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!