Games and Art

Most videogames are not art. I don't just mean "most videogames suck". I don't mean Madden or Call of Duty or other series that rehash the same principles under an annual release lack soul. I don't mean repackaged upgrades/expansions like Super Street Fighter 4: Ultimate Championship Edition are just cheap cash-in attempts. I mean legitimately good games that I love -- games like Final Fantasy VI, Ocarina of Time, or Mass Effect 2 -- aren't inherently art.

That's not to say that these games aren't, in a way, artful. There is skillful work of all manner in play in these games and others. There's writing. There's composing. There are models and environments to draw and render and animate. There's A.I. scripting and software design. Years ago, I would feverishly point out to these facets of game design and insist that games must be art. This agglomeration argument doesn't work for me anymore, though.

Many games have moments where they reach the level of art. There are scenes of catharsis and closure in adventure games and RPGs of all generations that (due to limitations of writing or presentation if nothing else) would lose their teeth if not for the connection that control gives you to the protagonist(s), and thus the world they inhabit. There are points in Mass Effect 2 and 3 where your decisions catch up with you and you're stuck having to choose between options you don't like with no idea of how things will pan out. Then you remember that, so long as you've been consistently good or bad, you'll almost certainly get a dialog option -- eventually -- that lets you satisfy all parties. But that doesn't make the game, as a whole, art.

In order for anything to be art, it must take advantage of the inherent, or at least prevalent, characteristics of its art form. For games, this means delivering messages and fostering ideas and discussions that are most effectively conveyed through the participatory nature of the medium. Few games are dedicated to this task, but it seems like examples of this are increasing, and I think that has something to do with the fact that we're finally beginning to understand this medium as multiple generations of people who grew up with it are finally working together to determine its future.

I think it's fair to take into account the technological context of a game when deciding if it's art. The original Legend of Zelda, for instance, seems to have a better claim to being art than any of its successors. Why? Because the entire game is exploratory. You begin helpless. An unfamiliar old man cautions you and gives you a sword. And you find your way and unlock the mysteries of the world around you on your own. You bomb walls and burn bushes and stab octoroks and, through cryptic clues, slowly discover the intention of the designers with as little overt instruction as possible. Lack of instruction was a common thing in older games, but generally there were people who gave obvious directions or level design that limited your options and made things pretty clear (I can't go to the left, I guess I'll go to the right). The Legend of Zelda had none of this, and that's part of what makes it so thrilling and frustrating to go back and play today.

For similar reasons, I'd call the original Metroid (and maybe even Super Metroid, if only because of Metroid's relative obscurity at the time) art. Nearly any time a game asks you to play with it and not just play it, I'd call that art. This falls apart in more sandbox-y games like Sim[fill in the blank], where developer intent is minimal, but I'd generally classify those more as toys than games -- a discussion for another day. Unfortunately, this is increasingly hard to do as genre norms and design conventions create a context in which we can figure out what a game wants from us without a whole lot of explicit instruction. It's still doable (this is what Jonathan Blow is trying to do with Witness), but it's harder.

Another example of how games approach art is by abusing, rather than obfuscating, the goal oriented nature of a "game".

As an example: At various points in the end of the classic SNES RPG Earthbound (also known as Mother 2), the developers break the fourth wall to ask you, the player, your name. Come the end of the game, it turns out that your characters, no matter how well leveled, cannot defeat Giygas. Instead, you need to use Paula's "pray" ability until, eventually, you, the player, pray for Giygas to die, causing him to take massive damage.

As a good little Christian boy, the intent of this was lost on me. "Of course praying can defeat evil," I thought. What was really going on was this: Shigasato Itoi, the creator of Earthbound, was trying to be subversive. The only reason that Giygas dies -- the only reason that these characters and this world can be saved -- is because the player wants it. The player doesn't even have to want Giygas to die for the sake of the characters, but only because he or she wants to finish the game. At the climax of the game, Itoi sucks you out of the moment by fantastically breaking the fourth wall and asks you to come to terms with the time and effort you've put into this ultimately meaningless experience.

Does it work? Not entirely. Is it admirable? Yes.

It's a technique that is accomplished infinitely better by Shadow of the Colossus, one of the best examples of games as art that I can think of. Some of what makes SotC great are the exploratory elements. The only instruction available to you is the beam of light that will appear to direct you to your next goal if you hold your sword up to the sun. The game world is large and empty and filled with small spots of quiet beauty that you can find if you're willing to just wander aimlessly.

The entire game itself consists of 13 fights with enormous creatures who you only learn how to defeat as you struggle to survive against them. You're never told explicitly why you're doing this, as I recall. It's just suggested that you're taking the only course of action you know to revive your lost love -- whose body you place on a stone slab inside a gigantic temple at the beginning of the game.

It's also suggested that what you're doing is taboo, and as your progress through the game you begin to get a sense of why. Every time you kill a Colossus, you're not only extinguishing the life of a magnificent being that, other than your intrusion, has lived in peaceful solitude for time immemorial. You're unleashing palpable darkness that both enters physically into yourself and gives rise to discomforting shades in the temple that serves as your home base.

But you have no choice. The nature of the game is such that you either have to continue doing this or put it down or simply ride your horse around the barren landscape as you try to decide between the two.

At the end, your misgivings are proved correct, and while your love is brought back, it's to life alone in this now completely empty country.

It's powerful and beautiful and perhaps one of the greatest games ever made. People have complained about the awkward controls, but they're meant to be. You're not a God of War or any other sort of ultimate bad ass. You may be a great warrior, but you're still on your own fighting against living mountains. It's not meant to be easy or fluid. It's meant to be gut wrenching and panic inducing, and the moment of triumph as a Colossus collapses to the ground and dissolves into nearly nothing is meant to be as total as the moment of conflicted-ness following it as you again see something ominous penetrating your soul.

Maybe less powerful, but likely more important, are games that ask us to think about the norms in gaming. This is what I see happening more and more, especially in small, one-shot indie games.

One of the most famous individuals in game design is Peter Molyneux. This is the man created the "god game" in Populous and took it to new levels in Black and White. He tasked players with taking on the role of the villain in Dungeon Master, and attempted to create a game world that would respond dynamically to the player's behavior in the Fable series. The thing about Molyneux is that, as much as for his games, he's famous for over-promising, and also for making promises and talking about ideas that gamers as a whole often don't care about. The use of the Dog as a surrogate HUD in Fable 2, for instance, or his talk about creating a sense of "touch" by using Kinect in Fable 3 (a feature that disappeared long before the game saw release).

Molyneux's lofty and occasionally absurd ambitions have given rise to a brilliant Twitter parody known as Peter Molydeux. This is a guy who asks questions like "What if your avatar was afraid of you and you had to gain his trust?". Kind of ridiculous, but sometimes, you just need to run with ridiculous ideas and see the result. Fortunately, game developers all around the country agreed with that sentiment, and a couple of weekends, we got the Peter Molydeux Game Jam, in which hundreds of developers/development teams spent a weekend making a game/prototype based on a Molydeux tweet.

There are half a dozen games about talking suicidal businessmen off of ledges. There are games about being a bear who needs to hug people in order to breath, but you will kill people if you hug them for too long. There are games in which a pair of lovers need to parkour their way out of a city but become distracted/incapable if they are too far apart. Most impressively, there are games like Recidivism, where you need to continually watch the death animation of every enemy you kill until they fill up the screen and/or you die.

For better or worse, videogames are violent, and rarely do they ask you to confront that notion. Again, there are instances (such as the airport scene on Modern Warfare 2 or, better yet, having to deal with the zombies of every person you killed during one of the boss fights in Metal Gear Solid 3), but these are isolated. Making games, even short, tiny ones, that ask us to think about and stare at the things that games tend to force us to do is good. It gets us to question why these activities are the only ones we engage in, and it asks us to open up our minds to new approaches.

The interactive nature of games can make for powerful storytelling in the traditional sense, but traditional design concerns make it relatively easy for player to simply escape the stories that game makers may be trying to tell. The attitudes that most people take into games simply aren't conducive to articulating the sorts of ideas that we see in books and movies. This is why the agglomeration argument doesn't work and why storytelling isn't the measure by which we consider games as art..

What games are good at is confronting us with ideas about leisure and how we spend our free time. This, then, is how games become art: by building into their structure questions about how and why we play them and what their limitations are. A game is are art when it changes the way we play and think about games as a whole.

Events like the Molydeux jam give me hope that people will take time to think about games at this level and to make statements about the state of gaming through games more regularly going forward. The importance of the ideas being expressed may not make immediate sense to people outside the culture, but that happens with all art, and it doesn't matter. Art isn't about appeal. It's about truth. And we're finally reaching a point where we're willing to pursue that.