Respect my Hobby!

A few weeks ago I visited The Art of Video Games exhibition at the Smithsonian American Art Museum in Washington, D.C. The exhibition is relatively small, and if you don’t stop to play any games you can easily walk through all the rooms in about half an hour. It’s divided into three main sections: an introductory area, an “arcade” area where visitors can play famous games such as Pac-Man and Super Mario Bros., and a “best of” area where various gaming devices (consoles, PCs, etc) were on display along with video samples of well-regarded games. It was also completely free, which is the right price for me.

Setting aside the particulars, the basic idea of video games in an art museum is an odd one. Paintings and sculpture are designed to be viewed, but games are meant to be played (preferably while seated in a comfy chair). While the “arcade” section makes a certain amount of sense, the rest of the exhibition involves looking at games rather than actually playing them. The traditional manner of museum display (look but don’t touch) is inappropriate for the medium.

But a more significant problem is that the exhibitors never show how video games are art. To be fair, “art” is difficult to define even when discussing a more established medium. However, common definitions of art usually mention creativity, the unique expression of an idea, or an aesthetic accomplishment above mere craft. How does something like Pac-Man qualify as art? It was certainly unique when first released, but is there any underlying idea beyond cute ghosts and a chomping circles? How is Pac-Man more than mere craft? I suppose if you define art in the broadest possible terms – including Michael Bay movies, talk shows, and Superman dolls – then there’s no reason not to accept Pac-Man as well. But if art is simply a synonym for entertainment, then the entire exhibition is nothing but pretense. Displaying video games in an art museum is clearly a statement that video games are on par with the fine arts that usually appear in museums or galleries. But if any amusing diversion can qualify as art, then the only reason to put it in a museum is the “snob factor.” It’s in a museum/gallery, therefore it’s respectable.

On a more favorable note, the strongest feature of the exhibition is the evolution of graphics and visual design, with numerous examples from each decade. One of the earliest games, Pong (1972), is nothing more than a white square on a black background that bounces between two white lines on opposite sides of a television screen. Flash-forward to 2010, and games like Mass Effect 2 sport cutting-edge graphics, 3-dimensional environments, and a visual design that rivals any sci-fi blockbuster. The technological progress that allows for flashier visuals also allows for a full musical score and voice actors. While the exhibitors no doubt want to draw attention to the increasing sophistication of gaming narratives, that sophistication would not be possible without technological breakthroughs. In fact, no other entertainment medium has experienced such radical change in such a short time, and that was all driven by improvements in computing technology (film experienced several technological leaps, such as synchronized sound and the switch to color, but these changes were spread across a century, and many other aspects of filmmaking have changed little).

And yet the  actual  technology of gaming is mostly absent from the exhibition. There’s a small exhibit that explains some technical terms like the difference between 16-bit and 64-bit, but the attendees are never allowed to “look under the hood.” The wires, chips, processors, hard drives, and other do-dads are not on display. There are obvious reasons why this is the case. After all, this is an exhibition in an art museum, not a science and technology museum. But the science cannot be easily separated from the art (if we’re willing to call it that), so the exhibition feels incomplete.

The Art of Video Games exhibition reminds me of the similar effort by comic professionals to gain academic and institutional respectability. Comics have largely been successful in this regard, and scholars now refer to the medium as art without rolling their eyes.  Perhaps video games will find equal success, though it probably won’t happen any time soon. When comic creators made their bid for respectability they could at least point to a few works that were acclaimed by critics from outside the comics community (Maus, Jimmy Corrigan, and classic strips such as Peanuts). By comparison, few critics outside the insular gaming community speak of Pac-Man with reverence. And even the best video games are little more than addictive diversions (Angry Birds, Tetris) or solid genre product (Mass Effect, Grand Theft Auto).

But then again, who am I to argue with the Smithsonian? If they say shooting zombies in 1080p resolution qualifies as art, then I’ll go along with it. I’m an art lover.

47 thoughts on “Respect my Hobby!

  1. “The traditional manner of museum display (look but don’t touch) is inappropriate for the medium.”

    I don’t this is entirely correct. I haven’t seen the exhibit but it seems like your main complaint is that the video games were running on automatic or on a loop. At the very least, what they should have done is get experts to play these games – which would still be “look but don’t touch”. People enjoy watching exhibition matches and there are even Youtube videos of playthroughs of old games in their entirety. For example, sometime back I spent a few minutes watching a Youtube video of this ancient game called Realms of the Haunting which I played when it first came out. It would have been a terrible experience playing through it again myself but the video was just right to refresh rose-tinted memories. And I expect it would be fun to watch a real master play something like Ninja Gaiden.

    The Smithsonian American Art Museum has also exhibited jewelry and Norman Rockwell so I think the video game exhibit can seen in those terms – a celebration of craftsmanship and popular mass art. I don’t think the Smithsonian has accepted video games as “Art”. These kinds of institutions are pretty moribund (I mean rock solid museums) and are usually the last to catch on to the possibilities of any new medium. Not to mention the fact that most games are bad art at best. I can’t think of many games which would pass muster even given lax standards. The early Civilization games are the only video games I’ve played which I think fit the bill. The rest: Ico? Something by Jenova Chen? The insiders who talk about the great qualities of Pac-Man are the kind of insiders who talk about X-Men as the finest comics ever.

  2. Having an expert play would have been a decent compromise, and it would be fun to see someone beat Ninja Gaiden (I never could). But that’s more appropriate for a specific gaming event rather than an ongoing exhibition. Obviously, you can’t have the expert standing around 8 hours a day, every day, playing the same game. The poor guy would go mad.

    You’re right that the Art Museum has sections for craftwork, but I still think the exhibition is about the celebration of games as art (mass art, if you prefer) rather than mere craft. After all, it’s called the ART of Video Games, and it’s part of the modern art floor of the museum (whereas the craftwork sections are on the floor below).

    They did display one of the games by Jenova Chen – Flower. I never really liked that one, but mostly because I hate the sixaxis controls for the PS3. I’ll grant that it’s pretty though.

    I can maybe see ICO or Flower as art, but Civilization? What’s your reasoning?

  3. I’m not a gaming fan, but I do love Pac-Man. I wrote this about what I consider the perfect video game in comparison to the more recent examples:

    I’ve […] played a few of these realistic “moving” games where one drives through a simulated real city, running into other cars or over innocent bystanders (other variations of this game type have the player as a superhero, vigilante, soldier, or cute creature on some ostensible quest — e.g., killing zombies — but they’re more about just moving through a virtual environment). The only thing they add to the endless struggle (at least, ideally) of a little round guy eating dots is more detail — the ontology remains unchanged. Pac Man already had the truth of its and the player’s existence written into its elegant design. That is, it said everything that needed to be said: keep playing, desire can now be quantified by the score; the goal never changes, nor will you ever get closer to it, no matter how fast things start moving.

    A commenter pointed out that this was hardly an original take with a quote from Chris Marker:

    Video games are the first stage in a plan for machines to help the human race, the only plan that offers a future for intelligence. For the moment, the inseparable philosophy of our time is contained in the Pac-Man. I didn’t know when I was sacrificing all my hundred yen coins to him that he was going to conquer the world. Perhaps because he is the most perfect graphic metaphor of man’s fate. He puts into true perspective the balance of power between the individual and the environment. And he tells us soberly that though there may be honor in carrying out the greatest number of victorious attacks, it always comes a cropper. — Sans Soleil

    Seems like Pac-Man, at least, should be called Art to me (and probably Chris Marker).

  4. I think Civilization is art in a way which is quite specific to video games. There’s the complexity of course but I think the way it allows players to experience the mechanics, emotions, addictions, and desires of building empires, civilizations etc. is unique among strategy games. It’s far from perfect but it’s the only video game I can think of which rises to a certain level of intellectual engagement. I haven’t played a single RPG from Zork/Ultima onwards which has fulfilled even the minimum requirement of a good narrative. They’re almost all juvenile in the way almost all superhero comics are juvenile. Which is not to say that these RPGs are thoroughly bad. There are short moments in many RPGs which hit the right notes (for e.g. 10-20 min in Fable 2). As for adventure games, I think Heavy Rain is a baby step in the right direction but those kind of tiny steps arrive once or twice a decade. And when they do occur, they’re trying to catch up with things like CSI/Criminal Minds (in this particular example).

    Btw, they displayed Mass Effect 2 but not Mass Effect 3?

  5. “Seems like Pac-Man, at least, should be called Art to me.”

    More like a cute metaphor. You’ve set the bar way too low for video game art.

  6. Not really. There’s always a place for subjectivity in such matters (even for video games). Pac-Man has no aesthetic appeal to me (not in playing, not in a visual sense, and not even when seeing others play it). It doesn’t speak to me as a true or meaningful commentary on life. Frankly, I find it plain boring.

  7. I haven’t seen this, but I believe Bjork in her last album had a video game which played along to the song Virus, which is about love as infection. You were surrounded by invading viruses and had to shoot them to stop them…but when they stopped invading you, the song stopped to. You had to lose to get all the way through the aesthetic experience.

    Like I said, I haven’t seen it…but that definitely sounds like conceptual art to me (in a good way; I love Bjork.)

    I bet there’s other fine art work that links up with/functions as video games. Maybe someone with more knowledge can weigh in….

  8. The yellow guy with the big mouth would have to spend 5 minutes staring into the abyss of cherries for that comparison to happen.

  9. Noah- I’m not aware of any conceptual art project like that, but the idea sounds interesting. Maybe the problem is that there aren’t many artists who also have programming ability? Bjork is fairly rich, so she can just hire game programmers.

    Suat- thanks for the response. I never played Civilization much, but a few of my friends still speak fondly of it. In college, we preferred to play Age of Empires or Starcraft, which are much faster paced (but have less sophistication to their gameplay).

    As for Mass Effect 3, I think the exhibition was prepared before Mass Effect 3’s release date, so they only had Mass Effect 2 on display.

    Charles- it’s good to see someone sticking up for Pac-Man, but I have to side with Suat on this. It’s just not that good a game, even by the standards of old arcade games. Galaga is equally simplistic, but it’s more aesthetically attractive and a lot more fun to play.

  10. I was, by coincidence, at this exhibit on the night it opened (we were in DC, staying at a hotel across the street, had time to kill before dinner reservations, and I wanted to re-see the Jenny Holzer (out of service that night) and Mark Tansey works in the museum), and… it was pretty damn boring. The highlight was seeing a screenshot from Pirates! a game I used to play as a kid on my Commodore 64 (and is the only reason I know any of the geography of the Caribbean). It was a little too crowded to try any of the playing examples and I found the weird set-ups of video screens showin g highlights from specific types of games really uninterested to look at.

    The Norman Rockwell exhibit was way more engaging.

  11. The exhibition did have a certain air of nostalgia. There’s a strange thrill when you see an old NES game that you played religiously as a kid. But overall, I think you’re right. The “highlight” videos were not engaging.

    As for the Commodore 64: it’s one of those gaming machines that I completely missed. Some of my older friends swear that it was great, but I started on Nintendo.

  12. I bristle when the word “craft” is used as a discriminator to differentiate between “real” art and everything else.

    The reason is simple: Much of what is defined as art today clearly fell under the umbrella of craft back in the day.

    Items from ancient Egypt, such as hieroglyphs, frescos, jewelry, architecture, burial accoutrements, furniture, pottery, etc., all were created by craftsmen — not artists in the rigid sense of the word.

    However, I am an advocate of a much looser version of the definition, which is: “An artist skilled in the techniques of an art or craft.”

    The term craftsman (along with the term illustrator) is frequently used by some members of the art community as a perjorative door which is used to keep out the riff raff. Needless to say, I strongly disagree with such discriminators.

    That said, I guess it’s pretty easy to figure out which camp I fall into regarding the question of whether or not video games are art.

  13. “spend 5 minutes staring into the abyss of cherries”

    More like 5 hours. Jesus, the final sequences of A Turin Horse are the most horrifying, depressing thing I’ve ever seen.

    Noah, I believe there are freeware games that function as conceptual art: e.g. other games where you have to die to “win”, or where it’s deliberately made impossible to win, or there are no objectives, or the objectives are deliberately designed to frustrate or be unattainable… These kinds of games are designed to make conceptual points about the structure of games or to question our received wisdom about them or to illustrate/problematise features of the human condition (e.g. the role of reward in motivation). To my mind, these are clearly art; or, at least, if you’re going to allow Dali’s lobster telephone, you can’t exclude these. That said, I don’t remember playing any of them, so I’m going off reviews and commentary that I’ve read.

    In general, video games as art? Well, we wouldn’t be having this conversation if the exhibition had been in a design museum. But all games have some degree of representational content — often very elaborate — and are often designed to elicit particular affective responses or cognitive reactions (beyond merely presenting factual information), so how on earth can we possibly resist calling at least some of them “art”?

    To my mind, it’s consistent to consider a game both as art and as purely functional object, and to separately evaluate its quality as either. What I’m thinking is that, e.g. many of the Mario or Zelda games are brilliantly, just brilliantly designed as functional objects — as artifacts to do things with, in this case to play — but may not be great art qua art. But its compatible with something being art that it’s not very good art, as even less well designed games are. X-Men comics are art too, just generally not very good.

    On the other hand, I can think of several games where the narrative content, or production of emotional response, is strong enough to count as art. Here I’d include Planescape: Torment, Fallout 2 (maybe also 1), System Shock 2, at least the orphanage level of Thief 3 (and maybe the whole series), GTA San Andreas, probably a few others, and then there’s all the games that I haven’t played (I’ve been on the wagon for several years). And in terms of visual and narrative sophistication, I think Grim Fandango can hold its own with very good art in other media.

  14. The question for video games, though, Russ, isn’t, are they art or are they craft? It’s more like, are they art/craft or are they pastimes?

    I think that the line between pastime/sport and art can also maybe be less rigid than we tend to think. Sports communities and art communities are fairly rigorously socially and culturally separated, but you could argue that the viewing (or participating?) in all is centered on aesthetic responses.

    I mean, is chess art? If not, why not? And if so, is there a video game that’s an equal aesthetic experience to chess?

  15. A video game is as much a work or art as is a film, is it not?

    Look at how the cinema started out. Initially, it was little more than a crude source of technological amusement for the masses, ala “Fred Ott’s Sneeze” (1894). Yet, only 40-odd years later, there were cinematic masterpieces like “Citizen Kane” being created on a regular basis. And while those masterpieces had much more sophisticated equipment, armies of technical experts, vastly bigger budgets, and much greater degrees of sophistication in writing and visual storytelling techniques, in the end they were still strips of celluloid traveling at a certain frame rate through a shuttered projector — just like “Fred Ott’s Sneeze.”

    These differences are sort of like the difference between “Pong” and “LA Noire” — which were produced roughly four decades apart.

    I’m not saying that “LA Noire” is “Citizen Kane,” but playing video games no more a pastime than is going to the movies to see “Casablanca” — or “Bedtime for Bonzo.”

  16. But the goal is winning rather than aesthetic enjoyment…and there’s a question of whether that goal-orientation changes the nature of the experience.

    Again, is chess art? What about basketball? Isn’t a video game more like chess than it is like a movie?

  17. That would be a big no in many instances. Video games are becoming more and more like movies (the summer blockbuster type). The most acclaimed such experience in recent years must be Bioshock which I suppose holds the same critical position in video games as Blade Runner does in SF movies. The goal in a number of video games isn’t winning but getting to a particular ending (which could be good/bad).

  18. On second thought, this debate (as waged here and extensively elsewhere) strikes me as kind of irrelevant, really. It’s not as though we all walk around with a Definition of ART in our heads, with a list of necessary and sufficient conditions such that it includes all and only those things were are genuinely art. We don’t walk around with any such definitions of anything, pretty much (except maybe for some formal concepts such as ADDITION or BROTHER).

    And it’s not as if our concepts of ART, whatever they consist of if not definitions, don’t vary over time or community. Try telling a French Academian from the 1800s that Duchamp’s bicycle is art.

    After a variety of factors have played out over time, our shared culture will ultimately either consider video games as indisputably art, or not. Some of those factors will include similarity or dissimilarity to other uncontentious instances of art — that’s what Noah and Russ are arguing, and I guess I’d argue that representational content and affect-production push it closer towards art than not — but lots of the factors will be contingent accidents of history. Imagine e.g. that Bill Gates established dozens of hifalutin Museums of the Video Games Arts, or the New York Review of Books started running in-depth analyses of video games. Until this gets played out further, video games remain somewhat marginal, but does it really matter whether video games are close enough or not close enough to our current, continuously (if slowly) revised concept ART? To a very large extent I’d say there’s no fact of the matter about whether they’re art or not.

  19. Somewhat insider here (in actuality, just a long time reader of game criticism). Don’t have time for much in-depth talk, just a few quick replies…

    >The insiders who talk about the great qualities of Pac-Man are the kind of insiders who talk about X-Men as the finest comics ever.

    That’s an interesting thought. As the game designer Kelly Tadhg said, Pac-Man, Space Invader and Tetris are founderworks, not masterworks, and shouldn’t be worshipped as examples of games’ finest achievements. So it’s akin to a comic insider worshipping The Yellow Kid, or Japanese aka-hon?

    >I haven’t played a single RPG from Zork/Ultima onwards which has fulfilled even the minimum requirement of a good narrative. They’re almost all juvenile in the way almost all superhero comics are juvenile.

    The standard reply people like me will give is PC RPGs like Planescape: Torment (1999) and The Witcher series (2007 and 2011), all can be purchased at GOG.COM, and The Witcher 2 has been ported to consoles. Planescape: Torment is based on a branch of Dungeons and Dragons, and The Witcher series are based on the eponymous Polish fantasy series, but they are all original stories.

    But anyway, not everyone has time for a lengthy and unwieldy PC RPG. I can wholeheartily recommend a short action RPG called Bastion (2011), which can be downloaded on the Xbox 360 or via the Steam PC gaming platform. I don’t agree with the direction the writer took the story, but do admire what it has achieved.

    On games that are not RPGs: the Portal series (2007 and 2011) are puzzle games with a first-person view, known for their strong narratives. And they are short, too.

  20. And in terms of strategy games, the Europa Universalis family of games, including the Crusader Kings series and Victoria series, are special. The Crusader Kings games simulate in detail the dynamics of medieval dynasties, especially the inheritance systems and all the intrigue and drama it causes.

  21. >But the goal is winning rather than aesthetic enjoyment…and there’s a question of whether that goal-orientation changes the nature of the experience.

    My quick and easy reply is that the goal can be likened to the metre in music and poetry, a framework that helps shaping the experience, at least in theory.

    >Isn’t a video game more like chess than it is like a movie?
    >That would be a big no in many instances. Video games are becoming more and more like movies (the summer blockbuster type). The most acclaimed such experience in recent years must be Bioshock which I suppose holds the same critical position in video games as Blade Runner does in SF movies.

    There are several different directions games are being taken in. The blockbuster model, due to its skyrocketing cost, is often said to be unsustainable. The iPhone / Facebook free-to-play model of shallow and addictive mainstream-oriented games is another. Small developers making in-depth or experimental niche games yet another direction.

    Bioshock (which in fact is a critique of Ayn Rand) is possibly the game that got the most exposure. The insiders tend to think more highly of games I’ve mentioned in previous posts.

  22. cuc:

    Thanks for the suggestions. I’ll play video games on almost any system except the Wii (since I don’t plan on owning one). Also, I’m not saying that I haven’t played any RPGs since Ultima 2 (I never got round to Ulitma 1). I’m saying that despite being a fan of and playing RPGs from Ultima to Wizardry to HoMM to Baldur’s Gate to Final Fantasy to Elder Scrolls to Dragon Age (I’ve only touched part of Witcher 2), I don’t think any of them amount to more than average fantasy game-narratives. I’ll still play them but largely for the pleasure of killing monsters, leveling up, and experiencing the latest tech – reasons close to those which explain why I watch Hollywood action pics (like the Avengers or the upcoming Dark Knight thingie). There’s got to be a reasonably well formed story of course but they’re mostly entertaining diversions which require minimal intellectual or even emotional activity. If the story turns out to be unusually complex and novel, it’s gravy. Most times, they don’t. Mind you, I don’t even consider A Song of Ice and Fire a “great” fantasy series.

    I’ll try out Crusader Kings but my interest in medieval RTS games sort of went away after playing Age of Empires.

    What video games do have going for them is the immersive experience. I can’t get frightened at horror movies any more but playing something like the early parts of Dead Space 1 for the first time did give me the creeps once in a while. There’s no way that would have happened in a movie.

    Going back to Jones’ second last comment, I played the Fallout games and Planescape as they came out but I can’t remember much about them except they were fun while they lasted. Just like X-Com: Apocalypse was fun. The recent Fallouts have dampened my enthusiasm for the series though. Nostalgia can only go so far. I also agree that discussing whether video games are Art is irrelevant from a practical standpoint (though obviously HU often displays little interest in practicalities).

  23. I’m on Jones’s side with the argument that the debate over video games as art is kind of pointless.

    But I think its interesting to ask whether or not talking/writing about video games as art can be interesting/entertaining/illuminating/sufficiently distracting from work

    Could you write a nice left field article for HU about Grim Fandango’s appropriation of South American folklore and Film Noir tropes? Probably

    Would I like to read about Planescape Torment, and the role of agency/self determination in video games? Damn skippy, even if its just because I had a crush on Grace as a kid

    But no-one’s really doing that, as far as I know? It might be pointless to ask whether video games are art or not, but I’d like to see someone at least try and approach them from an aesthetic viewpoint beyond ‘OOH Graphics! Shiny!’

    Basically, HU should play more video games.

  24. What do you think of Silent Hill 2?

    For a more obscure and esoteric game (but still published through mainstream channels), check out Killer7 (2005, PS2 and GameCube).

    For non-commercial experiments… The text adventure community happen to be one that has been doing it for many years. I haven’t began exploring this area, so I can’t make good recommendations myself. I do know some notable names: Emily Short, Adam Cadre, Andrew Plotkin.
    http://ifwiki.org/index.php/FAQ

    >Mind you, I don’t even consider A Song of Ice and Fire a “great” fantasy series.

    Well, the moment I read A Game of Thrones and realized it was utter garbage, I felt so relieved: this means I’ll never have to worry about not having read much mainstream fantasy fiction.

    >But no-one’s really doing that, as far as I know?

    Actually I have been reading this kind of writing for ten years, and we are getting even more of them today: a new game criticism website pops up almost every week. It’s just doing this level of writing is kind of pointless, when the craft of the medium is as little understood as it is now.

  25. Cuc : Would you mind providing a link or two? As I said, I’d love to read something on that level if it exists. I’ve just never found anything of any quality.

    I also don’t think its pointless at all to be dong that writing. If the craft of the medium is little understood, that seems exactly the reason to write more, not less…

  26. I personally find the question about whether or not Video Games are Art a little less interesting than the ones raised when you start to take the games (and their politics) as seriously as gamers claim they want you to take them. (I wrote a bit about that here: http://parabasis.typepad.com/blog/2011/03/thoughts-on-narrative-ii-video-games-in-the-sweet-spot.html ). In order to answer the Are They Art? question in the negative universally you have to figure out how something that has a written narrative, music, animation and all these other things we casually call art suddenly becomes not art when they’re all put together and a controller is plugged into them. The Ebert line on this one is that he actually doesn’t consider most movies, books, paintings etc. to be art, that art for him is a very narrow thing. So that’s cool, I guess, but it would’ve been helpful to know that at the start of the conversation.

    The other thing I find fascinating is the ways that the in-game experience/narrative clashes with the cut-scene experience/narrative. Thus we have the Uncharted games, all three of which are greater works of narrative story-telling than either the second or fourth Indiana Jones films, and all of which feature a hero who also, if you count the number of bodies in the games, is a mass-murdering psychopath. (Tom Bissel writes about this in reviewing LA Noire here: http://www.grantland.com/story/_/id/6625747/la-noire ).

  27. >isaac
    Pretty nice article. The clash between gameplay and narrative has been named “ludonarrative dissonance”, and the Uncharted example is quite infamous.

    The debate surrounding player story vs. authored narrative, highlighted in your article, is endlessly repeated among fans, developers and academics alike. The academics call it “ludology vs. narratology”. A comparable dichtomy is simulationist vs. gamist, or whether games should provide complex simulations.

    On this topic, I kind of like Kelly Tadhg’s theory that the games should neither abandon story or simulation (and only worship Tetris and Pac-Man) nor hope they can one day magically become great narrative art, fully realized world simulator or any number of similar goals, but rather provide a “storysense” that inspires player imagination.

    >BenC
    Perhaps that’s because most of these writings are inept, only providing the most superficial insights.

    Critical Distance is a blog that collects new articles on video games every week. Much of them superficial.
    http://www.critical-distance.com/

    Two of my favorite writers:

    Mathew Weise, game designer, researcher and teacher:
    http://outsideyourheaven.blogspot.com/

    Michael Peterson, known for his Slant Magazine comic column “The House Next Door”:
    http://www.projectballad.com/category/writing/

    >I’ll try out Crusader Kings but my interest in medieval RTS games sort of went away after playing Age of Empires.

    Crusader Kings is not a resource-gathering, unit-building type of RTS. It’s a grand strategy game that runs in real time.

    An example of its gameplay: the goal in Crusader Kings is to ensure the survival of your dynasty. If your third son is more talented than the first two, and your inheritance system is primogeniture, you will have a strong motive to either change the law, or murder the first two sons. But the first two sons, your spouse, your vassals and your neighbours, may all have schemes of their own.

  28. cuc,

    Thanks for the education in terminology! Can’t wait to bust that one out next time I write about video games.

    I am constantly stymied by how little discussion there actually is of story-content in mainstream video game discourse running on the same sites that are demanding legitimacy for the medium as an art form. That’s basically what that essay I wrote is responding to. If we’re going to treat it as a narrative art form, then we have to admit that most of the narratives are deeply lacking outside of the providing-excuses-for-you-to-do-things requirement. And that the narratives for Rockstar games, which are routinely praised simply because of Rockstar’s habit of ripping off beloved films, are amongst the emptiest.

    I’ll give one recent example.. a lot of praise has been heaped on the Witcher series of RPGs because of how much choice there is in the narrative in particularly the second game…. apparently the choices you make affect what story you get to a pretty dramatic degree, so that there are large swaths of the game that you don’t end up playing, depending on your choices.

    I was kind of interested in this and picked up the first game in the series (the second one isn’t available for Mac or PS3). And right at the very beginning it’s telling me that I’ll enter a world where there isn’t good or evil, only choice. I found this somewhat intriguing because, hey, sometimes the binary obvious good/evil thing in mass effect got a little boring.

    What I discovered instead was that they got around the good/evil thing by making everything in the game a loathsome male power fantasy. Your character walks around intimidating people by threatening them and being an asshole no matter what choices you make and every time you fuck a female character (you can do this roughly once per hour of gameplay) you are given a pin up poster with a picture of them naked, often disfigured in some deeply misogynist fashion. And while there’s plenty of discourse about that on fan blogs and whatnot, none of it permeated the major reviews in IGN or 1Up or similar sites, which focused on the mechanics of the game’s alchemy system.

    That said, I don’t envy mainstream video game writers. The ambitious ones have to both craft a satisfying, interesting narrative while also sublimating that narrative to the needs of gameplay. I can’t imagine that’s easy.

  29. Regarding The Witcher series (or RPGs, or blockbuster games in general): this is the point where I admit I have hardly played any long video games myself, and can’t confirm whether there’s anything worthwhile underneath all that stuff you pointed out :-).

    I’m actually more confident about the quality of writing in certain games of the Shin Megami Tensei franchise, especially Shin Megami Tensei 1 and 2 (never officially translated in English), Persona 1 and 2 (the gameplay of Persona 1 is a bit lacking though), and the Digital Devil Saga games. Not because I’ve played them, but because I’ve seen them discussed at length.

  30. “Could you write a nice left field article for HU about Grim Fandango…

    “Would I like to read about Planescape Torment, and the role of agency/self determination in video games?”

    I’d like to read those articles too — you should totally write them!

  31. I think it’s interesting to ask whether video games are art for the same reason that it’s interesting to think about art; aesthetics are tied into the rest of our lives. I find the division between sports and aesthetics to be strange and arbitrary, and video games seem to speak to that in possibly provocative ways.

    Obviously these are cultural categories, not absolutes. But the eagerness to disavow the question on the basic of practicality (why is art supposed to be practical?) is itself suggestive, I suppose….

    And, yeah, Ben, you want to write those pieces, I will publish them.

  32. Just in general, if anyone wants to write video game analysis articles for HU, I’d love that. It’s noahberlatsky at gmail; send me a pitch!

  33. Speaking of RPGs, I wonder if one of the commenters can answer this question: are there any prominent RPGs where the gameplay does not largely consist of killing scores of creatures and looting their corpses? Not that I mind killing orcs, but I’m curious whether anyone has taken the RPG genre in a different direction.

  34. Noah wrote: “But the goal is winning rather than aesthetic enjoyment…and there’s a question of whether that goal-orientation changes the nature of the experience.”

    As some others here have touched on, video games can be goal-oriented, but often that portion of a game is greatly overshadowed simply by the experience of playing — i.e., the act of immersion and enjoyment (and yes, even aesthetic enjoyment).

    “Gears of War” is a good example. I don’t know how many times I stopped in the middle of a mission — or even during a firefight — to take in some of the breathtaking vistas of the “world” around me. It’s the same basic feeling I get when I’m at the art museum and I’m looking at some beautiful classical painting, or when I’m at the cinema watching a film like “Lawrence of Arabia.”

    Obviously, tools like paint and a brush can be used to paint a fence or the side of a house, or the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. The same goes for more modern visual tools like cameras and computers. They can be used for mundane purposes, or for things that are arguably art.

  35. I would think you would have to classify some games as art, if only because they provide an immersive narrative experience for the player, much like reading a novel or watching a movie. There are levels of quality in the experience, of course, as there is in any medium. Eh, this has probably already been settled, but I know Noah likes to discuss those nitty-gritty details.

    If I was to recommend a few games that I found “artistic”, it would be story-based games that made an emotional impact, whether that was due to taking characters through interesting stories, setting up expectations and either delivering on them or twisting them in ways that make one question one’s desires and goals, or by immersing the player in a beautifully crafted world. My favorites of those are probably Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, and Okami. The first two were made by the same developers and featured a really striking visual style and well-crafted settings, along with some nicely-upended expectations regarding the nature of the goals the player is trying to complete.

    Okami, on the other hand, is based on Japanese folklore, and it’s an amazingly beautiful experience, a completely unique visual style based on old Japanese art, with a calligraphy-based playing mechanic and a plot about restoring color to the world. It’s fun to watch and play, but it’s also got one of the most satisfying and emotional endings of any game I’ve ever played, with a moment in the final boss battle that takes the full experience of the game and turns it into an affecting journey that makes all the playing time feel earned and worthwhile as a pursuit within the world the game created. I highly recommend it; there’s nothing else like it.

    I’m also kind of fascinated by the various small games that can be found all over the internet which either create an interesting aesthetic experience or make a statement or point of some sort. That sort of thing is a whole genre unto itself, and there are countless examples, but I don’t have any at hand, of course. If I think of or come across any, I’ll link to them here.

  36. I don’t remember the plot of Okami at all, but I remember that the basic structure reminded me of The Legend of Zelda. The calligraphy combat was a cool idea, though.

    Re: immersion – games are likely the most immersive of all entertainment forms (as Suat and Russ have noted), but I don’t think being immersive in itself elevates a game above crass entertainment. The example that Russ uses, Gears of War, illustrates my point. The visuals are gorgeous, but the gameplay is simplistic and repetitive (which can be satisfying in its own way) and the plot is merely a B-grade sci-fi blockbuster.

  37. “Are there any prominent RPGs where the gameplay does not largely consist of killing scores of creatures and looting their corpses?”

    Harvest Moon is considered an RPG, isn’t it? I got bored after ten minutes of it, but the gameplay in that series consists of working a farm. And though there’s combat in Planescape, the vast majority of that game is dialogue.

  38. Richard — Other types of art can be beautiful but shallow, so while that’s a consideration, I don’t think it’s a show-stopper regarding what may or may not be art.

    I know I’m going to get hammered for this, but one example that springs to mind, film-wise, is “Barry Lyndon.” I saw it in the theater during its intitial release in 1975, and while it’s a gorgeous, award-winning film, I walked out at about the two-hour point because for me, watching it was like watching paint dry.

    I’m sure I could think of some other artistic creations that are beautiful but simplistic, but you get my point.

  39. I’ve already whined everywhere else about that awful “curation” (no arcade games, variety of PCs, or foreign consoles/handhelds? crowdsourced choices?), so I’ll skip it.

    “Are there any prominent RPGs where the gameplay does not largely consist of killing scores of creatures and looting their corpses?”

    Forgive the rambling writing, as I was extremely busy with other things at the time. You’ll adore this (it’s more properly a graphic adventure game, but I think your question is less, “are there role-playing games that do this” [yes] than, “are there games that comment on this”):

    http://www.neogaf.com/forum/showthread.php?t=376513

    the short version:
    http://hardcoregaming101.net/lovedelic/lovedelic.htm
    http://www.rpgfan.com/reviews/moon/index.html

    a walkthrough that I ripped from Nico Nico Doga:
    http://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PL4D426F4EC09E6ABB&feature=plcp

  40. —————————–
    R. Maheras says:

    …I know I’m going to get hammered for this, but one example that springs to mind, film-wise, is “Barry Lyndon.” I saw it in the theater during its intitial release in 1975, and while it’s a gorgeous, award-winning film, I walked out at about the two-hour point because for me, watching it was like watching paint dry.

    I’m sure I could think of some other artistic creations that are beautiful but simplistic, but you get my point.
    ——————————–

    I didn’t find “Barry Lyndon” (one wag said, “No, it’s not about the 1964 presidential campaign”) so unbearable, but that’s an understandable reaction. Kubrick carefully removed the lively, satiric verve of the original novel and made it a ponderous exercise in his favorite theme of the futility of human endeavor.

    A visually exquisite work: some critics meant to praise by saying, “You could blow up any frame of the film and hang it on a museum wall,” but these are supposed to be motion pictures…

    Re video games as art, the most high-tech one I ever got to play was 1987’s “Double Dragon”: http://www.arcade-museum.com/game_detail.php?game_id=7619 .

    As for “video games as art,” they certainly qualify in the category of works which may have aesthetic worth (even greatness), yet whose function is primarily utilitarian: architecture, industrial design, furniture and household objects, advertising.

    Of more sophisticated games others here have described, indeed it sounds like there’s a complex, evocative experience, with the audience a participant in the art form, rather than passive spectator.

    Can’t help but be reminded of…

    ——————————-
    eXistenZ is a 1999 body horror-science fiction film by Canadian director David Cronenberg. It stars Jennifer Jason Leigh and Jude Law.

    As in Videodrome, Cronenberg gives his psychological statement about how humans react and interact with the technologies that surround them. In this case, the world of video games.
    ———————————-
    Much more, at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Existenz

    Hm!

    ————————————
    David Cronenberg Films Will Be Giant Augmented Reality Game
    01/06/12

    The Toronto International Film Festival is in the process of organizing a retrospective for the Canadian filmmaker, part of which will be “The Worlds of David Cronenberg,” a multi-platform augmented reality game.

    Augmented reality describes layering digital information on top of the real, physical world. For example, a game might use your phone’s GPS to sense when you walk past a particular site, and provide you with information triggered by the location…

    TIFF’s Cronenberg game isn’t the first initiative to marry technology with other forms of art and culture. Bjork’s recent album “Biophilia,” came complete with a suite of iPad apps that demonstrated certain properties inherent in the songs. And, for Showtime’s marijuana dramedy “Weeds,” the network released a Facebook game that lets users deal fake drugs online. Meanwhile, traditional video games are hedging closer and closer to other forms of entertainment, with continually improving graphics, increasingly detailed narratives, and consoles like the Kinect, which let users’ bodies serve as the controllers.

    Still, the idea of taking one director’s backlist and designing an augmented reality game as a part of a retrospective is an ambitious one. If successful, the game could potentially simulate what it might be like to enter one of Cronenberg’s cinematic worlds…
    ———————————-
    http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/01/06/david-cronenberg-augmented-reality_n_1190468.html

  41. Hey Russ, I can’t really defend Barry Lyndon. I think I might actually call it art though. As Mike pointed out Kubrick was exploring some of his favorite ideas, partly by altering the themes from the source novel. It’s just that his ideas aren’t that interesting and his method of exploring them was overlong. So it’s bad art.

    Jones, Ghaleon- thanks for the recommendations.

    And thanks to everyone who took the time to comment.

  42. Didn’t read all of these comments…and I’m not that interested in video games. On the other hand, I am unreasonably obsessed with sports…and the question of “goal orientation” is an interesting one. Clearly, the goal of a basketball game is to “win,” but most games are not actually “beautiful” or an aesthetic experience. _Some_ games, however, (to my mind) clearly ARE beautiful and are aesthetic experiences. It doesn’t matter who you’re rooting for (or playing for), some games are beautiful and often the tapes of these games get put in some kind of “gallery” (the Hall of Fame, or repeated play on ESPN Classic) as aesthetic objects to be appreciated no matter who wins. in this way, goal orientation is a spur to the aesthetic experience, but is not ultimately the way to judge or understand it. In fact, one could argue that there’s even a “canon” of great games and/or great plays (Bird steals the ball… Laettner hits the last second shot… Jordan strips Malone… Jordan shoots over Bryon Russell… Magic plays center for Kareem…Willis Reed limps on the court…etc.)

    Soccer is often referred to as “the beautiful game” and though the goal is to win…ties can be equally aesthetically pleasing as games with a clear victor.

    Baseball, too, is often treated as an aesthetic object by romantic writers, etc. It’s an interesting question, though ultimately determined by one’s arbitrary definition of both art and sport…

    To me, Johan’s no-hitter was a work of art.

  43. On the one side there’s Ichikawa’s aesthetic appreciation of sports in Tokyo Olympiad and on the other side there’s Stockhausen’s appreciation of the Twin Tower destruction.

  44. Richard — Even though I didn’t like the film, I readily concede that “Barry Lyndon” is art.

    One of these days, I’ll have to watch it again to see if my “old fart” self agrees with my “young pup” assessment.

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