirely) base our judgment on a painting based on the story it tells. Games are unlike almost any other form in that they necessarily involve interactivity. And beyond the matter of games telling stories, you must ask if the interactivity itself should qualify as part of a game's artistry.
Gregory Weir explores a lot of aspects of player interaction and game design in a way I'd call artful, but are difficult to appreciate unless you've played lots of games and have an expectation. In a way they're thought experiments. The Day explores perpendicular goals -- that is, two possible outcomes that are completely unrelated, and that you cannot pursue simultaneously. Waves explores gaming and learning, starting off with an excellent example of the implicit tutorial. And then if you want something more traditionally considered an art game, try "The Majesty of Colors."
I think game design in itself is something that deserves a lot of thought, and probably should be ranked as high as the ability to solve problems in constructing narratives1 rather than being delegated to the equivalence of some kind of technical skill. In many cases it does explore issues of agency and decision-making -- as you noted, something integral.
But as for the story end... there's a question I've been struggling with lately while writing Paramagica, and that is, how aware should the player be of the conceit? If I want them to role play as a special agent in a low-fantasy world, should I let the wires show and give them very mechanical segments in which they hit buttons that say things like "Choose Pace > Sprinting/Jogging/Walking/Sneaking" or should I completely integrate it into the story like "I try to walk calmly across the village in hopes of not being noticed"? In a way it's not that different from the questions that playwrights must ask in matters of staging. I was amused to learn that Tony Kushner explicitly gave directions in Angels of America to let the wires show.
It's a question I want to raise because I feel like it lies in between your two categories. In group A, you play with the conceit as a separate entity from the narrative. In B, there almost is no conceit -- they are the automated version of having a guy tell you a story, while you ask him "But what if ___?" Which is, perhaps, a different matter. Most people would consider Choice Of Games and the like to be interactive fiction rather than a "game," which I think says a lot.2
(Also math is totally beautiful and for what it's worth, I get a similar feeling when I see a really elegant proof to when I hit something awesome/clever in a story.)
I love Radiant Dawn and I think it does a lot of cool things with its narrative, even though its plot is essentially static. Short of a game over, nothing you do actually matters aside from deciding whether some minor moppets live or die. And yet, it does force you to do things you don't want to do and feel like you've had a hand in them, which is pretty awesome.
There is definitely a trick to the amount of agency you can grant a player when forcing them into the discomfort zone. As you noted with Spent, if you give the player ways to overcome things, it can defeat your point. And yet, if you write some situations where you don't, it can feel intensely dissatisfying. (There was some wank over the inevitable death of Silas Hope in Choice of Vampire, I think.) Here's one of the big narrative problems of writing games!
One interesting moment I had was with the McDonald's simulation game, which, yes, is ultra-preachy, but the funniest thing about it is that the only way you can keep the corporation indefinitely is to play sustainably, even though it's unstated -- which I think is fucking hilarious.
Anyway I have lots of feels on this subject and we should talk about this sometime on IM too! 8D
1 Example of a problem you might have as a novel writer: I want a teenage protagonist because I want it to be a teenager's experience, but how can I justify a teenager having such a pivotal event in these roles? [Hunger Games solves this one nicely.]
2 Although personally I like playing Choice Of Games seriously a few times, and then looking at the code and trying to accomplish some silly goal. Trying to successfully survive solo in Zombies was very fulfilling, although I think COG are never as well-designed as games where you are aware of the mechanics.
no subject
Date: 2012-07-13 02:16 pm (UTC)Incidentally, Dragon Age: Origins is a damn good foray and you should play it. (And then leave Awakening and 2 alone, as they are deeply flawed. Well, maybe play DA2 because the gameplay's fun, but other than that.)
no subject
Date: 2012-07-14 02:15 am (UTC)Looking at your comments, I think my original post talked too much about narrative and not enough about gameplay—probably because narrative is what I've always latched onto / cared about in games I've played before.
re: game design as an art/skill: might be interesting to look at German board game creators in this regard. They take their stuff super seriously; there's some Wired article I read that interviewed the creator of Settlers of Catan, and it was interesting how much thought he put into every detail of the game.
Thanks for the Greg Weir stuff; I hadn't seen his name before.
Possibly relevant to your interests: Anna Anthropy's blog highlights a bunch of stuff coming out of the weird/indie/artsy game scene, with some thoughts on game design itself and frequent snark.
also I just spent like ten minutes trying to find this one really interesting IF game I liked, but I failed. I'll send the link your way if I can find it (and probably many more; I think I've got a pile of relevant bookmarks lying around on my laptop).
no subject
Date: 2012-07-14 02:36 am (UTC)But more than that, if I may go onto softer ground here, life is made of doing things -- why should we think that adding in the ability to do something in a medium should inherently render us less able to remark upon life?
Also board game creators can be very smart and I bow to their leet skills.
Anna Anthropy raises some good points but is a bit combative for my taste. (Pot kettle black, I know! But she sounds like People I've Seen on Tumblr.)
no subject
Date: 2012-07-14 03:30 am (UTC)hey that would be a great idea for a tumblr...! oh wait.
no subject
Date: 2012-07-16 02:16 pm (UTC)At the Art Institute of Chicago there's this giant heap of hard fruit-flavored candy in one corner. It's an exhibition, and all visitors are encouraged to take a piece, and the pile is replenished regularly. The object label says it's supposed to be about weight loss or something. The loss, which the viewer is a part of, is the point -- the interactivity.
no subject
Date: 2012-07-16 06:52 pm (UTC)Traditional definitions of art have focused a lot on authorial intent—i.e. what makes something art is the fact that an artist sat down at some point and deliberately created it, with an intended experience for the viewer—but interactive stuff flips that definition on its head. If the viewer can participate in the art, what's the difference between them and the artist? what if they do something the creator didn't intend? can they have a "wrong" experience? and so on.
This isn't as big of a problem with, say, improv jazz music or improv theater—in these sorts of things, the artist will take a "prompt" of some sort, and create art from that, but beyond the prompt there's not much audience interaction. But when you've got a video game, there's a lot more interaction.
...but then that whole postmodernism thing happens, and you get stuff like John Cage's 4:33, where the point is that he isn't doing anything; all of the art comes out of like, the crowd's fidgeting and coughs and whatnot.
So the "art is based on intent and non-interactivity" is a comfortable argument, a traditional argument, and one that probably worked pretty well when people were focusing on novels and symphonies and whatever. But I don't think it works so well in shiny-21st-century-land, with all these weird John Cage-y things floating around.
The more interesting question I think is: could an art-game feature an idea of "winning," in a traditional sense? Is an experience where you're focused on optimizing the strength of your position, amassing strength, besting opponents, etc. compatible with an "art" experience? (And if so, are there board games that also fit the definition of "art"?)
Interactive fiction doesn't have to face that problem so directly—because, even if the game has multiple endings, oftentimes (though not always!) the focus is more on the totality of the experience—i.e. the gamer keeps going out of a desire to see "what happens next," or what the consequences of choice X might be, or whatever, rather than "yay I got the best ending!"
But a puzzle game, a twitchy-hit-everything-moves-game, or a strategy game faces a pretty legitimate question here.
no subject
Date: 2012-07-16 07:20 pm (UTC)But at the very least I want to say that "interactivity = not art" only holds absolutely if you're willing to discount a lot of "art" recognized by massively endowed museums.
It's a bit of an appeal to authority, in a sense, but these definitions are only made up by people to begin with. And some people out there are willing to dump millions of dollars to proclaim these objects as art.
/preaching to the choir?
It seems that we've reduced the problem to a matter of semantics (no, literally, as in semantics). Are cheesecakes cakes? When does a color stop being red?
I'm more interested in the discussion we could have once people agreed on the definition of art, if they could ever.
no subject
Date: 2012-07-16 07:48 pm (UTC)While I doubt it's possible for everyone to agree on a definition of art, I think it's certainly possible to have discussions of the form, "If we accept, for the sake of argument, that X is an acceptable definition of art, then we must conclude that Y and Z fall under this definition because reasons Q," or whatever.
Also possibly relevant to your interests—I stumbled on this essay by Donald Knuth a few weeks ago when I was fiddling with some thoughts on computer programming as an art. He spends a lot of time talking about the historical uses of the term "art," and how that use has changed over time—I thought it was pretty interesting.
no subject
Date: 2012-07-16 08:48 pm (UTC)That essay is really cool! Thanks for sharing.
no subject
Date: 2012-07-25 05:24 pm (UTC)I think Alter Ego is an interesting case example as far as video games and art goes. It certainly touched me very deeply and it's definitely got a lot about the human condition in there. And unlike IF, there are definitely stronger gamey elements in there.
Also, it's like two decades old.
Just putting it out there.
no subject
Date: 2012-07-26 07:00 am (UTC)uh, I've seen this game before! I only played for like, a few minutes and got bored, but I'll give it another go; I'll let you know what I think once I get a decent way in =D