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i.
Back when the "are video games art" debate was raging in the 2010s blogosphere (and what a quaint-looking debate that is nowadays, haha), the piece I often cited as the go-to example of what an Art Game should do was a little 15-minute text-parser-based parlor trick, "maybe make some change". Not because it was my favorite game or the only game that I thought of as art, but because it accomplished the marriage of narrative and gameplay in such a tidy and decisive way.
The game consists of a single puzzle. The solution to the puzzle and the emotional epiphany at the core of the story are one in the same. Solving the puzzle gives you the epiphany; the epiphany is the solution to the puzzle.
If I were to engage in that sort of discussion today... well, first off, I'd go read some actual literature on how people define / think about art first, haha. And I'd do away with the distinction I previously held between gameplay and narrative—too often they're impossible to pull apart, and even a game without any of the stuff I'd associate with a "story," characters and plots beats and such, can still have a narrative. And I'd actually accord more respect to the various Square Enix RPGs than I did at the time—my complaint back then was that they aped too much from cinema to really be thought of as their own kind of thing, and the seeming total separation of narrative from gameplay concerns held them back, whereas now I'd argue there's quite a bit more interplay between the two than I'd first thought.
But I'd still hold "maybe make some change" in pretty high regard. That perfect marriage of mechanical and emotional insight isn't something that makes a game art, but it's still a neat damn thing to pull off*.
( Read more... )
Back when the "are video games art" debate was raging in the 2010s blogosphere (and what a quaint-looking debate that is nowadays, haha), the piece I often cited as the go-to example of what an Art Game should do was a little 15-minute text-parser-based parlor trick, "maybe make some change". Not because it was my favorite game or the only game that I thought of as art, but because it accomplished the marriage of narrative and gameplay in such a tidy and decisive way.
The game consists of a single puzzle. The solution to the puzzle and the emotional epiphany at the core of the story are one in the same. Solving the puzzle gives you the epiphany; the epiphany is the solution to the puzzle.
If I were to engage in that sort of discussion today... well, first off, I'd go read some actual literature on how people define / think about art first, haha. And I'd do away with the distinction I previously held between gameplay and narrative—too often they're impossible to pull apart, and even a game without any of the stuff I'd associate with a "story," characters and plots beats and such, can still have a narrative. And I'd actually accord more respect to the various Square Enix RPGs than I did at the time—my complaint back then was that they aped too much from cinema to really be thought of as their own kind of thing, and the seeming total separation of narrative from gameplay concerns held them back, whereas now I'd argue there's quite a bit more interplay between the two than I'd first thought.
But I'd still hold "maybe make some change" in pretty high regard. That perfect marriage of mechanical and emotional insight isn't something that makes a game art, but it's still a neat damn thing to pull off*.
( Read more... )
