As the ‘Hollywood’ era of the video game pushes our hobby further and further into the public consciousness, there’s a tendency within our community to champion the idea of games as ‘growing up’ – gaining the ability to be something serious, something meaningful or productive, something that can rival the cultural importance of film or literature.
Games are increasingly regarded as worthwhile relative to how well they can match or exceed the proficiencies of older media. Gaming magazines, blogs and websites regularly point to modern games telling grand sweeping narratives in Mass Effect, exploring deeply emotional themes in Braid and political themes in Spec Ops: The Line, provoking legitimate aesthetic responses in millions of people daily. The aspects of graphical fidelity, sound design, dialogue and rhetorical messaging are also well-discussed in terms of whether a game is progressively worthwhile.
But games are not comparable to older media. They are not interactive stories or a technological new way to present old ideas. They are not art. Games are games. The practice of imaginative play, from which games are descendant, is ancient. It predates all media. Its history is weaved throughout the history of society itself. It became chess. It became Monopoly, Battleship, Cowboys and Indians, Dungeons & Dragons. And now it’s become Mass Effect. As such games seem to resist the application of analytical rules and tropes that we’ve designed for the study of narrative media like films and literature, as well as for art media in general.
At their core, games are about 'imaginative play'.
In fact, it can be easily seen that the aspects integral to those older media – narrative, character motivation, visual style and so on – are merely arbitrary in video games. They’re a shell that houses the true core and worth of games – the playful interaction. The imaginative application of our minds to a system of rules. Games are about the play, and in most cases the play of a game would remain exactly the same throughout even if you scrapped the narrative entirely and replaced it with something different.
As renowned games scholar Markku Eskelinen once wrote: “If I throw a ball at you, I don’t expect you to drop it and wait until it starts telling stories”. Games are conceived and created as objects to play with, not to draw meaning from. An emphasis on their non-gameplay parts is not representative of the joy and sensation that results in actually playing a game, in the same way that studying the mechanics of tennis ball construction, gravity and energy transfer to understand what happens when a man throws a ball cannot convey the sensation of playing catch.
There seems to be many reasons the playfulness or ‘gameness’ of video games is often underplayed in favour of those attributes that have been appropriated from older media. Game companies want to hype the idea of graphics, sound and narrative as worthwhile because it’s much easier to sell than gameplay, which requires the user to actually grab the controller and feel the feedback loop between input and output. Gamers themselves want to draw focus to these aspects too, to use the language of older media that even non-gamers understand; in an attempt to prove their favoured medium is worthwhile.
Yet the danger of all this is a trivialisation of video games that do not meet old media standards in visuals or narratives. Does the visual verisimilitude and beautiful soundscape of Flower make it more worthy a game for study than the jaggy pixel worlds of VVVVV? Does the far-reaching narrative of Mass Effect mean it should be made a showpiece of the modern video game ahead of New Super Mario Bros?
Think of The Unfinished Swan. The game is beautiful and minimalistic in both visuals and in gameplay design. The interactions between the game world and the player are surprising and entirely joyful. At one point the player will come to a realisation that the orbs of water they’ve been throwing around can actually be used to manipulate the growth of surrounding climbable vines, and this produces a strong aesthetic response – a ‘wow’ moment – that one could point to as containing some spark of the sublimely artistic.
However it’s the moment following this that most completely represents the very core of the video game and its unique nature – the moment that the player understands this new rule and thinks ‘I wonder if I can get those vines to wrap around that bridge so I can cross this chasm’. That moment of player agency defines the amazing experience of playing The Unfinished Swan well above anything inherent in the visual style or narrative.
The Unfinished Swan is driven by constant gameplay evolution.
Or consider Braid – a game that weaves its narrative theme throughout its gameplay in a manner so pretentious you may be inclined to think ‘this must be art’. Yet the second-to-second gameplay, consisting of running, jumping, climbing and rewinding time, would feel the same even if the narrative was about a chibi Albert Einstein on a quest to find his missing toaster.
The blockbuster AAA games of recent times have been pushing ever closer towards parity with films and other media in just about every way including production value and writing. These games are the ones featured on billboards and buses, and the ones touted by publishers and console manufacturers as the height of the medium. Some of these games also provide great gameplay, but it’s very clear those older attributes have little to do with whether a game is actually fun or not, beyond serving as a vessel to help explain and carry gameplay ideas.
Concepts of the traditionally artistic in games are limited to a supporting role. There will never be a documentary game, and despite the most desperate efforts of well-meaning researchers and academics there will never be a game that can effectively teach history or be journalism or be art. Nor should there be. Such an aim, which requires a straightforward communication from creator to player, would degrade the possibility for playful interaction to such an extent that the end experience would be an interactive experience but not a game.
One might be led to argue that the creation of gameplay could be viewed as a new form of art, yet the fact that gameplay is inexorably tied to the idea of concurrent creation and definition by the system of rules and the player’s interaction seems to imply that such labelling would require a fundamental rethinking of the place of authorship in art, and at that point the debate has entirely dissolved into semantics.
Nobody ever bothered to consider whether the rules of chess constitute art. This is because the system of rules in chess is nothing until understood and applied in a creative way by the player. It is a playful phenomenon that subsumes ideas of war and battle but is not a representation of them; it uses them to imbue the system with just enough meaning to send the player on their way.
In video games, the graphics, narrative and trendy rhetorical metaphors that are rife in today’s blockbusters could conceivably be called art, but then so could a really well-crafted and ornate wooden chess set.
What do you think? Should games stand proudly apart from other forms of media, or do you think the debate over games as art plays a valuable role in the discourse around our fantastic pastime?
Tim Biggs is a games writer based in Melbourne. You can catch up with him on Twitter or here at IGN. And why not join the IGN AU Facebook community while you're at it?
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