If you’ve ever sat down and played Limbo, the puzzle-platform game from indie developer Playdead, you probably already have a good idea what the answer to the question “can games be art?” is. If you haven’t played it, forget this blog and your degree and go and play it now. It’s awesome. From its silhoutte art-style to the enigmatic plot I wouldn’t hesitate to call it “a work of art”. But what do I really mean by that? What even is art?
There’s probably a few PhD’s worth of answer to that question, so I’ll try to narrow it down. How does the experience of playing an ‘arty’ game differ from that of, say, watching an art film, and can games as a medium ever be viewed as a means of provoking thought and emotion in the same way that cinema, or even music, already are?
I’m personally convinced that games have the capability to stimulate emotion to exactly the same degree as a movie. Anyone who watched Eli Vance die at the end of Half Life 2: Episode 2 can testify to that. Even Modern Warfare 2’s airport terrorist scene, though executed a little ham-fistedly, made me feel an interesting mixture of remorse and disgust that games rarely provide. My choice of wording there was intentional: “rarely”. The fact that a lot of the time when you’re playing games you’re just performing the mechanics (however enjoyable they may be) in order to progress, without feeling much of anything at all because you don’t expect to is a problem that the industry needs to address. I’ll get to that shortly.
Modern art?
As for motivating thought, not in a puzzle-solving sense but in a way that makes you look at your life, or the world, I’ve spent a long time pondering what games like Limbo and Braid are really trying to say. As much thought about the narrative structure, what to give the audience, and what to leave ambiguous, was clearly put into these games as was put into an interesting film like Memento. Sure, sometimes games fail to draw you into their story, but often they succeed and the rewards can be immense.
‘Art games’, however, need to filter more into the mainstream before their full potential to engage an audience can be unleashed. Right now there aren’t enough people in the right frame of mind when they sit down to play a game for it to be worthwhile for a triple-A developer to make a really artistic game. There are a significant number of people who just want to blow stuff up. And that’s a good thing; we all want to shoot stuff in games.
But why then should writers, designers and developers try to make an emotionally engaging, thought-provoking game when there are already other well-established channels for doing this? I’ll tell you why: because the potential of games is HUGE. The interactivity that defines videogames encourages greater emotional investment in characters. It can force an audience to think about moral decisions because they have to deal with the consequences. With games you live in a world of the designer’s creation, making you a willing sponge for their ideas. The scope of games as an art form is conceivably beyond that of cinema; certainly there is a great deal of room left for film-makers to push the boundaries of their medium, but they are limited to making people sit down in front of a screen to absorb content in a way that games simply are not. The audience has the capacity to shape their experience within a framework established by the designers. Games are beautifully set up as a medium for communicating intimately with an audience.
This is not a good example of ‘beautiful communication’
How, then, do we get to a place where games are extensively being utilised to make people think and feel to their fullest extent, in the mainstream? It’s got to be an incremental process. Games with unusual stories, messages and approaches need to be eased in. As I mentioned before, at the moment a great degree of game enjoyment is provided by their mechanics – shooting, puzzle-solving, battling – with story and setting there just to provide context. But why can’t the mechanics be part of the message? Take Braid as an example: the fluidity of time and the consequences of one’s actions are intimately interwoven (“braided”, you could say) with the mechanics of the game. In this way the audience can be affected deeply without any obvious intrusion into the player’s experience.
And it’s already happening. The masterpiece that is Portal is not a particularly arty game, but it dared to push the medium: its mechanics were new, you barely saw the antagonist (though you sure do hear her) and the main character never speaks. Yet it’s one of the biggest selling games on Steam, is an incredibly entertaining experience, and provides a step in the direction that I’m talking about. Good for you Portal. You could also look at the narrative style of Heavy Rain, or 2006’s beautiful Shadow of the Colossus for more examples of off-beat games in the mainstream.
So the wheels are turning, and we could be heading toward a situation not dissimilar to what we’ve got in the film world: Hollywood blockbusters and indie, arty movies living harmoniously, side-by-side. Both is good; we don’t want every game to be Battlefield 3, nor The Stanley Parable (look it up). What we do want is a rich and varied selection of games, in an industry that is constantly striving to challenge and surprise its audience. Right now I feel like thoughtful, deeply effecting games are underrepresented in the gaming industry, but if we keep supporting our favourite indie developers, and thinking about what we’re consuming, that might not be the case forever.
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