Mechanics As Art Part 2: Mechanics as the Beautiful and the Instrumental

A Continuation

This arti­cle serves as part 2 of a two-part exam­i­na­tion of the art of video games as found in their mechan­ics.  In the first part, I dis­cuss how mechan­ics can serve to enhance and enrich a game’s exist­ing artis­tic con­tent with­out nec­es­sar­ily being art them­selves.  Today, how­ever, I wish to dis­cuss how mechan­ics can be art in and of them­selves, how some games, with­out plot, char­ac­ter, or even nec­es­sar­ily much in the way of visual design, can be art just in light of their mechan­ics.

On The Nature of Art

Way back in one of attempts on this blog’s inau­gu­ral posts, I dis­cussed the fact that art is a flighty and dif­fi­cult cat­e­gory, whose para­me­ters and spec­i­fi­ca­tions are some­what dif­fi­cult to nail down, and that is just as true today as it was then.  For the pur­poses of today’s column, I find myself return­ing to a dis­tinc­tion I first made in my old high school olympic the­sis (a long and heav­ily flawed paper on the aes­thetic the­o­ries of Whitehead and Rorty, if you really want to know), and will thus save myself some time and quote directly from it at length, edited slightly for length and with at least one really embar­rass­ing typo­graph­i­cal error cor­rected:

First and fore­most, it is nec­es­sary to explain some of the fun­da­men­tal char­ac­ter­is­tics of art as I shall be dis­cussing it.  First is the char­ac­ter­is­tic I shall refer to as the Beautiful.  The pur­pose of art is a con­cept far larger than the scope of this post, but it is often assumed that art usu­ally (though not always) aims at a form of beauty.  A well-written sym­phony is char­ac­ter­ized as beau­ti­ful, and most crit­i­cism and dis­cus­sion of that work of music will be focused around whether or not it pro­duced a sound pleas­ing and inter­est­ing to the ear.  The qual­ity of the Beautiful in art is, in a sense, an objec­tive qual­ity, inso­far as the qual­ity is said to reside in the piece of art itself.  One does not say “that sym­phony gave me beau­ti­ful feel­ings,” but, rather, “that sym­phony was beau­ti­ful.”  Art which aims at the Beautiful seems to exist almost for its own sake — it is less inter­ested in “mak­ing a state­ment,” or enact­ing some kind of social response, and more inter­ested in pro­duc­ing a par­tic­u­lar kind of aes­thetic expe­ri­ence.

A sec­ond char­ac­ter­is­tic of Art is its Instrumentality.  Art is often spo­ken well of for its abil­ity to pro­duce cer­tain feel­ings and changes in those who par­tic­i­pate in it.  Most recently, in the twen­ti­eth and twenty-first cen­turies, art is often spo­ken of as attempt­ing to enact some kind of social or indi­vid­ual change — the protest songs of the1960s and books such as 1984 attempted to change the way soci­ety acted.  That said, art as an instru­ment for change is far from a new con­cept — medieval moral­ity plays and sig­nif­i­cant swaths of fic­tion in the Victorian and early mod­ern eras were writ­ten with the intent of impos­ing cer­tain sets of moral beliefs upon their lis­ten­ers, and thus chang­ing them at an indi­vid­ual level.  Art in this sense is not seen as being an end in itself — it is seen as a vehi­cle for the artist’s polit­i­cal or social opin­ions, an attempt to draw atten­tion to cer­tain things of which (usu­ally) the artist dis­ap­proves.  In this way, art aims at a sub­jec­tive qual­ity — the true work of the art lies in the sub­ject, the one who observes the art — this art is a means, an instru­ment, a step on the way to a goal, what­ever that goal might be.

It is impor­tant to note that art does not have to be one or the other — I have dubbed them “char­ac­ter­is­tics” of art and not “classes” of art for that very rea­son.  Some indi­vid­ual pieces of art may be gen­er­ally char­ac­ter­ized more by an aim at the Beautiful or at Instrumentality, but many are both.  Simon & Garfunkel’s Scarborough Fair/Canticle is both an anti-war protest song and a beau­ti­ful, well-structured har­mo­nious expe­ri­ence, whereas Tschaikovsky’s first sym­phony aims (pre­sum­ably) only at beauty, and Rage Against the Machine’s entire discog­ra­phy is fun­da­men­tally aimed at Instrumentality.

Art cer­tainly can have a num­ber of other char­ac­ter­is­tics, but it is these two broadly-sketched cat­e­gories that are most rel­e­vant for the pur­poses of this post.

With that said, I will now try to dis­cuss how a game’s mechan­ics can be con­sid­ered art by show­ing how they can be Beautiful, and how they can be Instrumental.

Save Vs. Wands: Mechanics As The Beautiful

This sec­tion ini­tially gave me some trou­ble, not because I was in any way doubt­ing my the­sis, but because it is really very hard to prove that some­thing is beau­ti­ful, and even harder to prove that a class of things can be beau­ti­ful.  Why is Dvorak’s New World Symphony beau­ti­ful?  Well, I mean, lis­ten to it.  It’s beau­ti­ful because, well, lis­ten.  But that makes for a rather poor dis­cus­sion– while I can cer­tainly point out a num­ber of video games and table­top games with mechan­ics I would con­sider beau­ti­ful and sug­gest you play them, I feel it will be more effec­tive if I try to actu­ally ana­lyze a speci­fic exam­ple.

To do that, I’m actu­ally going focus not on a video game as such, but on the grand­daddy of all video games and RPGs, Dungeons & Dragons, and try to explain how later edi­tions of D&D (specif­i­cally, 3rd, 4th and 5th) are inher­ently more beau­ti­ful sys­tems than the first few.  But before I get started, I want to state that if the com­ments below this turn into an argu­ment about which edi­tion of D&D is best, so help me, I will turn this car around right now, and you all will go to bed with­out any sup­per or ice cream.

Anyone famil­iar with 1st or 2nd edi­tion AD&D can tell you that they are messy, messy sys­tems.  Needlessly com­pli­cated mechan­ics for the sim­plest of sit­u­a­tions (Would you believe THAC0 was an improve­ment?) and abil­i­ties and pow­ers thrown in purely for fla­vor, with­out con­sid­er­ing their mechan­i­cal impli­ca­tions, made for some­times con­fus­ing and obtuse expe­ri­ences. They could still be fun to play, but con­tained gigan­tic bar­ri­ers to entry, and often got in their own way.  “Wait a min­ute, so what hap­pens if I do X?” was a much more com­mon ques­tion in the days of AD&D than it is today, and the game would fre­quently grind to a halt while DMs and play­ers alike pored over arcane tomes and tables to deter­mine just exactly how grap­pling worked.  Often, indi­vid­ual pieces of the sys­tems didn’t work very well with each other.  A suf­fi­ciently moti­vated player could very eas­ily “break” the game, or con­struct char­ac­ter builds from dis­parate pieces of sep­a­rate rule­books that clearly exploited loop­holes the design­ers hadn’t thought of.

In short, AD&D was rev­o­lu­tion­ary, impor­tant, and I’m very glad it existed, but it was also incon­sis­tent, lop­sided, con­fus­ing, and ugly.

In later edi­tions, once D&D had been trans­ferred from the hands of TSR to Wizards of the Coast, the design­ers behind D&D decided to try to clean house a lit­tle bit.  3rd edi­tion intro­duced the “d20 sys­tem,” which replaced ear­lier edi­tions’ schiz­o­phrenic flit­ting between ran­dom num­ber gen­er­a­tion with one uni­fied mechanic: regard­less of specifics, if there is uncer­tainty that needs to be decided by a die, one per­son rolls a 20-sided die, adds a bonus num­ber, and tries to tie or beat the other person’s num­ber.  It fur­ther uni­fied skills across the board, ratio­nal­ized the multi-classing sys­tem, stan­dard­ized defenses from a myr­iad of inter­est­ing and oddly-specific cat­e­gories down to four, and did away with THAC0 for good.  (4th edi­tion has since stream­lined the sys­tem even fur­ther, a move which has irri­tated some and pleased oth­ers and don't even start me on beauty of 5th)  In short, the newer edi­tions are pret­tier than the older ones.

For just as a beau­ti­ful piece of music has cer­tain recur­ring themes to lend it a sense of unity, so, too, does a beau­ti­ful set of mechan­ics have recur­ring themes to always keep the player grounded in just which game he or she is play­ing.  Just as a beau­ti­ful paint­ing or pho­tograph is con­structed in such a way that each part pulls your atten­tion towards the proper point of focus, so does a beau­ti­ful sys­tem of mechan­ics ensure that the major­ity of the player’s time is spent engag­ing with the most impor­tant rules.  Just as a beau­ti­ful book or movie does not con­tain excess mate­rial which dis­tracts the reader/viewer and detracts from the work’s total worth, so, too, do beau­ti­ful sys­tems of mechan­ics do away with excess mate­rial, con­tain­ing as much detail as is inter­est­ing and worth­while, and no more.

Mind you, an ugly sys­tem is not nec­es­sar­ily bad, or no fun.  Much of the fun of Dwarf Fortress is the sheer dif­fi­culty and ugli­ness of its mechan­ics.  The unadul­ter­ated, befud­dling, need­less com­plex­ity of the game and its mind-bogglingly stu­pid dwarves (Urist McHammersmasher Canceled Job: Kill Goblin — There Is A Cat In The Way) actu­ally dou­bles around to make the game kind of charm­ing, in an obnox­ious sort of way.  (Losing is fun!)  And I hardly mean to sug­gest that all of the many, many peo­ple who had a great deal of fun with 1st Edition AD&D were some­how mis­guided or fool­ish.  Many peo­ple have par­tic­u­larly derided 4th edi­tion for “over­sim­pli­fy­ing” the game, and while I think it’s hard to argue that 4th edi­tion isn’t a more beau­ti­ful set of mechan­ics than ear­lier edi­tions, it might be true that the sys­tem favors style over sub­stance, or oth­er­wise lost some of its iden­tity in the change.  I hap­pen to like 4th edi­tion, but sup­pose I can see the valid­ity in some of these argu­ments.  Nevertheless, while Dwarf Fortress and 1st Edition AD&D are valu­able, and can be fun, they are uglier than other games.

What this means is that if you accept my the­sis that it is pos­si­ble for sys­tems to be uglier or pret­tier than each other, then it seems that sys­tems of mechan­ics can be eval­u­ated accord­ing to a cri­te­rion of beauty, which is about as close as you’re going to get to a rig­or­ous proof that mechan­ics can be art, and that they can sat­isfy the char­ac­ter­is­tic of the Beautiful.

Montezuma and Genghis Khan Have Made Peace: Mechanics As The Instrumental

First of all, I hardly wish to sug­gest that all game mechan­ics have some­thing to say about the nature of real­ity, the human con­di­tion, or some speci­fic soci­etal insti­tu­tion.  Chess is a very beau­ti­ful, ele­gant game, but I doubt its mechan­ics really teach us that much about soci­etal injus­tice or the human con­di­tion.  (It makes an excel­lent anal­ogy for other parts of human expe­ri­ence, but that seems a dif­fer­ent mat­ter).

It is nev­er­the­less true that any game which aims to be any­thing but a total abstrac­tion like Chess or Go must nec­es­sar­ily stem from its design­ers’ philo­soph­i­cal pre­sup­po­si­tions.  This is as true of a game like Monopoly (an abstract sim­u­la­tion of the real estate mar­ket) as it is of Dungeons and Dragons or Civilization IV.  Perhaps the most appar­ent exam­ple of this can be found in the way dif­fer­ent table­top role­play­ing games treat char­ac­ter cre­ation.  Are there rigid char­ac­ter classes?  This implies the design­ers view peo­ple as spe­cial­ized.  How much does a character’s species affect his or her options?  If the answer is “a great deal,” maybe the design­ers tend to believe nature is more impor­tant than nur­ture.

These pre­sup­po­si­tions can show up in other places, too, how­ever.  Does suc­cess in com­bat require a great deal of team­work?  This might imply that the design­ers have a less atom­istic and more com­mu­ni­tar­ian view of human endeavor.  What does the game’s moral­ity sys­tem or align­ment sys­tem look like?  Is there a rigid con­cep­tion of good and evil, or does it take pride in being gray?  And even if there is a rigid con­cep­tion of good and evil, what is defined as “good?”  You can learn a lot about a design­ers’ con­se­quen­tial­ist or deon­to­log­i­cal lean­ings from the answer to that ques­tion.

These fac­tors may serve as win­dows into the design­ers’ world­views, as state­ments of how the artists behind the game view the world and the human con­di­tion.  To try to make this clearer, I will now take a look at Civilization IV to shed some light on some speci­fic instances of Instrumentality in mechan­ics: first, how the game shows some of how Soren Johnson, Sid Meier, and the rest of the Civ team view human soci­ety, and sec­ond, how play­ing the game com­mu­ni­cates cer­tain broader top­ics about the nature of human gov­ern­ment.

(Before I get started, it is impor­tant to note that I did not choose to dis­cuss Civ IV out of some petu­lant hatred for Civ V or recently released Civ VI – I sim­ply have yet to play them at all.  I have every rea­son to think they're excel­lent video games, and I’m sure much of what I say below would apply to it as well, but I shouldn’t very well talk about games I haven’t played!)

First, then, a quick bit of con­text.  If you are not famil­iar with the Civilization games, they can be sum­ma­rized as sim­u­la­tions of the life of an entire civ­i­liza­tion.  The game places the player in charge of a civ­i­liza­tion from the Stone Age to a time just ahead of the present.  Victory can be achieved in a num­ber of dif­fer­ent ways, from direct mil­i­tary action to cul­tural hege­mony to being the first civ­i­liza­tion to begin a major space col­o­niza­tion effort.  Along the way, the player bal­ances a myr­iad of dif­fer­ent parts of the civ­i­liza­tion, from its mil­i­tary, its diplo­matic rela­tions, its espi­onage efforts, to its indus­try, com­merce, research, its world won­ders, and so on and so forth.

If you’re really unfa­mil­iar with Civ, part of the fun is also the incon­gru­ous jux­ta­po­si­tions that the game presents: though each civ­i­liza­tion gets one unique unit and unique build­ing, there are no other restric­tions about reli­gion, won­der pro­duc­tion, neigh­bors, etc.  This often results in sit­u­a­tions where, for exam­ple, Islamic armies of Queen Victoria wage war against Saladin’s faith­ful Taoist armies over the embat­tled city of Berlin, which con­tains the Mausoleum of Maussollos.  If that sounds at all appeal­ing to you, you should def­i­nitely play Civ.

As the game is an attempt to be a playable sim­u­la­tion of the growth and expan­sion of human soci­ety, it nec­es­sary involves the design­ers’ philo­soph­i­cal pre­sup­po­si­tions about how human soci­ety works, as well as their opin­ions about the nature of cer­tain exist­ing civ­i­liza­tions and their rulers.  By attempt­ing to con­vert well-known ideas and tech­nolo­gies into mechan­i­cal ele­ments of a game sys­tem, the design­ers can make state­ments about what the ben­e­fits and dis­ad­van­tages of dif­fer­ent soci­etal ele­ments are, as well as sim­ply how they func­tion.  Using the Slavery civic can allow you to con­struct build­ings more quickly in your cities, but can also lead to slave revolts and gen­eral unhap­pi­ness in your pop­u­la­tion, as peo­ple gen­er­ally object to being turned into bricks.  Fundamentally, reli­gion makes peo­ple hap­pier and encour­ages cul­tural activ­ity, though dif­fer­ences in reli­gion inher­ently cause fric­tion between your civ­i­liza­tion and oth­ers.  The “Scientific Method” tech­nol­ogy obso­letes monas­ter­ies.  These are not sim­ply game mechan­ics: they are also polit­i­cal and philo­soph­i­cal state­ments about human soci­ety.

Finally, the game’s mechan­ics, all by them­selves, can teach the player some­thing about what it is like to gov­ern a soci­ety.  Many table­top RPGs have to include a clause such as “Of course, this game works bet­ter if you actu­ally try to behave like a real human being,” thereby admit­ting that the game requires a cer­tain degree of buy-in from the player in order to really work.  D&D not only isn’t any fun if all the play­ers are just goof­ing around and do what­ever they please, it fails as art.  But in Civilization IV, the only con­ces­sion the player has to make in order to expe­ri­ence its art is to try to win the game.  By forc­ing the player to bal­ance cul­tural, mil­i­taris­tic, diplo­matic and eco­nomic con­cerns; enforc­ing a bal­ance between the amount of work you can get out of a city with­out mak­ing its peo­ple too unhappy to be coop­er­a­tive; and con­struct­ing a fluid, shift­ing geopo­lit­i­cal cli­mate, the game causes the player to make the same sorts of deci­sions that a country’s lead­ers have to make on a reg­u­lar basis.  It teaches the player, through its mechan­ics, about what it is like to gov­ern a coun­try.

In Conclusion

Part of the rea­son peo­ple like me are so excited by the artis­tic poten­tial we see in games (and video games in par­tic­u­lar) is that they are a fun­da­men­tally new way of telling sto­ries and shar­ing beauty.  There is some­thing dif­fer­ent about expe­ri­enc­ing a story from some­thing approach­ing a sense of agency that is truly unique to games, and part of that unique­ness is to be found in the game’s mechan­ics.  No other artis­tic medium imple­ments sys­tems of mechan­ics, and so at first glance, it is easy to rel­e­gate mechan­ics to a purely means-to-an-end role: sim­ply nec­es­sary for the game to work, no more and no less.

I hope I have shown that mechan­ics can not only actively sup­ple­ment and improve more tra­di­tional modes of art in video games, but can also effec­tively be art in and of them­selves, how play­ing a game can be an aes­thetic expe­ri­ence which teaches us some­thing about the world, about our­selves, or both.

Bit Players

An impor­tant part of any nar­ra­tive expe­ri­ence, whether pre­sented in a video game or a pen-and-paper expe­ri­ence, is the sup­port­ing cast. Few weeks ago, I cri­tiqued the over-population of heroes and hero nar­ra­tives in gam­ing, and this week’s dis­cus­sion is sort of con­nected to that issue. A diverse and inter­est­ing sup­port­ing cast doesn’t merely offer more char­ac­ters and dis­trac­tions to a heroic nar­ra­tive. The sup­port­ing cast pro­vides most oppor­tu­ni­ties for char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of the hero, and this is espe­cially the case in gam­ing. This is as true in BioWare games (after all, we get a much bet­ter idea of who Shepard is in light of his/her treat­ment of the many char­ac­ters in the uni­verse who appear for a moment and then dis­ap­pear for the rest of the game) as it is in cin­e­matic action/adventure games like God of War or Castlevania: Lords of Shadow. This is also where the nar­ra­tives of most action/adventure games fail, in my opin­ion. A sup­port­ing cast is also impor­tant for verisimil­i­tude, and, if the nar­ra­tive is inter­ested in estab­lish­ing a set­ting, a good sup­port­ing cast is essen­tial.

Having a strong sup­port­ing cast is par­tially its own reward. This is self-evident, and won’t need fur­ther expla­na­tion. A strong exam­ple of this raw nar­ra­tive value is Shale, from Dragon Age: Origins. She’s inter­est­ing in and of her­self, and though that isn’t her only value to the nar­ra­tive, her own self is the pri­mary con­tri­bu­tion to the work. So we’ll skip right past that point, and head right into the other two rea­sons why a sup­port­ing cast is essen­tial to good sto­ry­telling.

The Master/Slave Dialectic

The first essen­tial func­tion of a sup­port­ing cast is to enhance the main char­ac­ter. Let’s not mince words: the avatar char­ac­ter is the focus of the great major­ity of game nar­ra­tives. Convincing the player to empathize with the avatar char­ac­ter can make an incred­i­ble dif­fer­ence to the player’s enjoy­ment of the nar­ra­tive as a whole. That link is just a fact of gam­ing. In nar­ra­tive terms, the main character(s) are more real than the sup­port­ing cast. They are given more screen time and more agency. A good nar­ra­tive will seek to increas­ingly reveal aspects of the main character(s) to the player/viewer, while also induc­ing and dis­play­ing char­ac­ter growth. Due to var­i­ous con­straints, this means that the sup­port­ing cast is essen­tially less real to the player, or at least serves as a mir­ror, or foil, to the main character(s).

The prob­lem with many action/adventure games is that the cast is too small or too lim­ited to give even the main char­ac­ter a chance to grow in response. It is typ­i­cal to see the reck­less hero treat every other char­ac­ter they encoun­ter in roughly the same fash­ion. Kratos, for instance, has three basic reac­tions to the peo­ple and people-like things he encoun­ters: beau­ti­ful women with­out any plot use are screwed (the beau­ti­ful women demo­graphic of the cast cor­re­sponds 100% with the infatuated-with-Kratos-and-his-god-like-physique demo­graphic), any­thing foe-like in nature is evis­cer­ated, and any­one else is bru­tally used until its use­ful­ness is expended, at which point it is also evis­cer­ated. Therefore, Kratos never obtains any sort of depth, and this is par­tially due to lack of qual­ity sup­port­ing cast.

Castlevania: Lords of Shadow is an exam­ple of a higher-quality sup­port­ing cast. The cast in LoS is able to human­ize Gabriel, the hero of the tale, to a much greater extent than Kratos. For instance, early on in the game, he encoun­ters a young mute woman (she has telepa­thy, so she’s not too mute) and her pro­tec­tor, a mur­derer pun­ished by eter­nal impris­on­ment in a giant suit of armor. At the end of the sec­ond chap­ter, when the woman is mur­dered and Gabriel is left hold­ing the knife, Gabriel is forced to reluc­tantly kill the girl’s mas­sive and enraged body­guard (since he does need the gauntlet worked into the giant’s armor, and there’s no talk­ing him down). In that scene, Gabriel dis­plays anguish over the death of the girl, though the feel­ing are tem­pered by Gabriel’s resolve to stop the Lords of Shadow and res­ur­rect his dead wife. That scene begins to com­pli­cate Gabriel, essen­tially mak­ing him more human.

While LoS is far from per­fect in this regard, its com­par­a­tively large sup­port­ing cast is almost always use­ful for char­ac­ter­iz­ing Gabriel. Without these inter­ac­tions, Gabriel would have been another Kratos; a stub­born man who expresses only rage and a deter­mi­na­tion to see his goal ful­filled. These cast mem­bers are included in the game not just because they pro­pel the plot, but because they are inter­est­ing foils to Gabriel, even if they aren’t that inter­est­ing in and of them­selves. Even the Lords of Shadow, despite being plenty mega­lo­ma­ni­a­cal, are the shadow selves of the ancient heroes that founded Gabriel’s holy order; they are pure evil, yet intrigu­ingly so, and serve as con­stant reminders of what Gabriel could become. They become voices in Gabriel’s own psycho-drama.

A bet­ter exam­ple is the Uncharted series. Nathan Drake is an enjoy­able main char­ac­ter, but the game would be much less inter­est­ing if the vil­lains were not good foils, and espe­cially if Elena weren’t around. Not only do Nathan and Elena have fan­tas­tic chem­istry, she brings out a very human (and often frus­trated) side in Nathan. Without her, the nar­ra­tive sim­ply wouldn’t work as well.

This is excep­tion­ally true in role-playing games. A GM includes a sup­port­ing cast not because he wants to play char­ac­ters too, but because in a game with­out non-player char­ac­ters (and thus a believ­able, inter­est­ing world) to respond to player action, player action becomes totally empty. This is because actions are, ide­ally, per­formed to affect change; the best way to dis­play the ram­i­fi­ca­tions of player action in any­thing more com­plex than a dun­geon crawl is through the non-player char­ac­ter. The non-player char­ac­ter can, for instance, be opin­ion­ated about the player character’s activ­i­ties, for good or ill. Hearing their own actions recited and framed by the peo­ple of the game world can be equally encour­ag­ing and sober­ing for play­ers. Moreover, a diverse cast of non-player char­ac­ters allows play­ers to explore the nuances of their char­ac­ters; per­haps a bar­bar­ian char­ac­ter only respects non-player char­ac­ters who are not rich and greedy, but then he dis­cov­ers that a pre­vi­ously respected NPC, now a friend, was slum­ming when he met him, and is actu­ally an incred­i­bly wealthy noble­man. A good GM will seek to bring out these nuances in his player’s char­ac­ters.

A Culture Is Made — Or Destroyed — By Its Articulate Voices

Take note, because I rarely use Ayn Rand quotes. This makes a good point, though. To some extent, the sup­port­ing cast is an ele­ment of game set­ting. Members of a sup­port­ing cast often rep­re­sent orga­ni­za­tions, races, and philoso­phies that fea­ture in a nar­ra­tive. In inter­act­ing with these speci­fic NPCs, they func­tion as path­ways to under­stand­ing the narrative’s set­ting, and often its themes.

The obvi­ous exam­ple here is Dragon Age. Characters like Sten, Zevran, and Leliana are inter­est­ing char­ac­ters, but they’re also win­dows into cul­tures and loca­tions that the game doesn’t directly explore. This is espe­cially the case with Sten; Qunari cul­ture is so rad­i­cally dif­fer­ent from the cul­tures encoun­tered in the game that Sten feels very alien, and dis­cov­er­ing why he acts so strangely is simul­ta­ne­ously fun, intrigu­ing, and reveal­ing of the set­ting. Each mem­ber of the party con­tributes to the player’s knowl­edge of the world in some way, though; Alistair explains the tem­plars and the Grey Wardens, Leliana has both fan­tas­tic and his­tor­i­cal sto­ries, as well as knowl­edge of Orlais, and so forth. This gives the player a broader sense of the world, as well as a rea­son to care about it, by way of the sup­port­ing cast.

An even bet­ter usage of the sup­port­ing cast is to shore up a narrative’s themes. This is seen in Dragon Age 2, actu­ally. One of the largest issues that the game deals with is free­dom, namely how much an indi­vid­ual, espe­cially a poten­tially dan­ger­ous indi­vid­ual, should have. This is seen most clearly in the con­flict between Kirkwall’s mage and tem­plar pop­u­la­tions, though it’s preva­lent in plenty of other parts of the story. Most of the char­ac­ters have strong opin­ions regard­ing the polit­i­cal cli­mate; there is Anders, who believes that mages should be free from tem­plar rule, but has speci­fic ideas about what mages should be free to do, and he cer­tainly doesn’t con­done the actions of blood mages or mages who have con­tact with demons. Merrill cares less about the pol­i­tics at work between the Circle and the tem­plars, but she is also will­ing to go to any lengths, even blood magic, in order to dis­cover more about her elven her­itage. Meanwhile, Fenris argues strongly for the neces­sity of the Circle, which is weighted by the fact that his ear­li­est mem­o­ries are from a land where mages rule with an iron fist. Combine that the fact that your avatar character’s sib­ling is either an apos­tate mage or is so tired of hid­ing apos­tate mages that he becomes a tem­plar, and you’ve got plenty of ten­sion brew­ing among your own lit­tle group. If the polit­i­cal issues of Kirkwall remained present only in rarely re-occuring NPC char­ac­ters, the ten­sion would be con­sid­er­ably less. Instead, char­ac­ters that the player can­not help but care about embody the poles of this tense dis­cus­sion, which draws the player into the issues at hand in an incred­i­ble way.

This is, again, dou­bly true for role-playing games. Any good GM will tell you that if you want to make the play­ers really care about a tense issue in your cam­paign world, make sure the issue touches an NPC that they see often and care about. It’s a huge aid to a game if the GM can suc­cess­fully human­ize a num­ber of NPCs and then use them, prob­a­bly by doing a lot of mean things to them, or hav­ing the NPCs do incred­i­bly mean things to other NPCs. Never under­es­ti­mate the abil­ity of human­iz­ing char­ac­ters to drive themes home and to bring incred­i­ble nar­ra­tive weight to a ses­sion.

That’s it for this week, folks! See you next week.

Mechanics As Art Part 1: Mechanics As Art Support

The Idea

This week, I want to change my tac­tics a lit­tle bit.  Usually, in this column, I have a ten­dency to dis­cuss a game’s writ­ing when I dis­cuss its aes­thetic value.  This prob­a­bly stems from the fact that writ­ing and music are the two parts of game devel­op­ment with which I am most famil­iar.  I can­not draw digitally to save my soul, and my cod­ing knowl­edge is still very lim­ited but writ­ing is some­thing I have at least some idea how to do, so I can crit­i­cize a game’s writ­ing with­out feel­ing too much like a poser.

What I want to do for the next two weeks, though, is take a look at how a game’s mechan­ics can not only be cru­cial to its art, but actu­ally be art in and of them­selves.  This week, I wish to focus on how mechan­ics can serve to enhance a game’s artis­tic value beyond sim­ply pro­vid­ing the struc­ture in which the game exists.  Next week, I will dis­cuss how mechan­ics can be art in and of them­selves — how some games, with­out plot, char­ac­ter, or even nec­es­sar­ily much in the way of visual design, can be art.

Mechanics As Support

Obviously, a video game can­not really exist with­out mechan­ics, as mechan­ics are nec­es­sar­ily what makes the video game inter­ac­tive.  In that sense, then, the notion that mechan­ics serve as sup­port for a game’s art is clearly uncon­tro­ver­sial.  What I want to talk about today, how­ever, are a few ways in which a game’s mechan­ics, with­out nec­es­sar­ily being ter­ri­bly art­ful in and of them­selves, can nev­er­the­less serve to high­light and under­score the game’s themes, char­ac­ters, and atmos­phere.

Mechanics seem to be able to do this in at least two ways.  In the first place, there are mechan­ics which remain con­stant through­out a gam­ing expe­ri­ence, and then, in the sec­ond, there are moments in a game when the mechan­ics are sud­denly changed to mir­ror a change in the story, char­ac­ters, or atmos­phere.  The first might be ter­med a game’s mechan­i­cal “envi­ron­ment,” and the sec­ond, instances of mechan­i­cal “mir­ror­ing.”

Mechanical Environment

Planescape: Torment is a game about a lot of things, and if you haven’t already played it, stop read­ing this and go play it.  If some­one held me down and forced me, through some act of hyper­bolic vil­lainy, to pick one video game as being the “best video game of all time,” there is a very real chance I would pick Torment.  You can buy it for $10 on Good Old Games, and it’s old enough that it should run on more or less any PC from the last five years.  Go ye forth and play it.  It’s not with­out its flaws, but it will make you a bet­ter per­son.

It is also an excel­lent exam­ple of a game where the mechan­i­cal envi­ron­ment serves an artis­tic pur­pose.  The Nameless One, pro­tag­o­nist of Torment, is per­haps most chiefly char­ac­ter­ized by the fact that he can­not die.  Stab him, burn him, drown him, and he sim­ply awakes some hours later, amne­siac and scarred, but oth­er­wise unharmed.  This is not only dis­cussed in the nar­ra­tive, but is part of the fun­da­men­tal mechan­ics of the game: if, in the course of the game, he should be reduced to 0 hit points, the screen will fade to black, and you will find your­self back in the Mortuary, wak­ing up again and restored to full hit points.  Further, his many years of deal­ing with death have taught the Nameless One how to manip­u­late the life-force of oth­ers, such that up to three times a “day” (period between 8 game-hour rests), he may res­ur­rect his fal­len allies.

I can think of no bet­ter way to dis­cuss how these mechan­ics  relate to Torment as art than to cite Eurogamer author Robert Purchese’s neg­a­tive review of the game, from 2000: “…it cheap­ens death… This approach to death may appeal to some peo­ple, but for me it made the lives of my char­ac­ters rather cheap and mean­ing­less. They were just cannon-fodder, and no mat­ter how many times they died I could always bring them back.”

Yes, Mr. Purchese.  That is exactly the point.  For The Nameless One, death is cheap.  He has no fear of death, and, in fact, longs for it.  His own immor­tal­ity can cause him, depend­ing how you play him, to lose all respect for the mor­tal­ity of oth­ers.  Past ver­sions of him­self (remem­ber that he loses his mem­ory every time he dies par­tic­u­larly vio­lently) have been shown to cal­lously dis­re­gard the lives of those around him at the slight­est hint of per­sonal gain.

The fact that the game lacks a death-triggered Game Over screen (there are a few ways to get a Game Over, but you usu­ally have to try pretty hard) does two things.  First, it under­scores and rein­forces Torment’s under­ly­ing themes and con­ceits.  It would be dif­fi­cult to imag­ine telling a story about an immor­tal man while still main­tain­ing any kind of seri­ous penalty for death.  Second, and most impor­tantly, it dras­ti­cally reduces the dis­tance between the player and The Nameless One.

Character death is never any­thing but an annoy­ance in video games.  Sometimes a very sev­ere annoy­ance, if it has been a long time since you have saved, but never any­thing more than annoy­ance.  While Isaac Clarke lies bleed­ing to death on the floor, regrets flash­ing before his eyes as he painfully expires from the vio­lent stom­ach wound he has just received, the Dead Space player, at most, sighs, shakes his or her head, makes a face at the gore, and reloads from a pre­vi­ous save.  This is a fair amount of dis­tance, and it is usu­ally more or less unavoid­able.  (As a side note, Dead Space and many sim­i­lar games try to avert this by hav­ing the death sequences be excep­tion­ally graphic, hop­ing to dis­turb the player as pun­ish­ment for fail­ure.)  But in Torment, the player and the char­ac­ter feel much the same way: irri­tated, frus­trated, and pos­si­bly embar­rassed.  Death is just a minor incon­ve­nience for both par­ties.

Mechanics as Mirroring

When play­ing a game, we get used to the way the rules work.  Much of the fun of play­ing a lot of games is found in learn­ing how to best manip­u­late the char­ac­ter within the frame­work of the game’s mechan­ics, fac­ing stiffer and stiffer chal­lenges as we become more and more famil­iar and pro­fi­cient with the game’s rules.  When the rules remain unchanged, every­thing is nor­mal.

As such, one par­tic­u­larly excel­lent trick in the game designer’s pocket is the abil­ity to sud­denly alter the way the mechan­ics work at a par­tic­u­larly rel­e­vant moment in the story, to break the rules to which the player has become accus­tomed.  This throws the player out of his or her com­fort zone, and is usu­ally done in an attempt to force the player into sym­pa­thy with the char­ac­ter by mir­ror­ing the character’s men­tal state, thus less­en­ing the dis­tance between the two.

A par­tic­u­larly sim­ple exam­ple can be found in BioShock, when, as Fontaine uses what men­tal con­trol he has over Jack to try to force his heart to stop beat­ing, Jack begins to suf­fer occa­sional reduc­tions in his max­i­mum health.  This forces the player into sym­pa­thy with Jack — both won­der if Fontaine really has enough influ­ence to out­right kill Jack, and both find them­selves scram­bling about all the faster to try to put an end to Fontaine’s men­tal con­di­tion­ing.  In this way, by break­ing the rules and reduc­ing the player’s max­i­mum health, rather than doing straight­for­ward dam­age, the game sud­denly shifts its core mechan­ics in such a way that it throws the player into sym­pa­thy with the char­ac­ter.

There are many other exam­ples, but a more com­plex one that comes to mind from a game I played not long ago is from the sin­gle player cam­paign of Splinter Cell: Conviction.  One of Conviction’s new addi­tions to the Splinter Cell fran­chise, for bet­ter or for worse, was the “Mark and Execute” sys­tem.  By dis­patch­ing a foe in hand-to-hand com­bat, the player earns an “exe­cute token,” which enables him or her to “mark” sev­eral foes in a room and, by press­ing a sin­gle but­ton, watch as Sam Fisher exe­cutes every one with unerr­ing pre­cise head­shots.

Normally, the player can only have one exe­cute token at a time, forc­ing him or her to make quick deci­sions about when to use a token and when to save it for later, as well as giv­ing him or her some incen­tive to enter hand-to-hand com­bat with cer­tain foes rather than sim­ply hang­ing back and pick­ing them off one at a time with a firearm.

At one point in the game, pro­tag­o­nist Sam Fisher dis­cov­ers the truth behind an overly com­pli­cated con­tro­versy con­cern­ing the sur­vival of his daugh­ter and the true nature of his recently-deceased best friend.  The details aren’t ter­ri­bly rel­e­vant, and Conviction’s plot is prob­a­bly bet­ter when not exam­ined too closely, but the gist of it is that Fisher’s friend betrayed his trust by fak­ing his daughter’s death, thereby keep­ing her safe from those mad at Fisher, but also to ensure that Fisher can remain a focused agent, untrou­bled by fam­ily com­mit­ments.

Unsurprisingly, this makes Fisher very, very angry and con­fused.  But rather than treat­ing the player to long sequences of Fisher deliv­er­ing angst-ridden speeches or brood­ing, it prefers to show us Fisher’s men­tal state through a quick shift in mechan­ics.  Immediately after this rev­e­la­tion, Fisher must escape the build­ing he is in before it self-destructs (no, I didn’t know build­ings could do that either, that’s not the point), and is con­fronted by waves of angry guards on his way out.

Normally, deal­ing with this many hos­tiles would be quite dif­fi­cult, and would require a lot of sneak­ing around and catch­ing iso­lated guards one at a time.  Fisher, how­ever, A, does not have time right now, the build­ing is explod­ing, and B, is in no mood to deal with mooks.  He has just dis­cov­ered that the last two years of his life were wasted, that his daugh­ter might actu­ally be alive after all, and that his best friend betrayed his trust, how­ever noble his inten­tions might have been.

So, the player sud­denly, with­out any fan­fare, dis­cov­ers that he is now pos­sessed of an infinite num­ber of exe­cute tokens.  Sam marks a few foes, guns them down, and then imme­di­ately gains a new exe­cute token.  This means that Sam can effort­lessly stroll through the explod­ing build­ing, unerr­ingly killing numer­ous ene­mies with one shot to the head each.

Why is this rel­e­vant to the game as art?  Because the fact is that Sam is not really think­ing about the burn­ing build­ing or the num­ber­less mooks between him and the escape.  He is fully stuck in his own mind, try­ing to make sense of the infor­ma­tion he has just received, oper­at­ing in the phys­i­cal world on autopi­lot, let­ting his years of train­ing and expe­ri­ence do the work for him with­out any mis­takes or pause for remorse.  If Sam Fisher isn’t pay­ing atten­tion, why should the player have to?  This sud­den break­ing of the rules allows the player deeper insight into the sort of man Sam Fisher is, and dras­ti­cally reduces the dis­tance between the player and the char­ac­ter.

Obviously, this sort of trick can only be pulled so often in a sin­gle game.  It only works if the player is already accus­tomed to the game’s rules, such that he or she will really notice the change, and it needs to hap­pen rarely, or it will lose its nov­elty and effec­tive­ness.  Used cor­rectly, how­ever, mechan­i­cal mir­ror­ing can be one heck of a tool.  Few game­play sequences in recent mem­ory have had as much effect on me as Sam Fisher’s emo­tion­less, jug­ger­naut slaugh­ter on his way out of the Third Echelon build­ing.

To Be Continued

Next week, I will dis­cuss ways in which a game’s mechan­ics can serve not only to under­score a game’s more tra­di­tional nar­ra­tive ele­ments, but can actu­ally com­mu­ni­cate ideas and artis­tic insight in and of them­selves.  There is also prob­a­bly another arti­cle dis­cussing ways in which mechan­ics can end up actu­ally detract­ing from a game’s artis­tic worth if they are incor­rectly imple­mented.  In the mean­time, I would love to hear of more exam­ples of mechan­i­cal envi­ron­ments or mechan­i­cal mir­ror­ing in video games that you find par­tic­u­larly notable.  There are many more than those men­tioned above!

Just a Few Reviews

Hey there! So, I’ve been absurdly busy this two weeks; a new school, gamedev work pick­ing up in pace, and crises arriv­ing and lin­ger­ing. It’s now come down to Sunday, though, and to be hon­est, I don’t have the capac­ity right now to really do jus­tice to the con­cept I wanted to talk about.

However, I did just get a little bundle, and so I fig­ured that I would review the games that I get in from a nar­ra­tive per­spec­tive. So essen­tially, I’ll be eval­u­at­ing whether they tell a qual­ity story, whether that story has good pac­ing, whether their char­ac­ters are believ­able or inter­est­ing, and so on and so forth. I imag­ine that I’ll make a habit of this, and will prob­a­bly do this in addi­tion to my typ­i­cal posts. Or, like this week, when I just don’t have the focus to write some­thing aston­ish­ing, it might fill in.

So, the first two games that I received were Transformers: War for Cybertron and Dead Space 2…

Transformers: Battles in Robotland

My first impres­sion of T:WFC wasn’t all that pos­i­tive. For one thing, I found the set­tings to be so clut­tered and over-designed that it was dif­fi­cult to tell what on the screen was me, or an Autobot foe, or an explo­sive ele­va­tor. To com­pli­cate the mat­ter, the cam­paign starts on the Decepticon side, so the first few sce­nes all fea­ture Megatron’s cease­less mono­logu­ing, which is a taste I find impos­si­ble to acquire. However, as my eyes slowly grew used to the game (a cog­ni­tive feat I can’t quite explain), my opin­ion soft­ened. While most of the Decepticon mis­sion were set to the boast­ful dron­ing voice of Megatron, the sup­port­ing Decepticon cast of syco­phants (and Soundwave) were actu­ally sim­per­ing qual­ity writ­ing. There is not much sub­tlety to the game’s char­ac­ter­i­za­tion, but the trans­form­ers, and espe­cially the Autobots, tend to grow on you. The Autobot mis­sions were much the supe­rior because the game por­trays the rise of Optimus Prime after the death of Zeta Prime, which is in all cases bet­ter than the Decepticon story, which has you access­ing the core of Cybertron, which is only opened by a key… which is a mas­sive killer robot. Getting to play Optimus Prime through that rise is an absolute plea­sure. Despite the moments of that rise, the plot felt a lit­tle scat­tered, but I’m pretty sure there’s a Confucian adage that says some­thing about look­ing for qual­ity plot in a Transformers game. Transformers may also have you won­der­ing how ecol­ogy works on a world that is both a robot and that has a bunch of robots liv­ing on it, and then han­ker­ing for some Autobot phi­los­o­phy to see how the hell they jus­tify that messed up world.

Space Just Got Dead

Dead Space 2 is fan­tas­tic. Nothing I say below this state­ment should at all sully the fact that Dead Space 2 is a bril­liant game, and that you should play it soon.

Just like in Dead Space, from the start of the game to its explo­sive fin­ish, there is not a sin­gle moment when Isaac is not on your screen. For 99.95% of the game, you have full con­trol of Isaac. It’s incred­i­bly immer­sive, and I can finally say that giv­ing a voice to Isaac was a jus­ti­fied move. He still speaks spo­rad­i­cally, as would be expected; if he’s not actively talk­ing to an NPC or a hal­lu­ci­na­tion, then he won’t be say­ing much. The necro­morphs aren’t inter­est­ing con­ver­sa­tion­al­ists (though if you stomp on the ground repeat­edly, he will start to shout, “Mother F***er!” in time to the stomps, which is a jus­ti­fied thing to say if you’re grind­ing a hor­ri­ble, vicious mon­ster into a pulp with your boot heel). But those hal­lu­ci­na­tions allow the game to dis­play Isaac’s inter­nal mono­logue in a nat­u­ral way, and Isaac is an inter­est­ing, tor­mented, and believ­able fel­low. He is also obvi­ously fed up with this necro­morph busi­ness, and it def­i­nitely shows in his dia­logue. It’s worth not­ing that Isaac is well voice-acted, and his dia­logue is qual­ity.

Isaac’s strug­gle is the focus of the game, but at the detri­ment of the plot fuel­ing the events of the game. Now, the con­cepts at work here, the story that could have been told, has a lot of merit. It’s unfor­tu­nate, then, that the plot receives lit­tle time to breathe and come into its own. The most inter­est­ing qual­i­ties of the events of the game, and the plot’s antag­o­nist (other than the necro­morphs), are only cemented in the last hour and a half of the game, and pre­sented to the player through text files alone. This is unfor­tu­nate. The story-telling of Dead Space worked so well because there wasn’t a lot of intrigue to the plot that had reduced the Ishimura to a necro­morph hunt­ing ground; the only sto­ries to tell were the sto­ries of peo­ple who had strug­gled to sur­vive on the ship, to no avail. They were meant not to con­struct a large nar­ra­tive, but to add atmos­phere and a human ele­ment to the ship. Dead Space 2 isn’t like that. These necro­morphs are appear­ing because of the med­dling of Isaac’s human foes. There’s inter­est­ing intrigue going on behind the sce­nes, but it only goes on behind the sce­nes. Squandered poten­tial, to be sure.

However, the other peo­ple that Isaac encoun­ters on the sta­tion are inter­est­ing folk. Ellie is a stand-out char­ac­ter. She’s tough but believ­able, evok­ing sym­pa­thy and dis­play­ing pain with­out ever seem­ing like a dis­tressed damsel. Better yet, Isaac’s rela­tion­ship with her is dis­tinctly non-romantic, and you actu­ally empathize with Isaac’s reac­tions to her predica­ments and behav­ior. Seeing Isaac and Ellie inter­act is very plea­sur­able. Nolan Stross is also an inter­est­ing char­ac­ter. He’s a dan­ger­ously dis­turbed indi­vid­ual who, like Isaac, has been aversely affected by the alien Marker. He, unlike Isaac, killed his wife and child in the wake of his insan­ity. Better yet, Stross remem­bers more than Isaac does, and so Isaac is forced to keep the man around; it gen­er­ates an inter­est­ing rela­tional ten­sion that didn’t exist in the first Dead Space. The sup­port­ing cast is totally supe­rior to Dead Space’s cast. Neither Kendra nor Zach elicited near as much emo­tional response. For that mat­ter, the first chap­ter of Dead Space 2 is prob­a­bly the best; you watch the infec­tion spread wildly across a heav­ily pop­u­lated sec­tor of the space sta­tion, and see plenty of inno­cent peo­ple con­sumed by it. It’s cool to see it unfold, and adds more grav­ity to the rest of the game’s events.

I’ll end by not­ing that the end­ing is much bet­ter than Dead Space’s con­fus­ing cliff-hanger. It will leave you sat­is­fied… and say­ing, “I see what you did there.”