Counterpoint: Games Are About Winning, Art is About Experience

I apologize for the lateness; this is what I get for trying to mess with Blogger's HTML to get pullquotes when I've only a basic familiarity with coding.  I know what I'm doing now, so hopefully in the future I can insert pullquotes without severely delaying the articles.

Back in 2006, deservedly revered film critic Roger Ebert spoke out saying that video games were not, and indeed never could be, art (it's a few questions down).  This claim was followed up twice in the following years, once further stating his argument in 2007 then again in 2010, followed soon after by an interesting assertion that he was still right, but never should have brought it up.  If you were a gamer during these times, you no doubt remember the uproar.

Unfortunately, all the responses to this focused on Ebert himself rather than his arguments.  It seemed there were only two responses: seething hatred for the man who dared to make such ignorant statements about something so clearly out of his experience and understanding, and completely writing him off as an old man ranting against a new art form that isn't his.  While the basis for both of these reactions is valid (his statements obviously came from a perspective with very little actual knowledge of video games, and they did seem an awful lot like what theater critics said about film back in the day), the mistake was to focus so much on Ebert himself.  His arguments, though still incorrect, are have some interesting concepts that can help us further understand not only those who object to this medium's artistic legitimacy, but the present and historical development of interactive art.
Ebert's arguments can help us further understand not only those who object to this medium's artistic legitimacy, but the present and historical development of interactive art.
There were two main arguments that Ebert put forth in his arguments.  Both fall into another broader argument; that is, games cannot be art because the nature of a "game" inherently involves certain elements that art must inherently be without.  The two arguments he specifically focuses on within this are 1) video games cannot be art because the game-like nature involves completely different objectives from art, and 2) video games cannot be art because the player has control of the outcome rather than the author. This Counterpoint article will deal with the first argument, and the second will come later. But I would like to strongly specify, this article is not about Roger Ebert.  He is simply a framing device as the man who popularized two of the very few arguments against games as art that actually have legitimate and worthwhile artistic thought behind them. Let's focus on the arguments and the theory behind them, not the man and his motivations and qualifications.

Let's try to grasp this particular argument first.  The best way to do this would be to take a quote from the article itself, in which Ebert is specifically supplying counter-arguments to various quotes given by Kellee Santiago in a TED talk given at USC.

One obvious difference between art and games is that you can win a game. It has rules, points, objectives, and an outcome. Santiago might cite a immersive game without points or rules, but I would say then it ceases to be a game and becomes a representation of a story, a novel, a play, dance, a film. Those are things you cannot win; you can only experience them.

This is a decent summation of Ebert's argument on the matter (if you want more detail, read the full article).  Essentially, games are about using skill and coordination to prevail over the competition, whereas stories are not about "winning" or getting to the end, they are about the experience and the effect it has on you as the reader, viewer, or indeed, player.

Not much winning going on here, but if you didn't cry in
The Land Before Time as a child, you had no soul.  

Admittedly, this is a compelling argument.  After all, I've discussed the difficulties of combining gameplay and narrative in a previous article.  It is not easy; the two do in fact, to some extent, contradict each other in their basic nature.  Games are about performance and competition, not an emotional and intellectual experience designed by an artist.  So when one attempts to combine a game with a narrative, does it legitimately create a work of narrative art, or just a game with a story attached?

In general, the argument fails when it considers video games to be a game with a story tacked on.  Though this does often happen with unfortunate results, it is far from an inherent trait of the medium.  This argument seems to be viewing video games as a checkers board with the cover of Casablanca unceremoniously taped onto the back, when in reality the effect we're going for is more like chemical bonding, where the two elements fuse to become a new thing entirely.

This is a hamster with a knife taped to its back. Not how
videogames combine their elements, though it would
make for an awesome game.

Taking specifically from the quoted paragraph, there are two issues here on which the argument fails.  The first is the term "win."  Ebert is referring to the traditional idea that a game is something where the end goal, the entire purpose of the game, is to overcome the challenges it presents.  The completion of this goal is the entire reason the game was played, and the actions along the way have little value to the game outside of the progress they made toward that goal. And of course, if that goal is not accomplished, the actual events of the game are meaningless, as their value exists only in the context of victory.  Art, on the other hand, is about everything, each and every moment of the experience and everything about it that made it what it is. Stories have an ending, sure, but without experiencing the rest of the story in the way it was specifically designed to be experienced, said ending has absolutely no satisfaction, meaning, or impact.

However, video games are not all like this anymore; some exist, of course, and hopefully always will, but it simply cannot be denied that the medium has largely moved past the idea of "beating the game" to an emphasis on the experience of the game.  The player must prevail over challenges, yes, but this is not toward the purpose of getting to the end as much as it is to progress through the story.  Beyond that, the fact that many games allow the player to make choices affecting nothing but the story seems to imply goals outside of the completion of the game's challenges.  The game may be about overcoming its challenges, but the motivation for prevailing is not the completion of the game, but to see what happens next in the story and bring said story, not just the challenge, to its eventual conclusion.  So really, to claim that the goal of a video game is to get to the end and win is a severe misunderstanding of what the medium is actually about.

The second way in which the argument fails is in the word "representation."  If you remember, he said that a game without rules would cease to be a game and instead be "a representation of a story," implying that the goal that games must attain but can inherently never reach is to be a representation of a story.  Which is something with which I imagine most artists and scholars would agree is the goal of art, in the field of narrative art at least.

Victory is not the entire end goal of a video game, but more of a prerequisite to experience more of the story.
But then the question arises; why can't a game represent a story?  Even in basic game theory there are ideas about sports such as football and games such as chess having a narrative; the only thing keeping them from being "art" is the fact that the end result is created by competition rather than specific artistic intent.  But unlike those games, video games allow the player to try again until victory is accomplished.  This means that victory is not the entire end goal of a video game, but more of a prerequisite to experience more of the story, or even if story is not a focus, more of the game.  Victory is not an end in and of itself, but rather a goal that must be completed for both game and story to move forward.

On a simpler note, can it really be argued that a video game is not a "representation" of a story if it has a story in it?  Regardless of the game-like aspects of a video game, if it has a story that progresses as the player does, is the game not representing a story?  One could say this is just arguing semantics, but it does get to the core of this argument; if a game and story exist within a single work, designed and created by an artist or team of artists, how can it be said the final product is not a representation of a story and, as a result, a work of narrative art?

In the end, this argument is based on a lack of understanding about how games work, and seems to have been made under the impression that modern video games are just more realistic-looking versions of Galaga.  It simply doesn't hold up to informed scrutiny.  However, that is not to say it has no value.  Even to a small degree in this article, it has driven us to consider the nature of a game and the nature of a narrative, how the two naturally both compliment and contradict each other, and what it really means for a game and a story to be combined into a single work.  Many of the present and future articles on this blog explore just such topics.  This is why it is so important to not shrug off these arguments because of their fallacious nature, but instead to consider them and explore why they are wrong and what they can teach us.

See you next week!  Don't forget to "Like" Binary Narrative on Facebook!

Busy Busy Busy

I apologize to whatever few regular readers I may have; this last week has been quite the whirlwind.  I will be back on schedule by this next Saturday with what will hopefully prove to be a very interesting article.

L.A. Noire and the Narrative/Gameplay Paradigm

I know I just reviewed this game, but it did things that merit some discussion beyond what I could do in a review, so here we go.

L.A. Noire did some very interesting things.  It created a pitch-perfect noir atmosphere to go along with its detailed recreation of 1940s Los Angeles, which is enough to make it worth playing in the first place.  It also made me curious as to when the word "noir" had an "e" on the end of it.  But its greatest accomplishment came by way of its technology for recording the faces of actors.

Nothing against you, Phoenix.  I still
love your games.  

I can imagine the cries of "Graphics whore!" I may get for that statement, but there's more to it than that.  The facial animations of L.A. Noire allowed it to take some of the game-like elements out of the gameplay and replace it with a sort of real activity.  Rather than watching meters or playing a silly minigame, or even cross-referencing Phoenix Wright style, the expressive faces in L.A. Noire allowed the gameplay to work off actual observation.  This required the player to judge the truthfulness of suspects and witnesses based on their visual and verbal cues, something that is much more difficult, complicated, and realistic than comparing notes or pressing the right buttons at the right time.  It allowed the gameplay and story to mesh on a deeper level by removing the game-like elements that normally govern the player's interaction and, to some extent, separate the player from the game world.  It managed to defy the Narrative/Gameplay Paradigm on which I previously wrote.  But it did not do it fully or perfectly.  L.A. Noire did many things right and was groundbreaking on many levels, but what exactly did they do right and what did they do wrong?  What are these breakthroughs truly capable of, and where could they go that this game did not?

First of all, let me preface this discussion by saying I am not suggesting that all games should avoid game-like elements, or even that games must do so to tell a story well.  I've seen many people say that the "games as art" movement wants to see all games become abstract, boring experiences full of meaning but entirely void of entertainment or challenge.  However, I think I've made it clear that I consider many different games, from Shadow of the Colossus to Halo, to be great works of art; the concepts I discuss in this article aren't blanket suggestions to be applied to video games as a whole, but interesting possibilities for the future of what the medium will be able to do.  In this particular case, L.A. Noire offers a new way to eliminate black-and-white gameplay elements and instead present an experience that, while perhaps is not a "game" by traditional definition, it more of an interactive storytelling experience.

The interrogation process in L.A. Noire is, in its basic form, almost entirely devoid of "gamification," if you will excuse the use of the term in this context.  The idea of actually watching and listening for signs of lying or hesitance is exactly how real interrogations go, not an objective-based, formulaic system by which the player solves some sort of puzzle. This was fantastic, as it eliminated the certainty that most games depend on.  The player could not have a simple logical process of elimination or success at a simple challenge, they had to read the character's voice and face and trust their judgement.  Most people I know, myself included, took a while to get used to it.  It is far more abstract and less concrete than most gameplay processes; it was based on the player's judgement, not on quickness, not on coordination, not even fully on observation.  And if you don't get all the information out of the witness, you move on with the clues you have and hope you haven't missed anything too important.  If the investigations and interrogations go poorly, it is even possible to arrest the wrong person.  This process lacks certainty, lacks the sense of absolute victory that we gamers are used to; but so does the real-life process L.A. Noire emulates.

The amount of emotion the human face can convey is
astounding, and L.A. Noire emulates it well enough to
base its main gameplay feature around it.  

At least it would be like this, if not for a simple but important gameplay element; the chime that tells you whether you have chosen the best reaction.

In the interrogations in L.A. Noire, the player immediately knows whether they "won" or "lost," which unfortunately goes a long way toward invalidating the advancements the game makes.  The player should, as the in-story detective does, feel like they've done their best, like they have uncovered all the clues to the best of their ability and gotten as much information through questioning as they could.  The player should blame the suspect, not themselves, if they got no good information, because as far as the detective knows he did his absolute best.  If the police chief gets angry at them for putting the wrong person away, the player should be surprised and frustrated at their failure rather than simply saying, "Yeah, I did really screw up those last few interviews..."  The uncertainty that should mark each answer, each reaction, each question, is negated by the absolute knowledge of the player's success or failure.

The crazy thing is that the game's story is structured in such a way that this can feasibly be done with little extra effort (the only thing that may have to go would be achievements based on correct questions, but even that would only be for difficulty reasons).  Who gets arrested usually either doesn't matter in the long run or happens because they run or something, proving their own guilt enough to warrant the arrest.  In a few particular cases, the story dictates that the convicted person is innocent anyway, regardless of who it is.  It's not like the designers would have had to code in tons of different endings or events based on the player's success or failure; the player is led to an arrest regardless.  This would not negate the role of statistics; the game could give the player their information and statistics at the end of each case, so the player knows how well they did afterwards and how to do things differently if they play it again.

This is not to say I don't understand why they did what they did.  Absolute knowledge of our objectives, victories, and losses is something we, as gamers, are used to.  We were already far out of our element with these interrogations, and this made it a little easier for us, made the interrogations less frustrating (at least in the way gamers traditionally define frustration).  Unfortunately, this positive effect came at the cost of immersion.  Not that L.A. Noire wasn't immersive (I think a game that faithfully recreated 1940s Los Angeles is immersive by default, to some extent), but it could have become much more so if not for the constant reminder that this is a game, and we just totally bombed that question.  We, as gamers, must be willing and excited to get out of our comfort zones and abandon the security of traditional game design in order for video games to move forward in artistic viability and cultural impact.

This is the main thing I meant in my review when I said I hoped for a sequel that refined and expanded the revolutionary gameplay elements L.A. Noire introduced.  I would like to see this potential franchise develop these concepts into more of a storytelling experience than a traditional game; not because it makes for a bad game, but because the impact could be exponentially increased if the security of formulaic gameplay were further removed from the story and investigations.

I'd be incredibly surprised if everyone agreed with me on this, so feel free to post your arguments, agreements, or random observations, and make sure to Like Binary Narrative on Facebook if you don't hate my ideas!

The Role of Non-Interactive Storytelling in Interactive Media

Cutscenes have recently become, in the minds of many, the "failure-state" of video game storytelling. People complain that a cutscene interrupts the gameplay experience or takes away an opportunity for varied and interesting gameplay moments. It has gone so far that many have claimed that a game fails in its very artistic value as a game if the focus is anywhere else but the interactivity; if it is taken away or belittled for the sake of the story, the game has failed as an interactive artwork.

It’s true that the most memorable moments in gaming are those where interactivity is used or toyed with in the context of a powerful story moment. The epilogue of Halo: Reach, the famous plot twist in Bioshock, the moments leading up to the infamous death scene in Final Fantasy VII… Many interactive artworks have used interactivity to create impacting moments that truly could not exist in any other medium. And that is awesome.

The final mission of Halo: Reach is the pinnacle of
the series' storytelling.  

However, this idea that non-interactive story movement in an interactive medium is inherently bad storytelling has a problem. A huge problem that most people don’t notice unless, again, they take it to its full logical conclusion. Let’s see where it leads.

So the idea here is that the only good way to tell a story in video games is to use interactivity in everything, that everything must be interactive in some way, because interactivity is the storytelling property entirely unique to video games. Applied to art theory as a whole, this is saying that any given artwork must take full advantage of its medium’s unique properties in order to be good.  Any artwork that breaks from its unique properties is not a good artwork.

To illustrate, let’s apply this specifically to animation, as kind of a sub-medium of film. To clarify, animation is not a genre, but a subset of film itself, capable of telling far too many types of stories to be considered a simple genre. Feel free to comment (and good luck) if you want to make the argument that Cowboy Bebop and Disney's Cinderella both belong in the same genre.

Animation is, within the larger medium of film, uniquely capable of wildly over-the-top imagery and very silly slapstick comedy. It is easier for someone to take violence humorously when it is animated because much of the reality is lost, especially if the animation style is exceptionally quirky. It is visually capable of more silly or just plain weird images than live-action.

What would make for a bad animated feature, then? Well for one, animation that tries to look like reality is out; trying to look real abandons the lack of reality animation can deliver, eliminating the entire uniqueness of animation.  For that matter, if the work is expected to take full advantage of its unique properties, the animation had better take full advantage of that fact.  Any frame where characters are standing and talking is wasted, any scene without constant motion and exaggerated movement is doing it wrong.  In simpler terms, Spongebob Squarepants and Ren and Stimpy are objectively better works of art than Death Note, Avatar: The Last Airbender, or The Lion King.

The pinnacle of
animation, everyone.

Let's apply this logic to video games, since that is the whole point of this blog after all.  The unique property of video games as a medium is interactivity.  Thus, applied to this art theory, a good video game is one that uses interactivity in all its facets and never breaks from delivering an interactive experience.  It delivers a constantly interactive and intense experience, and achieves immersion by keeping the player constantly in control, constantly challenged and involved.  Perhaps aesthetics, graphics, story, music, etc. matter, but all are of minimal importance in comparison.  If the game stops with the interactivity to move a story forward, it loses its immersive quality and stops truly being a "video game."

So, according to this, what would a bad video game look like?  Well, like any of these.

To name just a few.

This prioritization of interactivity above all else is not entirely meritless, but I think it's a bit too extreme. The most erroneous aspect is the idea that there's only one way to tell a story well within a given medium, even if that way takes the fullest advantage of the medium's unique capabilities. To say in any artistic venue that one way is the only good way to tell a story is problematic because it discourages creativity and variance, two of the most important things in art. It's essentially telling an entire medium to stick to what it's good at before it even knows what it's really capable of.  The fact is, a good story is a good story.  Sometimes a story in a video game would not have lost much had it been told in a television mini-series, or perhaps a long movie, but that does not make the story bad. Though cutscenes have their benefits, they do not offer anything particularly special to video game storytelling, but that does not mean a good story told by a well-made cutscene is somehow bad.

This idea is really just coming out of the need for video games to claim their spot in the world of artistic media (though some also use it to support the idea that video games should not focus on art and storytelling).  In a previous post, I talked about how, despite the great stories some video games have told, games as a medium are still largely considered to tell worse stories than other mediums, and how this may be in large part due to the fact that video games have explored less of their uniqueness than other, older mediums.  Video games need to explore interactivity and truly come into their own with their ability to effectively wield this unique power, as this is the thing video games can do that no other medium can.  But this is intended to free and empower video games, not to limit them.  As we explore the frontier of this art form, we do not all pack up and move to the newly discovered areas; rather, we expand, settling and exploring the new frontier while still developing what we already know. We do not abandon the older tactics to game development and storytelling as we discover new ones, we use the old knowledge to improve and understand the new, and vice versa.  It is all important.

This is a bit of a heated topic as of late, so feel free to comment or email me with any thoughts, disagreements, or concurrence.  I would like this blog to be discussion-based to an extent, so if you have something to say, please do, and I will make sure to reply, and perhaps bring up your points in a future article.

See you next week, and assuming you don't vehemently disagree with what I've said here, don't forget to Like Binary Narrative on Facebook!  

The Importance of Video Games as Art

I was trying to figure out how I could start this off, and I think this is a good topic to cover early on.  Hopefully this first post can address some of the basic questions and criticisms people might give early on.  I can’t possibly address everything, so if enough people make comments I may very well write another post on this subject, but for now I’ll address this as I can.

Now and again in various internet forums someone will post something regarding video games as art, and many views on the subject start flying.  There are often some interesting things said within this sea of mostly repetitive arguments, but there is one simple thing I keep hearing that has been getting to me for a long time: “It doesn’t matter.”

Most gamers argue that video games should be looked upon more favorably by society, but many of them do not feel as strongly that society should look upon games as an art form.  The ideas behind this viewpoint are varied.  Some claim that as long as they can enjoy their games, it doesn’t matter whether or not they are an art form.  Some say as long as gamers know and understand games as an art form, society as a whole does not need to.  Yet others claim that the very meaning of “art” is subjective, meaning that video games are art if you think they are, and they are not if you think they’re not, so the entire issue is meaningless.  All of these arguments are based on some degree of subjectivism, but regardless of whether that fits into your personal philosophy, there is something very important that they all ignore.

If you’re not one for art theory, think back to your high school or college sociology class and what it said about art.  In short, art is an absolutely vital, critically important part of culture.  Art is the way humans try to explain and explore some of the less quantifiable aspects of the human experience.  It’s the way we both influence and record our culture of the time.  Creativity, the driving force of art, is one of the things that separate us from animals.  Art brings culture together, defines and enforces societal values, and has the power to affect both individuals and culture as a whole.

'Cause these two are totally the
same, right?

Since art is so important to culture, it makes sense that the concept of art must be solidified enough to study it.  In fact, this is already done in many ways that we often take for granted; consider genres, for instance.  Despite the complexity of art and all the ways it can be presented, in order to more effectively study artworks, we have assigned them labels based on their themes and settings even though these things are much too difficult to grasp with a system of simple labels.  What chaos would ensue if we tried to study Citizen Kane in the same way we study District 9, or if we applied the same analytical logic to Sense and Sensibility as to Lord of the Rings!  However, there are always the occasional works that challenge these genres, often resulting in new genre labels until there are so many sub-genres that most people can’t figure it out.  How do you categorize Apocalyptica, a hard rock band comprised of four cellists and a drummer (no, I’m not kidding; check them out)?  Has anyone yet put Shawn of the Dead in a definitive genre, or does it still stand alone in the “romantic zombie comedy” category with a healthy dose of parody thrown in?  Genres are important because they allow us to more effectively study artworks, but they are ultimately an attempt to quantify the unquantifiable.  Impossible though it may seem, it is very important.

So considering the importance of putting a definition on the indefinable, one must ask what bearing a subjective art theory has on this.  The answer?  Nothing at all.  Because even if the very definition of art is up to the individual, that is not an effective way to study or categorize something.  Such ambiguity has its place, but this, a situation where something must be categorized and studied, is not it.  We as a culture must attempt, as best we can, to solidify these slippery concepts of art and creativity so that we may analyze them, explore them, and allow them to affect culture as they can and must.

This is why, regardless of whether “art” is a subjective or objective concept, definitions regarding what general medium is and is not an “art form” must be made if a culture is to effectively study, explore, and truly experience what art has to offer.

This is my view on the issue, at least.  If you have any questions, disagreements, encouragements, suggestions, whatever, feel free to comment.  And if you like what I’ve said so far, like me on Facebook!  Or if not, just wait to see if I ever say anything good first.