“Art” Games.
This is probably going to be the angriest thing I’ve ever written, and it will likely move into “derelict rant” territory.
Over the last couple of years, a new trend has begun in video games: the “art game”.
There’s nothing fundamentally wrong with art games as a concept. In some particularly inspired cases, it can result in some pretty creative results.
Take, for example, Braid. It isn’t based around any particularly creative gameplay mechanics, as the use of the control of time as a feature has been used many times before (for example, Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time or Blinx: The Time Sweeper), but its use of these gameplay mechanics resulted in some clever puzzles, and even though I think most of the narrative was overwrought and pretensious (although I loved the ambiguous ending, despite/because it wasn’t related to the story), I can’t deny that it was well-written, for what it was.
However, my issue with this entire “genre” is that it represents the basest form of art fuckery. Many of these games are made by the people who make me hate going inside of any business in the downtown part of my city. They’re the people who are talking to naive women about how they’re feeling so much “anguish” over everything that’s going on in their life, but totally aren’t just trying to get laid, because they’re sensitive guys, and own every album by Clap Your Hands Say Yeah. They’re the people talking about how their “art collective”, which is totally not just him and his bar buddies who constantly talk about their horrible ideas that they never have time to finish (even though they’re always just wandering around the city), and are totally not just trying to get laid. They’re the kind of guys who bring girls to coffee shops and talk about “a philosophical concept” they’ve been “trying to wrap their head around” or the “project” they’re “trying to get off the ground”, but totally aren’t just trying to get laid. Honestly, I’d rather spend the rest of my life with unwashed hicks who alternate between talking about fishing, NASCAR, and hating black people, because at least they aren’t full of fucking bullshit. I seriously can’t go to certain places downtown because this kind of blatant horseshit literally makes me physically ill.
Now, they’re moving onto ruining my hobby with psuedo-philosophical crap.
Take, for example, Passage, by Jason Rohrer. The “game” endeavors to tell the story of life within an early CGA-graphic style (think King’s Quest). There is no real storyline or narrative, so all you have is the game itself. The game is about walking right. You walk right, then you have a wife that walks right with you, then she dies, then you die. Don’t get me wrong, I understand the point, it’s a simple simulation of life shown in a video game. Artistic? Yes, much in the same way as when you’re in 8th grade and think you’ve come up with the totally original idea of image as metaphor. Fun? Of course not.
Therein lies the problem; why do the creators of these so-called “art games” not realize that art can actually is aesthetically pleasing? Creating “avant garde” or “nontraditional” art is nowadays overdone to the point of being more cliche than traditional art. It’s actually looped around to the point where it would be fresh and original if someone created a piece of visual art that was actually beautiful instead of “forcing you to take a skewed interpretation of reality” or something. I think the problem is that our society has made it too easy for people without talent to be praised as talented.
Talent doesn’t necessarily have to come in the form of traditional skill, of course; to relate this to video games (which I doubt I’ve done a very good job of so far), what I mean is that you don’t have to be able to create poly-rendered mipmap anti-aliased z-buffers in order to create something with meaning. It doesn’t matter if it looks like crap, or has a terrible soundtrack, or even if it’s buggy. It can still have meaning and be enjoyable. However, many arthouse “game” developers miss this point, and think as long as something has a philosophical theme, even if it’s an incredibly cliche and amateur theme, it’s automatically great art. Just because you use a lot of five-dollar words in the title and have quotes from Nietzsche doesn’t mean you’ve created art. The opposite is also true; a game doesn’t cease to be art or is devoid of deep meaning just because the game is fun or even simplistic. Look at Mega Man 9. Beyond just being fun, I think the game has deep meaning in that it is meant to inspire the same feeling of wonderment and fun the player would have had as a kid playing the original series, or even to inspire that same feeling in players who never got a chance to enjoy it when they were younger. By returning to the aesthetic values of such games intentionally, rather than by necessity, the designers have made a conscious artistic choice, thus making an entirely valid piece of art in the medium, possibly even more valid (depending on the definition being used) because they actually managed to create something that exists within the medium of video games, rather than just being a game-like creation.
I think the reason why this is so difficult to understand is that many of these artists misunderstand the medium. That’s completely understandable; most other popular forms of art are very simple. A painting is paint on anything. A movie is anything that is filmed. But a video game is not just anything on a computer that requires input. It’s possible to stretch the traditional definition of a painting or a movie because the technical definition allows it. The technical definition of a game is as follows:
“a competitive activity involving skill, chance, or endurance on the part of two or more persons who play according to a set of rules, usually for their own amusement or for that of spectators.”
Obviously, many arthouse “games” do not fit under this definition. This being the technical definition, it’s not possible to expand it to include things that are not that, just how you can’t change the technical definition of banana to mean carburator. Believe me, I’ve tried. The repair cost $2800.
If you change the definition to mean “any art that requires user input”, that would include all kinds of art that obviously is not a game. Take, for example, Yoko Ono’s Ceiling Piece, well known as the work that intrigued John Lennon and led to their relationship. The piece is a ladder that reaches the ceiling, where a magnifying glass hangs. You are meant to climb the ladder and pick up the magnifying glass (already, this is far more interactivity than most arthouse games offer). Upon picking up the glass and holding it up to the ceiling, the word “yes” is found. Obviously this is not a video game. If you stretch the definition to include anything that requires user input on a computer, then I’m enjoying art right now, by using Internet Explorer on my shitty work computer.
Of course, maybe this is just splitting hairs. We don’t have to use a technical definition, because art cannot always be defined in technical terms. This is true, but the problem there is that “game” can be defined in technical terms. I can’t stand it when people talk about how they work in the medium of video games. Unless you’re actually making a game, you are not working in the medium of video games. You are creating interactive visual art. There’s a huge difference. This can be rectified! You can create an actual game to carry your message. Do you know how I know this? Because games have been doing it for over 20 years. What’s the difference between Rod Humble’s grossly pretentious Stars Over Half-Moon Bay: The Gentle Bite of the Ouroboros and, say, 187 Ride or Die? One is a game, and one is not, although they’re both at an equal level of fun. Also, one is stupid, while the other is retarded. There’s a panoply of differences. They both make artistic points, so just because one is pretensious and one is dumb doesn’t mean one is more artistically valid than the other. One does, however, succeed in existing in the medium it claims to exist in.
To wrap this aimless rant up, I guess what I’m trying to say is that, for the most part, the whole art games “movement” is utterly full of horseshit. Arthouse Games, a blog concerning the movement, sums up everything I hate about it. The tagline of the site is “Insisting that our medium can reach beyond entertainment”. That would be fine, if designers and gamers had been doing that (and doing a much better job at it, for that matter) for years, or even if they were at least actually using video games as a medium.
Ok, I feel better now. Back to dick jokes and 80s references.
Optimus Prime? More like OptPENIS Prime. lolol
