Posts Tagged ‘Games as Art’

The gaming audience has expanded in the last decade. From the pastime of children and cool/geek dads, games have widened their reach to embrace almost everyone. Whether it is annoying you with Mafia Wars invites on Facebook, or quietly playing Sudoku on an iPhone, the chances are each of your friends spends at least a small percentage of their life ‘gaming’ (even the sporty ones you think looks down their nose at you).

Casual gamers (or non-self identifying gamers) of course make up a vast proportion of the gaming populous, people who use social games as a mild distraction between emails at work. But the expansion of gaming’s acceptance isn’t limited to these ‘uncommitted’ groups. The children who used to play are now professional people and, contrary to the protestation’s of their mother, they never grew out of gaming.

As gamers aged their interests outside gaming diversified, and they wanted this reflected in their games. New genres emerged to appeal to these new demographics. Games designed to cater for ever facet of life could be found. Social, party and casual games all bought the hobby out of the bedroom and in to the public consciousness. Even traditional games started to see a change, with mature titles (in the literal sense of the word, not gore and oversized boobies) starting to gain visibility along with the stereotypical ‘kiddie’ diversions.

A mature development community, eager to stretch their creative legs, met this audience. From the big budget boxed titles to smaller downloadable titles, more variety and risks began to be seen in the topics games addressed.

Scattered among this wealth of new titles are products that it would be hard to clarify as games in the traditional sense of the word. While some have argued that they are games because you can ‘play’ them, I maintain that they are more akin to interactive art. Programs that allow artists to create playgrounds, allowing the audience to interact with their vision in a manner no other medium could.

Which brings me to my memory of the last decade, my discovery of The Path. I had intended to make my decade memories less recent but I find it hard to ignore the impact one 2009 title had on me. I have written extensively about it already, extolled the virtues of the game and its developers (Tale of Tales) at length on numerous sites. Yet still I feel a need to revisit it.

Perversely I am sure I have spent more time writing about The Path than I ever did playing it, but that is exactly why I am so impressed by it. Like any piece of art it stays with its viewer after the experience itself is finished. It inspires conversations and debates for me to this day and now informs my outlook on the medium. These statements are by no means exclusive to The Path, but while most ‘games’ just affect my view of gaming, The Path that directly challenged my views of art and the world before it tried to entertain me.

To further elaborate on The Path would be a disservice to the developer/artists at Tale of Tales. To ask you see their work, its fragility and innocence, is the best compliment I can pay them (even if you only try the demo). If you do, pay attention to your character when she idle, to the artefacts on screen as you move through the world, think about what they were trying to convey through every element of the design, and the story they wanted to tell. If you feel nothing, then it simply wasn’t a piece of art that spoke to you; there will be some that do, if you continue to keep an open mind about the titles you consume.

I had always though games were capable of being art but The Path was my first experience with something committed to the feeling and message the designer/artist wanted to produce. Since then I have delved deeper, learnt of other games that managed to be just as thought provoking (such as “Every day the same dream”), but The Path was my first and continues to hold a special place for me.

I make no secret of the fact I no longer consider myself a hardcore gamer. I play to experience the worlds games have to offer. Developer Tale of Tales manage to cater to my touristic sensibilities. They design interactive experiences that provide portals to exploration and narrative rather than game play. I understand that this isn’t something that is to everyone’s tastes, unguided experiences that offer little in the way of action, but to me they prove a beautiful escape.

Tale of Tales most notable title to date is The Path, and while it would be misleading to call it a game, it is fascinating interactive world. The Path essentially retells the story of Little Red Riding Hood, but with six Ms. Hood to select from. Each of the young ladies sits in a room with a distinctly gothic aesthetic engaged in a pass time that communicates more of their personality than text ever could. From the youngest that plays with toys, to eldest who talks on the phone, you feel like you know each instantly. Their age and personality affects their desires and the stories they later experience. After choosing your Ms Hood you are set on a path (or The Path) and are tasked with simply following the straight trail to grandmothers house.

As a gamer I set off along the path, intent on achieving the objective set to me. It struck me how distinctively my character walked, how suggestive it was and how indicative it was of the personality she had displayed when I selected her. She, I, continued on, it was slow and after a few minutes it became tedious. The lush scenery and dream like effects around me soon wore thin as I made my way ever forward. After five minutes I arrived at the house and entered.

Inside grandmas’ the world switched to first person, but movement was limited. My options reduced to hammering the ‘W’ key to move onward toward grandma. I found her, in bed with a stuffed wolf watching over her. I sat on the bed and slept next to her. According to the result screen that followed this, I had failed.

It became clear my task was to explore the forest (and somewhat ominously according to the site, learn my lesson). Ignore the one rule the game had set me. With this revelation I jump back in and was gifted with an onscreen prompt teaching me how to run. I set off in to the forest in search of… anything, before heading to grandma’s house for my ‘reward’. The world felt ephemeral and every interaction magical, though not always in a good way. It was like a fairytale come to life, but with no white knight, just a young girl playing in a forest, for better or worse.

It is an acquired taste, and you have to be open to the idea of being a young girl alone in the forest, of the excitement and fear it could elicit. It is a world that is poetic and enticing to me and so I cannot help but recommend that you at least download the prologue.

After some time with The Path I visited the site again to see if they had any other offerings for my Mac, and I found The Graveyard. Where The Path offers you a storybook unfolding in a fairyland dreamscape and a tales of lost youth, The Graveyard offers something far grounded in reality and at the opposite end of life. It unfolds the last minutes (or not) of an old woman’s life on her visit to a cemetery. It is simple, but it its simplicity that makes it powerful.

The Graveyard offers nothing more to do than sit on a bench, but to reach the bench the old woman must walk painfully slowly past the tombstones of friends and family. As she travels its clear to see how the effort of the journey is effecting her, the pain she exhibits as she shift her weight to her cane and hobbles her way forward. She can deviate from her path, look at the headstones, but this achieves nothing but more pain for her. Upon arriving and the bench she slowly sits, and you hear a wistful song of her lost friends and family. Then you can hobble her out of the cemetery, unless you have bought the full game, in which case there is a chance she will die on the bench. Dropping the cane at her feet.

People talk about how Metal Gear Solid 4’s final ‘microwave’ scene managed to create a connection with the protagonist (Snake) through the pounding of the ‘X’ button as he crawled painfully forward. But by some point in the game Snake became capable of that feat. He was a hero, and despite all of his frailties you knew he could do it. There is none of this in The Graveyard, the woman is simply old, and struggling to make it to a bench. Nothing she does in your time with her shows her as anything but frail and weak. The empathy you feel for her pain is created through the struggle portrayed through her animation, and the length of time you have to spend with her in reaching her mundane goal.

I actually bought both games in full, costing me a total of less that £10. The Graveyard’s value over that of its demo is questionable, but I was happy to purchase it to support Tale of Tales and their continued work, in the hope that some of their more ambitious projects will come to fruition.

Most notably of the group’s upcoming offerings is Fatale, a tale inspired by the biblical tale of Salome. My new found love of the Tale of Tales team alone would be enough to make me eagerly anticipate the game, but my excitement reached fever pitch when it was announced that Takayoshi Sato is the games character designer. Sato was also involved with the character creation in the first two (and best) Silent Hill titles, creating unique and evocative characters that supplemented the games story and mood perfectly. To have these two artistic forces combined talents in a single project is fulfilling a fantasy I previously didn’t know I had.

As a game tourist and a horror game fan I look forward to seeing what interactive poetry Tale of Tales will offer in the future. If you have similar sensibilities, or just want to try something different, I would recommend you check out their offerings and keep and eye on their upcoming projects.

Often when we talk about the art of game design a comparison with movies soon follows. It is not a surprise that the two are so frequently talked about in the same breath as many gamers have an interest in movies and they regularly share themes and ideas. Also, and perhaps more importantly to the wider audience, the media on which we view them is the same. Fortunately for this article the comparison is also a useful place from which to look at the evolution of games.

In truth the two forms of entertainment are very different, with the passive nature of film making the experience far easier for the author to sculpt a consistent narrative. The illusion is rarely stretched by the viewer, and no one deliberately tries to break the experience. But both media exist in a similar space in most people’s consciousness and there are frequent crossovers between the two. Usefully the two are also both very recent forms of entertainment and as such cinema proves a useful starting point from which to draw analogies to help us better visualise the phase of the development games are in.

If we look at cinema’s development (I am not a scholar here, just an enthusiast) we can view how the media progressed and was put to better use, both in the technology and its creative application. The very first examples of cinema were merely tech demos (for want of a better term), a proof of concept of what the medium could do. Upon seeing this new art form people were inspired. The lack of sound meant workarounds had to be used; on screen text helped to progress plot and live pianists (later gramophones) produced additional atmosphere for the filmgoer. Despite these limitations people started to produce comedies and romances, drawing heavily on classic storytelling methods. Even theatrical stage techniques (such as mime) were applied to great effect, producing a spellbinding magic for early audiences.

As engineers became more familiar with the technology and inspired by the work of directors they too were inspired to advance the medium. Sound and then colour came to movies offering more possibilities to creative storytellers. Still theatrical elements were applied, but suddenly location, camera tricks and special effect became used to great advantage. But it didn’t change the fact that for a long time the majority of movies were stage shows committed to screen. Closed sets and simple plots that could have been recreated in theaters. The movie musicals of the fifties are a prime example of this. Drawing heavily on the cabarets and stage musicals of the time, story was for the most part filler to the huge Technicolor set pieces that were the focus of the show.

Movies such as Citizen Kane (1941) left the crutch of theatre behind and formed a new narrative style for film. Utilizing the tools available director Orson Welles managed to take people on a journey that couldn’t have been created in any other entertainment media. This laid the groundwork for modern cinema, but it was still some time before it became more widely adopted. More recently movies like Memento managed to use the medium of film to contort the expectations of what a story could be, how flow could be manipulated to misdirect but not cheat us. Cinema is far from finished in its development but it has managed to craft a strong fundamental base to its art that will form the foundation moving forward.

Thanks to the age of their conception games have undergone an incredibly rapid advancement. The jumps seen in the thirty something years of gaming’s life would be the equivalent of the first seventy years or so of cinema, and in many ways with theatre to draw upon cinema had a head start. But gaming is not yet at a point where I feel we could fairly compare it to modern film masterpieces such as The Usual Suspects or A Clockwork Orange.

Developers are just now moving beyond the cinematic equivalent of the death of the musical. We have moved through the technological barriers which limited designer’s creativity and are just beginning to limp away from the crutch of the cinema. Hopefully soon game stories can be told without gameplay being a way to bridge the gap to the next plot element. Games are now able to start coming to terms with how the manipulation and interactivity they offer the audience makes them fundamentally different. This seems obvious but only recently have games stared breaking from a fairly basic sport or movie narrative structure (at least in terms of the underlying goal).

Indie/art games have been doing this for some time and recently their lead is starting to be followed by the mainstream. Ico managed to use the interaction with your computer ally to form a bond different from those experienced in movies. Without speech or heavy exposition the game manages through interaction alone to form an attachment. Action titles are also starting to apply the lessons learned through the evolution of the industry. Though the story is more cinematic in its pacing Call of Duty 4 manages to place you in the role of four characters during the course of its story. By virtue of the first person perspective the game was able to allow you to experience each character’s story. While many games utilise the first person to great effect, Call of Duty 4 created situations rarely effectively portrayed in either games or movies. By allowing the player to control characters who were powerless against their fate the game toyed with the audience’s expectations of empowerment. By doing this the developers (Infinity Ward) displayed an awareness of the medium that is only recently becoming part of mainstream gaming.

Games have come along way. Indeed I think everything that anything a designer could want to do in a game (at least in the form we recognise them in today) can now be done, technically at least. That isn’t to say that everything has been done, but the mechanics are in place to do them (excluding a huge leap within the field of AI). There are still advancements that will alter how we interact with games, but the ability is there to produce any world. Graphics and physics will continue to improve but the environment can be produced. Hopefully we are now at a point where our directors and our storytellers, can focus on the art of their craft, untied from the worries of what they are able to do, focusing instead on what they want to achieve.

If this generation of consoles last longer than previous ones (as some are anticipating) then this can only be a good thing for the art of game design. They will be freed from the pressure of relearning hardware and the expectation of pushing the visual fidelity. Developers will be free to learn how to best use the tools they have, pushing the medium in new and interesting directions rather than simply iterating on what has gone before.

Often when we talk about games being art we approach the subject in terms of definitions. People seem to forget that usually to the observer art elicits something more than a pragmatic break down of its construction. Unless specifically tasked to do so, I rarely look at a painting or listen to music and dissect it. I see the work in its entirety and feel the emotions it provokes.

When I approach a game it is in much the same way. Some parts of me will immediately assess it on a level of technical competence but my reaction is an emotional one towards the design aesthetic and story. It is the range of emotions that a game can elicit however than make the medium less versatile than most of its contemporaries as an art form.

Games side towards more aggressive, adrenaline fueled reactions. These are no less worthy responses to art than any other emotion, but if these are the only feelings games are able to conjure then does undermine their merit as an art form? If it cannot convey more subtle or sensitive emotions effectively then is it less than its peers?

Some more recent and niche titles are attempting to redress this balance and introduce a greater range of sentiment. For instance Braid’s story centers on the protagonist’s quest to repair a broken relationship (explicitly at least). This move is currently being made by independent developers, who produce such titles as downloadable releases to limit the cost and risk but this limits their sales and exposure. Fortunately as in all media indie trends are starting to filter down (or up) into mainstream titles.

Ico is one such full release which springs to mind. By revolving it game mechanic and story around a dependent partner, Yorda, it creates an attachment rarely experienced in games. Your wards vulnerability makes the connection you form incredibly powerful and it achieves without the use of language, relying instead on the interaction and tactile feedback felt between the characters. Even blockbuster title like Gears of War 2 now try to introduce more sensitive elements to their story as we see (the character) Dom’s quest to be reunited with his wife forming much of the game’s narrative drive.

But the question posed by the title of this article stands; will a game ever make us cry? It is a question which requires some clarification. For some we may have already reached a point where a game can educe such powerful emotions, but the trigger is never the game itself. The gameplay, the element that defines it as a game is not instigator but a story element usually expressed through a cut scene or similar device.

I don’t know if this is something that will ever be achieved, the barriers maybe insurmountable. The narrative function play provides is not the slow, contemplative segments but the fraught action. People simply don’t experience sentimental moments during the adrenalin rush, it comes in the subsequent lull. We may soon experience a greater range of emotions during our time engaged with a game but I suspect it will be a long time until we feel them during our actual interactions.