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.