Writing, characterization, plot, narrative… flow?

The Idea

 

Not long ago, I men­tioned to my friend that I thought Mirror’s Edge and Prince of Persia 2008 might have more in com­mon with bal­let than with Asteroids, and, indeed, the more time I’ve spent with this idea, the more I like it.

In case you’ve never seen either of these played, here are game­play trail­ers for both games: Mirror’s Edge, and Prince of Persia.

I found myself in the awk­ward posi­tion of really, really enjoy­ing Prince of Persia even though most of the video game com­mu­nity seemed to regard it with a sort of ambiva­lent apa­thy– most peo­ple liked the visual style, but found the char­ac­ters largely for­get­table and the plat­form­ing too easy. Much was made of the fact that it is impos­si­ble to die in the game, as any time the Prince would fall to his death or be mur­dered by an enemy, he is res­cued by his part­ner, Elika. Critics derided this game­play mechanic as mak­ing the game “too easy,” and less­en­ing the impact of the com­bat and plat­form­ing sec­tions.

Yahtzee Croshaw dis­agreed with this point in his Zero Punctuation review of the game (for those unfa­mil­iar with Zero Punctuation, it’s a lot of fun, but quite vul­gar, so don’t play that link around chil­dren or those eas­ily offended). He defends the mechanic, stat­ing that while in other games, instant recov­ery from death would defang any pos­si­ble threat, freerun­ning games are all about flow, which this mechanic helps main­tain.

I hap­pen to agree with Yahtzee on this point, but the rea­son I bring this up is found in the state­ment that freerun­ning games are all about flow. This state­ment got me to think­ing about the fact that dif­fer­ent games are, fun­da­men­tally, about dif­fer­ent things. Left 4 Dead is about coop­er­a­tion, Torment is about writ­ing, Assassin’s Creed is about immer­sion, and Prince of Persia and Mirror’s Edge are, indeed, about flow.

Games as Dance

 

In think­ing about what makes these games enjoy­able, I came to an odd real­iza­tion. Most games are com­pared to movies as their most sim­i­lar ana­logue. Some games even use this as a mar­ket­ing tool: “This game is so darn pretty and immer­sive that it’s almost like a movie. It’s cin­e­matic.” This is fine, and in most cases, it makes sense. Games are sub­stan­tially dif­fer­ent from movies, but most prob­a­bly have more in com­mon with movies than, say, books, (though there are excep­tions) or plays.

But I real­ized that in the case of games like Prince of Persia or Mirror’s Edge, it might almost make more sense to com­pare the games to bal­let than to a film. After all, if Prince of Persia and Mirror’s Edge are any good, they are not enjoy­able because of their writ­ing or plot (harm­less but unin­spir­ing in the first and laugh­able in the sec­ond), but because of the beauty and grace found in the way the player can con­trol the move­ments of the player char­ac­ters.

Both of these trail­ers con­tain what makes these games art, com­pletely removed from what­ever plot or char­ac­ters the games con­tain. In these games, the plot and char­ac­ters serve only as a way to explain why the player is expe­ri­enc­ing these beau­ti­ful plat­form­ing sequences. (This is not nec­es­sar­ily the case– there’s no rea­son a dance-like game couldn’t have good writ­ing, but nei­ther of these games seemed to find it impor­tant). Furthermore, sim­ply hav­ing this “dance-like” com­po­nent is enough to make a game art– most art does not require a plot.

What I think of when I think of play­ing Prince of Persia or Mirror’s Edge is of exe­cut­ing a series of deft and beau­ti­ful acro­batic maneu­vers which not only look beau­ti­ful on the screen, but have a cer­tain rhythm to them, and which require a cer­tain kind of skill from me as the player. This is par­tic­u­larly the case in Mirror’s Edge, which is a much harder game. It requires some skill to move about the City with enough grace to make the game look beau­ti­ful– oth­er­wise you sim­ply end up falling to the ground and/or get­ting shot a great deal. In fact, it could be argued that with­out some degree of skill, Mirror’s Edge is not very beau­ti­ful– the “flow” of the game is often inter­rupted if the player con­tin­u­ally makes mis­takes. One might say that to the aver­age player, Mirror’s Edge is not par­tic­u­larly beau­ti­ful– that it requires the player to have a cer­tain buy-in of skill in order to unlock the game’s artis­tic poten­tial.

This is the pri­mary rea­son why these games remind me of dance– a movie can show a beautifully-executed park­our sequence or a well-choreographed musi­cal num­ber, but while the actors may be par­tic­i­pat­ing in a dance, the audi­ence is merely watch­ing. In the case of these games, how­ever, only with the input of the player does the game take on its dance-like qual­i­ties. Thus, while movies might con­tain ele­ments of dance, Prince of Persia is some­thing like dance in its entirety.

 

The Location of Art

In this case, I won­der if the player isn’t actu­ally pro­duc­ing the art in con­cert with the game’s engine in a way he or she usu­ally does not. I gen­er­ally think that, in a video game, the player is expe­ri­enc­ing the art, and not actu­ally cre­at­ing it. But in the case of these games, I’m not so sure. Neither Prince of Persia or Mirror’s Edge are par­tic­u­larly dif­fi­cult games to com­plete, but to play them beau­ti­fully requires skill and some aes­thetic sense.

This is rem­i­nis­cent of a school of lit­er­ary the­ory called Reader-response crit­i­cism, which, in what is prob­a­bly a crim­i­nal trun­ca­tion, gen­er­ally thinks that a work does not gain “real exis­tence” until it is read. One might, then, from a reader-response per­spec­tive, argue that art is cre­ated not when an artist puts pen to paper or paint­brush to can­vas, but when an observer inter­acts with the com­pleted paper or can­vas.

I don’t gen­er­ally go much for reader-response crit­i­cism, for a vari­ety of rea­sons which are more or less irrel­e­vant to the point at hand, but in the field of video games crit­i­cism, I feel it may have a proper place. I think that in most video games, the player is expe­ri­enc­ing art (albeit in an unusu­ally active man­ner) rather than cre­at­ing it. I would gen­er­ally hold that Myst and Portal are explored as artis­tic expe­ri­ences, rather than cre­ated through the player’s inter­ac­tion with the game.

But in the case of these dance-like games, while I would cer­tainly sug­gest that the games also con­tain art in them­selves, it seems that the player has a hand in pro­duc­ing some­thing like art while he or she plays the game. The games in and of them­selves are very well-crafted, but it takes a skilled player to really show off the beauty and artis­tic qual­ity of one of these games. In this case, when a skilled player meets a well-constructed dance-like game, the result is some­thing like art in and of itself, and I would sug­gest that this is a qual­ity at least mostly unique to this kind of game.

In Conclusion

Neither of these games are remotely per­fect. Both would have been improved by bet­ter writ­ing (or, in Mirror’s Edge’s case, a com­plete removal of its writ­ing) and are rather clumsy at inte­grat­ing com­bat into the rest of the game. But these games seem to occupy an unusual place in the gam­ing canon– they actively involve the player in the pro­duc­tion of beauty more than other games.

I spend a great deal of my time dis­cussing writ­ing in games, and as it my area of quasi-expertise, I’ll prob­a­bly keep that focus in my own essays here. But it’s worth remem­ber­ing that not all games gain their artis­tic merit through plot and char­ac­ter­i­za­tion– some are artis­ti­cally valu­able because of their graph­i­cal finesse and excel­lent move­ment engines– the sort of thing that allows a player to feel as though he or she is actively engaged in aes­thetic activ­ity sim­ply by play­ing the game.

This is a rel­a­tively new idea for me, and, as such, I have not had time to fer­ret out all the pos­si­ble ram­i­fi­ca­tions of such thought. As a result, I’m def­i­nitely inter­ested in hear­ing dis­cus­sion on this point– are there other kinds of games which require a skilled player to pro­duce art, rather than sim­ply being art in and of them­selves? Perhaps a role­play­ing game, if played by a seri­ous role­player, might qual­ify. I’m not sure, and I would love to hear your thoughts. I would love to use this post as a jumping-off point for a dis­cus­sion– I am quite cer­tain there is more to this idea than I have laid out here!

(I So Hate) Consequences

A lot of the think­ing I do about games-as-art relates to choice in games, and how to make those choices rea­son­able and inter­est­ing while pre­vent­ing them from derail­ing the game as an artis­tic expe­ri­ence. Today, I want to talk about the other side of choice: con­se­quence.

Without con­se­quences, choices, whether in real life or in games, have lit­tle to no weight. This is true at the most basic level, or at the most com­plex– the occa­sional non-branching dia­logue tree in Mass Effect or Dragon Age, where choos­ing one or another dif­fer­ent dia­logue options results in the exact same response from the per­son to whom you are speak­ing, is very annoy­ing. You won­der why you were given a choice in what to say– the other per­son obvi­ously doesn’t care what you said, and will carry blithely on regard­less of your feel­ings about the mat­ter.

That par­tic­u­lar exam­ple is usu­ally only a minor annoy­ance, but this can be a more seri­ous prob­lem if the choices in ques­tion are some­what larger. In the “Arl of Redcliffe” quest in Dragon Age, one is con­fronted with a sit­u­a­tion and sev­eral pos­si­ble ways to solve it: a lit­tle boy has been pos­sessed by a demon and is gen­er­ally wreak­ing havoc around the cas­tle and vil­lage of Redcliffe, and has to be stopped. There’s some chance the boy could be saved if a mage could be sent into the Fade (the dreamworld/realm of demons) to deal with the demon directly, but this would require a tremen­dous expen­di­ture of energy found only through for­bid­den Blood Magic and the will­ing sac­ri­fice of the boy’s mother or a tremen­dous amount of lyrium (the game’s catch-all mag­i­cal sub­stance) and the help of sev­eral mages from the nearby Circle of Magi.

So, The Warden has sev­eral choices: he or she can kill the boy out­right, sac­ri­fice the boy’s mother, or try to get help from the mages. The third option involves let­ting the demonic child ram­page through the town for at least another sev­eral days, and the char­ac­ters in the game repeat­edly state that such a move would be dan­ger­ous, as, while you are gone, Connor might well kill every­one around him, thereby negat­ing your attempt to avoid his mother’s sac­ri­fice.

This should par­tic­u­larly be a con­cern as, if you haven’t already done the mage’s quest, upon arriv­ing at the Circle of Magi, you find it in seri­ous dis­ar­ray and in need of some res­cu­ing of its own, a quest which might take sev­eral days in its own right. Nevertheless, if you choose the option to go for help, no mat­ter how long you take in your search for mag­i­cal aid, noth­ing hap­pens at Redcliffe Castle. No other NPCs are killed or harmed in any way, and the demon pos­sess­ing Connor is no harder to kill.

This effec­tively means that there is absolutely no rea­son not to go this route, as by keep­ing the boy and his mother alive, you ensure that all of the mem­bers of your party don’t take any approval hits, and no one impor­tant dies. This essen­tially means that what could eas­ily have been a very com­plex trilemma of a choice involv­ing the weigh­ing of lives and the moral­ity of dab­bling in Blood Magic loses its grav­i­tas. This is bad. Perhaps if you’ve already done the mage’s quest, such that it’s a rel­a­tively sim­ple mat­ter of just hop­ping over to Lake Calenhad and ask­ing for a bit of help, you should be able to get back in time for no seri­ous dam­age to have been done. But if you haven’t, and upon arriv­ing at the mages’ tower you have to spend sev­eral days res­cu­ing them, too, you should return to Castle Redcliffe to dis­cover that Connor has mur­dered all of the impor­tant NPCs in the cas­tle.

Choices can lose their weight if they haven’t any real, last­ing con­se­quences. This can hap­pen either through sit­u­a­tions like the exam­ple above, or sit­u­a­tions where one or another of the options in a choice results in a flat Game Over.

Death, in most video games, is about the least seri­ous thing that can hap­pen to a player. The player can sim­ply reload the game from a few min­utes ago and try again. It’s slightly annoy­ing, and if the player doesn’t remem­ber to save very often, can some­times cause him or her to lose a lot of progress, but has no last­ing impact upon the game itself. As a result, doing stu­pid or reck­less things in a game has no con­se­quence, and any choices which inevitably result in char­ac­ter death sim­ply become false choices.

An excel­lent exam­ple is a scene in Knights of the Old Republic where, after hav­ing been arrested by Selkath author­i­ties, the player char­ac­ter is forced to talk his or her way out of an imme­di­ate exe­cu­tion. There are a mul­ti­tude of dia­logue options, but nearly half result in imme­di­ate and uncer­e­mo­ni­ous elec­tri­cal death. As a result, half or more of the poten­tial role­play­ing options are not options at all– they sim­ply result in game overs.

This comes from an under­stand­able source: it’s prob­a­bly true that sass­ing off to one’s cap­tors in such a sit­u­a­tion would result in sum­mary exe­cu­tion, but here it’s sim­ply an exam­ple of giv­ing a player false choices, just as much as the non-branching dia­logue trees men­tioned ear­lier. Furthermore, it does not man­age to con­vey the appro­pri­ate feel­ings that should be asso­ci­ated with the main character’s death– rather than feel­ing shocked (hahah), or upset, we sim­ply feel cheated, reload the game, and say the “right” thing this time.

In short, death is not usu­ally an appro­pri­ate con­se­quence for a sit­u­a­tion. There are excep­tions, of course– the end of Half-Life, where you choose whether to end the game in some sort of stor­age unit, await­ing an assign­ment from a name­less and fright­en­ing employer, or die. The game ends either way, such that reload­ing and try­ing again does not seem as appeal­ing– you know full well that this choice will end in your death, and must sim­ply decide what to do.

The trou­ble with this fact is that since most video games are set in life and death sit­u­a­tions, the fact that death has lost its sting forces the game design­ers to be quite cre­ative in com­ing up with con­se­quences for choices. Planescape: Torment found itself in this sit­u­a­tion, as the main char­ac­ter could not be killed at all, thereby really ren­der­ing death-as-consequence moot. Consequences for reck­less or self-sacrificing behav­ior in Torment are thus han­dled rather dif­fer­ently, and can result in the per­ma­nent death of allies (if you feed them to the Pillar of Skulls) or the loss of up a non-trivial amount of the Nameless One’s max­i­mum hit points (if you feed your­self to the Pillar of Skulls), as exam­ples.

Several JRPGs have a habit of rein­tro­duc­ing death-as-consequence by remov­ing any save points from the games’ “secret dun­geon” areas. Star Ocean II  had no save points in its Cave of Trials, and FFX’s Omega Ruins were sim­i­larly sparsely-save-pointed. This serves to cre­ate an atmos­phere of real fear in the player when faced with death, as the player has likely spent the last forty-five min­utes col­lect­ing fan­tas­tic equip­ment and fac­ing ter­ri­ble foes, and the thought of los­ing all that work and going back through the har­row­ing dun­geon is wor­ri­some. This is an approach which, although it removes the “consequence-ness” of death in terms of in-game mechan­ics, at least aims to cre­ate an emo­tion in the player in response to the character’s death. You really don’t want to have to redo the last forty-five min­utes of your life and run the risk of find­ing another fucking Great Malboro that always gets the first turn.

This is a dif­fi­cult prob­lem– ensur­ing that the player takes chal­lenges in-game any­thing like as seri­ously as the char­ac­ter prob­a­bly would were it all real is very impor­tant to RPGs, in par­tic­u­lar, but with­out var­ied and last­ing con­se­quences, and some­thing like a fear of death, I expect it’s more or less impos­si­ble. It’s also a prob­lem more or less unique to video games. Books and movies (gen­er­ally, as I’m sure there are excep­tions) do not require the observer to make choices, and do not allow the observer to sim­ply “reload” and aim for a bet­ter out­come. But it’s a prob­lem that sim­ply has to be addressed. Nothing kills a player’s attach­ment to a char­ac­ter or involve­ment in a sit­u­a­tion like real­iz­ing that what appears to be a choice isn’t. In video games, just like in many the­ol­ogies, an illu­sion of free will sim­ply leaves the player feel­ing hood­winked and cheated, and with­out real and dif­fer­ing con­se­quences, any sup­posed choice will remain super­fi­cial and illu­sory.

A (Wo)Man called Hawke

In this post I wanted to take you six years back in time, to a moment, when it was announced  that Dragon Age 2, sequel to the fan­tas­tic (if flawed) Dragon Age: Origins, was going to make a fun­da­men­tal change in its design phi­los­o­phy. DA:O had allowed its play­ers a great deal of free­dom in the char­ac­ter cre­ation process. Following in the foot­steps of ear­lier BioWare games like Baldur’s Gate and Knights of the Old Republic, Dragon Age allowed the player to wholly cus­tomize his or her char­ac­ter. While cre­at­ing the Warden (as the player char­ac­ter of DA:O is often called), the player chooses a race, class, and ori­gin story (approx­i­mately two for each race), designs the character’s phys­i­cal appear­ance, and gives the char­ac­ter a name. The Warden never speaks dur­ing the game (except for occa­sional grunts and order acknowl­edg­ments), although every other char­ac­ter in the game is fully-voiced. (The Warden is not a tra­di­tional Silent Protagonist, either, as the player chooses lines for the Warden to say. These lines are sim­ply not voiced.)

This design phi­los­o­phy stands in sharp con­trast to that of the Mass Effect fran­chise, another role­play­ing fran­chise devel­oped by BioWare at approx­i­mately the same time. In Mass Effect series, the player char­ac­ter is a human man or woman named Commander Shepard, and although Shepard’s phys­i­cal appear­ance, class, and (in a small way) ori­gin story is cus­tomiz­able, much more of Shepard’s char­ac­ter is deter­mined by the devel­op­ers at BioWare. Shepard is fully voiced and ani­mated just like any of the other char­ac­ters, although what, exactly, he or she says is up to the player.

The Catalyst 

Six years ago, BioWare announced that, for Dragon Age 2, they would be aban­don­ing the for­mat put forth in DA:O in favor of a more Mass Effect–like approach. In Dragon Age 2, the player is put in the role of Hawke, a fully-voiced human man or woman. All the details relat­ing to exactly how much con­trol the player will have over Hawke’s back­story or class was as of yet unknown, but the point was that, with­out a doubt, the num­ber of choices open to the player at the start of Dragon Age 2 would be sub­stan­tially smaller than the num­ber of choices avail­able at the start of DA:O.

This caused quite a fuss on the Internet, with gamers every­where often lament­ing what they per­ceived to be BioWare’s cruel, dic­ta­to­r­ial restric­tion of their free­dom, or com­plain­ing that they didn’t want Dragon Age to just turn into Mass Effect with swords. BioWare imme­di­ately felt com­pelled to defend their deci­sion, and jus­ti­fied the lack of char­ac­ter choices at the onset by stat­ing that there are more choices through­out the rest of the game to bal­ance it out. I imag­ine that if you go to any major gam­ing web­site, it will not be dif­fi­cult to find a thread on the forums argu­ing whether or not this was the right choice.

I’m going to go ahead and come down and state my opin­ion on the mat­ter: for Dragon Age 2, the move to a voiced, named char­ac­ter was absolutely, unequiv­o­cally, and with­out qual­i­fi­ca­tion, the right thing to do.

The Story of Paragon Aeducan

 

To jus­tify this claim, I want to talk a lit­tle bit about the first Dragon Age, using exam­ples from the life of my first com­pleted Warden, stal­wart dwar­ven war­rior Dain Aeducan. Dragon Age is, with­out excep­tion, the story of its hero. For Dain, the game hinged upon his actions and rela­tion­ships. His betrayal at the hands of his younger brother was what forced him into the ranks of the Grey Wardens, and it was his actions that led to the defeat of the Archdemon, the ascen­sion of a new king in Ferelden, and so on. Dain devel­oped com­pli­cated rela­tion­ships with his fel­low trav­el­ers: he was the only wor­thy man Sten met in Ferelden, was betrayed by Zevran, aban­doned by Morrigan, and loved by Leliana. He placed Alistair on the throne against the latter’s wishes and finally gave up his life to quell the Blight, redeem­ing his name in the hal­lowed halls of Orzammar and becom­ing a Paragon.

He did all of these things with­out speak­ing a word, and only con­veyed emo­tion in his face per­haps twice in the entire game. No one, not his friends, ene­mies, broth­ers or lover spoke his name once in the game, instead clum­sily talk­ing about “this Warden” or “my sec­ond son.” While in Orzammar, peo­ple would refer to him as “Lord Aeducan,” but this prac­tice ceased upon enter­ing the sur­face world.

What This All Means

 

You see, Dain was clearly meant to be a char­ac­ter, and not merely an avatar for the player. Some role­play­ing games place more empha­sis than oth­ers on the con­cept of role­play­ing. For many games, the player char­ac­ter is given only a rudi­men­tary back­story before being thrust out to explore the world. The “role” that is being played is lim­ited only to fairly cut-and-dry dif­fer­ences in basic moral behav­ior. The player char­ac­ter never attempts to enter into mean­ing­ful rela­tion­ships, pla­tonic or roman­tic, with any of his or her com­pan­ions or acquain­tances. In short, the pur­pose of these games is not to make the player expe­ri­ence what it is like to be another per­son, but rather to explore a liv­ing and com­pli­cated world.

But Dragon Age is not one of those games. This game’s story revolved around Dain, his actions, and his rela­tion­ships with the other char­ac­ters. And Dain never once spoke a word, and responded to every sit­u­a­tion with at most a shrug of his shoul­ders or a raised eye­brow. His lines were com­mu­ni­cated by unvoiced sub­ti­tles. It was a bit like watch­ing a ver­sion of the Lord of the Rings wherein Viggo Mortensen was replaced by a straw dummy of a rugged-looking man.

Mind you, in the Baldur’s Gate era, when no char­ac­ters were voice-acted, this would not have been a prob­lem. But to see Leliana pro­fess­ing her undy­ing love to Dain, with com­pe­tent voice act­ing and emo­tions reg­is­ter­ing on her face, only for him to stare at her the same way he would stare at a stone, or a were­wolf, or a par­tic­u­larly tasty sand­wich, did not make for an emotionally-satisfying moment. Conversely, Ashley or Miranda telling Commander Shepard she loved him was much more believ­able, even though the qual­ity of the writ­ing in the scenes in ques­tion was infe­rior. Shepard actu­ally responded to the dec­la­ra­tions of love, both emo­tion­ally and vocally.

In Conclusion

The pri­mary rea­son every­one seemed to be mad at Dragon Age 2 six years ago is because it low­ers the num­ber of choices avail­able. But this seems to sug­gest that choices are worth­while in and of them­selves, a point with which I quite dis­agree. In Dragon Age, no mat­ter which choice I make, I am con­fronted with a char­ac­ter that, no mat­ter how well writ­ten, or how con­sis­tently por­trayed on my part, is essen­tially made of card­board. All the choices in the game’s char­ac­ter cre­ation seem some­what pale and hol­low– none of my choices can make a char­ac­ter as believ­able as Commander Shepard.

This is not to say that choice is some­how a bad thing– if BioWare had run into an infi­nite amount of time and money to cre­ate six dif­fer­ent voice sets and custom-tweak every bit of dia­logue based on the Warden’s ori­gin story and so on and so forth, such that each of the six ori­gins was just as deep as Commander Shepard’s emo­tions and voice set, that would have been won­der­ful, and a mar­velous accom­plish­ment. But since BioWare does not have an infi­nite amount of time or money, if it is to pro­vide an expe­ri­ence as deep as Mass Effect’s, it is going to have to cut back on the num­ber of options avail­able.

This is emphat­i­cally the right choice. What mat­ters is not how many choices are in a game, but how deep and well-realized those choices are. One assumes that, if BioWare sticks to form, there will be many dif­fer­ent ways to por­tray Hawke. Renegade and Paragon Shepards behave very dif­fer­ently, never mind the fact that most play­ers will prob­a­bly play some com­bi­na­tion of the two. The same will be pre­sum­ably be true of Hawke.

If BioWare takes away my abil­ity to play an elf or a dwarf, but restores my abil­ity to believe it when a roman­tic inter­est tells Hawke she loves him, or a good friend praises him for his deeds, I will not even miss what I’ve sup­pos­edly lost. What I will have gained is the abil­ity to believe the story and play the role in the role­play­ing game.

So, what is all this about? Simply put, a mul­ti­tude of choices does not a deep expe­ri­ence make. Fewer choices at char­ac­ter cre­ation can allow for a deeper expe­ri­ence later. And for a character-driven game like Dragon Age, any­thing that can be done to make the char­ac­ters more believ­able and relat­able is a plus. Hawke will, hope­fully, be more than an avatar, like the Vault-Dweller of Fallout 3. Hopefully he or she will be a char­ac­ter, like Commander Shepard, or the Nameless One, a fully fleshed-out mem­ber of the cast.

Art Evolves: Interactivity as the New Frontier

Art has expanded and evolved over time. Paint today has vir­tu­ally noth­ing in com­mon with paints of yes­ter­day; paint is defined by its func­tion, not its chem­i­cal makeup. Sculpture hap­pens in dif­fer­ent media from iron to ice to SPAM. Art has never been lim­ited by requir­ing it to resem­ble that which came before it: indeed, the most cel­e­brated art is that which delib­er­ately escapes the pre­vi­ous trap­pings of the medium.

More impor­tantly, art expanded to incor­po­rate new tech­nolo­gies and prac­tices that required the devel­op­ment of new tools and prac­tices to imple­ment. Music was once hand-clapping and singing, and expanded to include drums, sim­ple wind instru­ments, and so on. As new forms evolved, new artis­tic roles came with them. With the advent of these devel­op­ments, new vec­tors of analy­sis and inno­va­tion became pos­si­ble.

One of the sup­posed obsta­cles to acknowl­edg­ing video games as art is that art is tra­di­tion­ally not ‘won.’ Bill’s answer to that, that many good video games are ‘fin­ished’ in a fash­ion more akin to a good novel than they are ‘won’ in a man­ner like a round of bowl­ing, is appro­pri­ate, but I think the orig­i­nal accu­sa­tion implies a stronger prob­lem: the con­cept of inter­ac­tiv­ity.

Before explor­ing this more care­fully, I do want to point out that any enjoy­ment of art is inter­ac­tion. Looking at an object is a com­plex psy­cho­log­i­cal event that involves a great num­ber of phys­i­cal, psy­cho­log­i­cal, and cul­tural events. The viewer brings her own vocab­u­lary of con­cepts to an art object and nar­rates and under­stands it based on that vocab­u­lary. While many view­ers in an inter­pre­tive com­mu­nity will share a broad swath of con­cepts (“This is a paint­ing of a red square on a white can­vas.”) the diver­sity of ways to nar­rate a work quickly make it clear that art objects are not bound to a sin­gle inter­pre­tive method.

With that out of the way, we can think about inter­ac­tiv­ity. This, I think, is what is really at stake when crit­ics claim that video games can­not be art because you don’t ‘win’ art. That iter­a­tion of the objec­tion is a lim­ited instan­ti­a­tion of a greater claim. Rather than being tied to a spe­cific por­tion of inter­act­ing with an object, such as defeat­ing an Ancient in Eternal Darkness, I think that the crit­i­cism is really more con­cerned with all the deep inter­ac­tion that the player has with the game, such as play­ing through the sto­ries of the 12 dif­fer­ent char­ac­ters who com­pose the nar­ra­tive of that game. While look­ing at art is an active, inter­pre­tive activ­ity, the depth and vari­ety of inter­ac­tion one has with a video game is far greater.

Video games present an almost entirely new type of inter­ac­tiv­ity to artis­tic crit­i­cism. While look­ing at a paint­ing is, aca­d­e­m­i­cally, ‘inter­act­ing’ with it, video games require a degree of inter­ac­tion not shared by any other artis­tic for­mat. I sug­gest that this is the excit­ing inno­va­tion that video games bring to art, rather than call­ing it an obsta­cle to over­come.

Art has not tra­di­tion­ally been heav­ily inter­ac­tive. Theatrical per­for­mances require actors, builders are con­structed by enor­mous crews, and musi­cal per­for­mances require pianists and singers, but these are all par­tic­i­pants at the level of cre­ation, not at the level of enjoy­ment or con­sump­tion. Musical per­for­mances may invite the audi­ence to sing along or dance, and a few movies invite more audi­ence inter­ac­tion, but, in gen­eral, obser­va­tion has been the prin­ci­ple inter­ac­tive activ­ity for the con­sumer of art.

This new dimen­sion is basi­cally what the entire his­tory of video games has been about refin­ing. How do you immerse a per­son in a story? What kinds of visual events can be made fun and excit­ing by adding rules and con­trols? What inno­va­tions can expand the ways in which we inter­act with our art? As gam­ing has devel­oped as an indus­try, dif­fer­ent stu­dios have con­stantly exper­i­mented with dif­fer­ent visual styles, con­trol schemes, and game­play mechan­ics that expand what video games are capa­ble of deliv­er­ing to the audi­ence.

While I intend to post many arti­cles here dis­cussing nar­ra­tive, I think it’s a good place to start as an exam­ple of how we can ana­lyze how an ele­ment of inter­ac­tiv­ity in video games shapes the use of tra­di­tional art ele­ments and molds the expe­ri­ence of the player. New ques­tions are pos­si­ble in video game inter­pre­ta­tion. How do you strike a bal­ance between main­tain­ing a sin­gle coher­ent story with­out con­fin­ing the player to a plot on rails? Do you need an in-game nar­ra­tive to tell a story? Is it more impor­tant to pro­vide a means of con­sis­tent char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of your pro­tag­o­nist, or to pro­vide a richly detailed world where you have more free­dom of action and a more vaguely defined char­ac­ter?

Creating games that fall on every end of this spec­trum is an impor­tant part of the video game mar­ket. I love clas­sic adven­ture games despite the plots on rails for the same rea­son I enjoy watch­ing my favorite movies and re-experiencing the nar­ra­tive. I love explor­ing Vvardenfell for its own sake, engag­ing the cul­tures of Morrowind with­out touch­ing the main plot, because the rest of the writ­ing and design of the game is sim­ply much bet­ter than the core plot. Exploring the styles and bound­aries of inter­ac­tive ele­ments is the chief inno­va­tion of video games as an artis­tic for­mat.

Beyond nar­ra­tive, the phys­i­cal meth­ods of inter­act­ing with games is some­thing almost entirely unique to the medium. Games change as you press but­tons, swing your arms, and speak into your micro­phone. While it is true that the Pieta changed after a ham­mer and chisel were angrily swung into it in 1972, this was not exactly viewed as an appro­pri­ate means of inter­act­ing with it. Video games are defined by their inter­ac­tion above any­thing else, and I expect it to be a major sub­ject of reviews to come.

Painting explores how we process visual ideas, writ­ing explores nar­ra­tive ideas and the bound­aries of lan­guage, and music explores how we under­stand sound. because they com­bine so many of these expe­ri­ences, video games explore the syn­the­sis of our senses. They are near-complete imag­i­na­tion engines, and the inter­ac­tive dimen­sion is what keeps them from being cat­e­go­rized as movies, ani­ma­tions, sound­tracks, and nov­els.

Rather than treat this as a bar­rier toward them being art, why not explore it as a dimen­sion to extend to other media? Joe Satriani’s “Crowd Chant” is a rock gui­tar piece that requires audi­ence par­tic­i­pa­tion. Rocky Horror invites audi­ences to shout at char­ac­ters and ob toast at the screen. Ayn Rand’s play “Night of January the 16th” requires audi­ence mem­bers to sit on stage as the jury and decide whether the per­son on trial is found guilty or inno­cent. Anish Kapoor’s ‘Cloud Gate’ in Chicago chal­lenges onlook­ers to cre­ate some­thing beau­ti­ful in its reflec­tive sur­faces.

Interaction is another fron­tier of artis­tic inno­va­tion, and video games are the deep­est explo­ration of it in art.