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.