• 11Feb 11

  Games as art.

  With films going the way of all action no plot and a lot of mod­ern art so inane, per­haps it is time for video games to become the art form of the 21st cen­tury. Films com­bine sto­ry­telling and char­ac­ter analy­sis with a stark visual styles that have the power to astound, but this type of cin­ema is becom­ing rarer and increas­ingly not told in Eng­lish. Thought pro­vok­ing cin­ema is shunted away from main­stream audi­ences to make way for the likes of Trans­form­ers 2, Prince of Per­sia and Clash of the Titans and while many crit­ics point to block­buster movies being noth­ing more than video game plots, this mis­in­ter­prets almost entirely what video games are. In the art world, six hun­dred years ago paint­ings lacked visual per­spec­tive and art was mostly con­cerned with reli­gious iconog­ra­phy. As time pro­gressed move­ments came and went, real­ity crept into what artists depicted and visual styles evolved. And yet no admired artist in the 21st cen­tury is paint­ing land­scapes like Turner once did with the form rel­e­gated to that of a mere hobby prac­ticed by old men sit­ting on cliff faces with their water colours. While art like cin­ema has the power to astound, its authored hand has become so man­nered that with­out it almost all mod­ern art becomes a total joke. In this year's Turner Prize Angela de la Cruz exhib­ited a three legged chair placed on a stool. Another was a basic orange plas­tic chair that had col­lapsed. These things, taken as they should be from a clearly objec­tive point of view are point­less and yet that does not stop crit­ics opin­ing about the deeper mean­ings behind the sup­posed art. For there has to be a mean­ing and these crit­ics must find it, or the emperor's new clothes will be truly exposed. For the art world to con­tinue to exist both the crit­ics and the artist must find a nar­ra­tive from some­where to ele­vate the art on dis­play from being an arbi­trary object in a room to that of eso­teric value. More often than not, to under­stand a piece of mod­ern art, you will need to read a blurb explic­itly telling you what you should be think­ing and feel­ing whilst view­ing, whereas pre­vi­ous works like the Sis­tine Chapel sim­ply aston­ished with its majesty; Michael Angelo never once left anote.

  Twenty five years ago video game char­ac­ters were pix­e­lated dots that, because humans per­son­ify every­thing, were deemed to be rep­re­sen­ta­tive of the human form. With the unprece­dented advance­ment in tech­nol­ogy devel­op­ers can almost cre­ate a life­like face and some, like those behind L.A. Noire are try­ing to include facial nuances into their work to make mod­els even more believ­able. Visu­ally video games sur­passed tra­di­tional art forms long ago, photo real­is­tic land­scapes avail­able for over a decade but games aren't lim­ited to a can­vas, they are much broader in scope for they cre­ate worlds. And yet in their ambi­tion the prob­lems devel­op­ers encounter allow crit­ics of the form to dis­miss video games out of hand as an art form. What seems to be hold­ing video games back more than any­thing are the nar­ra­tives con­tained within the games both in terms of qual­ity and execution.

  For many years, and indeed still today, sto­ries in video games are told in sequen­tial order. You play for a bit, trig­ger a part of the story, play more, get more story, fight a boss, have a rev­e­la­tion, com­plete the game and wit­ness the cli­max in a gen­er­ally longer cut scene. This is the tra­di­tional form of telling a story that has been wedged into games and for some observers it is both anti­quated and no longer an accept­able form of sto­ry­telling. In his sem­i­nal book Extra Lives Tom Bis­sell explores the dis­so­nance between the chal­lenge of games and the need to tell a story. Nar­ra­tive can only go for­ward, but games in their nature fight progress offer­ing a chal­lenge that must be over­come and often this requires rep­e­ti­tion that detracts from a lit­er­ary stand­point.Sto­ries are lin­ear and in the 1990s games could be too, but wit­ness­ing the reac­tion to Final Fan­tasy XIII we learnt that those days are over, gamers like art enthu­si­asts demand innovation.

  To address this dis­cord between sto­ry­telling and inter­ac­tiv­ity video games have intro­duced dynam­ics that allow gamers to go down var­i­ous paths towards the game's end, often pit­ting the out­come on moral choices taken within the game. This device has been received well and is becom­ing increas­ingly sub­tle. One of the cre­ators of Heavy Rain com­mented that play-testers found the game seem­ingly too easy and with­out chal­lenge because they didn't lose a life or restart from a check­point if, for instance, they let a bad guy escape. The game would just carry on but, unbe­knownst to the gamer, the game had logged the event only to man­i­fest the con­se­quence of that fail­ure later. Like­wise in the Mass Effect series moral choices under­pin the nar­ra­tive in such a stark way that any num­ber of out­comes are avail­able and watch­ing the result of other gamers' playthroughs on YouTube is fascinating.

  Yet these are two games that have been lauded for their attempts at plac­ing a strong nar­ra­tive at the heart of the expe­ri­ence to the pos­si­ble detri­ment of what a game is and what its sup­posed to do, i.e. be fun to play. Many play­ers bemoan the com­bat of the Mass Effect games and the jerk­i­ness of the con­trol sys­tem epit­o­mised by the way in which in order to climb over a waist high object you need to take cover crouch­ing beside it before hop­ping over. In a game where the story is the focal point gamers com­plained that the shoot­ing parts felt some­what tacked on despite its involv­ing real time point and shoot mechan­ics merged with R.P.G. turn based spell cast­ing. Along with Heavy Rain these games at times felt like inter­ac­tive movies, which for devel­op­ers cre­ates a real prob­lem as their game is then held up against tra­di­tional nar­ra­tive forms like movies.

  What many crit­ics of video games fail to realise is that the nar­ra­tive script­ing of the game is often cre­ated at a much later stage in devel­op­ment. With dead­lines loom­ing words are hur­riedly typed, actors hired and lines jammed into games. Game devel­op­ers pri­mar­ily have to make the game play well, as they know that gamers will for­give them any mul­ti­tude of retarded char­ac­ter­i­sa­tions if the game plays well. Super Street Fighter IV is the pin­na­cle of the fight­ing genre but for its lat­est release the devel­op­ers attempted to add a lit­tle back­story as to why the incred­i­bly var­ied cast are enter­ing a fight­ing tour­na­ment. Abel, a French grap­pler wear­ing shorts, shin pads and the upper half of a karate kit is found crouch­ing in the street. It's rain­ing and he's hold­ing an umbrella. The cam­era pans down and we see he's pro­tect­ing a puppy from the rain. "Hey there lit­tle guy. Let's see if we can't keep you dry for a bit. Where's your mother? [said with a tone so ambigu­ous I'm not sure whether he wants to punch her or make love to her] I don't see any other dogs around. Hmm. No col­lar either. All alone, are you?" We then cut to a shot of Abel look­ing toward a bal­cony with a mil­i­tary man hold­ing the puppy. "I'll be back as soon as I fig­ure out what Shadaloo is all about. Take care of the lit­tle one while I'm away." The final shot has Abel walk­ing across a bridge, "I'll return once my jour­ney is com­plete. Then I can give him a name, buy him a col­lar and I…Then I won't be alone any more." The end­ing is also sim­i­larly ris­i­ble as is the case for the twenty four other char­ac­ters. When writ­ing is bad, it really sticks out grind­ing against what peo­ple would say nat­u­rally. Gamers know this, and put up with it, because they are play­ing the game, but to an observer the words and the act­ing is the only expe­ri­ence they are privy to. Whilst play­ing Final Fan­tasy XIII, the nar­ra­tive is devoid of any sub­stance, but being Final Fan­tasy one has to sit through hours of mean­der­ing cut scenes that are intended to pose ques­tions of moral­ity and love. My girl­friend, sit­ting next to me while brows­ing the inter­net on her lap­top, would often pause, look at me, look at the screen then back to me and just shake her head ques­tion­ing how I could play such non­sense. The answer is that games are so much more than the story alone. Books require the reader to imag­ine a world, lead by the author to come up with their own inter­pre­ta­tive mean­ing of the prose. Films give us a fully realised world in which a story is aug­mented by pac­ing, tone, music, cin­e­matog­ra­phy and emo­tional res­o­nance that approaches a true to life depic­tion of real­ity. Yet games can go fur­ther and put you at the heart of the story in a way no other medium can.

  Whilst peo­ple like Tom Bis­sell rage against the qual­ity of the writ­ing, and he has every right to, per­haps because he is an author he demands too much from games. He appears to want the fran­tic emo­tions gleamed from play­ing with some­thing acutely intel­lec­tual that can be held up the light of crit­i­cal think­ing. How­ever to make this kind of game, with a story appre­ci­ated by edu­cated adults and yet have the dynamism of a first per­son shooter is nigh on impos­si­ble. Maybe games should no longer be con­sid­ered against movies at all, so dif­fer­ent are they that the dis­so­nance will never be resolved. Per­haps it is bet­ter to set video games against books and music instead. Last week I got an email from a friend who said he had finally read Mikhail Bulgakov's, The Mas­ter and Magerita, ten years after I rec­om­mended it. He said it was unbe­liev­ably bril­liant and think­ing back it is a truly mag­i­cal book. How­ever there is no way that I could describe the plot of the book at all, aside from a brief out­line. The joy that read­ing brings is our feel­ing about the work once we've read it. The nar­ra­tive fades quickly away but the emo­tions felt when think­ing about a book stay with you for­ever. I can rec­om­mend dozens of books from my uni­ver­sity days but if asked detailed ques­tions about any I would strug­gle. Music is the same. The lyrics are merely a guide, the emo­tion is all tied up in the song that can pro­duce time­less clas­sics that evoke within us an unlim­ited range of emo­tions. This too, is what games cre­ate. In Extra Lives Tom Bis­sell recounts a sin­gle match of Left for Dead that will stay with him for­ever. As gamers we've all had these moments, from get­ting a nuke for the first time on Mod­ern War­fare 2, to defeat­ing Rag­naros in World of War­craft, a gamer expe­ri­ences emo­tions so pow­er­ful that being com­pared to a movie can­not begin to get close to the video game expe­ri­ence. Every sin­gle gamer has their own indeli­ble moments ingrained and it is this expe­ri­ence that ele­vates video games to an artform.

  Still though peo­ple try to draw a nar­ra­tive out wher­ever pos­si­ble. If you watch a game of foot­ball and a striker goes passed four play­ers then strikes a 30 yard screamer with the out­side of his foot he will undoubt­edly be asked about it after the game and how it felt scor­ing such a goal. Putting that raw feel­ing into words is incred­i­bly dif­fi­cult and any attempts will fall short. More often than not, the player will utter things like, "Yeah, as I say, I took the ball well, and just set off really, then I was lucky with the shot, but it's more impor­tant that the team won and secured the points on the board." Nar­ra­tives try hard to get at emo­tion but dra­matic real life expe­ri­ences can never be emu­lated by words. While many are dis­mis­sive of games and the mer­its of their worth you can­not take away the fact that play­ing games is extremely enjoy­able. And as tech­nol­ogy improves, we move closer to a point where games take over from real life as the dri­ving force of emo­tional enrichment.

  One game in par­tic­u­lar that has had more press than any other as regards the detri­ment of real life is World of War­craft. In the game the mul­ti­tude of things the player can do is almost lim­it­less and yet its game­world is sur­pris­ing con­fined. Play­ers have no choices to make, no nar­ra­tive paths to choose and defeated foes sim­ply respawn to be killed and killed over and over until the next instance is released. There is also very lim­ited inter­ac­tiv­ity with the non-playing char­ac­ters the com­puter con­trols, pro­vid­ing one line responses at best. How­ever the quests in the game where the authored nar­ra­tive exists, despite many protes­ta­tions, are sur­pris­ingly good, with witty asides and pop cul­ture ref­er­ences at almost every turn. What World of War­craft does bet­ter than any other game is cre­ate a user expe­ri­ence unpar­al­leled in terms of chal­lenge, team­work and enjoy­ment. Gamers are not genre spe­cific in the way that a kid who likes Super­bad is highly unlikely to rent a ret­ro­spec­tive of Polanski's work. The only cri­te­rion a player cares about is whether the game is good and WoW is amaz­ing. Player ver­sus player matches cre­ate so much ten­sion, fury and ela­tion purely because the player knows the oppos­ing model is a real player not an A.I. bot. On the flip­side twenty five play­ers can team up and coor­di­nate intri­cately to develop strate­gies to defeat seem­ingly insur­mount­able A.I bosses. Then there is the craft­ing, pro­fes­sions, item­iza­tion, every day duties your char­ac­ter can do, quests, smaller dun­geons and explo­ration, lots of explo­ration. WoW suc­ceeds because it puts the emo­tional expe­ri­ence first and fore­most in its lists of pri­or­i­ties. The graph­ics are near­ing woe­ful given it is run­ning off an engine that was released in 2004, and despite graph­i­cal over­hauls to the spells, the world and char­ac­ter mod­els are sim­ple with the lim­ited musi­cal score looped repeat­edly for­ever.

  

  Yet these fail­ings never detract from the expe­ri­ence, partly because WoW has a reward sys­tem in place that will never fail to get gamers beg­ging for more but also because of the rela­tion­ships play­ers form with each other. These rela­tion­ships develop quickly, out of mutual inter­est and are required to suc­ceed in WoW's game­world. This is why ques­tions of authored nar­ra­tive need not be applied to games where human inter­ac­tion super­sedes the frame­work put in place by the game's cre­ators. The world within War­craft is every bit as real as every­day life, because it is pop­u­lated by real people.

  Both Grand Theft Auto IV and the Assassin's Creed series have sought to cre­ate believ­able life like game worlds and come very close but despite their valiant efforts once you have expe­ri­enced a mas­sively mul­ti­player world pop­u­lated by thou­sands of real peo­ple no man­ner of well writ­ten scripted nar­ra­tive can hide the fact you are play­ing a game, designed by peo­ple with the inten­tion that you expe­ri­ence exactly what they had in mind. There is noth­ing in these games you could go to a devel­oper with and say I did this and it was incred­i­ble, with­out him or her know­ing that was what you were sup­posed to be feel­ing. When you play a sin­gle player game, you are con­strained by the bound­aries of the developer's world, which is why these worlds feel so ulti­mately empty. It won't be long before all games are online, with the sin­gle player expe­ri­ence cosigned to the past and this is to the ben­e­fit of video games. Humans need to com­mu­ni­cate, need to tell sto­ries and by clos­ing off games to a sin­gu­lar per­spec­tive the emo­tional expe­ri­ence is reduced expo­nen­tially. To illus­trate this point one only needs to play Angry Birds. The game is a chal­lenge, but there is no point to it. It is addic­tive because of its chal­lenge but once com­pleted there is no rea­son to play it again or remem­ber it. The frus­tra­tion felt while strug­gling through try­ing to get three stars on each level dis­ap­pears once achieved and is not replaced by any last­ing feel­ing of sat­is­fac­tion. Con­trast this with a game of Bat­tle­field: Bad Com­pany 2 where you single-handedly storm a base in your quad bike, lay anti-tank mines around the enemy base, stealth into a build­ing killing defend­ers, before out-flanking another three, demol­ish­ing a build­ing while watch­ing an enemy tank explode before your team arrives to back you up to cap­ture the base. For that moment you feel god­like, like you have achieved some­thing spe­cial and tan­gi­ble that rates as highly as a real life achieve­ment all because every­one around you is human. Were this against a com­puter, the feel­ing cre­ated would never reach the heights of unbri­dled joy that can be attained when play­ing online.

  To even ques­tion whether video games are an art form is ask­ing from an out­dated cri­te­rion. Video games are the result of thou­sands of hours of cre­ative work to pro­duce some­thing so unique with scope to become the true mir­ror to real life in the way books, films and music aspire to be. By com­bin­ing strong nar­ra­tive, incred­i­ble visual and aural 5tyle with emo­tional res­o­nance, video games will surely become the medium of choice for the 21st cen­tury. One final exam­ple of how far games have come in mak­ing play­ers invest emo­tion­ally and com­pletely believe in the game worlds pre­sented to them comes from my friend who played Cham­pi­onship Man­ager. In this game you take con­trol of a foot­ball club and are in charge of sign­ing play­ers, imple­ment­ing train­ing regimes, over­see­ing tac­tics, off-field sta­dium redesign and con­tract nego­ti­a­tions. At a cer­tain point in his 15th sea­son one of my friend's play­ers who had started as a fresh faced 18 year old was now a creak­ing has-been unable to make any sus­tained impact in the first team. My friend could never bring him­self to sell a player he had grown so attached to after invest­ing hun­dreds of hours into the game and kept the vir­tual player vir­tu­ally employed for rea­sons of nos­tal­gia. He waited until the Cham­pi­ons League Final was all but won by his team and gave this player a ten minute run out at the end of the match as to give rhim a way to go out on a high, to win the big cup one last time and say farewell to the fans. Accord­ing to my friend, "it almost brought a tear to my eye as I subbed him on think­ing, 'he'll appre­ci­ate that.'" To put this in con­text Cham­pi­onship Man­ager was at the time, entirely text based with no images or player mod­els to speak off. He had cre­ated the nar­ra­tive on his own with the aid of the devel­oper hav­ing mim­ic­ked what it means to be a sup­porter so well. No medium exist­ing today can get close to what video games offer their players.

  (there were more pics but i over-ran the character limit)

  • Posted Feb 11, 2011 10:51 am GMT
  • Category: Editorial
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