155: The Game Design of Art

[Senor Pantz]

I don't think we have much chance of games being considered art until the choices are made more complicated, for example, KOTOR. I play through as a good guy all the way through, till I come to a binary choice, side with Bastila or against her, nothing else mattered. I personally preferred Fallout 2, where there wasn't so much as an ending, as a list of consequences to your actions.
I also think its important that, choices should have meaningful consequences, even if its that you fail, I liked in the original Wing Commander how you could continue with the game if you failed a mission, and it was possible to lose.
I don't however believe that games have to have choices in them, we have no choice in how a movie plays out, but its this middle ground of meaningless, or predictable choices that are holding games back.

 

[MannPower]

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.

But it can also be argued that no two people interpret a piece of art the same way as intended by the artist. There's a fault in logic here; I can't think of one person who can accurately figure out what an artist wanted to say in his work without the artist explaining it before, or after.

A game is played as intended by its designers, unless the player exploits a bug. The choice of a player to progress through a game is still driven by parameters set by the designer, just as how we're given the choice to start looking at the bottom right corner of a painting, instead of the top left. An artist can use emphasis to try to move our eyes through something - as intended - but it's not a sure thing, ever. This subjectivity is literally played out in video games - the player, playing that tangent subjectiveness by how he chooses to dispose of an enemy, or execute a puzzle, and when.

Who's to say that the designer's vision falls short? If you played a game and finished it, and saw an ending that was created by the designer - then where has the experience been lost? If you craft the game well enough, you can impress an intention on the player. This differs from sports; a sport is a set of rules which players must execute, themselves. There is no art, no audio, no set environments or a narrative - no story, just a contest.

 

[Wolfrider]

I'm sorry, but your argument was absolute garbage.

First, how on earth can you possibly get away with claiming that video games don't make us more philosophical and then go on to say that they will never reach the artistic value of a Kandinsky painting? The Abstract Expressionism school was about shirking the idea of painting communicating anything and simply being about the painting itself. If that's your definition of art then we nailed that way back when Bushnell started hawking Pong.

Furthermore, as far as you not being able to recall games that encourage philosophical reflection then clearly you're either being deliberately forgetful or your gaming background is razor thin. How is Silent Hill something that doesn't encourage philosophical reflection? Hell, if you consider George Romero as an "artist" then what is the difference between his films and the more high brow horror games like Clock Tower or SH? Also, you seem to be making a fundamental attribution error of sorts in your expectations of film verses games. First, you deride the gaming medium for producing nothing but idle entertainment, but then ignore when film does the very same thing. If "film" as a medium is automatically art, then what does that say about movies like Scary Movie or XXX?

Not to mention that I think most Europeans reading this are going to want to slap you. Have you even looked at the adventure genre back there? Games like Overclocked do not encourage philosophical reflection? What about older/indie adventure games like "I Want to Die" and the game adaptation of "I Have No Mouth and I Must Scream"?

Your argument that we should be making games that value gameplay over narrative is problematic at best. Yes, you can communicate through gameplay but if the user is in incapable of understanding how gameplay works that is the fault of the user and in no way makes the game less "artistic". Is Joyce less of an artist because most people have no idea how to approach Ulysses? As he says, "It took me 13 years to write, it should take you 13 years to read." The ability of the user to engage with the product has no bearing on the artistic integrity of the project. In fact, most of the time, art requires the viewer to speak a common language. That's why most people don't "get" abstract art. But, does it make it less artistic? Of course not.

Another thing, I can't stand this "gameplay is fundamental" issue in the games are art debate. Who says? Do the issues raised in MGS have less of an impact because they're introduced through a film-like medium? If they do, then why would games be considered less artistic than film?

There's a problem in this entire debate and that focuses on what the argument is. There's a difference between "Games are not art" - a transitional time specific comment and what Ebert says, "Games CAN NOT be art." A permanent comment on the medium itself. Something that has been said about expressionism, film, comic books, jazz, punk, and at one time (GASP) even prose. It's a stupid statement and one so fundamentally flawed that it's not even worth discussing. It's bred of ignorance of the medium and should be left at that. The fact that Ebert does not see the connection between the history of film (and frankly every artistic medium) and video games is his problem, not ours.

We have our artistic games. September 12th, Tale of Tales "The Graveyard", Braid, Earthbound, Ico (for god sakes Ico), Shadow of the Colossus and on and on and on. If Ebert can't understand why it constitutes art then... well... who cares? His opinion carries no more water than someone who has no background in classical music listening to Cosi fan Tutte and reviewing it by saying, "This is gay."

 

[Quiche]

We don't need to impress Roger Ebert. He's an overrated popular press critic. We should really be trying to convince those in academia, who are the ones that, de facto, control what the definition of art is. That's one small part of the reason why I'm specializing in media theory in college right now.

Ebert does raise good points, but he shouldn't set any sort of gold standard. Also, a game's gameplay doesn't have to resonate with the narrative to be artistic. That just shows a subservience to the idea that narrative in itself makes something culturally valuable when it otherwise wouldn't be (and earlier in the article you were warning against games copying other media). What's important is an experience that enriches or complicates our ways of thinking; this can be achieved through aesthetic choices, narrative, interactive scenarios, and the dialectic between those elements. My point is that a gameplay system or style could seem to oppose the narrative, but as long as that opposition is meaningful or has some intentionality behind it, then it's all good. Even then, games don't need narrative to be powerful, the same way abstract paintings don't need them. It often seems like what games do best is sharing experiences in an abstract way, regardless of the story.

 

[Smokescreen]

I'm just wondering why games have to be art.

Why can't they just be games? I don't see a lot of people insisting that Monopoly or Chess be considered in some kind of artistic pantheon.

 

[Tabloid Believer]

I'm just wondering why games have to be art.

Why can't they just be games? I don't see a lot of people insisting that Monopoly or Chess be considered in some kind of artistic pantheon.

Well, I think they can be both. Just like a film can be pure entertainment, but it can also be art. Some films can be both entertaining and art. Some films can just be entertaining.

I think there is a strong drive from the gaming community for games to be art, because I think gamers and creators want to be taken seriously. And there is nothing wrong with that. Indeed, I think that people are starting to take games very seriously simply as a matter of economics. When Grand Theft Auto IV outdoes Iron Man in its opening weekend, people sit up and take notice.

 

[laikenf]

I don't understand, why should games be art in the first place? A game can be artistic, but why should it be an art medium as a whole?

 

[Aethonic]

Gameplay is the differentiating factor between games and movies. It seems like the only hurdle is making gameplay artistic; everything else has established means of getting there.

Games don't have 'survival utility', and so they must have some *other* utility. I'm willing to bet it is catharsis by means of aesthetics - which includes gameplay for my purposes. I guess what we're looking for, then, is more emotion (we can relate to) in our games.

But while gameplay is the only wholly unique element to games, there are many unique expectations on other elements of the game that do not seem to be considered as much as they should be.

But really, games serve a different purpose. They don't need to be art, so all the efforts you get are going to be fringe.

 

[Novan Leon]

To me, game play IS artistic. Each of the games I mentioned earlier I consider works of art precisely because they blend together all the different facets of music, art design, character development, story, gameplay and presentation in a way that's very near flawless, and very difficult for others to replicate.

If anything, video games present the opportunity to be MORE artistic than movies precisely because they attempt to combine all of the traditional arts such as music, art design, character development and story ALONG WITH good gameplay (ie. appealing human interaction), which is a much more difficult task in my opinion.

 

[GregoriusH]

Oh, this absurd argument again. Games can't be high art? Stroll over to Killer7. As someone who studies literature that game impressed me a hell of a lot more than any novel or film I've seen released in the last ten years. Dripping in post-modern excess, Killer7 has the power to make you question; "Perhaps.... I'm the one going insane...". And it's gameplay is essential toward this end, needed to make you a part of the world which it presents.

I think there's this sense that in order for video games to be good art they need to be good narrative art. And that's what Ebert does, he attacks the narrative structure of video games. However, I don't that's the criteria on which we should judge them, or it is at most only a small part of the criteria. Video games are so much more than a narrative art, unique to video games is an ability to make you feel as though you represent a moral agent existing within a world - not just an outsider looking in, condemned to observe the comings and goings of others.

The art of video games isn't about narrative, it's about the architecture of worlds and the systems which make them run. For example, Silent Hill. Think of how the world is designed (locked doors, dead ends, fog, darkness) to inspire a feeling of oppression for those who would exist in it. Think of how the systems of game play (radio, clumsy movement, awkward weapons) further that feeling. That is what makes Silent Hill art, even before we consider the visual design and narrative constructs.

Whenever someone whines at me about video games not being art because of a lack of good narrative, I whine back at them that Beethoven's Ninth is pretty shitty for the same reason.

 

[Smokescreen]

I'm just wondering why games have to be art.

Why can't they just be games? I don't see a lot of people insisting that Monopoly or Chess be considered in some kind of artistic pantheon.

Well, I think they can be both. Just like a film can be pure entertainment, but it can also be art. Some films can be both entertaining and art. Some films can just be entertaining.

I think there is a strong drive from the gaming community for games to be art, because I think gamers and creators want to be taken seriously. And there is nothing wrong with that. Indeed, I think that people are starting to take games very seriously simply as a matter of economics. When Grand Theft Auto IV outdoes Iron Man in its opening weekend, people sit up and take notice.

See, I think that's just egotistical bulllshit. Not you, just that position that for something taken seriously it either has to be 1) a moneymaker or 2) artistic. All that it needs is for people to take it seriously, and we have always taken our fun seriously.

Human beings have been playing games for thousands of years. It's part of who we are. It engages our psyche in interesting ways, helps us learn, but if it isn't fun, we don't give a fuck about it real fast.

The demand that games must be art is a facetious one to me, putting an onus upon them that doesn't have to be there for the game to be an excellent one.

Go will probably never be 'art', but it's lasted longer than most art has.

 

[Hurray Forums]

I think that Roger Ebert is a joke and the fact that people care about proving anything to him an even bigger joke. I've already found games that changed me as a human being for the better and I'm sure 99% of people could find a game that spoke to them as a person if they gave gaming a chance instead of branding it immature time wasters with no game knowledge what so ever. That is THEIR loss though, not ours. I don't need some critic to share my opinion before I can take myself and my hobbies seriously. The experiences I have had with gaming is all the proof I need that games can be incredible art even if the majority are not.

 

[teknoarcanist]

This notion of 'difficulty' irritates me. GAME OVER IS ARCHAIC. DYING IS IMMERSION-BREAKING. The notion of a dead-end loss, or that by failing to do a specific task you are forced to go back and do it again until you get it right, is one of the major hurdles we need to jump. When a hero is beat by a group of random thugs in, for example, a comic, does he die? No. He is taken prisoner, he escapes, he whips out some new secret, etc. The idea that an artistic experience can ONLY be experienced by those who are skillful within the confines of its own esoteric community is pretty self-defeating. Literature is often panned, and rightly so, when it is written in such a way that it's only accessible or appealing to other writers. That said, when a book is accessible to the mainstream, but offers deeper philosophical insights to those trained to spot them, it takes a step in the right direction. Imagine if a book were written in english up until chapter 3, and then suddenly became klingon; anybody who doesn't speak klingon doesn't get to keep reading. Defending this piece as art would prove rather difficult.
Why then, have games refused to embrace more creative approaches? Laziness, mostly. Don't get me wrong, developers work hard, but I think a great deal of modern game design focuses on building an engine and designing the world and experience around that, rather than the other way around. You die if the goons kill you because the developers were too lazy -- or challenged for space, budget, or time -- to produce an alternative.
Which brings me to my next point, in that the video game INDUSTRY itself is an extremely crippling enemy to the medium. Think of the greatest literary works of all time. Do you think Dostoyevsky would have been able to effectively portray the angst of a dualistic class society in Notes From the Underground if he had a publisher breathing down his neck and asking for rough play-tests and bullet-point feature lists the whole time? Of course not.
This carries to film as well; to say nothing of commercial popularity, the most artistically and culturally relevant films have generally been produced by new or outcast directors or indie studios, been widely panned by their peers at the time, and achieved little success at the box office. They go on to find cult followings years later, as in the case of Fight Club, or are later recognized as having been ahead of their time, as in Citizen Kane.
From that, too, I think there is something to Ebert's argument that most games lack a singular vision, ie, a director. The specific pieces we gamers call masterpieces almost always have a master's name attached to them: Kojima, Miyamoto, Wright, etc. Some counter that even artistic films are produced by teams numbering in the hundreds, and this is true, but they all begin and hedge back to the root idea of a single person, be he a writer seeking to create a film that showcases the themes of human nature, or a director looking to do a new take on a specific genre.
By contrast, videogames are decided by the market. "First-person shooters are popular. Let's get on that. Kids like Space Marines, right?"
Yes, gaming can be, and will eventually become, an art form. But only when it is crafted lovingly by artists, and not chained down by an industry concerned primarily with money.
Of course, I am speaking in broad terms of gaming as a median and a whole. There have of course been flashes of brilliance. Hearing the music swell as I seize hold of a Colossus and the camera shoots outward to a dramatic pan. Seeing a secondary camera view of a police officer walking towards the bathroom as I stumble to clean up a body. Pathetically crawling away from a mushroom cloud and dying in the dirt.
Books may grip you from start to finish. Many films have been praised as having not one scene of excess; every frame is relevant and beautiful. Cite me ONE example in which the above moments of brilliance are extended into an entire game without lapse, and I will show you the poster-child for gaming as its own medium of noteworthy artistic expression.

 

[Tabloid Believer]

See, I think that's just egotistical bulllshit. Not you, just that position that for something taken seriously it either has to be 1) a moneymaker or 2) artistic. All that it needs is for people to take it seriously, and we have always taken our fun seriously.

Human beings have been playing games for thousands of years. It's part of who we are. It engages our psyche in interesting ways, helps us learn, but if it isn't fun, we don't give a fuck about it real fast.

The demand that games must be art is a facetious one to me, putting an onus upon them that doesn't have to be there for the game to be an excellent one.

Go will probably never be 'art', but it's lasted longer than most art has.

I think that gamers want to be taken seriously and they want their passion to be taken seriously. Period.

But I agree that to be taken seriously, something does not necessarily have to be art, or even moneymaking.

All that aside, I think that games as art has either happened or will happen very soon. It's simply inevitable. And not just because there's a push for video games to be taken seriously. It's because it's the next logical step in the evolution of games. It happened with photography and it happened with film.

 

[Tabloid Believer]

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

It would be curious to see, given the parallels of film and video games, what Ebert would have to say about that.

 

[senor pepper]

I can completely disprove Ebert's allegations. The reality is he has attempted, perhaps accidentally to misdirect the debate.

First off let me explain this from a game artists perspective. I feel as if the programs I use are merely digital versions of a rock, hammer, chisel, paint brush and canvas. So as a creator of content I am no different to the Sculptor or Painter except that I use more technologically advanced methods.

Secondly the end result I produce is no different to a sculpture and the constraints which allow you to view the sculpture are no different then the constraints of the real world on a human viewing a real sculpture.

What I am saying is that directing your attention to the storyline of a game and away from the ART is as much a misdirection as saying that the art gallery contains no art because it allows you to choose your path through it instead of forcing you to view its contents in the way the artist intended you to.

Sure ... I only go so far as to prove that games are art because they are made of art. But this means it is only up to the game to be a true work of high art. Unfortunately however we live in a world filled with detractors who seem to think that unless they can hang it on their wall and have their friends applaud them that it doesn't qualify. But as per usual in the history of art, they will merely be looked back on as another generation of conservative idiots who couldn't accept the changes in medium and theme.

 

[teknoarcanist]

Yeah but if you had a director of the gallery constantly shoving you backwards and telling you you weren't skilled enough to see the rest, that experience as a whole doesn't quite count as art. There's something to the argument that a game can CONTAIN art without being art in and of itself.
I do agree that a lot of Ebert's arguments just serve to misdirect the debate. I like the man's way of thinking and his reviews are usually pretty insightful, but whenever you see him in interviews and things like you this you just get the feeling he's probably an asshole.

 

[Novan Leon]

It almost makes me wonder if what we consider genuine "art" these days is nothing more than a collection of material objects that the self-absorbed academia selects arbitrarily and proclaims as "art". Those who disagree with the academia are simply discounted for "not understanding it's artistic value" while those who choose to agree with the academics receive the much valued label of being "cultured" or "deep" while only half of those who receive that label probably even think the object is art-worthy.

This is just the inner skeptic in me speaking. In the end I could really care less whether anyone considers video games as art or not. All I know is I have a great appreciation for the hard work by artists, composers, writers, production designers and programmers that all goes into each game, sometimes coming together in a way that is entirely beautiful and presenting the player with an experience unlike any other in the entertainment world.

 

[Smokescreen]

See, I think that's just egotistical bulllshit. Not you, just that position that for something taken seriously it either has to be 1) a moneymaker or 2) artistic. All that it needs is for people to take it seriously, and we have always taken our fun seriously.

Human beings have been playing games for thousands of years. It's part of who we are. It engages our psyche in interesting ways, helps us learn, but if it isn't fun, we don't give a fuck about it real fast.

The demand that games must be art is a facetious one to me, putting an onus upon them that doesn't have to be there for the game to be an excellent one.

Go will probably never be 'art', but it's lasted longer than most art has.

I think that gamers want to be taken seriously and they want their passion to be taken seriously. Period.

But I agree that to be taken seriously, something does not necessarily have to be art, or even moneymaking.

All that aside, I think that games as art has either happened or will happen very soon. It's simply inevitable. And not just because there's a push for video games to be taken seriously. It's because it's the next logical step in the evolution of games. It happened with photography and it happened with film.

Now I think we're talking about 2 different but related subjects.

First, there's the desire for gamers and the audience of gamers (developers, QA people, etc, etc) to be taken seriously.

Second, there's the idea that because we are taken seriously we can be art, or perhaps is the other way around; because art is serious we should granted some kind of respect.

Hm. I'm not getting those ideas as clearly separate as I'd like. But I guess what I'm saying is that there's a flawed assumption that games are or should or even need to be art. The tools of the artist may be involved (anything from painting to writing to...well, that's about the extent of it-but you want to use your imagination to expand what writing/painting tools there are) but the tools of the artist just that; tools, and they can be used for anything.

As to the 3rd point, that eventually games will be art, I truly wonder. We've been playing games for so long, it's not like they haven't had their chance to become art. What makes videogames special from cribbage, chess, go, D&D, Boggle or Magic the Gathering?

What I'm talking about, in a way, is a reevaluation of the mindset that games need to be something more, when it seems that people need games as part of who we are. I can't think of a single culture that hasn't had some kind of game that they play/teach (for a variety of reasons) so obviously play and fun have some kind of integral element to us. Why do we need them to be judged by some other person's standard. Fuck that.

Which leads me to my final point; I think that we're looking to the wrong place for validation. People like to play games. They don't need to be anything more (and sometimes shouldn't be anything more) than fun. The requirements that they meet some kind of artistic standard takes away from the whole point of games to exist; for us to have fun.

That doesn't mean that games will never be art, but I'm currently of the thinking that they don't need to be, and shouldn't aspire to be. They should aspire to be awesome games.

 

[OurGloriousLeader]

001



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.

The idea that for art to be both art and high art, it must be the expression of an artist, is highly disputed! Since the 60's and before, with the rise of theorists like Barthes and Derrida, the subjectivity of literature and art has been pretty much established(...objectively? hmm, anyway). That's why it's both interesting to look at ancient literature and contextualise, and also look at it from new perspectives - feminist, Marxist etc. We can find things being said that the writer never wanted to be said. A painting makes each of us think different things, all the time, and the painter probably didn't even think about what he was trying to say, a lot of the time. Da vinci certainly didn't, he just drew beauty.

Ebert is grasping at an old theory about art, and we shouldn't stick rigidly to that. However, your answer as to what games must become to be art I actually agree on - to a point.

As for the article, it's one of the best I've read on The Escapist.