Level Up: Respectability +10

As many of you probably know by now, gaming has won a great victory this week.  On June 27th, this past Monday, the Supreme Court of the United States voted in favor of video games.

In case anyone is not familiar with the case, Brown vs. EMA was an attempt to regulate "violent video games" (yes, it was purposefully vague) with government involvement.  Rather than the voluntary rating system by which the video game industry already keeps M-rated games out of the hands of children (the exact same system by which the film industry voluntarily abides), this law would have made it illegal for anyone under 18 to buy whatever games were deemed offensive, effectively controlling video games not like an artistic form of expression, but in the same way as pornography and cigarettes.

Because clearly, video games are just
as dangerous as lung cancer.

Obviously, little could possibly be worse for a developing medium than the involvement of a legal censorship movement.  Imagine if the only way to buy Mass Effect or Halo was to go to that creepy backroom some movie places have.  Imagine how most developers would decide that it's not worth the risk to make violent games, or tell stories through games that deal with mature issues, such as Bioshock or L.A. Noire, since they wouldn't be widely sold or advertised.  Imagine if any games deemed too violent by our government were treated by console makers the same way AO games are now; shunned from official publication.  Not a very bright future.

But thankfully, the Court ruled against this law, not only allowing us - gamers, the video game industry, and the first amendment itself - to dodge a huge bullet, but also supplying us with some pretty powerful ammunition.

And our ammunition has always been better than theirs anyway.

No longer must we defend ourselves with rhetoric that will me violently turned against us.  No longer must we suffer the lies and ignorance of entities like Fox News.  No longer must we fear for the censorship of our medium.  Will these things still happen occasionally?  Of course.  But it's always been more difficult when the opposition was intensely convinced they were standing on solid rock; now it's becoming blatantly clear they've built their house on the sand.  And while they may never accept this personally, there is little they can do when the legal precedent is no longer neutral, but dead-set against their attempts to silence interactive art.

"Like protected books, plays, and movies, they communicate ideas through familiar literary devices and features distinctive to the medium.  And “the basic principles of freedom of speech . . . do not vary” with a new and different communication medium."  So says the syllabus from this case, plainly and for all to see.  Two pretty simple sentences, but they say everything necessary for us to know that this medium, our medium, is safe.

If ever you've doubted the importance of video games being widely accepted as an art form, look to this example.  Had it not been demonstrated to these people, some of the men responsible for how life is conducted in one of the world's most powerful countries, that video games are in fact a viable artistic medium of expression and communication, millions of people would be barred from these incredible interactive experiences, and, according to some analysts, the industry itself may have crumbled entirely, banished into obscurity.  The very existence of this case, what many are rightfully calling the biggest victory video games will ever win, was based around this simple question: Are video games art?

Some claim it's not important.  Games are just fun, that's the whole point.  As long as we can enjoy them, it doesn't matter what other people think.  Some claim "art" is too subjective and elusive a concept to bother trying to classify anything under it.  But these events very strongly beg to differ.  This is a fight for respectability.  This is where we step up and show what video games can truly be; not just enjoyable pastimes, and not harmful addictions, but a medium of expression that is truly deserving of the first amendment protection its very nature clearly warrants.

This is an art form now, fellow gamers.  Not just in identity, but in social status.  Let's show the world that the Court made the right choice.

In Addition to This Week's Article

There's another thing I thought of after writing the article about comparing film to video games.  That is, why do we treat the medium different than it's genres on this matter?

In genres, bending and combining is encouraged and praised.  RPG elements such as leveling and skill trees have been incorporated into even the most mindless of genres, and though it's perhaps gotten a little commonplace, I can't think of anyone who actually condemns that trend.  When Mirror's Edge mixed platforming with the first-person perspective, even people who disliked the game for its very imperfect nature agreed that it was inventive and interesting in its concept (I recommend it highly).  When a movie mixes genres, such as Shawn of the Dead (for a rather extreme example), it gets highly praised.  So why is it when we try to mix mediums, this is doing video games a disservice?

I think part of it may sprout from the recent mainstream nature of interactive media.  All of us who are really dedicated to gaming and have been since before it was cool get kind of threatened now and again by the encroachment of "casual gamers" on our territory, and perhaps this is one of our ways of trying to keep our medium separate, out of reach of those who would dare defile it with ideas from outside the gamer's realm.

Okay, so that's a bit overdramatic and exaggerated, but the point stands.  But I think it may play a part in why we sometimes try to segregate our medium away from the influence of others.  Maybe the integration is bringing us too close to being normal, no longer being able to wear the "gamer" badge as an honor since everyone will be wearing one in the near future.  But the artistic and cultural development of this medium is more important than that.

On another note, I finally got around to playing Castlevania: Lords of Shadow.  I'm usually pretty good at keeping my love for a franchise out of the way of an adaptation of it (which this essentially is, seeing as it's made by a different developer and trying, yet again, to convert the series into 3D), but I just can't with this one.  It's a pretty good game on the whole; passable if typical hack-n-slash gameplay predictably reminiscent of God of War, a conflicted and mysterious protagonist the player can connect with easily, beautiful scenery that draws you into this finely-crafted world... it's all there for a decent if slightly generic action game.  But so much of it is not a Castlevania game.  There's not yet been a single mention of Dracula, for one, but mainly, the game is almost entirely linear.  Almost Final Fantasy XIII linear.  No big castles to explore, no huge side-areas just to get one powerful item, just straight pathways with the occasional offshoot or fork in the road.  There are some areas you must return to later with another ability to get by something, but it's done in chapters and levels, not a single continuous game world.  As I said, I can usually handle change in situations like this, but this just doesn't feel like a Castlevania game, and it's affecting my enjoyment of it way more than I wish it would.  Somewhere in here is a decent and rather beautiful game, but it's tough to go through it wishing it was something else entirely.

Don't think the Supreme Court decision escaped my notice; full article about it next week!

The Comparison to Film

Film and interactive media have an interesting relationship.  Film has often been a reference point for video games as they have developed as a medium, both in understanding and inspiration.  But this is a different medium, one that is still coming into its own and learning to use its unique capabilities: capabilities film, and any other medium, simply do not have.  So what place does film have in understanding video games?

"Cinematic" qualities in games became more valued as hardware developed to allow more visual style in cutscenes and gameplay.  Now that games are coming into their own, however, this comparison is being viewed very negatively, saying games should not constrain themselves by basing this interactive medium on an older, non-interactive one.

We all know what happens to
things with bad foundations...

I do not disagree with that last point.  It's been endorsed by game critics from Yahtzee to Jim Sterling to tons of random vloggers on Youtube, and it definitely has validity.  It makes sense that we would not want the foundation of a new medium, especially one as unique as this, to be based on the development of an older medium that entirely lacks this new medium's defining quality (in this case, interactivity). That said, I think it's important that we not discard the benefits that can be had by studying the two side-by-side.

On a simple level, the comparison is useful in preliminary understandings of how video games tell their stories because, while film and interactive media are definitely not the same thing (main difference being interactivity, of course), they are closer to each other than any other storytelling mediums.  If you tried to explain to someone who had never played games since the Atari that video games are a narrative art now, they would likely have a tough time understanding it.  If you tried explaining it entirely from scratch, as though they know nothing about how they work, it would be difficult to give them a good understanding because they have no frame of reference.  But say, "It's like a movie, but you're part of it," and it instantly makes sense.  It's hardly comprehensive, and someone who's really interested would still have plenty of questions to ask, but by referencing something similar of which they have a clear understanding, the concept is much easier to understand.

I know I wasn't the only one
that loved this game, but enjoyed
watching it almost as much.

As for applications to gaming beyond that basic level, as much as the idea of "cinematic" gaming is scoffed at sometimes now that it's commonplace, we owe a lot to it for making our games more visually interesting. There was once a time when cutscenes were valued because they simply looked cooler than gameplay; that time has passed, and the idea of cinematic style is largely to thank for that.  Creative in-game camera work and more flair in character movement has made some games almost as much fun to watch as they are to play, from Prince of Persia: The Sands of Time to the Uncharted series.  The early effects of games trying to be "cinematic" are largely responsible for the visual style that we now take for granted.

When it comes down to it, all we are doing when comparing video games to film is trying to learn from another medium.  It happens regularly in all other artistic fields, and hopefully it will continue to happen.  Other mediums, with their strengths, weaknesses, and unique abilities, have a lot to offer one who studies them for application in another medium.  Closing yourself off from other mediums to exclusively study one cuts you off from a lot of great influence and out-of-the-box ideas, and can cause a developing medium to become stagnant and monolithic.

But I think we can generally agree that just because an artistic medium is different does not mean it doesn't have something to offer other mediums, and maybe even that there is value in learning from more established and developed mediums.  But when does this concept go too far?  The common answer I've seen when it comes to this issue is, "When the game is trying harder to be a movie than it is to be a game."

The commonly-cited example as of late is Heavy Rain, a game that is essentially a movie that lets you determine the events through story choices and quicktime events.  And here I use the term "game" for lack of a more fitting word; many have argued that Heavy Rain is not actually a game, something I might agree with if not for the fact that these arguments usually paint that fact as a bad thing.

I'll just admit it right now: I loved this game.

The express goal of Heavy Rain was to be an interactive movie; thus, the criticism.  I believe the term coined by David Cage, director of the project, is "interactive drama."  It was not simply adopting cinematic principles into a game, it was basing the presentation of the game entirely around them, with gameplay reduced to generalized button presses related to the action onscreen.  The negative reaction many gamers had to this was that Heavy Rain was trying to be a movie instead of a game, and since games are their own thing and shouldn't define themselves based on older and simpler mediums, this was a bad thing.

It should be noted, however, that despite Heavy Rain's simplified gameplay, it took more full advantage of player choice and story consequences than all but a few games I've ever played.  Most other games that could be dubbed "interactive movies" are similar in nature; in the relatively few examples of this within the medium, interactivity is never abandoned.  Perhaps gameplay is, to some extent, but the storytelling is more dependent on interactivity than the vast majority of shooters or action titles.  The uniqueness of video games is still heavily present, just not in the same way as your average game.

I don't mean for this article to turn into a defense of Heavy Rain, but I do want to use the game as an example to make a point.  If all games started being like Heavy Rain, focusing on being as much like a movie as possible, we would have a problem.  But if all games started doing any one thing at all, we would have the same problem.  Innovation and experimentation is always inspired by something, and in the case of some games, that something is film.  In others it's poetry.  In others it's music.  And in others it's simply cool ways to make some guy's head asplode.

Bulletstorm's skill kills are probably the best recent
example of that latter inspiration.

My point is simply that there are many things that can inspire one to create art. That art may take on characteristics of many things, and this experimentation and blending is important to the artistic exploration of all art forms, genres, and mediums involved.  Should we base all our interactive art theory on another medium like film? Absolutely not.  But that definitely does not mean we should condemn the games that try to blend the two mediums.

Didn't See That Coming...

So apparently video games are actually decreasing violence in the United States.

Fact is, anyone who is actually familiar with video games and has been watching crime rates over the last decade or so already noticed the correlation.  Obviously that is not cause to assume causation, but it certainly seemed interesting, especially in the face of claims that video games were responsible for the rise in youth crime.  The rise that, based on even a simple glance at the figures over the last 20 years, has never existed during the life of this medium.

So I say it's about time someone figured it out by doing a legitimate study.  I especially love that it's not actually a study on video games, it's a study on the crime rate decrease; it has nothing to prove regarding video games, it just caught on.  Just an exciting bit of information; the decreasing crime rate has always been an argument against video games causing violence, but now it's actually a real argument for societal value, not just lack of damage.

Pretium Vita

I've been working on the article I meant to put up this week, but it's just not forming up as well as I would like.  It's an important issue and I want to do it justice, and for some reason my writing lately has felt kind of like that last paper you need to write at 4:00 AM the night before your final is due.  As a result, I decided I'd rather deliver a good article to you later than try and pump out something mediocre, especially on the topic I've been writing about.  You'll find out what it is next week, in an article that will hopefully do justice to the topic.

So I'll use the placeholder I've had prepared for just this situation, if you'll excuse a bit of advertising myself.  Last year my university had its annual film festival, where the 10 best of the submitted 10-minute films were shown at a ceremony and awarded in various categories based on the judges' decisions.  I decided to make a film for it.  For the sake of being different (and because I'd messed with it before and really enjoyed it), I made a machinima using Halo: Reach.  Most entries were live action, of course, but this festival had seen a few alternative types of films, including stop-motion and animation.  Machinima, however, had never been done before, and I wanted to see how well it was received.  So, I made Pretium Vita.

In the end, it did not win any awards, though Jessica Nelson was nominated as best supporting actress for her role as Rachel.  One of the judges came to me later and explained that, being unfamiliar with machinima, the judges were unaware as to how much effort had gone into the film on my part, and did not award it anything because they thought the program did most of the work.  But it was a good experience, and I think the final product turned out well.

Sorry you didn't get the usual article, but I hope you enjoy the film.  Next week I'll be back to normal.

E3: The Unknowns

Since most of what I covered in last week's E3 post was the bigger titles, I figured I should shine the light on some of the smaller or newer titles that caught my eye.  These are ones to keep an eye on. Careful, this is another Youtube-heavy post.

Bastion: This game seems to be an interesting action RPG.  I haven't seen enough to talk too much about it, but the basic concept is that as you go through the levels your actions are narrated.  It sounds annoying, but the way it is used it actually seems really interesting.  The narration either puts the player's actions in the context of the story or involves gameplay hints, such as implying whether it's wise to walk in the place you just went.  The gameplay seems to be pretty creative as well; nothing groundbreaking, but it doesn't look like you'll be facing the same simple enemies over and over again.

Metro: Last Light: If you haven't played Metro 2033, go do that right this second.  It was a really awesome post-apocalyptic shooter with some awesome survival mechanics and great atmosphere.  Rather terrifying, not necessarily because it was that scary, but that atmosphere just made it wonderfully immersive.  For that matter, it is one of the few, if not the only, example of a great game based on a novel.  It is not to be missed, and I really hope this sequel lives up.

Jurassic Park: Developed by adventure game veteran designer Telltale Games, this looks to be an interesting expansion on the story of the classic dinosaur film.  Though most of their adventure games follow a traditional point-and-click control scheme, this one looks to be taking a cue from Heavy Rain in how it functions.  The result definitely looks interesting, and I look forward to seeing how it turns out.

Trenched: A tower defense game where you also do some actual shooting on the battlefield?  Count me in.  This summer-bound game is developed by Double Fine, the studio founded by Tim Schaefer (Psychonauts, Brutal Legend).  The idea is interesting, and the style seems like the wacky, awesomely strangeness you would expect from that studio.  Speaking of Double Fine...

Once Upon a Monster: This is less a recommendation to check out a game as it is an interesting note on one.  This is a Sesame Street game being developed by Double Fine, and it was at E3.  It will be a storybook-style game aimed at teaching kids basic lessons and values, much like the show.  I imagine it will be far too simply for adult gamers to enjoy, but my interest comes from the fact that a kids' game was at E3 in the first place, and is being done by a respected developer.  I hope it's indicative of an end to the far-too-common "kids don't know a good game anyway" approach to kid-oriented game design.

Prey 2: Prey was an interesting little shooter in the early days of the Xbox 360.  It was by no means perfect, but it was very interesting and had some pretty awesome concepts that some consider to be the simplified precursor to the Portal gun.  The sequel doesn't seem to be directly connected, but I'm excited that a game that showed such potential is getting a second go when we have a better hold on the technology.

Defiance: This is interesting.  This is an MMO tie-in to an upcoming show on the Sy-Fy Channel; apparently the idea is that the events in the game and the events in the show will connect, and what the players do in the game will affect some events in the show.  The concept is really intriguing, and while it's yet to see whether the game is going to be any good, it's an awesome experiment for which I am rather excited.

Rounding out this list are two games with weird names; the first is Awesomenauts.  Awesomenauts looks to be a just-for-fun side-scrolling shooter with an art style similar to games like Castle Crashers.  We'll see if it's any good, but seriously, it's called Awesomenauts.  That has to be at least worth checking out.  And doesn't this music just sound like some Saturday morning commercial from the 90s?  Awesome.

Secondly, there is Insanely Twisted Shadow Planet.  This one looks quite interesting, with an intriguing aesthetic and some awesome-looking side-scrolling puzzle/action/shooter/platforming(?) gameplay.  I think this'll be one to keep an eye on.

Anyway, there are a bunch of games from E3 that maybe didn't quite make it onto your radar.  I hope you give some of them a look; they deserve it.

Seriously though, where the heck was Beyond Good and Evil 2?  Ubisoft, you continue to make me cry...

Entertainment vs. Art: How Do They Relate?

In the interest of argument, I'll sometimes go onto a random chat site (just text, not video chat; I want information and discussion, not mental scars) to ask people if they think video games are art.  I've gotten all sorts of replies, but a surprisingly common one is that they are not art, but entertainment.  Which is interesting to me, not as a sort of argument against games as art, but as a general principle of art theory.

The question here is one of coexistence.  Can art be entertainment?  Can entertainment be art?  Are both capable of being the other, is one inherently also the other, or are they entirely separate, with no overlap?

Tag, you're it!

Well, there are definitely things that are entertaining, but are not art, at least in its culturally defined sense.  The best example is that of children.  Kids are entertained by the simplest of things; they don't need a complex RPG battle system or a non-stop action-packed movie, they just need you to grab onto their hands and spin them around.  To a child, pretty much anything is entertainment.  A game like Tag is obviously entertainment, but it would be difficult to argue for its status as art.  So entertainment can most definitely exist independently of art.

But is absence of art a necessary quality of entertainment?  I think a simple glance at any art form will prove otherwise.  Film is an art form, and movies are enjoyed by millions of people on a daily basis, most of them not even giving a second thought to its artistic value as long as they were entertained.  Literature does this as well, as do visual art forms such as painting and photography; just because something is an art form does not mean it can't be entertaining.  In fact, most art forms in today's world are dependent on some form of entertainment since artworks need to make enough money to fund others.

Thus, we conclude that entertainment is capable of being entirely independent of art, but is also fully capable of, and commonly does, exist within art.  In short, it can go both ways.  So now that we know how entertainment relates to art, how does it work the other way around?

Art can, I suppose, exist independently of entertainment, though that possibility is heading squarely into subjective territory.  I've known people who couldn't stay awake through the original Star Wars films because they were bored to death.  I've since avoided those people like the plague and now pray for their salvation on a daily basis.  Point being, these are three films largely considered some of the best, most influential and important works of cinema in history, and some people find no entertainment value in them.  Entertainment is a rather subjective thing, up to personal taste, so the only way we could make any sort of concrete judgement in this specific area is by considering intent rather than effect, since the effect of entertainment tends to be subjective.  So for the sake of figuring out art's relation to entertainment, I will use the word "entertainment" not to refer to anything that is entertaining to someone, but rather to anything that is created in order to entertain.

Case in point: I highly doubt you
watched Schindler's List thinking,
"This is so fun!"  But it was great.

But is there any art that does not seek to entertain in some way?  Sure, art has a higher purpose than to simply entertain, but if the viewer, reader, or player is not entertained, how will they be interested enough in that message for it to really have an impact?  The viewer/reader/player must be invested in the artwork, and that is best accomplished by being entertaining in some way.  Perhaps not "haha, this is fun" sort of way, but I think we can all agree based on the existence of horror movies, intense action games, and pretty much any other media made to keep those experiencing it tense, that "having fun" is not necessarily the same as "being entertained."  It would seem that art seeks to entertain as a means of communicating the higher purposes of its existence.  Perhaps this does not mean that entertainment is always necessary to art, but it most definitely points to the idea that entertainment is an important aspect of art, not some sort of opposing force to it or a "lower" version of it.

We have determined that entertainment does not inherently exist independently of art; it can, but does not do so on principle.  Nor is art inherently separate from entertainment; in fact, entertainment is a natural part of art and is commonly used within it to effectively communicate to the audience and financially allow the existence of artistic industries and studies.

So where did we get the idea that "entertainment" cannot be art?  It could be one of those things we think without realizing it conflicts with other things we think.  It could also be the result of a common thought that "art" is some sort of high-brow, snooty concept of which our entertainment cannot be a part.  Or is it perhaps it's simply that, if you look at something merely as entertainment, you will not see the artistic value in it.  I'm not entirely sure; this week seems to be more of an exploration than an explanation, I suppose.  But it's an interesting thing to consider.  I think it's important for us to remember that art and entertainment are not mutually exclusive, and just because not all examples of an art form are particularly "artistic" does not mean the entire form is one solely of entertainment with no artistic legitimacy.

Let me know if you have any further ideas in the comments, or feel free to email me at the address at the bottom of the page!  And don't forget to Like Binary Narrative on Facebook!