Novelty and Mastery

So, a while back I said I was going to write a three-part series on Dragon Age II and things like enti­tle­ment, but as I’ve repeat­edly tried to draft said arti­cles, I’ve real­ized that they mostly amount to me whin­ing a bunch.  So, very briefly, here is a sum­mary of the salient points I was going to make:

1. Gamers: if you want games to be art, don’t com­plain when devel­op­ers do things you don’t expect them to do.  It’s only not very good art that only caters to what you want and never attempts to expand your hori­zons.  If, how­ever, you only want games to be enter­tain­ment, then, you know.  Carry on.

2. Gamers: stop whin­ing all the damn time.  Seriously.  You sound like chil­dren.  Remember the stat that the aver­age gamer is 33?  No one famil­iar with the aver­age forum post is likely to believe that sta­tis­tic.

3. Companies (I’m look­ing at you, EA): while we under­stand you have to make money in order to make games, don’t turn out half-finished games hop­ing to pull a fast one.  You don’t hurt us, mind, but you do hurt your­selves and your fran­chises.  And you also look like jerks.

So, with those points said, let’s move on to what I really want to talk about now: the con­cept of inno­va­tion, pri­mar­ily inspired by Portal 2.

The Catalyst

Last week I finally got around to replay­ing Portal 2, and for the sake of this arti­cle, I am going to take it as read that the game is very, very, very good, both as a puz­zle game and as art.  I’m pretty sure this is an uncon­tro­ver­sial state­ment, but if you hap­pen to dis­agree, com­ment below and I’ll be happy to dis­cuss the point– I’m not going to waste a lot of time preach­ing to the choir up here in the main arti­cle, though.

So, upon fin­ish­ing Portal 2, as I began to think about what it was that made the game so great, I real­ized some­thing: the game, for all its bril­liance, seems to do rel­a­tively lit­tle to inno­vate in the form.

It is far from stag­nant, but it gen­er­ally sticks to the tried-and-true for­mat Valve has used for sev­eral games now: strictly first-person, silent pro­tag­o­nist, a “less is more” approach to plot, no (or at least very few) real cutsce­nes, and a prodi­gious amount of detail.  Further, while there are sev­eral novel mechan­ics not present in Portal 1, most of these come from an exist­ing inde­pen­dent game whose devel­op­ers were absorbed into the stu­dio.  (This was true of the base mechan­ics of the first game, too).

In short, the game doesn’t really seem to do all that much that is new, yet it’s nearly-universally regarded as bril­liant.  This seems at odds with the way we usu­ally talk about inno­va­tion as being a nec­es­sary part of a good game.  Games which do not bring any­thing new to the table are “stale,” or “tired,” we say.  We desire “fresh,” “new,” and “novel” con­cepts.

This seems, then, to raise a few prob­lems.

1. If games need to do new things in order to be artis­ti­cally worth­while, how can we under­stand games like Portal 2 to really be good?

2. If games must do new things in order to be artis­ti­cally worth­while, does this mean that a game’s artis­tic value is entirely depen­dent on its posi­tion in time?  Does the same game become bet­ter or worse entirely because of its con­text, or is there any­thing we can under­stand to be purely objec­tive about a game’s qual­ity?

In other words, what is it to inno­vate?

This is obvi­ously a pretty big ques­tion, and I’m hardly going to be able to deal with every piece and sub­tlety it deserves.  Further, it has to do with a lot more than just video games, and as such, much of this post will be pretty applic­a­ble to any artis­tic medium.  But I think that there is a quick dis­tinc­tion we can make which will help us begin to answer these ques­tions.

This dis­tinc­tion is that between what I will call inno­vat­ing for­ward ver­sus inno­vat­ing upward.  Or, in slightly more palat­able terms, it is the dif­fer­ence between nov­elty and mas­tery.

(As usual, it is impor­tant to note that this is not a hard dichotomy– many games and other works of art are very good at inno­vat­ing in both direc­tions, though some def­i­nitely prefer to empha­size one over the other.)

Novelty, or Innovating Forward

Strictly speak­ing, this is prob­a­bly what the word “inno­va­tion” really means.  To aim for nov­elty in a work of art is to aim for new ideas, ideas which have not been done before, to “think out of the box.”  This, I think, is what is usu­ally meant by “inno­va­tion.”  These new ideas can be tech­no­log­i­cal advances, advances in form, or any other kind of push for­ward.

Novelty is about break­ing the rules, and allow­ing the artist and observer to expe­ri­ence new things which were not pre­vi­ously con­sid­ered options in art.  Many of the artists, com­posers, and writ­ers we revere most are known at least pri­mar­ily for their con­tri­bu­tions to nov­elty.  Good works which aim at nov­elty aim to push bound­aries, and great works of nov­elty shat­ter the exist­ing rules and par­a­digms, all the while mak­ing us won­der why we ever imposed such strin­gent rules in the past.  Novelty is impor­tant because it pre­vents art from becom­ing stale or stag­nant, and it is gen­er­ally excit­ing, and fre­quently icon­o­clas­tic.

The trou­ble with focus­ing on nov­elty, of course, is the risk.  New ideas are untested, and while some are bril­liant advances, oth­ers are dead-ends.  Further, even if an artist does cre­ate a new idea which works very well, its first few incar­na­tions are likely to be halt­ing and awk­ward, as the artist strug­gles to come to grips with the ram­i­fi­ca­tions of the idea.  Thus, while most of the great works of nov­elty are valu­able in and of them­selves, (Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 and Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, though quite novel, hardly sac­ri­fice qual­ity to that end), oth­ers are pri­mar­ily mem­o­rable for their effects on the out­side world, rather than their own intrin­sic qual­ity.  As an anal­ogy, we revere the Wright Brothers not for mak­ing a par­tic­u­larly good air­plane, but for the act of mak­ing an air­plane at all.  As air­planes go, the Wright Flyer is pretty lousy.

Novelty is fre­quently empha­sized in game devel­op­ment, and with good rea­son.  As we are still very much in the ado­les­cence of gam­ing as an artis­tic medium, there are a lot of fun­da­men­tal ideas we still need to sort out.  We are barely learn­ing how to com­mu­ni­cate sto­ries well in the medium of video games, and are only at the very out­er­most edge of the sorts of won­der­ful ways this medium can be uti­lized for artis­tic expres­sion.  As such, most of what we need are good, new ideas.

Also, let’s not get too full of our­selves, it’s a lot eas­ier to sell a game with a slo­gan like “new and excit­ing com­bat mechan­ics like you’ve never seen,” than “com­bat mechan­ics that are exactly the same as the last sev­eral incar­na­tions of the series, but slightly pol­ished.”

The dif­fi­culty we face with con­stantly empha­siz­ing nov­elty is that we fre­quently end up with games that are full of a lot of good ideas, but aren’t ter­ri­bly well-executed.  I have played a lot of games lately (L.A. Noire, Metro 2033, Alan Wake) which, though full of great new ideas, fail to hold together when viewed as a coher­ent whole.  The new ideas them­selves often need much more atten­tion, or are, in some cases, so novel and inno­v­a­tive that the artists who had the ideas have no idea how best to employ them.  We end up with a lot of games that are inter­est­ing as mile­stones to mark the begin­nings of ideas, but rel­a­tively few games that will stand the test of time as truly worth­while expe­ri­ences out­side of their imme­di­ate con­text.

The dark side of nov­elty, of course, is that it’s addic­tive.  It’s fun and excit­ing to break the rules, and this leads to the cre­ation of nov­elty for its own sake in art.  That’s the sort of behav­ior that results in ran­dom, non­sen­si­cal “per­for­mance art” pieces that serve lit­tle pur­pose beyond sim­ply being odd or novel (note - I'm not saying every performance is nonsensical!).  So far as I know, no one has sat, naked and cross-legged, in the mid­dle of Times Square with a baked potato bal­anced on his head while a woman plays “Scotland the Brave” over and over again on an ill-tuned bag­pipe for three straight hours.  That would cer­tainly be novel.  But it would prob­a­bly not be ter­ri­bly worth­while if there was no thought behind it.

That, of course, is an extreme exam­ple, but the point holds in games, too.  It is impor­tant to remem­ber that nov­elty is not an end-in-itself.  When one exper­i­ments with new ideas, the goal is to find bet­ter ways to com­mu­ni­cate ideas or cre­ate expe­ri­ences.  The goal of think­ing out­side the box is to allow your­self to see things from a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive, thereby enabling you to notice details or con­cepts you might have missed.  It’s not that there is some­thing inher­ently more valu­able about the out­side of the box.

In this way, nov­elty is forward-moving inno­va­tion– it takes the medium into new and inter­est­ing places, and opens up new ways of expe­ri­enc­ing games.

Mastery, or Innovating Upward

Johann Sebastian Bach is not a com­poser gen­er­ally asso­ci­ated with inno­va­tion or nov­elty.  Bach did not really intro­duce new forms of music into the baro­que lex­i­con, nor did he sub­stan­tially change the types of instru­ments usu­ally used in baro­que music.  Towards the end of his life and after his death, he was regarded as being some­what old-fashioned when com­pared to the new and excit­ing “clas­si­cal” style.  Bach, in short, is not par­tic­u­larly famous for break­ing the rules.

What Bach did do is take the exist­ing rules and forms of baro­que music and use them to pro­duce most of the best exam­ples of that style of music in his­tory.  No one before or since has shown such utter mas­tery of the forms of baro­que music, and it is dif­fi­cult to imag­ine that any­one ever will.  Bach, then, did not break the rules or push music for­ward, as such.  Instead, he explored and unlocked the true poten­tial con­tained within the exist­ing ideas — pushed them upward to greater heights than they had yet seen.

I believe this should be under­stood as a kind of inno­va­tion, because while you would not say that Bach gen­er­ally did things that were novel, exactly, nei­ther could you say that he was stag­nat­ing the form.  He pushed music to great things, and stands pretty much undis­puted as one of the great­est com­posers of all time.

We value this brand of inno­va­tion because it allows us, gen­er­ally, to have deeper expe­ri­ences than those con­cerned purely with nov­elty.  Observing or inter­act­ing with a mas­ter­ful work of art may not always be as ini­tially excit­ing, but by choos­ing to worry less about how to break the rules or where to push the envelope for­ward, the artist can focus instead on cre­at­ing the deep­est, purest expe­ri­ence a given set of rules or con­ven­tions allows.  In other words, while it is def­i­nitely good that not all poetry needs to be in son­net form, the son­net can be used to pro­duce won­der­ful works of art.

Focusing too much on mas­tery is not with­out its draw­backs, how­ever.  It is a rel­a­tively short step to go from “obey­ing the rules of the son­net is a great way to write poetry” to “all poetry must be writ­ten in son­net form.”  If a medium or a cul­ture focuses too much on mas­tery with­out any room for nov­elty, it will even­tu­ally stag­nate.  After Bach, there were really only so many more things that could be done with his con­ven­tions.  It is rather unlikely any­one is going to write a bet­ter baro­que chorale.

Gaming, as I men­tioned before, does tend to focus on nov­elty over mas­tery, and I think that makes sense.  Many of the rules and con­ven­tions of gam­ing are so new and untested that it makes sense to keep try­ing on new ideas.  But it is nev­er­the­less help­ful to some­times take a step back from the arms race and sim­ply use the tools one has to pro­duce some­thing like a great work of art, and that’s the sort of game Portal 2 is.

Portal 2 isn’t per­fect.  For one, there are a few too many sweep­ing envi­ron­ments with lit­tle to do other than “look really hard for the one patch of con­crete you can por­tal to.”  (Though I think “there are too many pretty things” is a pretty good prob­lem to have.)  I don’t exactly mean to sug­gest that it is the apoth­e­o­sis of the cur­rent first per­son puz­zle genre, or that it ought to be under­stood as a Meaningful Game (though I think it maybe stands a bet­ter chance at that title than most).  That said, it is very hard to imag­ine what Valve could have done to make Portal 2 sub­stan­tially bet­ter.  For while it does not seem to push the medium for­ward that much, it cer­tainly shows mas­tery and inno­vates upward by using Valve’s con­ven­tions about as well as we’ve ever seen them used.

Upward mov­ing inno­va­tion, then, or mas­tery, seems to be the process of tak­ing pri­mar­ily exist­ing rules and cre­at­ing the best work of art one can out of that sys­tem.

Conclusion

As I said before, these are not hard, strictly-delineated cat­e­gories.  Most games that inno­vate do so in at least some of both ways, and many of the true greats in art simul­ta­ne­ously restruc­tured the way peo­ple viewed the medium and show­cased excel­lent exe­cu­tion of the new ideas they spawned.

So, I wish to con­clude with a few bul­let points.

First, that nov­elty is not an end-in-itself, that for­ward inno­va­tion must be done with pur­pose, and not just for kicks.

Second, that you should never be afraid to try out new ideas if you think there is any chance the new ideas will bet­ter serve your ends than the ones you’re com­fort­able with.  Gamers: remem­ber that you are not enti­tled to games remain­ing exactly the same, and never chang­ing the for­mu­las you like.  Developers should be free to try new ideas with­out fear­ing con­stant screech­ing of fan­boys at every change.

Third, that even as we strug­gle to push the medium of video games for­ward through the intro­duc­tion of novel ideas and con­stant for­ward inno­va­tion, occa­sion­ally it is good to take a step back, look at the tools we have cre­ated, and show­case the won­der­ful things we already know how to do.  Games like Portal 2 may not reshape the medium the way Doom or Super Mario Brothers or World of Warcraft did, but they do show­case the great things that artists can do with games, even as they help pave the way for the next great works of art.

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Postscript:

I had intended to work in a link to this arti­cle, but the para­graph in which it was to reside has since been proven unwor­thy.  So, though it’s not imme­di­ately rel­e­vant to this topic, it’s about Portal 2, and it’s an inter­est­ing ques­tion.  The blog on which it was posted is also very much worth check­ing out– the author had some very inter­est­ing and intel­li­gent things to say about games, and I find it par­tic­u­larly inter­est­ing because he fre­quently talked about rac­ing games, a genre with which I have lit­tle expe­ri­ence.