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.