155: The Game Design of Art

[Jason Rohrer]

The Game Design of Art

"Let's face it: Games, in general, suck. Most are repetitive and shallow. Most eat up precious moments of our lives without giving us anything more than idle entertainment in return. The really good games, the ones that we would only be half-embarrassed to show Roger Ebert as art samples, are few and far between - maybe one game per console generation, if that. This is hardly what we would recognize as an "art-full" medium. Yes, games pass the zero-utility test, but that's not enough to stand them up proudly next to a Kandinsky painting."

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[MannPower]

I'd have to say that the first title that came to my mind when you ran off the 'art' criteria was Deus Ex.

 

[Juan Regular]

I think establishing a way of making games playable by non-gamers and challenging enough for gamers is close to impossible. Games have always and will always have a learning courve. A film, a book or picture just require you to look or to read and of course to think. You don't have to interact.

As for the games that use gameplay to communicate I'd say Shadow of the Colossus takes a big step to the right direction in almost every aspect. And Silent Hill 2 maybe.

 

[alzheimers]

This article is very enlightening as to why Gamers are losing the argument over games being Art.

Ebert's whole point about games NOT being art is that by their very nature they're interactive. See http://rogerebert.suntimes.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20070721/COMMENTARY/70721001

"How do I know this? How many games have I played? I know it by the definition of the vast majority of games...player control of the outcome. I don't think these attributes have much to do with art; they have more in common with sports."

His point is this: the player influences the outcome of the game, therefore the game can never be an accurate expression of the artist's (Game designer's) vision. Without that expression, there's no meaning to the game, and hence no art.

Some will argue games that are story driven, such as the Final Fantasy series, can artifically limit choice to a series of progressions that ultimately tell the same tale. However, no two games will ever be the same, and thus the designer's vision will ultimately always fall short and thus the nuance of the craft are lost.

Gamers want to redefine art in the method of Andy Warhol -- anything can be art. But that's never going to fly, or else we must redefine EVERYTHING as art, utilitarian or not. Ebert himself, has perhaps unintentionally given us the direction that this argument must flow towards.

What gamers fail to realize is that for Games to be considered art, we have to change the definition of what a GAME is. If designers and players alike only realize that games at their core are 2nd Person Narratives, we can better frame this argument as a style we can defend. The aesthetics of the game, the mood and feel, are only details, not the art itself. The art is in the expression, the performance.

Unlike sports, where there is a set of rules players have to follow, video games are about the experience the player has while playing within the bounds of those rules. The RULES ARE NOT THE GAME. The emergent gameplay (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Emergent_gameplay) is what makes the game art. It's the player's creativity in response to the game design that makes a game art.

I challenge you that games are NOT sport. They are the tools by which the Performers (which we call players) express themselves through improvisation within the bounds defined by the Directors and Producers. We are all artists, our controllers are our paint, our consoles the canvas, the Television the gallery. And through the internet, the world becomes our audience.

 

[Da_Vane]

Learning how to read and figuring how to use the DVD player can be considered the 'learning curve' of reading a book or watching a movie. These are the main points of access to these mediums and their artistic payloads.

The difficulty with games is that more often than not, the interaction is not as intuitive or fundamental as these other mediums. Once you know how to read a given language, you can access all the titles of that language. Once you know one DVD player, you know them all. However, more often than not, each game requires individual learning of the controls to experience the significant effect.

Games tend to be overly complex and laden with options and interactivity. In many ways, this can form a barrier that seems purposely designed to seperate gamers from other users, in much the same way that literacy differentiates those who can read from those who just look at the words without understanding. Such is the clarion call of 'challenging enough for gamers'.

 

[anachron]

*shudders*

And it all collapsed with the conclusion that our "high art" is only "high art" to us.

Art need not be art to everyone.

Don't work from a starting point of objectivity; that is in complete antonymy with art as a concept.

Do over.

 

[ToenailCar]

This resounds with pretty much everything I think about the "games as art" thing that goes on.
Sure, games can be art.
But they aren't, yet.
Or at least not real art.
Think of the difference between a rendering of some anime giant fighting robot compared to the Mona Lisa for example, see the difference?

The thing that separates them is that gameplay is almost exclusively an end result, not a means of achieving something more.
Meaning games are usually more akin to sports than anything else.

Yes yes, this is re-iteration, I know. Have pity on me for you beat me to it.

Anyway, I always think of The Residents: A Bad Day at the Midway, when people start talking about art-ish games.

Though there are a few Indie games that try for something more. I would suppose the lack of high-art in games, more than anything else is because real artists and just generally the artistic community, haven't exactly embraced the medium.
I guess that in this generation and the ones after, there is a much greater chance this will happen given how much gaming is becoming a part of everyday life for more and more children these days.

 

[wadark]

Excellent read. I dont quite remember if it was mentioned directly. But there seems to be a fundamental disconnect that keeps games from being art: the connection between story (or artistic expression) and gameplay.

A game is made from one or the other and which ever one it isn't is thrown in at the end. BioShock was an excellent example of artistic style lost under gameplay.

On the other side of the coin I could mention one of my own favorite games: Shenmue. Shenmue is a game designed heavily around its story and artistic nature. The problem is that it plays simply like a drama movie in which you must push the analog stick in one direction to make it play. There isn't much action, what there is is rather short, and you basically end up running the main character from place to place to talk to NPCs X, Y, and Z until the end of the game.

 

[ToenailCar]

The other point being that while most story driven games present a narrative that's fine for your target audience of teenagers, they just can't compare to good books or anything beyond an action movie (And yes, I'd stipulate that they aren't art either).

 

[Anton P. Nym]

Accessability has never been part of the definition of "art". Heck, look at the tangled, self-referential soup of concepts pureed into many abstract paintings; I'd argue that it takes a lot longer to learn the conventions (and bucking-thereof) in the field of painting in order to appreciate a Pollack as art (as opposed to really-expensive wallpaper) than it does to play though any video game on the market today. Poetry too often relies on convention and reference, sometimes deliberately so; film, too. (Especially that sunnavabeech Felini.)

And I'll also point out that art can require the participation of the audience, at least in its interpretation. Installation art also can require its audience to trigger events, or even capture actions of the audience to incorporate into itself. Stage drama these days can include improvisational pieces driven by audience reaction or suggestion. And are we to relegate jazz improv to the dumpster of "not-art" because it has no unique creator?

Ebert's definition of art is artificially narrow. I doubt that tailoring a game (or any other work) to meet it would lead to any great success in convincing him, or others, that it is art.

-- Steve

 

[Tabloid Believer]

I think that people have to be aware the both photography and film have been down this road. The journey of video games from pure entertainment to art is mirrored very much in the passage the film took.

Film, when it was first developed, was nothing more than a novelty. Someone might peer into a viewer at a Vaudeville sideshow and watch a dog jump through a hoop, or a lady undress. When it later became something projected upon the screen, it was still a novelty. People would watch trains roll by on tracks, or birds fly. There was no story or plot to speak of in the first films - not unlike the original Pong game, which appeared first in bars and restaurants.

Later, when silent films began to have stories, these tales were still being created by the people who ran side-shows. Thus, the first silent films that were created to have stories were created for, again, pure entertainment. It was only later that the question of art even came up.

Interestingly, enough, at that time, the critics didn't believe that film could ever be art. Obviously, they were wrong. And to be fair, even in this day and era, the question of film and cinema as art often comes up. How often to we hear that movies are nothing more than bombast, explosions, and quick-takes by the critics?

So, I think that video games will inevitably join the ranks of film and photography down this hard journey. But it will be a hard-fought one.

 

[PedroSteckecilo]

I really liked this article and I felt you made an excellent point about expressing ideas and themes through gameplay as something the industry needs to tackle before Games can be art.

 

[Anton P. Nym]

Later, when silent films began to have stories, these tales were still being created by the people who ran side-shows. Thus, the first silent films that were created to have stories were created for, again, pure entertainment. It was only later that the question of art even came up.

I still haven't had a response from Ebert (after two years!) to my note pointing out that, and that the first film Ebert recognises as art is Griffith's Birth of a Nation, which not only came nearly forty years after movies were invented but also was a puff-piece for the KKK. And parents these days are worried about mature themes in games...

-- Steve

 

[conzy]

Video Games ARE art, They ARE "high art" too whatever the hell that is...

If some famous artist can throw some paint on a canvas and sell it for millions as "art"

Then how isnt a whole 3d world with hundreds of textures (individual pieces of art ?) compelling characters and a whole story art?!

 

[L.B. Jeffries]

Interesting read, that's the fourth take on re-examining the approach to creating games I've seen. Henry Jenkins suggested we think of them as architectural spaces for the player to inhabit, Ben Abraham wrote a great blog on focusing the game on reactions to the player rather than activities for the player to do, and my own little stab over at Moving Pixels of thinking of them as miniature languages.

I like the idea of starting with a philosophy or concept first, I know Steve Gaynor said the same thing over at Fullbright but he focused more on inducing emotions besides 'fun'.

Whatever the approach, I think it's great that people are slowly developing new ways to tackle games. Just so long as there is more than one, there can be growth.

 

[L.B. Jeffries]

Video Games ARE art, They ARE "high art" too whatever the hell that is...

If some famous artist can throw some paint on a canvas and sell it for millions as "art"

Then how isnt a whole 3d world with hundreds of textures (individual pieces of art ?) compelling characters and a whole story art?!

Well, most of the paintings that do that now are mostly crap. Back in the 70's when Pollock and other people first started doing it, they were challenging the conventions of society and shaking the foundation of art. They were inspiring new ways of thinking and redefining a centuries old medium that was obsessed with the idea that a painting had to look like something.

A whole 3-D world, with the exception of a few games, generally inspires a discussion about graphics and how it compares to other games. The majority of characters in games, with the exception of a few, are kill-happy sociopaths who seem to feel almost no emotional impact to the combat and destruction they spread. And the plots themselves, with the exception of a few, tend to leave something to be desired.

It's not going to get better if you don't start pointing out how it could be better.

 

[Same River New Water]

I think this article takes the wrong path. Roger Ebert has defined art in such a way as to exclude games by definition: art cannot be directed by the audience, games are controlled by their audience, therefore games cannot be art. I suspect Ebert reverse-engineered this definition: he felt upset by the idea that games can be art, so he thought about why they shouldn't be, and came up with the interactivity clause. After all, if you were attempting to define art while considering all media except games, why would you think to include that point at all?

Why does the author think it's necessary to argue on his terms? Sorry to use such a tired example, but it's like saying "Accepting Hitler's definition that Jews are Untermenschen, how can we demonstrate that they should still have all the same human rights as Aryans?" In this example, the argument that art is any creative human production that serves no survival purpose is like the argument that all humans are equal: just because the debaters of the other side reject the premise doesn't make it flawed.

 

[birdboy]

I think the bellow You Tube video pretty much sums up what is wrong with video games when they try to be art, it's what the article said but focused on stories: a game's gameplay is thought up first, then the story or the ideas that are supposed to make you think, are cobbled on to it. No thought is given to how to make the story better with gameplay, after it has been written, only to trying to force the two together in a hope they'll click, or something.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1jdG2LHair0

I do find Ebert's theory that games can't be art because they are interactive a bit preposterous though, it seems naive to assume that for something to be considered art it has to have been made by only one person. Why can't games be art because of this interactivity, which makes each play through unique to the player? That works for me.

 

[SonofSeth]

So, no game art until we get a holodeck?

 

[Novan Leon]

Ebert must not have ever played games like Final Fantasy, Chrono Cross, Metal Gear Solid, Half-Life 2, The Legend of Zelda, Super Metroid, ICO, Shadow of the Colossus, Call of Duty 4 or many of the others that are simply legendary in their execution and evoke emotions of sadness, glory, honor, anger, hate, joy, fear, determination, indignation, wonder and satisfaction. I wonder how anyone who's played one of these games from beginning to end can't realize it's artistic value.