Ars Technological: Part 1

The Art of the Videogame

Via Althouse I see that Roger Ebert is again going on a crusade against video games as an artistic medium. I'd link direct, except the Sun Times website is glitchy beyond reason, so if you're really interested you can get the gist, or spend the time trying to load the original article, from Ann Althouse.

Frankly, I'm just going to ignore and dismiss Ebert in general (I've not been a fan for some time as it is). His argument is, at best question begging, and at worse simply ignorant. Not in the "you just don't get it" sort of way but in the "the entire discussion centers on whether video games are more like chess or more like movies, so it isn't really an argument to say that video games are games like chess, chess isn't art, and therefore video games are not art, and if you don't know that, why are you commenting in the first place?" Being somewhat familiar with the games he uses as his evidence, it's also abundantly clear that Ebert knows nothing about the games. Example: the great accomplishment of Braid (which I'll admit to being less impressed than many others by, but whatever) is the way it incorporates the gameplay mechanic of reversing time into the puzzles, and then uses that incorporation to explicate the theme of... whatever the theme of the game is, frankly it's pretty confusing which is why I'm not that impressed by it. But there are some sequences of the game, particularly the very last (which is actually the very first -see, it's confusing) which demonstrates how context and order change the meaning of scene better than a thousand Rashomans. The time mechanic is emphatically not just about reversing your mistakes, thus invalidating the challenge of the game or puzzle. That was Prince of Persia, and even the Prince series managed to incorporate that game mechanic into the larger thematic story -and even manages real tragedy with the mechanic.

All of this thinking got me wondering. I've heard people say that the art of photography is the dark room. The art of film making is the editing room. The art of painting and sculpture, poetry and prose are their own forms. And so on, each art form has its own form of excellence. So I got to wondering, what the excellence of the video game is.

It is, incidentally, an important question in art. Poetry, according to Aristotle, is artistic in its cathartic ability. Oedipus Rex is a good tragedy because the audience identifies with Oedipus, thinks highly of him, and then feels the pain, frustration, agony, and crushing depression of Oedipus's fall, and leaves the play -like Oedipus -feeling purged of the negative emotion.

Tolstoy thought art was determined by its communicative ability. Folk art is good because it is a universal translation medium for explaining the farmer in the valley to the banker in the city.

Kant argued that art was a tool which allowed the mind to engage in judgement and reason without practical context (what he called mental free play).

The Beauty Theorists (a representative of which is eluding me) claimed that art was determined by its aesthetic characteristics -i.e. beauty -and when that became obviously untenable (this is, incidentally, the source of my love for Goya) they switched to the argument that it was determined by the opinion of experts.

And then there's Danto who writes that art is made by its transformation, in which a mundane collection of materials is artificed into something which is more than the mundane parts (hence his title: Transfiguration of the Common Place).

Video games can be any of these things.

Catharsis: Play Knights of the Old Republic I and II on the Good path and feel the tragedy of the characters as their central reason to exist is stripped away and revealed to be an illusion sourcing from their inner corruption, and then play on the Evil path to realize that even giving into base nature and desire is ultimately banal and unsatisfying. And then see the heroic overcoming of the base nature, or the tragedy of slavery to the Dark Side, and be released of your own anxiety.

Communication: 14 Final Fantasies (10 had a sequel, and I'm not counting the spin-offs) 7 Tales and dozens of other Japanese games break down the cultural barriers between the US and Japan, and in many ways do a better job of it than film or literature did.

Mental Free Play: I give you any Western RPG -Neverwinter Nights, Planescape: Torment, Balder's Gate, Kotor I & II, and Mass Effect. Emersive games which give you many opportunities to reflect, think, and consider the themes of the games. Many of the classic "Westwood" Real Time Strategies -the Command and Conquer series, Dune series, and the Blizzard Studios Warcraft and Starcraft which offer opportunity to explore and reflect while playing the levels, but also give you the alternate campaigns to allow you to see the game from the "villain's" perspective (though, really, it isn't until the later games that the villains become sympathetic).

Beauty: People play Shadow of the Colossus just to look at the imagery. I once parked a landspeeder atop a Tatooine mountain in Star Wars: Galaxy just to watch a herd of banthas cross the Dune Sea. Mass Effect provides visuals that make Star Wars look like a student film. Outlaws gave music that would make Sergio Leoni blush. Stylized games like Braid offer aesthetic experiences equivalent to anything Hollywood can produce.

Transfiguration: Perhaps the strongest argument for video games is that they have transformative powers far beyond what many other art mediums can, because they include the player in making the transformations. In how many movies has the hero had to order a sidekick onto a suicide mission? How traumatic is the death of Obi Wan in Star Wars as he buys time for Luke to escape? This takes the simple imagery of the event, the reality of actors portraying events with the help of clever editing and special effects and provides a new meaning and new emotional response. Now, I give you Mass Effect, which gains the same emotional response, but now you don't watch helplessly as Luke can't save him, you are, by the mechanics of the game, impotent to help. Further, you decide who gets the suicide mission. I remember playing a number of games -Hidden and Dangerous 2 most recently -where you become quite attached to the men in your command, and the senseless death of one of them -particularly when you didn't do anything wrong, it's just the way war is -is a real shot in the guts that Hollywood can only achieve through excessive use of acting and mood music. H&D2 accomplishes it with a gunshot, a yell, and a crumpled body.


But I offer another possibility. Videogames are a new medium. Perhaps they need a new criteria which sets them apart from painting, or sculpture, or film, or music, or literature. Videogames largely started as games -Pong, for example. Over time, the game developers realized the artistic possibilities, and so began to attach stories to the game. Sometimes this worked very well, sometimes not. The history of FMVs (Full Motion Video Games) is one of a movie interspersed with random gameplay -and with notable exceptions (ORIGIN's Wing Commander Series, mainly) -is not well remembered. However, for at least a decade, game designers have begun the process of integrating the game into the story and vice versa. Sometimes this works really well, such as in many FPS games, like HALO or Deus Ex or Half-Life where its like a story told from the first person perspective. Other times it works less well.

The best games, however, are the ones that manage to blend the game mechanics into the art of the game. God of War is a game about a psychotic killer trying to get revenge on the gods who cursed him, and whom he blames for his problems, and is in many ways (so say the people who play it) a tragedy of a man who will not face his own responsibility for his station in life. The game mechanic is an action button sequence. They're simple combinations of buttons that flash on the screen, rather than combinations of moves you have to learn that give you a cool effect. What this means is that, in God of War, you have to be complicit in all the psychotic killing, and its easy. At the end of three games you find yourself in the same place as the protagonist. "I've spent hours casually murdering people, but really, it's not my fault. It's Zeus', or the Game Designer's..." This is basically the reason why I played the first three levels and then put the game away never to play again.

This is also the reason why Dante's Inferno seems to have been so bad. The designers copied God of War, but they missed the connection between the gameplay mechanic and the game.

Bioshock goes a step further and demonstrates how a character in a game, even a wide open sandbox, really has no free will except the choice not to play. And at the end of the game gives the player explicitly this option: murder the villain or turn the game off. How do you like choice now? And it does all of this with the basic genre conventions of the FPS.

And with this as our working definition, there are in fact a lot of games which really aren't much art. Sandbox games like Pirates! Live the Life, while fun, are basically on the level of folk art. They don't communicate anything directly, but rather indirectly. Many strategy games, RTS or TBS, or even the new 4X (that is, Real Time, Turn Based, and Expand/Explore/Exterminate/Exploit) are basically chess with fancier graphics, and again are basically folk art. Some of them aspire to more, there's quite a bit of writing in the TBS Alpha Centauri and its spiritual cousins, Civilization, but at the end it's still basically an ornate chess set. Many flight sims, war games, and shooters are basically serviceable simulators, and again, just really nice sail boats or whatever. Art, but of a decidedly low type.

But then again, so is a lot of everything else. This is hardly unique to games.