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.