To Thine Own Self Be True

The Idea

What I want to talk about today is the con­cept of “scope” and dis­cuss two major areas where scope can become a prob­lem in video games.

On Scope

Like any good philoso­pher, the first thing I need to do is define my terms.  By, “scope,” I mean, gen­er­ally, the sorts of things the game is try­ing to do, and what kind of game it is try­ing to be.  Is it try­ing to be a gigan­tic epic telling a mas­sive story of love and loss and war?  Is it try­ing to be a small, character-driven piece show­ing you what it is like to be a par­tic­u­lar kind of per­son?  Is it a game with lit­tle to no plot or char­ac­ter, but one in which the graph­ics and flow of the game con­sti­tute its art?

These ques­tions remind me most of a sec­tion of the phi­los­o­phy of Alfred North Whitehead, where, in a dis­cus­sion of aes­thet­ics, he puts for­ward two char­ac­ter­is­tics of aes­thetic activ­ity (which is really all activ­ity in Whitehead, but that’s another con­ver­sa­tion): Massiveness and Intensity Proper.  In Whitehead’s schema, aes­thetic value is derived from tak­ing dis­parate ele­ments (con­cepts, peo­ple, musi­cal tones) and work­ing them into har­mony with one another.  A given work of art has more value (i.e. is “bet­ter”) the more har­mony it pro­duces.

A work’s Massiveness is the sheer num­ber of dif­fer­ent pieces it tries to rec­on­cile, while its Intensity Proper refers to the strength of its indi­vid­ual har­monies.  In more com­mon terms, Massiveness might be referred to as Breadth, and Intensity Proper, Depth.  Whitehead’s con­cep­tion of har­mony may or may not be ter­ri­bly help­ful in our dis­cus­sions here, but the ideas of breadth and depth are quite rel­e­vant to dis­cus­sions of scope in art.

A video game’s breadth is found in how many dif­fer­ent types of things it tries to do, and its depth in how much detail it puts into its pieces.  There is no rea­son a game (or any other work of art) can’t be both very broad and very deep, it just requires a lot of work– most things tend to pick one or the other and focus on it.

It is impor­tant to note that there is noth­ing nec­es­sar­ily wrong with being broad, nar­row, deep or shal­low, as long as one struc­tures one’s work accord­ingly, and chooses ideas and game­play mechan­ics which fit the game’s breadth and depth.  Some very good games have been very nar­row and oth­ers, very shal­low.  Problems only arise when a game’s writ­ers or pro­gram­mers seem to be unaware of what the rest of the game is up to.  In my expe­ri­ence, the most com­mon mis­take is try­ing to tell a story that requires a cer­tain amount of depth with­out spend­ing the nec­es­sary time or detail to tell it well.  It is, how­ever, true that too much breadth with­out any depth starts to make a game feel thinly spread and flimsy, and too much depth with­out enough breadth makes a game feel pon­der­ous and cramped.

It is impor­tant to note that these are not binary char­ac­ter­is­tics, but con­tin­u­ums.  Dragon Age: Origins is far from a shal­low game, and does, in fact, tend to delve into its char­ac­ters, set­ting, ideas and mechan­ics with a great deal of speci­ficity and detail, but it is sub­stan­tially shal­lower than Planescape: Torment, which trades DA:O’s breadth for a much nar­rower focus.

What I really want to talk about today is how many video games (and other works of art, for that mat­ter) seem to be some­what schiz­o­phrenic about their approaches to scope.  The speci­fic game I want to talk about today is Call of Duty: Black Ops, because I think it might be the per­fect exam­ple of a game which is not true to itself. 

The Numbers, Mason

I will state very quickly that I am here only talk­ing about Black Ops’single-player cam­paign, as its mul­ti­player is wholly irrel­e­vant to this dis­cus­sion.  I also want to quickly dis­claim that Black Ops is not a bad game, exactly, just a schiz­o­phrenic one. At times, at least, I quite enjoyed it, so when I spend the rest of this column harp­ing on it, don’t get the wrong impres­sion.

Black Ops clearly wants to be taken seri­ously.  Rather than sim­ply hir­ing what­ever voice actors hap­pened to be around, the cast is full of seri­ous actors like Gary Oldman and Ed Harris, and pop­u­lar per­son­al­i­ties like Sam Worthington and Ice Cube.  I imag­ine that many video games could pay their entire cast with Sam Worthington’s cut alone.  The game is full of gor­geous envi­ron­ments, smooth ani­ma­tions, and lots and lots of lit­tle details that are eas­ily missed in the first run-through.  This game would undoubt­edly have sold mil­lions upon mil­lions of copies what­ever Treyarch did, so the fact that they did not just quickly slap together some sort of vaguely-suitable mess shows that they cared at least some­what about the qual­ity of the pro­duct.

I have noth­ing bad to say about the graph­ics, the mechan­ics (it’s often very con­fus­ing and frus­trat­ing and easy to die, but, well, I imag­ine that’s what real war is like, too, so that’s prob­a­bly not a bad thing), or, in most cases, the voice act­ing.

What I object to is the han­dling of the plot, par­tic­u­larly when it is done at the fatal expense of devel­op­ing our main char­ac­ter, Alex Mason.  I won’t waste a lot of time going into detail, but Black Ops tries to be your stan­dard Cold War drama full of lots of shady deal­ings and double-crosses.  At one point, there are a quick series of big reveals about Mason that go sort of like this: He’s been brain­washed!  His Russian friend is a Tyler Durden-style hal­lu­ci­na­tion!  The mys­te­ri­ous peo­ple inter­ro­gat­ing him are his CIA bud­dies!  They want to save the world from some kind of pre­pos­ter­ous chem­i­cal weapon!  While brain­washed, he got many of his friends killed chas­ing silly revenge quests!  He was the sec­ond gun­man on the grassy knoll!  We never learn any­thing else about Mason unless we engage in a wholly-optional and easily-missed minigame with a com­puter that can only be reached via press­ing a cer­tain com­bi­na­tion of but­tons while star­ing at the game’s main menu.  (It is not, at least, at the bot­tom of a locked fil­ing cab­i­net stuck in a dis­used lava­tory with a sign on the door say­ing Beware of the Leopard.)

This is all, with the pos­si­ble excep­tion of the Nova 6 chem­i­cal, which I’ll ignore until later, poten­tially fine: there’s no rea­son why this couldn’t have made for a pretty good game, one which asks ques­tions about who to trust, and which reveals, in a shock­ing moment, that the untrust­wor­thy per­son is not cold CIA han­dler Jason Hudson, or the mys­te­ri­ous peo­ple inter­ro­gat­ing Mason, or even the vil­lain­ous Russians, but rather the point-of-view char­ac­ter him­self.  It is per­haps not entirely orig­i­nal (KotOR did a sim­i­lar twist very, very well), but there’s no rea­son it couldn’t have been good.

The prob­lem stems from the fact that the game refuses to actu­ally spend any time with the char­ac­ters and themes it has set up.  With the excep­tion of one pretty well-handled “mind­screw” scene when Mason finally real­izes he has been brain­washed, the game never slows down long enough for us to learn any­thing about the char­ac­ters we’re sup­posed to care about or even be entirely sure of the game’s time­line.

Here’s the thing: I know why this hap­pened.  There is at least a per­cep­tion that the aver­age Call of Duty fan is some species of “bro” and there­fore com­pletely inca­pable of spend­ing more than five or six sec­onds pay­ing atten­tion to any­thing which does not actively involve shoot­ing, screw­ing, or yelling at some­thing.  I can’t speak to the truth of this assump­tion, but I can under­stand why a game designer might not want to spend a lot of time build­ing a well-crafted nar­ra­tive if his or her audi­ence is mostly just going to get bored and com­plain if more than four sec­onds of violence-free dia­logue go by.  This is fair.

But what I don’t under­stand is going some­where halfway.  Had the Treyarch team given in to the demands of their per­ceived audi­ence and cre­ated a game with­out much over­ar­ch­ing plot and with­out the mas­sive con­spir­acy, and which just involved mur­der­ing var­i­ous com­mu­nists in var­i­ous exotic locales, I could respect that.  It might even have time to be a pretty decent expe­ri­ence– it’s prob­a­bly true that the aver­age sol­dier does not really know much of what’s going on behind the mis­sions on which he is sent, and so one could imag­ine a game which not only sells a bajil­lion units by appeal­ing to the dude­bro crowd, but also man­ages to be some kind of com­men­tary on war.  Such a game might well have been a nar­row but deep expe­ri­ence.

Instead, the game tries to tell a pretty decent story, but by never actu­ally slow­ing down and tak­ing some time with the char­ac­ters, we’re left with a game with just enough story to annoy the dude­bros, but not enough to make us intel­lec­tual types (read: pre­ten­tious lit­er­ary jerks) happy.  It’s impor­tant to note that, unlike Gears of War 2, which usu­ally does spend a fair amount of time on its plot, but fails mas­sively due to writer incom­pe­tence, Black Ops actu­ally has decent writ­ing when there is dia­logue, but fails to deploy enough of that writ­ing.  I sup­pose this is a bet­ter prob­lem to have, but it is still a prob­lem.

In Conclusion: To Thine Own Self Be True

What this all boils down to is that the whole pro­duc­tion team of a video game needs to be on the same page about what kind of game they are mak­ing.  If one per­son thinks the team is mak­ing a mas­sive war epic and every­one else thinks they are mak­ing a goofy lit­tle shooter, the results will be odd at best and dis­as­trous at worst.  Black Ops’ prob­lem is not found in any of its com­po­nent parts, but in the way the game’s design phi­los­o­phy doesn’t jive with the story it tries to tell.

If you want to make a game which is pretty much only about shoot­ing things, remove the excess plot and char­ac­ter work and take the time you would have spent com­ing up with com­pli­cated plots and use it to craft a bet­ter shoot­ing expe­ri­ence.  I’m not con­vinced that all video games even nec­es­sar­ily need plots at all.  In fact, I think both Mirror’s Edge and Gears of War 2 would have been dras­ti­cally improved by com­plete plot-ectomies, and Left 4 Dead 2 func­tions as some of the best art I’ve seen in a shooter by remov­ing any plot more com­pli­cated than “get from point A to point B” and focus­ing instead on mas­sive amounts of detail and atmos­phere.

So, Treyarch: be hon­est with your­self about the scope of your game, and con­struct it accord­ingly: don’t use unnec­es­sar­ily broad ideas if you’re pro­duc­ing a game which won’t take the time to develop them!  Also, tell Sam Worthington he needs to learn how to do a con­vinc­ing American accent already.  Seriously.

Post-Script: Some Informal Jabs at Call of Duty: Black Ops

1. Sam Worthington can­not main­tain a con­vinc­ing American accent (he’s Australian) when­ever he needs to show more emo­tion than an apa­thetic grunt.  This was true in Avatar and Terminator, but was espe­cially notable here.

2. I don’t know why the @#$% we thought it was nec­es­sary to make up a new chem­i­cal WMD for the Soviets to use in their thwarted-at-the-last-second attack on the US.  Half the point of the Cold War was the nuclear arms race, so I don’t know why we couldn’t have just had some kind of sur­prise nuclear strike, rather than mak­ing up a ridicu­lous, James Bond-style chem­i­cal weapon to muck up the oth­er­wise rel­a­tively real­is­tic tone of the game.  It feels sort of like some designer for­got what kind of game he was mak­ing, like if one of the badguys in Dead Space was not a hor­ri­ble, flail­ing undead mon­stros­ity, but an angry polar bear from one of those Cabela’s games.

3. The whole sequence with Daniel Clarke receiv­ing a glass jaw (ba-dum PSH!) has var­i­ous prob­lems, but I’ll name two: first, as has been men­tioned by oth­ers before, Clarke seems remark­ably happy to fight alongside the peo­ple that have been bru­tally tor­tur­ing him for the last few min­utes.  I am impressed by his capac­ity to for­give.  Second, I don’t know about you, but if you put a bunch of glass in my mouth and punch me a few times, I’m going to speak with a speech imped­i­ment for a while.

4. If you rap­pel like that in real life, Alex Mason, you will cut off your hands.

5. So, the com­puter ter­mi­nal thing is pretty cool, guys, but it obvi­ously took a lot of work, and I don’t know why you would spend that much time cod­ing and writ­ing some­thing which maybe 5% of the play­ers will find unaided, and only 1% of those play­ers will actu­ally read through.  I appre­ci­ate the abil­ity to play Zork, but as I played the game on my friend's Xbox 360, that was actu­ally more like dan­gling a choco­late cake in front of me, hop­ing I’ll for­get that the time you spent putting Zork in your shooter could have been spent mak­ing the actual shooter.  Only I have to eat the choco­late cake through a straw, because the Xbox 360 con­troller is not a key­board.

6. There are var­i­ous good ways to deliver a major plot twist.  “Oh by the way you shot Kennedy sorry for­got to men­tion that hope it’s okay game is over now here lis­ten to a bad eminem song bye” is not one of them.

7. Sam Worthington does a really ter­ri­ble American accent.

However, because you cast Ed Harris in a video game, all is for­given.

We Can Be Heroes

This week, I’ll be exam­in­ing the heroic nar­ra­tive and it’s close, close rela­tion­ship to video gam­ing! I’ll start by defin­ing what I mean by heroic nar­ra­tive, and then have a short dis­cus­sion on what its propen­sity in the world of gam­ing means for games as art.

A Narrative Undaunted

Now, I should make a dis­tinc­tion here between the hero nar­ra­tive as a form and hero­ism as a con­cept. Though many games con­form to the hero nar­ra­tive, the char­ac­ters in those games may not nec­es­sar­ily be all that heroic. Heroic activ­i­ties are uni­fied by this trait: the hero fig­ure res­cues another, typ­i­cally a help­less per­son or per­sons, and this res­cue may or may not entail self-sacrifice. However, the hero nar­ra­tive (I’m refer­ring to it this way because heroes more often than not fill the pro­tag­o­nist role in these sto­ries) is a form of story, in which the main char­ac­ter (and per­haps a select group of allies) face insur­mount­able odds in a bat­tle with very high stakes and still man­age to snatch vic­tory from the hands of their oppo­nents. This strain of story can eas­ily be traced back to ancient myth, found in the Hercules and Gilgamesh tales for instance. It also has an incred­i­ble foot-print in fan­tasy and sci­ence fic­tion media as well, which is par­tially indica­tive of why video games are dom­i­nated by the nar­ra­tive.

Now, games like God of War may not fea­ture a hero in any sort of moral­is­tic sense (as revenge, which is a dis­tinctly non-heroic action in mod­ern euroamerica society, is the moti­vat­ing fac­tor, and Kratos sur­passes mere dis­re­gard for other human lives in his strug­gle), but it still con­tains all the hall­marks of the heroic nar­ra­tive. The avatar char­ac­ter is the lone war­rior against a pan­theon of foes explic­itly more pow­er­ful than he and he finally, despite numer­ous set­backs and ulti­mately the sac­ri­fice of self, expends his revenge and claims vic­tory. A sim­ple inves­ti­ga­tion of the char­ac­ter Kratos shows him to be firmly in heroic ter­ri­tory. He is an immensely pow­er­ful war­rior, which is evi­dent both in char­ac­ter design and his piti­less man­ner; Kratos is a more bru­tal envi­sion­ing of the Conan arche­type, albeit with less cun­ning. His immor­tal foe is, at the begin­ning at least, the Greek god of war. In his ser­vice to that same god, he was dri­ven to kill his wife and child, and so revenge pro­vides the moti­va­tion. There is no ques­tion that Kratos’ anger is jus­ti­fied, but the story becomes heroic when Kratos elects to seek revenge against an oppo­nent that is seem­ingly impos­si­ble.

It’s worth not­ing that this is not a heroic story if Kratos seeks revenge against a fel­low spar­tan of sim­i­lar stand­ing. What mat­ters, for the heroic story, is that the chances of vic­tory are slim or non-existent at the begin­ning of the tale. To be a hero, the enemy must seem insur­mount­able. As the old adage states, “A man can be judged by the qual­ity of his ene­mies.”

This power imbal­ance between pro­tag­o­nist and pri­mary foe has an impor­tant impact on game design. After all, if a protagonist’s foe has access to no more resources nor power than the pro­tag­o­nist, then the game must stretch far­ther and far­ther to have any sort of verisimil­i­tude. Barriers to van­quish­ing the foe begin to feel forced. But the foe need not be espe­cially pow­er­ful in and of itself to be threat­en­ing and dif­fi­cult to con­front. Sauron can be slain by toss­ing a ring into a pool of lava; Frodo never even has to con­front him directly. But Sauron also has a mas­sive army at his dis­posal, and the ring itself proves a bar­rier. Such mod­els frankly work a lit­tle bit bet­ter than the “cos­mic power” vil­lain, since the story doesn’t have to jus­tify why the vil­lain doesn’t utterly destroy the weak hero before the hero can amass enough influ­ence and power to be an actual threat.

Even if the foe and the foe’s min­ions aren’t con­stantly threat­en­ing at the gates, the heroic nar­ra­tive ensures that there is con­sis­tent oppo­si­tion and threat. This is a stronger trait in video games heroic nar­ra­tive than in other sorts of heroic nar­ra­tive, but that’s because game pac­ing is in fact designed to suit heroic nar­ra­tives. For instance, there are fre­quent moments when Kratos’ loss and untimely death seems assured, but a com­bi­na­tion of skill and deter­mi­na­tion allows him to van­quish his foe, often by a slim mar­gin. This gen­er­ates a steady pace of dra­matic ten­sion in the nar­ra­tive. This becomes a more dom­i­nant trait in God of War 2 and 3, in which boss bat­tles occur at reg­u­lar inter­vals to main­tain an opti­mal amount of dra­matic ten­sion. That said, many war games also cor­re­spond to the heroic nar­ra­tive, despite often lack­ing a sin­gle defin­ing enemy.

Another com­mon trait in heroic nar­ra­tives is the ulti­mate suc­cess and sur­vival of the pro­tag­o­nist. There is much made of “sat­is­fy­ing” end­ings. In the heroic nar­ra­tive, the hero’s suc­cess must be total. This does not mean that there are not sac­ri­fices offered up (though such sac­ri­fices are usu­ally not total, that is, the hero’s life is rarely demanded), but rather that the effect’s of the hero’s jour­ney and actions are sig­nif­i­cant and last­ing. Perhaps the hero has pur­chased years of peace with his or her efforts, or per­haps the hero has won the cure to a hor­ri­ble plague. Deaths are tem­porar­ily averted, more often than not, and if revenge was a moti­vat­ing fac­tor, then karmic jus­tice is doled out in full. The sac­ri­fice of self some­times appears, but it must be han­dled with care. The death of a char­ac­ter, even if the char­ac­ter is not espe­cially wor­thy of empa­thy, can have large effects on the end­ing of a nar­ra­tive.

There are plenty of other heroic nar­ra­tives tropes that exist in gam­ing; it’s not too hard to see them when you look. I won’t spend any more time defin­ing the nar­ra­tive, though, and trust that I’ve illus­trated it suf­fi­ciently.

I Don’t Want To Be A Hero

The heroic nar­ra­tive has become, in many cases, syn­ony­mous with video games. The con­cept of pro­gres­sion and “lev­el­ing up” tie in to the heroic nar­ra­tive seam­lessly. Again, this is sort of com­mon sense, but tak­ing away the pow­ers that the pro­tag­o­nist has col­lected is a risky propo­si­tion. Now, the nar­ra­tive isn’t totally respon­si­ble for that; a player who exerts mas­tery over a sys­tem comes to like options, and hav­ing those options taken away can be frus­trat­ing. However, the nar­ra­tive at least rein­forces the dan­ger of steal­ing back char­ac­ter pow­ers, though I think that it may even be par­tially respon­si­ble for it. So the heroic nar­ra­tive fea­tures a steady pro­gres­sion to power. One actu­ally strug­gles to find games that don’t fea­ture a neatly-implemented pro­gres­sion sys­tem after the Super NES era. Now, this pro­gres­sion isn’t a neg­a­tive thing; I think that pro­gres­sion sys­tems offer fre­quent and sat­is­fy­ing rewards for play­ing a game. But at the same time, this pro­gres­sion will more often than not bend the game toward heroic nar­ra­tive.

What I’m get­ting at here is that the vast major­ity of video games are heroic nar­ra­tive, and this is not nec­es­sar­ily a prob­lem, but work­ing to get out­side of the heroic nar­ra­tive will be impor­tant as video games mak­ers seek to pro­duce art. The tropes of heroic nar­ra­tive are part and parcel of the video gam­ing expe­ri­ence; if they’re not there directly, they’re present implic­itly, or they are directly sub­verted. But this art form is also quite flex­i­ble. Experiences like Braid, which offers an inter­est­ing inver­sion of the hero nar­ra­tive in that its end­ing reveals your pro­tag­o­nist to be harm­ful and dan­ger­ous in his tire­less search for the “princess,” alter­nately a purer love than the one he has or the nuclear bomb, (it works on mul­ti­ple lev­els. Just play it, trust me) are refresh­ing because they speak a dif­fer­ent dialect than most video games, even as they depend on some aspects of game design that are often explic­itly tied to the heroic nar­ra­tive. In Braid, there are lev­els that grow pro­gres­sively more dif­fi­cult, for instance, though read through the lens of the time-bending mechan­ics and the end­ing of the game, this could also eas­ily be read as sub­ver­sion.

Heavy Rain proves another fer­tile exam­ple. Admittedly, since I lack a PS3 and money, I haven’t played it, but I have watched a lot of videos and read a lot of reviews… hope­fully that will be enough. From my lim­ited per­spec­tive, I can say that its game mechan­ics are not excep­tion­ally sophis­ti­cated when com­pared to, say, FPS games. It also shares very few traits with heroic nar­ra­tive (much less than even its pre­de­ces­sor Indigo Prophecy, it would seem). Now, it sac­ri­fices phys­i­cal dis­tance to get there, but it does some­thing com­pletely dif­fer­ent than most video games, eschew­ing many tenets of game design in the process. Regardless of its qual­ity, Heavy Rain is an exam­ple of some­thing else that video games are capa­ble of. It’s an exam­ple of a very dif­fer­ent story and a very dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ence, and should prob­a­bly be judged by a dif­fer­ent rubric than most video games are, since it is so far removed from the “typ­i­cal” heroic nar­ra­tive expe­ri­ence. Most nar­ra­tive art forms are capa­ble of telling many dif­fer­ent kinds of sto­ries, and while video games shouldn’t be faulted for find­ing a famil­iar form and build­ing around it, video games should also not be lim­ited by the dom­i­nant form. Heroic nar­ra­tive still has plenty of mate­rial, I think, and I sure hope to play some good heroic narrative-style games in the future, but I’d also love to play through rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent expe­ri­ences, as well.

As a small end-note, I think it’s also worth not­ing that the hero nar­ra­tive is going out of vogue. The post­mod­ern project has ren­dered typ­i­cal hero tales quaint at best, and destruc­tive at worst. At the very least, hero tales that por­tray vil­lains as totally evil and heroes as pure and holy have become stale, but also a lit­tle dis­taste­ful. After all, in the real world vil­lains are more com­plex. Video games are not often known for their nuanced and com­pli­cated treat­ment of char­ac­ters and themes, and can often express a “them vs. us/me” men­tal­ity. Such forms have less to say to us today (though I won’t say that a work should be cas­ti­gated because of such a men­tal­ity), and games that present more nuanced views of the world would be wel­come.

Art as Games: Valve’s Louvre

When Valve announced that they had been col­lab­o­rat­ing with the Musée du Louvre to pro­duce a new title uti­liz­ing their ven­er­a­ble Source engine to pro­duce the world’s first first-person vir­tual museum, the gam­ing world was stunned that such a pro­duct would be devel­oped with­out any announce­ment until right before its release. Much con­fu­sion was gen­er­ated as peo­ple guessed wildly at how an engine pri­mar­ily used to develop FPS titles could be used to pro­duce what sounded like a glo­ri­fied visual ency­clo­pe­dia. The dis­cus­sion grew even louder when Valve announced that it would be a mul­ti­player title, even though no details about game­play had been released yet.

As part of a viral adver­tis­ing cam­paign, they have been invit­ing select per­sons to expe­ri­ence and cri­tique the core game play, though cer­tain details and fea­tures are sub­ject to NDA restric­tions (such as a ban on screen­shots, I’m sad to report). Imagine my sur­prise when I was invited by Valve to par­tic­i­pate in the beta.

Obviously, I had no choice but to say yes.

What fol­lows is a com­bi­na­tion of nar­ra­tion of my expe­ri­ences, some com­ments on what I see in the game, and some related thoughts. We’ll start from the begin­ning of the game itself.

Our Story Begins

In the open­ing area, you look from your avatar’s eyes out the win­dows of the Paris metro as the cred­its gen­tly fade in and out of your Black Mesa Commute in a stately Helvetica. As your train arrives at the Louvre metro sta­tion, your first tuto­rial popup appears announc­ing you can leave the train using WASD. The walk from the train to the ticket coun­ter offers plenty of shops and beau­ti­fully scripted NPCs, but noth­ing deserv­ing of your atten­tion, and noth­ing with which you can inter­act mean­ing­fully.

The ticket coun­ter is staffed by a bored young Parisian man who wel­comes you to the Louvre in a cheer­ful voice and deliv­ers a help­ful speech:

“Bonjour et bien­v­enue au Musée du Louvre. You have before you the world’s finest selec­tion of paint­ings, sculp­tures, jew­elry, and other art objects for perusal at your leisure. I hope that your expe­ri­ence here will be enlight­en­ing. Included in the price of your admis­sion is this audio­gu­ide, which will provide you with more detailed infor­ma­tion about select works through­out the museum.”

The HUD popup indi­cates that your audio­gu­ide can be trig­gered by press­ing ‘E’ to inter­act with the tags for var­i­ous art­works. The ropes at the desk will not be removed until you suc­cess­fully trig­ger the sec­ond wel­come mes­sage from the sam­ple tag at the tick­et­ing coun­ter to ensure that you can cor­rectly iden­tify a trig­ger. On repeated playthroughs, you can skip this scene and jump straight to the atrium.

The sec­ond help mes­sage ush­ers you toward the atrium stair­well where your first real choices hap­pen. This is your point of depar­ture where you decide what kind of playthrough you’ll be doing, and what your char­ac­ter will be like. It would be some­thing of a mis­take to call Louvre a class-based game, as there aren’t any absolute restric­tions on what you do and how you play, but the first wing you visit does dic­tate some of the restric­tions on how you play through the rest of the museum.

Your are in a maze of twisty lit­tle pas­sages, all alike

Your first deci­sion is your choice of wing. You can begin by explor­ing loca­tions such as the Egyptian wing, the Etruscan exhibit, the Greek pot­tery hall, any era of paint­ings, or you can select speci­fic pieces such as Winged Victory or the monthly “Temporary Exhibit” DLCpack­age to work toward. Especially on your first playthrough, this choice dic­tates your expe­ri­ence for the entire run.

For my first go, I opted to visit the first Temporary Exhibit, which was a col­lec­tion of Magritte paint­ings and var­i­ous sur­re­al­is­tic early 20th-century painters. I imme­di­ately received noti­fi­ca­tion that I had unlocked the “Ceci n’est pas un Exploit” achieve­ment, and took my first step into the vir­tual museum.

Incidentally, Valve ambi­tiously packs Louvre with more achieve­ments than even the vaunted Team Fortress 2, all of which fol­low their tra­di­tion of cheeky meta-humorous titles and achieve­ment ideas. Easier achieve­ments include “Walk Like an Egyptian” for straf­ing through at least one room of the Egyptian exhibit, “Mona Lisa Mile” for bee-lining straight from the entrance to the Mona Lisa with­out trig­ger­ing any audio­gu­ide flags, and “Dan Br0wn’d” for talk­ing to an NPC named Robert Langdon who has some inter­est­ing but mis­guided thoughts about sym­bol­ism. Longer term achieve­ments include “Bust a Louvre” for unlock­ing all per­ma­nent exhibits, a spe­cial astron­omy exhibit called “Mystery Science Theater” for using 3000 audio­gu­ide entries, and “Notre Game” for pass­ing the tests to become a cura­tor for an exhibit.

Leaving the ticket booth deposits you in the first mul­ti­player por­tion of the game. There are var­i­ous NPC tourists, other play­ers, and “cura­tors” who are community-appointed mods. Each player’s avatar appears to oth­ers as a pas­tiche of clev­erly crafted stereo­types based on your choice of playthrough. For jump­ing right into the absur­dist exhibit, my avatar was gifted with thick horn-rimmed glasses, a black turtle­neck, and a slim mes­sen­ger bag which rep­re­sented my audio­gu­ide as an iPad app instead of the tra­di­tional speaker­box. The hall was filled with pudgy Midwestern tourists with gaudy t-shirts, Japanese tourists with com­i­cally over­sized cam­eras, and griz­zled old men in tweed jack­ets with leather elbow patches.

This is where the true expe­ri­ence began.

Every exhibit hall has care­fully ren­dered every real piece in the Louvre to scale in the dig­i­tal museum. You can wan­der through the actual lay­out of the Louvre and see every piece in its orig­i­nal con­text. The audio­gu­ide tags are some­what abstracted, as you can sim­ply focus the screen on a given piece and trig­ger the audio­gu­ide, which helps avoid issues of hav­ing every­one crowd around a tiny face­plate and acci­den­tally key­ing in the wrong exhibit tag. You can also open a sep­a­rate view of the piece in inter­ac­tive 3D if you want to mag­nify a par­tic­u­lar sec­tion or explore details that you wouldn’t be able to see at the actual museum.

Listening to the canned descrip­tions of every paint­ing and sculp­ture is much like vis­it­ing an actual museum. It tech­ni­cally con­tains all the infor­ma­tion that a museum would pack­age with a piece, such as frag­ments of the artist’s biog­ra­phy and a few basic details about the tech­nique of a piece, but it’s about as ful­fill­ing as sit­ting through one of the long-winded NPC speeches of Half-Life 2 that you actu­ally spent break­ing things with a crow­bar, or sit­ting through another tape jour­nal from BioShock. It’s appro­pri­ate, but it’s ter­ri­ble game­play.

The real game­play begins when you start a con­ver­sa­tion with another char­ac­ter. You can strike up con­ver­sa­tion with NPCs with the ‘E’ key, and walk through Mass Effect-style dia­logue wheels to hear some canned reac­tions to a paint­ing to col­lect either his­tor­i­cal infor­ma­tion or mod­ern inter­pre­ta­tions of a piece. Talking to a Midwesterner in front of one of Magritte’s self-portaits yields com­ments such as “So, he couldn’t paint faces?” and “I think this means he liked New York.” Talking to a tweed-clad art pro­fes­sor will inform you about Magritte’s career as a wall­pa­per designer, with options to inquire fur­ther about Magritte’s biog­ra­phy or the NPC’s favorite works in the hall. Certain dia­logue branches will yield infor­ma­tion that unlocks dia­logue branches with other char­ac­ters, like the art historian’s details on Magritte’s biog­ra­phy mak­ing it pos­si­ble to unlock con­ver­sa­tions with the Midwesterner (who hap­pens to be a real estate con­trac­tor) about the design lim­i­ta­tions imposed by wallpaper’s require­ment to be small sec­tions of repeat­ing pat­terns. It may be obvi­ously didac­tic, but it’s an inter­est­ing set of puz­zles to work out, and the dia­logue is almost as good as BioWare prod­ucts.

More impor­tantly, you can engage in con­ver­sa­tions with other PCs. The dia­logue can either hap­pen with a sin­gle player in the exhibit hall, or with a group of play­ers in a vir­tual “Coffee Shop” screen which whisks your view away to an abstracted cafe while your avatar slowly wan­ders the museum floors con­tem­pla­tively.

This sec­tion of the game is what will attract the most atten­tion and crit­i­cism. Ostensibly noth­ing more than a chat room with 3D graph­ics and fully ani­mated char­ac­ter responses trig­gered by your emoti­cons, the Coffee Shop is a place where you dis­cuss dif­fer­ent pieces with other play­ers. You can speak either with your micro­phone or with an instant mes­sag­ing prompt. There are eas­ily search­able menus for artists, speci­fic works, and generic sum­mary details of dif­fer­ent eras and styles which can be quickly and eas­ily linked to other play­ers. The effi­cient and styl­ish infor­ma­tion of deliv­ery is highly rem­i­nis­cent of the Civilopedia from the Civilization series, and lets you quickly ref­er­ence dif­fer­ent pieces, per­sons, and move­ments in a way that’s seam­lessly inte­grated into the game’s engine.

The Coffee Shop also has an easy tool for select­ing speci­fic parts of your con­ver­sa­tions and adding them to the Community Notes for an art­work or an exhibit. The Community Notes are a repos­i­tory for play­ers’ thoughts and analy­ses of dif­fer­ent top­ics that are some­where between a wiki and a forum. A sim­ple Up/Down vote sys­tem lets users rank con­tent. One excit­ing announce­ment from the Louvre states that Community Notes will even­tu­ally be made avail­able in the real museum at spe­cial ter­mi­nals to be installed early next year.

There is no speci­fic objec­tive of the Coffee Shop. Its sole pur­pose is to provide a forum for highly inter­ac­tive and information-rich dis­cus­sion of art­works. This is both a great strength and a great weak­ness, because it pro­vides a beau­ti­ful and easy forum for media-intensive dis­cus­sion of art, but it’s also eas­ily sub­ject to trolling and vacant con­ver­sa­tion. The “Vote to Kick” option helps expel the trolls, but there’s no auto­matic way to keep con­ver­sa­tion focused on art­work.

Take a key for com­ing in

What will be the most con­tro­ver­sial sec­tion of Louvre are the check­points between exhibits. Your first exhibit is avail­able auto­mat­i­cally, but sub­se­quent exhibits are unlocked sub­ject to approval through cura­tors or through auto­mated tests. To me, it felt like an uncom­fort­able fusion of the best of edu­ca­tion and the worst of edu­tain­ment titles. The auto­matic tests are mul­ti­ple choice tests that ask about basic facts about dif­fer­ent art pieces, like match­ing a sculp­tor to her most famous piece, or select­ing the name of a painter after see­ing 3 pieces by said artist. The tests have thou­sands of pos­si­ble ques­tions that are reviewed, refreshed, and replaced con­stantly by var­i­ous offi­cial project con­trib­u­tors, but I expect that they will invari­ably be solved pri­mar­ily by Google rather than by play­ers them­selves.

The alter­na­tive to auto­mated exams, “Curator Examinations,” are both bril­liant and doomed. As I men­tioned before, cura­tors are community-appointed experts in a par­tic­u­lar wing. Valve and the Louvre ulti­mately mod­er­ate who gets approved for the posi­tion through a process that they have not yet made pub­lic, but the nom­i­na­tions are avail­able to the gen­eral pub­lic. Every instance of an exhibit is guar­an­teed to have at least one cura­tor at all times, who is avail­able for chat and exams.

Yes, you can con­verse with a cura­tor as a sin­gle player or as a group to get approval to enter another exhibit. Through a free-text or micro­phone con­ver­sa­tion with the same Coffee Shop tools above, you can demon­strate your level of under­stand­ing of a sub­ject to a cura­tor, who can then award you with var­i­ous acco­lades, rang­ing from “Creative Interpretation” to “History of the World, Part I.” It’s the best of one-on-one teach­ing com­bined with the dread­ful hell of a call cen­ter expe­ri­ence.

Ostensibly, cura­tors will be peo­ple who demon­strate a pas­sion and knowl­edge for art, and want to work with oth­ers to help expand their abil­ity to under­stand art as a social, his­tor­i­cal, eco­nomic, psy­cho­log­i­cal, or aes­thetic phe­nom­e­non. Anyone who can prove they know enough about a given exhibit can act as the gate­keeper to other areas of the museum. It’s a great way to cre­ate experts on a given sub­ject, and make their knowl­edge avail­able to the world.

It’s also a hor­ri­bly arbi­trary sys­tem with no uni­ver­sal stan­dards for decid­ing who has demon­strated exper­tise in a sub­ject, and who is blow­ing smoke up your ori­fice. Arguably, this is the same prob­lem with art crit­i­cism as an aca­d­e­mic sub­ject.

The Good

Since I was par­tic­i­pat­ing in the beta ver­sion, I had time and oppor­tu­nity for exten­sive con­ver­sa­tions with other PCs who had been hand-picked to play the game. Every cura­tor I spoke to was bal­anc­ing, at most, two other PCs with my own con­ver­sa­tion, so dia­logue was delight­ful, thought­ful, and exten­sive. I was able to earn my way out of the Temporary Exhibition by dis­cussing a com­par­a­tive analy­sis of some of my favorite Magritte and Dali paint­ings with the cura­tor, and shared a fas­ci­nat­ing dia­logue with another player about how the Cubist stylings of the cru­ci­fix­ion face of Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia cathe­dral rein­forced the story’s themes of dehu­man­iza­tion and abstract sto­ry­telling.

In short, I expe­ri­enced the game at its very best. It’s a beau­ti­ful forum for dis­cus­sion. It’s focused, immer­sive, exten­sively detailed, and pro­vides every tool one could hope for in hav­ing an informed and eru­dite dis­cus­sion about art. It’s a majes­tic ency­clo­pe­dia of art­works con­densed into a sin­gle loca­tion that trumps the Louvre, the Guggenheim, and the Prado if they were all rolled into one sin­gle museum.

I still found it some­what lack­ing as a game.

The Bad

What kind of game makes your con­tin­ued pro­gress sub­ject to whether or not you learned the title of five paint­ings and penal­izes you if you only get four out of five? A need­lessly pedan­tic one. But would the game be bet­ter if its auto­matic tests were eas­ier? I think there would be less sense of accom­plish­ment, and cer­tainly less under­stand­ing of the sub­ject mat­ter if the tests were made eas­ier. And again, the shadow of Google hov­ers over all prospect of challenge-by-information.

Enjoying art is not an innately com­pet­i­tive activ­ity, while vir­tu­ally all games are, even if the player is only com­pet­ing against the game. There is some sense of accom­plish­ment in see­ing how many new branches of the museum one can unlock, an expe­ri­ence which is enhanced greatly by the vir­tual Louvre’s abil­ity to add new wings that the real museum doesn’t have space to accom­mo­date, and the achieve­ment sys­tem gives the same arbi­trary stan­dards of suc­cess that they grant to any other game. This still doesn’t change the fact that art crit­i­cism is about learn­ing to see and under­stand the world through sym­bols, which ren­ders an objec­tive stan­dard of pro­gress or com­ple­tion to be non­sen­si­cal.

Furthermore, even in my lim­ited expo­sure to the game, I found it dif­fi­cult to sup­press my nerd rage at dis­cov­er­ing a player whose sole knowl­edge of Renaissance art came from play­ing Assassin’s Creed II had unlocked the sec­ond wing I explored and had only used his audio­gu­ide twice. He obvi­ously didn’t know any­thing about what he was look­ing at, bla­tantly ignored the images and read­ings we selected, and his dis­cus­sions in the Coffee Shop con­sisted mostly of “I think it sucks.”

Seeking to bring enlight­en­ment to the trolls only causes them to bring trolling to enlight­en­ment.

The Ugly

Several min­utes after my fel­low play­ers and I voted to kick him from the Coffee Shop, it struck me that this sort of elit­ist exclu­sion was going to lead to a very fast and obvi­ous divide among Louvre play­ers. Excising the troll from our dis­cus­sion wasn’t going to help him learn about art or how to be part of our dis­cus­sion. Furthermore, who’s to say that he really wanted to par­tic­i­pate, but couldn’t artic­u­late his thoughts in a more pol­ished fash­ion than declar­ing whether some­thing “sucks” or not? I might get kicked from a dis­cus­sion later because a bunch of Pre-Raphaelite fanat­ics think I took a cheap and easy route into an exhibit by start­ing with 20th cen­tury art that mostly touches on themes that are still widely dis­cussed even in pop­u­lar dis­cus­sions.

This is the fun­da­men­tal prob­lem. There’s a two-way dia­logue between art and video games, and there’s a lot of over­lap, but there are some fun­da­men­tal dif­fer­ences that Louvre fails to bridge. Art is not, gen­er­ally, inter­ac­tive. Games require cer­tain fea­tures (rules and inter­ac­tive ele­ments) to be games. Attempting to turn art into a game is an inter­est­ing con­cept, one which I believe will be enhanced and smoothed out as Valve releases more DLC and can patch some bugs, but turn­ing ‘pure art’ into ‘pure game’ is some­thing of a con­tra­dic­tion. Attempting to com­bine two parts inher­ently trans­forms them into some­thing that is not iden­ti­cal to the orig­i­nals, and some­thing gets lost even when the new result is some­thing inno­v­a­tive, inter­est­ing, and fun.

The ten­sion between the auto­mated pro­gress mechanic and the mod­er­ated pro­gress mechanic cuts to the heart of the mat­ter. A player can mem­o­rize and search for all the facts about a piece of art they want and still claim not to under­stand it and not be able to artic­u­late any thoughts about it. Similarly, a dif­fer­ent player can have all the fas­ci­nat­ing dis­cus­sions and aes­thetic expe­ri­ences they want while get­ting frus­trated with the fact that the game doesn’t let them look at more exhibits with­out stop­ping to talk for the fifth time about how Etruscan sculp­ture influ­enced bod­ily forms in Greco-Roman sculp­ture. It’s hard to pick out just who the audi­ence for this title is.

Final Thoughts

I’ll still buy Louvre when it’s released on Steam. It uses the best fea­tures of a video game (end­less expan­sion, immensely detailed visu­als, and rich context-sensitive infor­ma­tion) with the best parts of art expe­ri­ence (broad diver­sity of pieces, forums for dis­cus­sion with other play­ers, and no fixed require­ments for par­tic­i­pat­ing). It’s frus­trat­ing to strug­gle at the bound­ary of the two media, as the ‘game’ aspects of Louvre some­times feel forced, restric­tive, or arbi­trary, and the ‘art’ aspects of the game can feel more like a glo­ri­fied chat room with fewer lol­cats. Ultimately, it’s a new idea that explores the rela­tion­ship between games and art, and beau­ti­fully show­cases how each is not the other despite hav­ing pro­lific areas of over­lap.

This post is a satir­i­cal thought exper­i­ment. Valve is not actu­ally devel­op­ing such a title, though I’ll be happy to send them my résumé if they want a project direc­tor to head devel­op­ment.