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!