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“It’s an extremely simplistic question, but the spirit of it is worthwhile. In essence, we’re asking, ‘What are video games capable of as a medium?’” says Ian Bogost, Ph.D., founder of the organization Persuasive Games. “Even asking such a question is an indication that our industry is maturing and games are becoming a dominant form of entertainment,” Denis Dyack adds. “The most popular forms of entertainment – TV, music, poetry, books – went through the same perception evolution.”
In order to answer the set question we have to clarify what we mean by games. Unlike watching a movie, reading a book, or listening to a song, playing a game is an active experience. Player(s) can interact with the rules, the game mechanisms, and the system should respond to their actions. Sports, video games, card games, dice games, board games, pen and paper games, role-playing games, those are all different types of games. The word game connotes play, toys (which differs from games in that there is no objective you are aiming to achieve), children, and this subtext is nowadays fallible. Indeed, when the idea of playing was discovered thousands of years ago, it consisted of simple elements: rules, challenge, interaction, decisions, victory, skill, strategy, chance, score, sides, goals and its main purpose was enjoyment. However, as games evolved, many of these fundamentals lost significance and gradually receded. Many of today’s (especially single-player video) games don’t have competing sides, scores, and victory. These are the types of games that I will examine to decide if games as a medium can be artistic.
Just as we defined what a game is, we must also do that with the word art which will be more subjective and controversial. What is art? Some might say art is anything aesthetic, anything that pleases our senses. Another person might say that art is anything which expresses a message, a feeling, a thought, or a lesson. Another opinion is anything which affects us emotionally. Is a violent movie, such as Die Hard, art, since it evokes a sensation of adrenaline inside us? We can classify emotions into low and high, low being the emotions that appeared earlier in the evolution of the human race, emotions such as fury, fear, hatred, disgust, and adrenaline, and high emotions being those that man learned to feel later, emotions such as love, friendship, empathy, humor. So is art anything that can evoke high emotions in a person? That would elevate some ordinary romance movie to art, which isn’t exactly satisfactory. Let us add another restriction: openness to interpretation. The work shouldn’t literally say what it is trying to communicate. Instead, one should ponder about the work, ultimately realize what it is trying to put across and relate this to his/her life, personality and situation. Making art should be a creative, innovative and inspirational process; the author should use his imagination to design a work. Lastly, art should enlighten us, it should help us “make ourselves more cultured, civilized, and empathetic,” as Roger Ebert stated.
So can video games be art? Firstly, let us discuss if video games are, rather than can be, an art form. Video games are a multi-billion industry, in fact one of the fastest growing in the world. Some games sell dozens of millions of copies and the costs of an average current-generation AAA title is about $10 million. From these mind-boggling numbers, we can undoubtedly say that video games are first and foremost a business. Businesses are for generating money and maintaining the sympathies of stock-holders, artistic values rarely come into consideration. Distributors are afraid to take risks and make novel and innovative games, because there is too much money in jeopardy. That is the reason why every year less new IP’s (intellectual property = brands) are published, as the costs and thus the potential loss increases exponentially.
Also, the fact that games are so complex and so sophisticated has a disadvantage over other art forms. All it requires to write your own story is inspiration, determination, a pen and paper. All you need to film your own movie is inspiration, determination, a camera, a computer and friends. However, to develop your own game, you need the appropriate dev kit (which costs thousands of dollars for each of the three consoles), you need to literally learn a new language to communicate your ideas with the computer, you have to be skilled in computer 2D or 3D art, you have to be able to compose music and so on. Creative people who desire to convey a message through artistic means usually choose literature over a video game because it doesn’t pose as many requirements. Another effect of the complexity of video games is that while a book is written by one person, a team of dozens or even hundreds of people develops a game. Due to this massive number, every person is responsible for just one part of the game, so it is much more problematical to add a subtext to the game. A writer devises a whole book himself, so he imprints his style into it. No one game developer has the control and authority to do that in a team of this many people.
The majority expects pure entertainment from video games, so studios have to develop games which satisfy this demand. The fact is that the main concert in most mainstream games is sales and therefore amusement, so there are usually no intended artistic values. However, that doesn’t mean that these games don’t contain components which could individually be classified as art. A video game consists of other things apart from the gameplay, the rules: music, graphics (the visuals), the design, the game world, animations and dubbing.
The music in a game is itself an art. The primary function of music in a game is the same as in movies, to produce a better experience by building the atmosphere. Music is sometimes licensed and sometimes composed originally for the game, the most well-known composers being Jeremy Soule and Inon Zur. Many games have soundtracks, which are either sold separately or packaged with the game in its Collector’s Edition. Also, there are numerous concerts with composed video game music performed by a live orchestra, for example Symphonic Game Music Concerts held annually in Germany, Play! A Video Game Symphony, held a couple of times a year around the world, and Video Games Live, a series of concerts which increase in quantity every year, 70 shows being schedules for 2009. Video game music is often very majestic and very epic in order to evoke a sense of grandness. If music by itself is considered an art form, why can’t music in a game be regarded as art?
Another element of video games is graphics. Most mainstream games strive to have realistic graphics, therefore they are merely duplicating the world around us. However, there are games with original graphics, which have a more artistic approach because they prefer style over detail. Same as with soundtracks, many games feature a concept art book that is sold separately or comes in the Collector’s Edition. Older games in particular sometimes have hand-drawn (and imported into the game through a scanner) portraits of characters or environments, which can be gorgeous. Board games often have a very appealing look. An example is the trading collectible fantasy card game Magic: The Gathering. When it was launched in 1993, the illustrations for the individual cards were very amateur. Today, having millions of players around the world and the prize pool for Pro Tour-Austin 2009 being a shocking $230 795, Magic has stunning illustration, the finest being Land cards in my opinion, which are Plains, Forest, Island, Mountain or Swamp and portray the spectacular beauty of nature. However, one of the aspects of games that still has to mature is the covers of games. Typically, there is just the main character looking at the camera, yet covers for any medium have a great potential to attract the buyer and, at the same time, have an artistic value. Overall, the visuals of a game are another element that is an art itself.
In video games, design is the creation of the content of the game. The game’s design is the world, plot, pacing, characters, dialogue, scenes, GUI (Graphic User Interface, the menu and such), levels and all of the game’s mechanisms. Let us leave game world for the next paragraph and examine the rest. Today, almost all AAA (big-budget) titles have a plot, even in games where it is unnecessary (such as racing games or strategy games where you are in command of an army or a civilization). This story line is there to explain certain events (e.g. why am I in a war with this country?), to motivate the player, and for pacing the game well. If a story in a book is art, why can’t a story in a video game be art if it’s arguably as complex and as engaging? Pacing in a video game is the balance between fast-tempo scenes, action, and low-tempo scenes, such as exploration, dialogue, puzzles, story and others. The pacing is part of the level design, which is the creation of stages in a game. The level design should be dynamic and it should make the game challenging. In some cases, it also involves creating a powerful scene that stimulates an emotional reaction in the player. Often, the level design conveys a message subconsciously, for example by using architecture, cloud patterns or lightning to direct a player’s attention to an object, a path, a character or any other answer to a problem. The player then has a feeling of triumph that he has discovered the solution, even though the level design was assisting him without his knowledge. Evidence of this is the Developer Commentary found in games developed by Valve, for example Half-Life 2. If you play through a game for a second time, you can activate comments made by the developers about the individual scenes. From that you can realize the elaborate design that goes into every detail of the level. By using this advanced level design, some scenes can make you cry or laugh. Part of the level design is also the learning curve, which is the amount of new techniques the player is taught given the time he spends practicing them. All of these building blocks of games relate to human psychology. Developers have to imagine what effect everything will have on the player, just like a movie director would have to think.
Designing a realistic game setting is very intricate. The world we live in is very complex, so creating a fictional replication requires knowledge about all aspects of the world , ranging from society hierarchy and the role of media to the process of creation of mountains. For the world to be credible, it must not have logical flaws in it. A designer has to think about questions such as “where is it the most likely that a settlement would be established?” One of the very difficult matters is nature. Designers have to observer the environment, how it is formed, the mathematical patterns it follows (for example, φ, the Golden Ratio), the different types of foliage and where they are likely to appear, how water moves when it is acted upon by wind, how weather and seasons proceed, what is the natural habitat for certain animals and other important facts to design the environment to be as convincing as possible. An example of a nonfictional setting is Far Cry 2 by Ubisoft Montreal which is set in present day in Africa. A team of twelve developers flew to Kenya where they observed the ecosystem and took thousands of high-resolution pictures of the wildlife, the foliage, the weather and others so that they could be able to recreate the experience compellingly in their game. Another aspect similar to nature is architecture. A game designer must be acquainted with the laws and principles of architecture. An example of this is Assassin’s Creed by Ubisoft Montreal whic is set in the Holy Land during the Third Crusade. The player spends a great deal of time climbing on buildings, so the architecture must be realistic. Overall, the fictional world in a book is art, so the creation of a video game world should be considered an art as well, in particular with regard to fact that it is many times more complicated, especially when the recreated world is based on an actual place. Also, attempting to reproduce the society we are living in can give us lots of insight into the patterns it follows and the rules that control it.
Another part of video games are the animations and the dubbing. The animations are done by a technology called motion capture in most video games. Motion capture involves an actor with dozens of points on his body performing a motion while a camera is scanning him and transferring the location of the individual points at any moment into the computer. The animator then connects these points with a 3D model and the outcome is that the animation is much more realistic. Dubbing is often performed by professional actors or singers due to the fact that the voice of a character has a great effect on our perception of the character and also, inevitably, for marketing reasons. An example of this is the famous rapper 50 Cent dubbing a soldier in Modern Warfare 2 or Al Pacino dubbing the protagonist, Tony Montana, in the video game adaptation of Scarface. Both the voice-over and motion capture have lots of similarities with drama. The performer must act out a role, either just the voice (dubbing), just the physical movement (motion capture) or both (drama). Tabletop (sometimes called pen and paper) role-playing games also have many similarities with live performing. One person is the Dungeon Master, the narrative of the story, the person who describes the setting to the other players, tells them the outcomes of their actions, and the person who acts out all the non-playable characters. The other players each have their own character with his/her own personality, background and goals and they try to portray him as genuinely as possible. These games vary widely in the amount of structure and rules the game imposes, with some having very few mechanisms and thus resembling improvised drama more than a game (called LARP’s, live-action role-play).
As we can see, many parts of a game (for example music) are considered an art form when they are alone, so why should it cease being aesthetic when it is part of a game? “I feel video games are probably the most advanced form of art thus far in human history,” Denis Dyack suggests. “Not only do video games encompass many of the traditional forms of art (text, sound, video, imagery), but they also uniquely tie these art forms together with interactivity.” An example of this is the video game Bioshock (2007) by Ken Levine and his team 2K Boston/2K Australia. Its aggregated critic score being 95%, it is the 21st best-rated game of all time on all platforms. Bioshock is set in an alternative history in the 1960s in an underwater city of Rapture. “Rapture was envisioned by the Randian business magnate Andrew Ryan, who wanted to create a laissez-faire state to escape increasingly oppressive political, economic, and religious authority on land,” Wikipedia writes. These are some quotes from Andrew Ryan from the game:
"I am Andrew Ryan, and I'm here to ask you a question. Is a man not entitled to the sweat of his brow? 'No!' says the man in Washington, 'It belongs to the poor.' 'No!' says the man in the Vatican, 'It belongs to God.' 'No!' says the man in Moscow, 'It belongs to everyone.' I rejected those answers; instead, I chose something different. I chose the impossible. I chose... Rapture, a city where the artist would not fear the censor, where the scientist would not be bound by petty morality, where the great would not be constrained by the small! And with the sweat of your brow, Rapture can become your city, as well."
"A man chooses, a slave obeys."
"What is the difference between a man and a parasite? A man builds, a parasite asks, 'Where's my share?' A man creates, a parasite says, 'What will the neighbors think?' A man invents, a parasite says, 'Watch out, or you might tread on the toes of God...'"
" In 1919 I fled a county that had been traded in despotism for insanity. The Marxist Revolution simply traded one lie for another. Instead of one man, the Czar, owning the work of all the people, all the people owned the work of all of the people. And so I came to America; where a man could own his own work. Where a man could benefit from the brilliance of his own mind, the strength of his own muscles, the might of his own will."
The whole game discusses society, the role of man, the value of a human life and even political ideologies: Communism, dictatorship, democracy and capitalism. This game isn’t artistic only with its story; the Art Deco styled graphics and the music, composed by Garry Schymann, both won awards for the game. The game sold over 3 million copies, Bioshock 2 is in production and a Bioshock movie was announced, which proves that there is room on the market for big-budget artistic games. We can agree that Bioshock is art, as it fulfills all the conditions we set, but what makes it artistic is the more film-like experience since the subtext is expressed through dialogue (in Andrew’s case monologue) and plot.
So what effect does interactivity have on a game? Film critic Roger Ebert says: “Video games by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control.” Bioshock is an example of a linear game, a game, where the player isn’t free to roam around the world and where he has little impact on the story and the ending. However, most video games utilize interaction in a more convenient way. Through interaction, the game is able to pose moral questions at the player. The majority of nowadays games offer more outcomes than the visibly positive one, with some games having real ethical conflicts, where the result isn’t black and white and doesn’t have an immediate effect. The player can later play through these conflicts, try making different decisions and perceive what influence it will have on the setting, the characters and the plot. Through these moral questions, the developer can very effectively communicate a message and an author of any other medium doesn’t have the ability to do this.
Now that we’d settled upon the fact that video games are art since they consist of many art forms, let us take the question to a next level. Can the mechanisms of a game convey an idea? Just as a poem can be art without illustrations, are the rules of a game alone, independent of all the other art forms, an art? This is a much more problematical question which is difficult to answer in mainstream games because they are gradually depending more on the film-like experience and neglecting the actual gameplay. The only, obviously unintended, spark of gameplay as art is in role-playing games (RPG). In these games, you play a character that is defined by the usual numerical values of attributes like Strength, Dexterity, Constitution, Intelligence, Willpower and Charisma. This provides room for many intriguing philosophical questions, such as “What is more important in life, physical skills or mental skills?”, “Is everyone initially as skilled in total (so the sum of the attributes) as everybody else (meaning that in the game you would always have an equal number of points to distribute amongst the traits) or are some people just more skilled (the number of free points would be decided by chance)?” or “In life, is it better to be skilled in one activity and not skilled in another, or should be strive to find balance between the two?” However, to this day I have no knowledge of an RPG, be it a video game or a board game, which further explores these questions.
We have to delve deep into the realms of indie (independent, without a publisher) games in pursuit of an answer to our question. Here we find an abundance of titles which try to pass on a message just through the means of game rules. An example of a commercial title is World of Goo by 2D Boy. The gameplay consists of manipulating balls made of mud to build a resilient tower and reach the destination with as few goo-ball-sacrifices as possible. This upward motion of the goo balls is very worthy of note; people have always wanted to be as high as possible, believing that they will be closer to God, the heavens, and to the ultimate comprehension of everything and World of Goo explores these ideas. There is an abundance of noncommercial titles that pass on a thought through game mechanisms. The Marriage by Rod Humble is a very simple game with barely any visuals; however, the intended meaning by the author goes up to 600 words. It is very open to interpretation, the topic being how life proceeds after marriage. Jason Rohrer, in his Game Design Sketchbook on the site of the Escapist Magazine, designs a game based on ideas such as immortality, police brutality, regret, idealism or perfectionism. Let me point out that he first chooses the theme, and then he builds a functioning set of rules to make the game enjoyable. This way, it is up to the player to deduce what Rohrer attempted to convey. His most remarkable piece is Passage, which tells the story of life and abruptly ends after five minutes of game time. Even many board games can deliver an idea. Monopoly, when it came out in 1935, explained one of the drawbacks of modern capitalism, monopoly, to the general public. Of course there are a countless number of other games that are undoubtedly artistic but this essay doesn’t provide the opportunity to analyze them.
Games can are art because they combine all the other art forms together. In addition, they have what no other medium has: the potential of making the rules of a game convey a thought, an emotion or a situation. “Some of us grew up with videogames; others didn't. Just like every other medium, the previous generation has trouble grasping its legitimacy as an expressive form. This happened with the novel, with rock & roll, with movies, with comics. Over time, this will change,” as Ian Bogost, Ph.D. puts it. Let us wait and see.
