On Games-As-Art

What is Meant By Games-As-Art, and What is This Blog Really Trying To Do?

When I first started this blog, I was look­ing for a quick way to sum­ma­rize what it was about.  “It’s a games-criticism blog,” is pretty accu­rate, I sup­pose, but what I wanted to con­vey was that mostly, this blog is less invested in whether or not a game is fun (though I like fun, don’t get me wrong), and more invested in whether or not a game is good art, and “games-criticism” didn’t quite con­vey that for me.  I set­tled on “games-as-art,” and I real­ized the other day that I’d done a bad thing by not prop­erly defin­ing my terms.

Games-as-art as a phrase is hardly unique to me, but when I first used it, I was think­ing of the way philoso­phers use the Latin word qua.  Qua lit­er­ally trans­lates to “as,” but it’s used in philo­soph­i­cal (and other aca­d­e­mic) cir­cles in a slightly more speci­fic man­ner.  Qua, in phi­los­o­phy, means some­thing more like “in the capac­ity of,” such that to talk about a chair qua chair is to talk about how a par­tic­u­lar chair func­tions in the capac­ity of chair­ness.  Thus, to talk about games qua art is to talk about how games func­tion as art– to talk about a par­tic­u­lar game qua art is to put aside how it func­tions as enter­tain­ment or escapism, and talk entirely about how it works as art.  So when I talk about “games-as-art,” that’s effec­tively what I mean.  I left out the Latin because I fig­ured we were already approach­ing dan­ger­ously high lev­els of pre­ten­sion as it was.

Thus, to talk about games-as-art is to talk about games through a fil­ter– a fil­ter which empha­sizes games’ artis­tic qual­i­ties and down­plays their other qual­i­ties.  This is why when I talk about Gears of War 2 through the lens of games-as-art, I tend to speak very harshly of it even though it’s one of my favorite games.

This is because there are plenty of other lenses one could use.  One can talk about games-as-games, and focus entirely on the func­tion­al­ity of their mechan­ics and ease of use.  One can talk about games-as-rhetorical-devices, and focus on games’ unique abil­i­ties to com­mu­ni­cate ideas through processes.  One can talk about games-as-fun, and focus entirely on how much peo­ple tend to enjoy a game.  One can talk about games-as-cultural-artifacts, or games-as-microcosms-of-reality or any num­ber of other things.

While I said above that to talk about games-as-art is to talk entirely about how games work as art, the bar­ri­ers between these lenses are a lit­tle vague.  Art is fre­quently rhetor­i­cal, and is usu­ally sup­posed to be at least a lit­tle bit of fun, etc.  Further, no one of these lenses is the “right way” to look at games.  Games are all of these things.  But what pri­mar­ily inter­ests me (though I’m inter­ested in all of the above) is games-as-art, so that’s mostly what I talk about here.

So, what is it to talk about games-as-art?  It is to look at games and look for expe­ri­ences of beauty, for social com­men­tary, or for ideas about the nature of the world.  It is to come to games with­out pre­con­cep­tions– not “this is what I want to play,” but “what do the artists want to show me?”  It is to engage seri­ously with the ideas behind every facet of game­play, and gen­er­ally to eval­u­ate them with cri­te­ria sim­i­lar to those that define the Meaningful Game.

The idea behind this blog is that it is a place for peo­ple to engage in seri­ous, in-depth, intel­lec­tual dis­cus­sion about video games, while still hope­fully remain­ing leg­i­ble to the layper­son.  The ques­tions I want to address here are “How do games work as art?” and “How can we make them bet­ter art?”

But those ques­tions, how­ever valu­able, raise another ques­tion that I have to address before I can deal with them.

Why Do We Care if Games Are Art?

One of the first things you’ll see in any forum dis­cus­sion about games-as-art is a post ques­tion­ing why we even care.  Why does this mat­ter?  Why are we so worked about it?  Why does it mat­ter what a bunch of non-gamers think about video games?  Can’t games just be fun and still worth­while with­out also being some sort of pre­ten­tious, “art?”

There are a num­ber of answers to this ques­tion, and like most ques­tions, there are nor­ma­tive and descrip­tive answers.  Why folks like me and my friends do, descrip­tively, care about games-as-art may not be the same as why we should, nor­ma­tively, do so.  So I’ll attempt to give two descrip­tive answers for why a lot of peo­ple prob­a­bly do care, and then move on to at least one good rea­son why we should care.

Answer One: We Seek Societal Legitimacy

One of the first rea­sons many gamers are so quick to leap to the defense of games-as-art is that we feel a psy­cho­log­i­cal need to jus­tify our behav­ior as some­how mature, worth­while, and, per­haps most impor­tantly, adult.  As the phrase “video games” still, in many folks’ minds, means “chil­drens’ toys,” those of us who are adult gamers want to dis­tance our­selves away from the image of child­ish­ness.

Many of us gamers spend a great deal of time play­ing video games, and we are not just 15-year-old layabouts or basement-dwelling col­lege dropouts, either.  Plenty of hap­pily mar­ried mid-30s folks with respectable jobs and 2.3 chil­dren play a lot of video games in their spare time, and no one wants to be seen as the weirdo who still plays with toys.  We seek legit­i­macy, the abil­ity to say “I’m a gamer” with­out being shunned, and so we argue that games aren’t sim­ply toys or enter­tain­ment, they are art.

If video games are art, then by play­ing 25 hours a week of World of Warcraft, I am not just screw­ing around or play­ing with imag­i­nary friends.  I am engaged in artis­tic activ­ity.  In fact, you should be impressed, just as if I spent 25 hours a week read­ing lit­er­a­ture, or 25 hours a week going to art shows.  If games are art, we feel that our behav­ior, our hobby and our lifestyle can be some­how legit­imized.

This is silly and dis­hon­est.  Games don’t have to be art to be worth­while.  Plenty of art isn’t very worth­while, and plenty of games that don’t much seem to be art are still widely regarded as excel­lent uses of one’s time.  Furthermore, the same per­son who dis­ap­proves of your 25-hour part-time job play­ing World of Warcraft isn’t likely to be impressed by the dis­tinc­tion.  He or she would prob­a­bly find you “weird” if you spent 25 hours a week read­ing high lit­er­a­ture, too.  An argu­ment for games’ legit­i­macy as valu­able and worth­while expenses of time and money does not require that games can be art, and the two dis­cus­sions ought to be kept wholly sep­a­rate.

Answer Two: We Want to be Different From Those People

The blood of a great many pix­els has been spilled of late to power dis­cus­sion sur­round­ing the term “gamer.”  Some folks think the term should go away, argu­ing that it serves as an arti­fi­cial line divid­ing “nor­mal peo­ple,” from “gamers,” and these folks argue that the word per­pet­u­ates neg­a­tive stereo­types about peo­ple who play games.  The stereo­type to which they refer is that of the socially-inept, vio­lent, aggres­sive, younger guy who does naught but play video games all day, who will never amount to any­thing or con­tribute any­thing to soci­ety.

There are many of us who play a lot of video games who would really prefer not to be asso­ci­ated with that stereo­type, the more so because there are a lot of very vocal peo­ple who seem to fit it to a T.  Anyone who has ever spent much time on the Internet or in an actual online game, knows that there are a myr­iad of obnox­ious, foul-mouthed, appar­ently vio­lently racist and/or homo­pho­bic and/or sex­ist folks out there that call them­selves gamers.  These are the sorts of folks that threat­ened Courtney Stanton’s life when she went after Penny Arcade, the sort of folks that have gamertags like xXl337FagKillerXx.  These are the sorts of folks that try as hard as they can to alien­ate and harass every sin­gle other per­son in the cha­t­room or server.

And those of us who aren’t that obnox­ious really, really, really want noth­ing to do with them.

So, we try to use every tool at our dis­posal to draw a line between us and those peo­ple.  We try to get rid of the word “gamer.”  We try to cre­ate places for intel­li­gent dis­course of games, where ram­pant trolling and hate speech isn’t allowed.  We try to openly and vocally behave like decent human beings.  And we try to use games-as-art to act as a divid­ing line.

See, xX1337FagKillerXx up there isn’t ter­ri­bly likely to care about games-as-art.  He plays games for any num­ber of rea­sons, but they usu­ally are more about dom­i­nance or aggres­sion or escapism, and not so much about mature nar­ra­tive or beauty.  So, we try to talk about games-as-art to draw a line in the sand, and to hope­fully iden­tify our­selves as the sort of peo­ple who care about that sort of thing.  We’re man­darins, we say, as we sip Chardonnay, read sec­tions of Dostoyevsky and then play BioShock.  We play games as art, not as enter­tain­ment.

This is under­stand­able.  But there are two prob­lems with this: in the first place, the way to deal with xXL337FagKillerXx is to ban him from your forums and ignore him when you can’t do that.  Actively try­ing to wall off an area for him and his ilk is bad because there is sim­ply no place where behav­ing like a child­ish brat is accept­able.  This leads me to the sec­ond prob­lem: there is noth­ing wrong with play­ing games for rea­sons other than their artis­tic merit.

To sug­gest that the smart peo­ple play games-as-art is to sug­gest that only the imbe­ciles play games-as-entertainment or games-as-whatever, which is a prob­lem, because there’s noth­ing wrong with play­ing games for enter­tain­ment pur­poses.  The same per­son who can truly under­stand and appre­ci­ate the com­plex nar­ra­tive of Torment or the philo­soph­i­cal ques­tions raised by BioShock can also really enjoy play­ing a round of Super Smash Brothers or Gears of War.  And that’s how it should be, for the same rea­son that a real cinephile can truly appre­ci­ate the great works of film while still enjoy­ing a good old sum­mer block­buster.  To draw ran­dom lines in the sand is point­less and more than a lit­tle elit­ist.  The point about games-as-art is not that it gives mature gamers some­thing to talk about, it’s that games can be art.

Answer Three: We Want To Experience Better Art

We ought to care about games-as-art not so we can feel bet­ter about our­selves or dis­as­so­ci­ate our­selves from repro­bates, but so we can fos­ter the devel­op­ment and growth of a new artis­tic medium.

Stripped of all the crit­i­cism, all the fan­dom, all the soci­o­log­i­cal stud­ies, art is beau­ti­ful, fas­ci­nat­ing, and worth our time.  We want to expe­ri­ence art, and to encour­age its cre­ation and devel­op­ment.  We should care about soci­etal recog­ni­tion of games-as-art because it will allow game-developers the resources and respectabil­ity nec­es­sary to pro­duce truly great works of art.  The devel­op­ment of art does not hap­pen in a vac­uum, and the devel­op­ment of video games tends to be very, very expen­sive.

It is very hard to con­vince a com­pany to sink an extra $5 mil­lion into a game to make it bet­ter art unless there is good rea­son to believe that the com­mu­nity cares about the qual­ity of a game’s art.  This isn’t self­ish­ness or vice or greed, it’s per­fectly rea­son­able.  The best way to show com­pa­nies and artists that we want them to make more and bet­ter art is by talk­ing about games-as-art.

Art needs crit­i­cism and dis­cus­sion to flour­ish.  Some have sug­gested that the whole pur­pose of art is the changes it makes in the observer, the dis­cus­sions that it engen­ders between friends and col­leagues.  So, why should we keep car­ing about video games as art?  Why should we talk about them so much?

Because we want to encour­age the artists to make bet­ter works of art.  Because we want to expe­ri­ence good art.  Because we have seen in video games the oppor­tu­nity for new and excit­ing ways to com­mu­ni­cate beauty and enrich our knowl­edge of the human con­di­tion.

Conclusion

Games can be art, and dis­cus­sion of games-as-art will help both the medium and our­selves.  If we crit­i­cize, poke, prod, inves­ti­gate, talk about and think about games, we will help the medium develop, help it flour­ish and grow into some­thing truly won­der­ful and truly respectable.  This, in turn, will allow us to expe­ri­ence bet­ter and bet­ter art, enrich­ing our own lives and mak­ing us bet­ter peo­ple.

You Are Dead

You’re a bril­liant, rogu­ish indi­vid­ual with plenty of expe­ri­ence evad­ing and dis­arm­ing traps, but this one is com­pli­cated. The tim­ing of the blades is tricky, and you know that a false step means at the least a hefty injury, which, since you’re deep in enemy ter­ri­tory and a great dis­tance away from any proper med­ical care, is essen­tially a long-form, suf­fer­ing ver­sion of a more griev­ous stum­ble onto one of those glis­ten­ing spikes. Still, your beloved sig­nif­i­cant other is on the other side of this trap (and many, many oth­ers), so there’s only one option: for­ward. You trail right behind the bristling wave of spikes, leap­ing around the spin­ning pole that some evil man tied a whole bunch of swords too, and come out of a dar­ing roll beneath a swing­ing log cov­ered in cruel hooks… right into the path of a lanc­ing saw blade that tum­bles down from the ceil­ing, ring­ing melod­i­cally off of the stone chamber’s walls, and straight into you, cleanly sep­a­rat­ing your arm from your trunk. You scream and tum­ble for­ward out of the trap, and as your vision start to go black from the sear­ing pain (because of course some­body had to POISON the saw), your last thoughts are of your beloved Henry. The angle of his smile and the way his eye­lids bunched up when he was sur­prised. The shame you feel, know­ing that he’s dead or worse now that your res­cue attempt has failed. Or at least, they would be your last thoughts if you weren’t stand­ing right before that same gauntlet of traps, remind­ing your­self to dive after you get past the log.

There is per­haps no game trope more per­va­sive than non-persistent char­ac­ter death. Even peo­ple that have never touched a con­troller are well aware of the trope. What are the most com­mon causes of the “Game Over” screen? Health bar is empty. Breath has expired. Bomb went off. And your char­ac­ter is most likely bleed­ing, diced, drowned, atom­ized, eaten, insane, turned into a zom­bie, or maybe just falling off the bot­tom of the screen upside down and with a shocked look on his face. But Game Over is not the end of the line. You get options, assum­ing that the game doesn’t just take you back to your most recent check­point auto­mat­i­cally. But for the most part, you find your­self back in your hero’s skin five min­utes prior to the most recent grisly demise.

This week’s post is focused on the tra­di­tional pun­ish­ments games use to illus­trate player fail­ure, and we’ll start by ask­ing, “Did you really have to kill him?

Did You Really Have To Kill Him?

Unlike other forms of art, games demand some level of chal­lenge, as I have (hopefully) demon­strated in an ear­lier post. Challenge means that there must be some chance of fail­ure. In fact, the chance of fail­ure makes games all the more fun; if the first attempt at a level or boss results in fail­ure, when you come back the sec­ond time and use what you’ve learned there’s a much greater emo­tional pay-off for your suc­cess. You feel like you have: A) learned some­thing and B) van­quished a foe that has trou­bled and beaten you in the past. Such an expe­ri­ence of fail­ure, as many hero nar­ra­tives demon­strate, can be a great moti­va­tor for improv­ing one’s mas­tery of the game and one’s abil­ity to trounce a par­tic­u­lar foe.

Death is eas­ily the most com­mon way that devel­op­ers pun­ish player fail­ure. There are of course a great many rea­sons why char­ac­ter death is so pro­lific. The first is that it is an easy nar­ra­tive way to express total fail­ure. There are, per­haps, fates worse than being evis­cer­ated, but they take too much time to present believ­ably and pow­er­fully with­out sub­ject­ing the player to an exten­sive expe­ri­ence every time they fail, and that (unless it is the point of the game, in which case: How inter­est­ing, I’d love to see your game) is coun­ter­pro­duc­tive to expe­ri­enc­ing the meat of the game. And so the char­ac­ter gets evis­cer­ated, or suf­fers a less grue­some, but equally final, fate.

Death is also an attrac­tive option because it is deci­sive: char­ac­ter death rep­re­sents a con­clu­sive end to the nar­ra­tive. The player won’t ask, “Wait, if bar­bar­ian lord Grimsplit was just beaten uncon­scious and cap­tured, couldn’t he then escape and foil the evil wizard’s plan any­way?” if Grimsplit’s organs are lay­ing on the ground. But the quick return to the last check­point com­mu­ni­cates that this end was the “wrong” end­ing, because it did not end in the character’s suc­cess. The fail­ure that ends in death is dis­carded as dross, and the game resets to a spot where the player can pur­sue the “cor­rect” end­ing. In other words, death enforces the nar­ra­tive in games that con­tain a non-flexible story.

Death is also just the nat­u­ral pun­ish­ment in cer­tain gen­res, even out­side video games. Zombie games should typ­i­cally fea­ture char­ac­ter death as pun­ish­ment, because it is the­mat­i­cally impor­tant. There are, per­haps, other ways to pun­ish fail­ure in a zom­bie game, but there’s no real impe­tus to seek out alter­na­tive pun­ish­ments when your audi­ence expects char­ac­ter brains to get eaten.

But the trend I’m exam­in­ing runs deeper than avatar death. What I’m really inter­ested in tack­ling is the model of pun­ish­ment that char­ac­ter death epit­o­mizes. The model applies to a wide vari­ety of game-play sit­u­a­tions: say you had to take actions to pro­tect an impor­tant non-player char­ac­ter, and then fail. Almost every time, the nar­ra­tive won’t con­tinue while dis­play­ing the ram­i­fi­ca­tions of that character’s death or cap­ture; instead, the nar­ra­tive will end (even though the hero is obvi­ously still capa­ble of action). This is in most cases a good thing; if the game was going to be less enter­tain­ing and less effec­tive as art with­out that char­ac­ter, then the nar­ra­tive reset is prefer­able. But let’s take a crit­i­cal look at this model, which resets the nar­ra­tive in instances of player fail­ure.

Tabula Rasa

As men­tioned above, the nar­ra­tive reset func­tions to enforce games with a sin­gle story-line, and the trope is so enmeshed with video gam­ing as a whole that call­ing it a dom­i­nat­ing theme isn’t really doing the trope’s pro­lif­er­a­tion jus­tice. It’s a trope that is totally unique to video games, since it only enters the expe­ri­ence as a result of player fail­ure. But what are the ram­i­fi­ca­tions of the nar­ra­tive reset model?

First, the emo­tional and artis­tic impact of the fail­ure is stripped away by a nar­ra­tive reset, which is rather obvi­ous, but it can also alter the impact of the sce­nes that fol­low the reset. A nar­ra­tive reset can make the last ten or fif­teen min­utes of game not count, and any emo­tions evoked in those ten or fif­teen min­utes will be evoked again the sec­ond time around, but nat­u­rally with less inten­sity, like watch­ing a movie scene twice in a row before mov­ing on to the next. Repetition of a scene can kill dra­matic ten­sion and con­ti­nu­ity, and the nar­ra­tive reset model has the poten­tial to screw with the impact of an imme­di­ately fol­low­ing scene that depends upon the themes and con­tent of the repeated scene.

Second, it removes the nar­ra­tive risk of the death of a main char­ac­ter except at the very end of a tale. The char­ac­ter will only really die if the game devel­op­ers want him to, and every­thing else is reset. Other tragedies may occur as the devel­op­ers wish, but there’s a vir­tual guar­an­tee that the main avatar of the player is going to sur­vive until the end of the game, at least. It cre­ates an even greater expec­ta­tion that a main char­ac­ter will sur­vive than even other forms of nar­ra­tive art. This trend has some roots in logis­tics, since killing off a main char­ac­ter before the end of the game requires a large amount of extra pro­gram­ming, assum­ing that the devel­op­ers actu­ally intro­duce a new char­ac­ter and not just a palette-swap.

This trope is not nec­es­sar­ily a bad thing; artis­tic tropes become tropes because they work well and fit the genre. And a game need not sub­vert this trope in order to be enter­tain­ing or good art. However, sub­vert­ing tropes is a great way to tell diverse sto­ries that the trope itself can’t sup­port, and there are often sto­ries that spring out of the sub­ver­sion of a trope.

Don’t Fear The Reaper

Some of the best games I’ve played have sub­verted the trope of char­ac­ter death to a greater or lesser degree. Prince of Persia, for instance, merely calls atten­tion to the trope, and incor­po­rates it into its own over­ar­ch­ing nar­ra­tive by rewind­ing time and, even when the char­ac­ter DOES actu­ally die, explain­ing it away as a slip-up in the Prince’s sto­ry­telling. The more recent Prince of Persia does away with char­ac­ter death com­pletely; there are still minor penalties for fail­ing, but the nar­ra­tive is never inter­rupted. Braid pulls a sim­i­lar trick; the char­ac­ter can die, but time can be rewound indef­i­nitely. In Planescape: Torment, death would set you back, but it was part of the nar­ra­tive since you couldn’t really, truly die; you’d just wake up in the mor­tu­ary, feel­ing stu­pid for try­ing to take on a whole flock of var­gouilles.

All of these have a rather straight-forward treat­ment or sub­ver­sion of char­ac­ter death, but they do main­tain a sim­i­lar model of pun­ish­ment; even if the reset is jus­ti­fied by the nar­ra­tive, it is still a reset. Because of player fail­ure, the nar­ra­tive was inter­rupted, and so the player is returned to the same sit­u­a­tion and given another chance to assert the proper nar­ra­tive. Is there the pos­si­bil­ity of a dif­fer­ent model of player pun­ish­ment?

I pro­pose this out of my expe­ri­ence with role-playing games, in which player fail­ure can be expressed in a mul­ti­tude of ways and can serve to enrich the nar­ra­tive instead of inter­rupt­ing it. I real­ize that this would prob­a­bly be intensely dif­fi­cult to build, but what if a game doesn’t threaten the character’s life directly? What if a char­ac­ter becomes injured, with all the penalties that would imply, and a character’s goals or affairs become vic­tim instead? And if the nar­ra­tive con­tin­ues, the pun­ish­ment for player fail­ure con­tin­ues to haunt the player as the story con­tin­ues. This could allow for really rich nar­ra­tives. Failure is occa­sion­ally some­thing char­ac­ters have to deal with, but it’s almost always a part of an inflex­i­ble nar­ra­tive, and so the player doesn’t feel as invested in the fail­ure as he or she oth­er­wise might. If the player’s fail­ures are com­bined with the character’s, that means a huge decrease in dis­tance; when the hero acci­den­tally lets the vil­lain escape and that vil­lain starts to kill peo­ple that the hero loves, the player will feel those deaths more acutely if their fail­ure played a role in let­ting it hap­pen.

Games have begun to reflect player choice in the nar­ra­tive, to a greater or lesser degree. BioWare games are par­tic­u­larly good exam­ples of mak­ing player choice mat­ter. But I’m sug­gest­ing some­thing else entirely. What if player skill became a decid­ing fac­tor in the nar­ra­tive? What if the pun­ish­ment for player fail­ure played out in the nar­ra­tive? I sug­gest that such a game would real­ize nar­ra­tive pos­si­bil­i­ties that no game has before.

Conclusion

Character death and the nar­ra­tive reset model is found in the major­ity of video games, and as I’ve tried to explain here, the trope has some dis­tinct nar­ra­tive ram­i­fi­ca­tions, and I doubt that I’ve exhausted the con­cept. So, what do you think? Do you think there’s some­thing to my sug­ges­tion of a game that explores the nar­ra­tive results of player fail­ure, even if it is a night­mare to pro­gram? What other pos­si­bil­i­ties do you think exist in sub­vert­ing the nar­ra­tive reset model?

No, Mr. Hawke, I Expect You To Feature A More Robust Inventory System

Introduction

I have spent a fair amount of time of late think­ing about the com­plex­i­ties of the rela­tion­ship between a seri­ous game player and a seri­ous game devel­oper, and have iden­ti­fied three trends which I wish to dis­cuss. The cat­a­lyst for this dis­cus­sion was my rel­a­tively recent playthrough of Dragon Age II, a game which left me feel­ing rather jerked around.

So, for the next three weeks, I wish to dis­cuss three speci­fic trends in the gam­ing com­mu­nity: Expectation, Entitlement and Exploitation, and though I will dis­cuss these trends in var­i­ous con­texts, each dis­cus­sion will use Dragon Age II as a cen­tral exam­ple. I have cho­sen to use DAII as the lynch­pin for this con­ver­sa­tion partly because it has been some­thing of a per­sonal obses­sion, but also because its var­i­ous con­tro­ver­sies have shown that it is thus par­tic­u­larly related to sev­eral issues in the games indus­try.

A Quick Review

Before I get started, I fig­ured it would be worth pro­vid­ing a brief review of Dragon Age II, so that there isn’t any doubt about my opin­ion of the game.

Generally, the first two thirds of the game aren’t quite per­fect, but are very, very excel­lent, and the last third exag­ger­ates the prob­lems of the first two thirds, con­tain­ing moments of bril­liance, but pri­mar­ily being char­ac­ter­ized by a sort of unfin­ished, buggy rushed­ness. Finally, though its last few hours begin with a moment of absolute bril­liance, the rest of the cli­max is absolutely dread­ful and is char­ac­ter­ized by a dra­matic and incon­gru­ous shift in tone and style, major char­ac­ters (par­tic­u­larly antag­o­nists) behav­ing in wholly unbe­liev­able ways, and, in a tremen­dously egre­gious exam­ple, the reuse of a char­ac­ter model from the first game’s DLC as the penul­ti­mate boss. They didn’t even bother to make it a palette-swap.

To deal with a few issues specif­i­cally: the changes in the com­bat sys­tem are inter­est­ing and enjoy­able, and many of the mechan­i­cal ideas are fresh and worth explor­ing, the teamwork-inspiring “cross-class combo” mechanic in par­tic­u­lar. That said, the design­ers skimped on the num­ber and com­plex­ity of antag­o­nists: you spend most of the game fight­ing the same four or five kinds of enemy, and even the most com­plex of vil­lains rarely have more than two or three sep­a­rate kinds of attack. Furthermore, some­times the game’s more action-oriented spin gives it trou­ble– it is both easy and nec­es­sary to kite a few of the ene­mies, for exam­ple. (Though this is prob­a­bly part of a whole ‘nother arti­cle, mechan­ics which encour­age or even really allow kit­ing or other silly mechan­i­cal exploits are bad.)

The deci­sion to half-heartedly limit the inven­tory sys­tem, such that you can change allies’ weapons, but not their armor, is more than a lit­tle con­fus­ing. It is impor­tant to note that there is noth­ing essen­tial to the idea of a role­play­ing game which neces­si­tates inven­tory micro­man­age­ment, and I can def­i­nitely under­stand the the­matic sym­bol­ism of not allow­ing you to change your allies’ equip­ment– the UI’s repeated admo­ni­tion that “your friends make their own deci­sions about what to wear” makes sense. The game repeat­edly reminds you that these are peo­ple with their own lives above and beyond your own adven­tures, so it makes sense they might want to be a bit less com­mu­nal about their pri­vate pos­ses­sions than char­ac­ters in other RPGs. But if that’s true, why can I fid­dle with their weapons and acces­sories? An indi­vid­ual who is pro­pri­etary about his or her cloth­ing is likely to be more so about his or her tools and jew­elry. In short, it just ends up feel­ing lazy, and pleas­ing nei­ther camp: peo­ple who enjoy equip­ment micro­man­age­ment feel cheated, and those of us who might have pre­ferred a Mass Effect 2–style stream­lined sys­tem still have to deal with too many menus.

I have already come out in favor of the nam­ing and voic­ing of the game’s main char­ac­ter, and found the con­ver­sa­tion mechan­ics joy­ful and excel­lent. Further, all of the recruitable char­ac­ters, includ­ing the DLC char­ac­ter, are excel­lent, some of the absolute best and most nuanced char­ac­ters in role­play­ing games. Several moments in the first two acts con­tain some of the most amaz­ing bits of con­ver­sa­tion I have ever expe­ri­enced in a role­play­ing game. The game also prac­ti­cally dou­bles the num­ber of strong and inter­est­ing female char­ac­ters in all of video game his­tory. Aveline is awe­some. The plot is won­der­ful, up until the third act, when it is quite rushed– character-specific quests, which up until that point have been absolutely excel­lent, begin to feel very rushed and con­fused.

In short, Dragon Age II con­tains bril­liant ideas and some­times excel­lent exe­cu­tion, but the game is clearly not fin­ished. It’s a really, really, really excel­lent sec­ond draft.

With that said, let’s move on to the actual meat of the arti­cle.

Quality and Enjoyment

The first point I wish to make is an impor­tant dis­tinc­tion which will be quite rel­e­vant to this arti­cle and any other arti­cle I ever write again.

The dis­tinc­tion can be sum­ma­rized as the dif­fer­ence between “lik­ing” a work of art and stat­ing that a work of art is “good,” or the dif­fer­ence between “favorite” and “best.” The words “like” and “favorite” refer to the amount which a per­son enjoyed a work of art, whereas the words “good” and “best” refer to what the per­son per­ceives as a work’s qual­ity. These are two very dif­fer­ent con­cepts.

Enjoyment is a purely sub­jec­tive expe­ri­ence, and offers no real room for dis­cus­sion. The state­ment “I liked it,” refers only to the feel­ings gen­er­ated in me by the work. Quality, on the other hand, is an objec­tive char­ac­ter­is­tic of a work. The state­ment “It is good,” is inher­ently a nor­ma­tive state­ment– it states that not only did I find the work valu­able, but that most other peo­ple ought to, too.

In this way, you could not really argue with me if I said “I really liked The Phantom Menace.” You could be sad for me, and might be morally oblig­ated to pray for the state of my obvi­ously degraded soul, but would have no real avenue for dis­agree­ment. The facts involved relate wholly to whether or not I liked the movie. I am only mak­ing a claim about myself, and I am, after all, the only real expert on the topic of my own likes and dis­likes.

If, how­ever, I was to say that “The Phantom Menace is a good movie,” there would be room for dis­cus­sion. In that case, I would be mak­ing a claim about the movie itself. Should you feel com­pelled to argue this point with me, you could point to the lack­lus­ter script, the obnox­ious spe­cial effects, the fre­quently wooden act­ing, the exe­crable plot, etc, etc, etc, as rea­sons why The Phantom Menace is not a good movie, regard­less of how much I might like it.

It is wholly pos­si­ble to like some­thing that isn’t very good, or to not like some­thing which is. I hap­pen to have some­thing of a soft spot in my heart for Lady in the Water, though it’s not what you would call a par­tic­u­larly good film. Similarly, though I gain lit­tle to no enjoy­ment from the aver­age Gran Turismo game, I under­stand that they are usu­ally very good. Furthermore, there’s noth­ing wrong with this. Taste dif­fers, and not every work of art will appeal to every per­son.

You’re Not A Very Good Dog, Cat

One of my Fundamental Axioms of Games Criticism is that a game’s artis­tic qual­ity is at least partly deter­mined by its scope, and I wrote an arti­cle a few weeks back dis­cussing that idea in some detail. The fun­da­men­tal point behind the axiom is that a game’s artis­tic qual­ity should be judged, in large part, based on what sort of game it is try­ing to be. This is, fur­ther­more, just as true of any other work of art as it is of video games.

At a very macro level, no one’s going to dis­agree with me about this. It would not make sense to be mad at Portal for not includ­ing an inven­tory sys­tem, or to crit­i­cize Final Fantasy VII because it’s not a very good sur­vival hor­ror game, but it does make sense to crit­i­cize Gears of War 2 for hav­ing a non­sen­si­cal plot. But on a more speci­fic level, I find that this ties in very closely with the Problem of Expectation.

By “expec­ta­tions,” I sim­ply mean the pre­con­ceived notions of what you believe a game ought to be that you bring to the table (or couch, more likely) when you start play­ing a video game. These expec­ta­tions can orig­i­nate from a game’s asso­ci­ated mar­ket­ing cam­paigns, pre­vi­ous games in a fran­chise, other games made by a devel­oper, the opin­ions of friends, recur­ring tropes in the game’s genre, or any num­ber of other sources. These expec­ta­tions are part of what allow us to sort through a col­lec­tion of games on Steam and decide which ones are likely to appeal to us.

The Problem of Expectation can arise when one’s expec­ta­tions become too speci­fic, and thus engage in con­flict with the design­ers’ artis­tic vision. Allow me to illus­trate what I mean with an exam­ple.

When I first began to play Assassin’s Creed, I had a very speci­fic con­cep­tion in mind for how I thought an assas­sin should behave, and attempted to play the game accord­ingly. Assassins, I rea­soned, should attempt to flit in and out of a given area com­pletely unno­ticed, deal­ing as lit­tle extra dam­age to per­sons and prop­erty as pos­si­ble, and draw­ing as lit­tle atten­tion to them­selves as pos­si­ble. While play­ing the game, I thus attempted to be per­fectly unde­tected in my every move, never to engage in com­bat except when absolutely nec­es­sary, and only to do high-profile actions like run­ning on rooftops or attack­ing mis­cel­la­neous guards when I absolutely had to.

And I wasn’t having a par­tic­u­larly good time. Getting across any of the cities took forever if I strolled casu­ally through the city streets, and was just as monot­o­nous as it was time-consuming. I over­planned my major assas­si­na­tion con­tracts only to have my intri­cate plans thwarted by scripted events which called for me to rapidly run on rooftops in mor­tal com­bat with sev­eral ene­mies at once.

Frustrated, I com­plained to Matt (I was play­ing it on his Xbox) that “I thought this was sup­posed to be a stealth game.” He looked at me and said some­thing to the effect of “No, not really. It’s a sand­box game with stealth ele­ments,” and the lights of heaven opened up above me. I finally under­stood! Assassin’s Creed is not a game where you play an unde­tectable shadow, it’s a game where you play a badass. Suddenly, all of the jump­ing off of impossibly-high build­ings and bru­tal coun­ter­at­tacks made a lot of sense to me, and I found the game much more enjoy­able. Assassin’s Creed is far from per­fect, but it works a lot bet­ter when held to its own stan­dards, rather than what­ever arbi­trary things I had cooked up and brought to the table.

I had let my expec­ta­tions for the game get in between me and the artis­tic vision of the devel­op­ers, and in so doing, dam­aged both my enjoy­ment of the game, and my per­cep­tion of the game’s qual­ity. Rather than engag­ing with the game itself, I was try­ing to engage with the game I thought it was, thereby gain­ing a skewed and incor­rect per­spec­tive about the game’s qual­ity and enjoy­a­bil­ity.

“Look, I Found A Slightly Better Hat,” and Other Epic Tales

I think very few games have suf­fered more from the vagaries and foibles of Expectation than Dragon Age II, which, as men­tioned above, opted to dra­mat­i­cally change sev­eral key mechan­i­cal ele­ments and design philoso­phies from Dragon Age: Origins, and instantly received a great deal of flak for said deci­sions. At the end of the day, it deserved some of this flak, as I’ve men­tioned in my quick review above.

But what is most curi­ous is that it received a great deal of this crit­i­cism long before the game ever hit stores. Longtime BioWare fans com­plained at the con­sol­i­da­tion of the numer­ous char­ac­ter options from Origins into a sin­gle named and voiced char­ac­ter. They com­plained about the less tac­ti­cal and more action-oriented nature of the com­bat. They com­plained about the sim­pli­fied inven­tory sys­tem, and they did all of this even before the demo came out, when at most, if they were very lucky, they might have played 20 min­utes of the game at PAX or some sim­i­lar con.

Most of these folks did not seem to con­sider that it was con­ceiv­ably pos­si­ble that the design­ers behind Dragon Age II had very good rea­sons for the changes they made. Further, at the time every­one first became so upset, since the game had yet been released, it was still pos­si­ble that each of the changes worked beau­ti­fully and con­tributed to a dynamic and beau­ti­ful whole. The only pos­si­ble rea­son to be upset at this point was if the game did not con­form to your expec­ta­tions.

And that, my friends, is a silly rea­son to be mad at a video game. Players whined that they were going to be forced to play the role of Hawke, rather than one of a num­ber of pos­si­ble char­ac­ters from dif­fer­ent back­grounds, when that is the entire point of Dragon Age II. The entire devel­op­ment team behind Dragon Age II fre­quently described it as a smaller story, focus­ing on one indi­vid­ual person’s rise to power. Whether you “like” this kind of story bet­ter than the sweep­ing epic of Dragon Age: Origins is up to you, but it is pre­pos­ter­ous to crit­i­cize DAII for hav­ing a small focus when that is exactly what it was try­ing to do. It’s like pick­ing up a jar of grape jelly, clearly labeled “GRAPE JELLY” in large, attrac­tive let­ters on the label and then some­how being sur­prised when it con­tains a sticky, jam-like sub­stance fla­vored largely like the fruit of Vitis vinifera.

WTF is this?

You don’t have to like grape jelly. You are def­i­nitely allowed to prefer straw­berry jelly, or even peanut but­ter. But the qual­ity of a jar of grape jelly needs to be eval­u­ated com­pared to other jars of grape jelly. The reduced scope of the game should be used as one of the premises against which to eval­u­ate it, not an eval­u­at­able (not a word) fact in and of itself. The prob­lem with DAII’s tight­ened scope is the fact that it aban­dons it at the very end of the game. Dragon Age II deserves to be crit­i­cized for a vari­ety of rea­sons, but among them is not the fact that it is not peanut but­ter.

Conclusion: On Expectation and Art

Some will argue that the design­ers behind DAII shouldn’t have made the changes they did because the audi­ence clearly didn’t like those changes. If every­one prefers peanut but­ter, and you make grape jelly, it might be good grape jelly, but you still haven’t pleased your audi­ence. This is a prob­lem I will mostly tackle next week, in my dis­cus­sion of Entitlement, but I will leave you with the fol­low­ing thought about the dif­fer­ence between art and enter­tain­ment.

Art is about what the artist(s) want(s) to com­mu­ni­cate. It is not about giv­ing the audi­ence exactly what they want to hear/see/play. Successful art cer­tainly needs to engage with the audi­ence in order to com­mu­ni­cate with them, but art is not sim­ply about giv­ing the audi­ence exactly what they expect. Giving the audi­ence what they want is the pur­pose of enter­tain­ment. Art may some­times func­tion as enter­tain­ment, and usu­ally needs to be some­what enter­tain­ing in order to appeal to a large crowd, but it is a fun­da­men­tally dif­fer­ent thing.

No fan of 19th-century sym­phonic music would have said that he or she par­tic­u­larly wanted to hear loud, bom­bas­tic brass and per­cus­sion in the con­cert hall, and cer­tainly would not have expected it. But that’s what Beethoven gave them, and we are very, very glad that he did. If Beethoven had focused only on giv­ing the audi­ence what they wanted, not only would we be with­out the great mas­ter­pieces he wrote, the whole his­tory of west­ern music would be much, much less inter­est­ing.

Game devel­op­ers do need to keep gamers’ expec­ta­tions in mind, as any game which com­pletely sub­verts them in every way is likely to be very dis­ori­ent­ing and dif­fi­cult to fol­low. But if we, as gamers, want to expe­ri­ence games as art, and not merely as enter­tain­ment, we have to be will­ing to put our pre­con­ceived expec­ta­tions of genre or con­ven­tion aside, and try to engage with games on their own terms. We will almost cer­tainly end up pre­fer­ring cer­tain types of sto­ries and modes of sto­ry­telling over oth­ers, but this does not mean that we must dis­miss out of hand as “bor­ing” or “bad” works that fall out­side our favored gen­res or styles.

The Meaningful Game

Introduction

That video games can be art is a truth I firmly believe, and I spend a great deal of my men­tal energy think­ing about all the cool things they have done and can do in the future.  But this empha­sis on games’ bet­ter parts and amaz­ing poten­tial occa­sion­ally causes me to be com­pletely blind­sided by the fact that the medium is still very much in its artis­tic ado­les­cence.  Much like a cute puppy that will one day be a true and trusted com­pan­ion, games now still have the ten­dency to pee on your floor, chew through your shoes and knock peo­ple over despite your best efforts to train them.  Even the very best con­tem­po­rary games are still plagued by strange quirks and seri­ous flaws, and Roger Ebert is prob­a­bly right to say that games have yet to pro­duce a work that can stand in the same cat­e­gory of artis­tic bril­liance as the great works of most other media.

So, when these two facts (video games’ abil­ity to be great art and their con­tin­u­ing refusal to act on that abil­ity) run into each other, I often find myself get­ting dis­cour­aged or frus­trated.  I played Red Dead Redemption and mar­veled at the gor­geous envi­ron­ments, the incred­i­ble level of detail in the mechan­ics, the mature themes and ideas raised by the game, but then was soundly dis­ap­pointed by the mediocre dia­logue, repet­i­tive and unin­ter­est­ing mis­sions, and char­ac­ters that behave con­trary to all laws of rea­son.  I played BioShock and found myself try­ing to ignore the fact that the game’s bal­ance is all wrong and its last few hours are really just not very good.  The list goes on and on and on.

So, what I thought I would do today is out­line what I think it would take for a video game to be truly great, to truly shat­ter the remain­ing bar­ri­ers between video games and real artis­tic achieve­ment.  In so doing, I found myself cre­at­ing a series of char­ac­ter­is­tics that I believe would be found in any Great Work of gam­ing.  In short, I found myself iden­ti­fy­ing some­thing like a Platonic Form for gaming’s great works, a Form I will call “The Meaningful Game.”

Everything I am about to say can more or less be summed up by the fol­low­ing two char­ac­ter­is­tics:

The Meaningful Game is mature.

This does not mean that it can never laugh at itself or make jokes, or that the Meaningful Game is never a com­edy.  It does mean that the Meaningful Game is grown up, “adult,” in the non-pornographic sense.  It treats its char­ac­ters, themes and mechan­ics as impor­tant, and makes them believ­able.  It engages with its audi­ence, but does not pan­der to it, and speaks to the artists’ thoughts and emo­tions with­out becom­ing rant­ing or solip­sis­tic.

The Meaningful Game is coher­ent.

By coher­ent, I do not just mean com­pre­hen­si­ble, though it is also that.  I mean instead that each of its pieces coheres together to form a rea­son­able, well-structured whole.  It con­tains no ran­dom jut­ting edges or mis­cel­la­neous sub­plots or func­tion­al­i­ties thrown in just for kicks.  Each encoun­ter, each char­ac­ter, each enemy, each plot point, each mechanic and each envi­ron­ment con­tributes some­thing to the game as a whole.  The Meaningful Game never pads itself for length, because it doesn’t need to.  It is exactly as long as it needs to be, with no extra­ne­ous ele­ments or under­de­vel­oped ideas.  No ele­ment in the game dis­tracts from the game as a whole, and every ele­ment adds to it.

Everything else falls under one or both of these umbrel­las, and so long as an artist keeps these thoughts in mind, he or she will prob­a­bly be well on his or her way to cre­at­ing good art.

Explication

For each of these, I shall cite the rule, explain it as effi­ciently as I can, and list (with some expla­na­tion) exam­ples of games which suc­ceed or fail in light of these rules.

The Meaningful Game does not delight in cheap sex or gore.

Where there is graphic vio­lence, it exists for a rea­son, and while it may trig­ger some vis­ceral thrills, it also clearly opposes the glo­ri­fi­ca­tion of vio­lence.  It may con­tain sex sce­nes or sexy char­ac­ters, but never drops to the level of pornog­ra­phy or exploita­tion.  Every sex scene adds to the plot, the char­ac­ter­i­za­tion, or the atmos­phere, and every low-cut top serves to tell us some­thing about its wearer.

Bad: God of War 3, which rou­tinely objec­ti­fies its women and pos­i­tively glo­ries in unnec­es­sar­ily graphic vio­lence, all to no point or pur­pose.  God of War 3 is a game for 15-year-old boys, not adults.

Good:  Mass Effect han­dles sex pretty maturely– it doesn’t shy away from sex sce­nes or pre­tend that sex isn’t a part of many human (or asari) rela­tion­ships, but it does not revel in point­less nudity or soft­core porn.  Left 4 Dead 2 is a very gory and vio­lent game, but the gore serves to rein­force the hor­ror of the sit­u­a­tion, and is never an end-in-itself.

The Meaningful Game has real, fleshed-out char­ac­ters.

It does not just epit­o­mize char­ac­ters, and never focuses on escapism or fantasy-fulfillment.  Even when the char­ac­ters are capa­ble of super­nat­u­ral feats or are very phys­i­cally attrac­tive, even when they are writ­ten to be pas­tiches or send-ups of tropes, they are writ­ten to be real peo­ple, with real per­son­al­i­ties, vices, virtues, hopes and fears.  These char­ac­ters may occa­sion­ally be exag­ger­ated, and each char­ac­ter may not receive his or her own mas­sive story arc, but every char­ac­ter is also an end-in-him-or-herself.

Bad: Halo: Reach, which insists the player should sym­pa­thize with Noble Team, yet never both­ers to paint them in any­thing but the broad­est strokes.  Each char­ac­ter is merely a card­board col­lec­tion of tropes, noth­ing more.

Good: Planescape: Torment con­tains no card­board– even char­ac­ters that seem like incar­na­tions of tropes are com­pli­cated, real peo­ple, whether they are major com­pan­ions or minor NPCs.  Flying skulls, suc­cubi and per­ma­nently burn­ing wiz­ards alike, Torment con­tains only real peo­ple.

The Meaningful Game does not neglect any of its ele­ments.

The Meaningful Game does not always have a plot, but when it does, it is a good plot, well thought-out and well-executed.  The Meaningful Game does not always have char­ac­ters, but when it does, they are good char­ac­ters, as men­tioned above.  The Meaningful Game does not always con­tain any speci­fic mechanic, but when it does, that mechanic is well-implemented and serves the game as a whole.

Bad: Assassin’s Creed: Brotherhood con­tains beau­ti­ful envi­ron­ments, gor­geous ani­ma­tions, excel­lent mechan­ics, and a point­less and pre­pos­ter­ous plot filled with shal­low and unde­vel­oped char­ac­ters.  Character devel­op­ment is only hinted at, and the plot flits jar­ringly from world­wide con­spir­acy the­ory to sci­ence fic­tion to his­tor­i­cal fic­tion with no links or the­matic con­ti­nu­ity.  Had the nar­ra­tive aspects of the game received half of the atten­tion of the rest, it would be an amaz­ing video game.

Good: Portal spends as much time as it needs on every given part of itself.  It forces the player to stop and lis­ten to GLaDOS for major moments of plot motion or char­ac­ter­i­za­tion, and con­tains appro­pri­ate music, beau­ti­ful mechan­ics, appro­pri­ate graph­ics, etc.  It con­tains min­i­mal plot, but what plot there is is well and effec­tively com­mu­ni­cated.

It is also worth men­tion­ing Civilization IV, a game which com­pletely dis­re­gards plot and char­ac­ters and is still some­what closer to being a Meaningful Game than most.

The Meaningful Game does not allow the player’s choices or pos­si­ble actions to derail the game or con­tra­dict its char­ac­ters.

The Meaningful Game gives the player as much free­dom as it is will­ing to take respon­si­bil­ity for.  It never gives the player the option to kill ran­dom civil­ians unless it is will­ing to make the player face the con­se­quences of his or her own actions.  Furthermore, it never gives the player choices which are com­pletely con­trary to the nature of the player char­ac­ter.  If the player is to be play­ing a char­ac­ter, and not merely a Myst–style avatar, then the only choices the player is allowed are those which could be rea­son­ably attrib­uted to the char­ac­ter.

Bad: Red Dead Redemption paints a clear and coher­ent pic­ture of John Marston as a man who desires to leave his out­law past behind and set­tle down, a man who cares noth­ing for the law in itself, but largely desires to stay out of trou­ble.  Yet the player can mur­der ran­dom civil­ians, burn down their houses and steal their things.  Further, the con­se­quences for these actions are wholly triv­ial and unre­al­is­tic: a few days in jail or a few dol­lars to pay off the right peo­ple in the gov­ern­ment.

Good: Assassin’s Creed (the first one) reminds you, upon try­ing to com­mit ran­dom vio­lence, that Altair did not kill civil­ians by desyn­chro­niz­ing the player for every act of ran­dom mur­der he or she com­mits.  Further, every quest obvi­ously per­tains to Altair’s goals, and the game’s choices con­sist of deter­min­ing the best way to achieve those goals.

The Meaningful Game does not con­tain sid­e­quests.

It may, how­ever, con­tain con­tent which is not required in order to reach the cred­its screen– it may con­tain sub­plots which can be avoided, optional con­tent which can be missed, and which exists to rein­force the set­ting or encour­age explo­ration or bet­ter play.  This optional con­tent may be struc­tured like a tra­di­tional sid­e­quest, and may even have noth­ing to do with the “main” plot, but the Meaningful Game never con­tains unpol­ished or irrel­e­vant ele­ments.  This optional con­tent always adds to the over­all expe­ri­ence, reveal­ing infor­ma­tion or expe­ri­ences not found any­where else in the game, and which is gen­er­ally equal in qual­ity to the game’s “main” con­tent.  The word “sid­e­quest,” how­ever, is too thor­oughly asso­ci­ated with mean­ing­less faffing about in spite of the game’s main plot, and thus the Meaningful Game never con­tains sid­e­quests.  Furthermore, there is always a rea­son for the char­ac­ter, and not just the player, to engage with this optional con­tent.

Bad: Nearly any mod­ern RPG or sand­box game, but a par­tic­u­larly egre­gious offender is Mass Effect, wherein almost every sid­e­quest occurs in one of three copy-and-pasted build­ings, con­tains very lit­tle in-depth dia­logue, and pro­vides no rea­sons for Shepard to engage with it.  Shepard will take time off from sav­ing the galaxy from immi­nent destruc­tion to medi­ate ran­dom par­ent­ing dis­putes, hunt totally irrel­e­vant crime lords and resolve hostage sit­u­a­tions, and the con­tent all feels tacked on and totally irrel­e­vant.

Good: Baldur’s Gate is 90% optional con­tent, but rarely if ever repeats a room, even for the small­est of optional quests, and pro­vides unique and inter­est­ing sit­u­a­tions and char­ac­ters in all of its optional con­tent.  Furthermore, it makes sense for the player char­ac­ter to be engag­ing in these optional quests, as things are not gen­er­ally very urgent or time-sensitive until the very end of the game, at which point the game tries to dis­cour­age mean­ing­less faffing about by turn­ing the local police on the player, mak­ing non-essential quests much harder to com­plete.

As a note, the idea of “optional con­tent” is more or less unique to video games.  Novels do not con­tain chap­ters which are only found on cer­tain readthroughs or based on cer­tain choices the char­ac­ters make.  Some plays involve audi­ence par­tic­i­pa­tion, and a few films have mul­ti­ple dif­fer­ent end­ings, shown on dif­fer­ent nights, but that is not exactly the same as optional con­tent.  Yet the idea of the “sid­e­quest” has not, so far as I know, really been explored in any great detail.  If any­one has read any­thing seri­ously dis­cussing the con­cept, please send me a link to it.

The Meaningful Game does not apol­o­gize.

If the Meaningful Game invites con­tro­versy, either through a major change in design phi­los­o­phy from sim­i­lar games or through sub­ject man­ner which is likely to offend some­one, it does so with an appro­pri­ate amount of class and pol­ish, but it also does so with­out apolo­gies.  It does not seek to appease naysay­ers by only mak­ing half of a change, and it does not skirt around its dif­fi­cult socio-political issues.  It either engages with an issue or doesn’t; makes a change or doesn’t.

Bad: Dragon Age 2 dra­mat­i­cally changed the inven­tory sys­tem from its pre­de­ces­sor and sim­i­lar games, but did so only halfway as if to save some face with the tac­ti­cal RPG crowd.  In so doing, it comes off as weak and half-hearted, angers the hard­core crowd and con­tin­ues to alien­ate those who don’t wish to muck about with inven­tory sys­tems.

Good: Mass Effect 2, on the other hand, went all the way with its mechan­i­cal changes, thereby pro­vid­ing the smooth, more shooter-like expe­ri­ence it aimed for.  It still irri­tated the hard­core tac­ti­cal RPG crowd, but actu­ally achieved its goal, and didn’t apol­o­gize for it– whether or not you like the new sys­tem is irrel­e­vant, as it is a coher­ent, com­plete sys­tem.

The Meaningful Game inno­vates with pur­pose.

The artists behind the Meaningful Game under­stand that nov­elty is not an end-in-itself, and that an inno­va­tion in game design is only really good if it works.  Thus, the artists behind the Meaningful Game will not seek to break tra­di­tion or dis­re­gard exist­ing norms sim­ply for the sake of being dif­fer­ent.  Many of the cur­rent rules of video game design can be bro­ken (and in some cases need to be), but some exist for very good rea­sons.  This does not mean that artists should only break rules when they know exactly how it will turn out– exper­i­ments need to be per­formed, and some­times even the noblest exper­i­ments fail.  Thus, the Meaningful Game breaks rules and pushes for­ward with­out fear (see above re: not apol­o­giz­ing) but only when it has a clear pic­ture of why.

Bad: Final Fantasy X attempted to dis­tin­guish itself from other con­tem­po­rary JRPGs by remov­ing the “expe­ri­ence points” model of char­ac­ter advance­ment and replac­ing it with what was sup­posed to be an inter­ac­tive, detailed expe­ri­ence called the Sphere Grid.  But because it didn’t seem to have a real clear pic­ture of why it wanted to get rid of the expe­ri­ence point sys­tem (a tried and true sys­tem), it con­structed a strange and con­fus­ing grid, which, until the char­ac­ters were very far along indeed, mostly still func­tioned as a class-based expe­ri­ence sys­tem.

Good: Mirror’s Edge, on the other hand, attempted to inno­vate by cre­at­ing a freerun­ning game played from the first per­son.  It didn’t quite work, mind, but there were good rea­sons for the change: actual peo­ple seem to freerun from a first-person per­spec­tive all the time.  It could allow for a more intu­itive, flow­ing kind of motion than is usu­ally found in a third per­son game.  Thus, even though it didn’t quite work, the inno­va­tion was inter­est­ing and worth explor­ing.

Finally, and per­haps most impor­tantly,

The Meaningful Game is made with artis­tic integrity.

There is noth­ing wrong with mak­ing money from art.  There is even noth­ing wrong with pro­duc­ing art pri­mar­ily for the pur­pose of mak­ing money.  Further, there is noth­ing wrong with try­ing to cre­ate said art in an effi­cient, cost-effective and orga­nized man­ner.  What is wrong is skimp­ing on a work of art, or rush­ing out a work of art before it is ready to be shown to the pub­lic.  The Meaningful Game is not released until it is fin­ished and pol­ished.  It may not be per­fect, and there may be things that the artists involved wish they could have done dif­fer­ently, but at no point will the Meaningful Game feel as though it was rushed or phoned in.  Every artist involved in the pro­duc­tion of the Meaningful Game will ded­i­cate a great deal of effort and time to it.

Bad: Dragon Age 2 could well have been the great­est role­play­ing game ever made, but was, for what­ever rea­son, rushed out the door only three-quarters fin­ished, lack­ing the depth of expe­ri­ence and detail that would have trans­formed it into a beau­ti­ful artis­tic expe­ri­ence.

Good: Really any­thing by Valve, a com­pany which can per­haps be faulted for being too per­fec­tion­ist in their games.  I do not agree with every design deci­sion or artis­tic choice behind Half-Life 2, but it is never rushed or incom­plete, and the level of detail and pol­ish on the game is absolutely amaz­ing.

In Conclusion

The Meaningful Game is that game which stands a chance of co-existing with other impor­tant works of art, a game which is cre­ated, first and fore­most, to be good art.  It can be of any genre, can be single- or multi-player, can be for any con­sole or device.  The Meaningful Game is the game which shat­ters any seri­ous argu­ment about whether or not games can be art, the game which can be shown to the world and rec­om­mended with­out reser­va­tion or dis­claimer, no “it’s great, but,” no “pretty good for a video game.”  The Meaningful Game is a mas­ter­piece, on par with Beethoven’s Fifth and To Kill a Mockingbird; its appear­ance will con­clu­sively prove that videogames can not only be art, but great art.