Yesterday, Polygon printed a book exerpt by Phil Owen that made what I consider to be the ultimate rookie mistake in the ‘are games art?’ discussion. They suggested that game designers and developers are failing at art because games do not do some things as well, such as storytelling, as the movies. While this is, in fact, true, it’s also a very silly point of view. It’s roughly akin to saying ‘movies can’t give detailed prose as well as books can, so they fail at art!’ or ‘music doesn’t do character development the way that television does, so it fails as art!’
Each genre or medium of communication and art has its own strengths and weaknesses. Each has elements that are true challenges for that genre, and other areas where it simply crushes other genres. Television didn’t really succeed until it stopped trying to be radio, for example, and embraced doing visual things that it does well. It took a while for TV to mature as well – some would argue that the genre took sixty years to mature, and didn’t fully until the advent of premium television and rise of quality serial television. Even that was a product of the times — binge-watching on Netflix makes serial television a net positive, where in previous decades it was more likely to bewilder viewers and push them away.
Gaming does some things very well – most notably interactivity. And while some people, including my old colleagues at BioWare, will keep continuing to improve the story experience in games, storytelling in games will never be as good as it is in the movies. The visual quality of avatars will never match the nuance of actual human actors, and the lack of control of pacing makes it devilishly hard to maintain control of the emotional beats. But even in story, when the genre embraces what its good at — interactivity, such as making truly impactful moral choices — you can start to see the stories that games tell actually provide experiences that challenge and emotionally move players in ways that movies never can.
From here, though, things get a little more bizarre. Owen goes on then to complain, effectively, that gathering scrap in Last of Us and the reload mechanic in Gears of War detract from the art by not being realistic. This is interesting to me because I’ve long railed about how realism should be abandoned if it doesn’t serve the overall game experience, and games aren’t alone in being deserving of treatment. Movies, for example, freely go off of realism all the time if it suits their purpose. They tighten dialog. They cut everything extranous to the narrative. They cut off rough edges that detract from the story. And they use symbolism heavily: Rosebud from Citizen Kane. The Briefcase in Pulp Fiction. The Red Dress in Schindler’s List. Fucking everything in 2001. These symbols act as abstraction to explore, explain or call attention to the tale the movie is attempting to tell.
The gameplay mechanics described in this article are exactly that: symbolic abstractions. The gathering of scrap to make a weapon that breaks quickly is meant to underscore a sense of scarcity, frailty and desperation. This narrative would not have been sold so well if Joel could just use the same unbreakable knife for the whole game. Similarly, the Gears of War reload mechanic underscores a sense of rhythm and flow – it creates an experience of being ‘in the zone’ – and his suggestion that perhaps players should drop clips and be forced to fumble with them would make for a more realistic game, but one that was decidedly unenjoyable, due to how hard it is to do things like change focus and manipulate the camera on a standard console controller. The ability to create these very hands-on experiences to help create these emotional states in ways that movies can’t is actually testament to what games do well, despite their very real limitations. In short, Owen sees these as bugs, and I see them as features.
From there, Owen veers into derision about “thirty seconds of fun”. To wit:
The lead designer on Gears was Cliff Bleszinski, or Cliffy B, and he often extols the virtue of “the thirty seconds of fun” that you repeat over and over for as long as the game lasts — one of the more obnoxious concepts of mainstream game theory.
This is roughly akin to saying ‘NOT ART!’ because great movies cut all extraneous scenes to the plot, that books should have a trackable number of strongly distinct characters, or that network television programs should be written with commercial breaks in mind. Each genre has its own needs, its own minimum bar to cross, in order to keep the audience’s engagement maintained. For video games, that engagement is based on activity loops within activity loops, that slowly move players up the engagement and skill ladder. It is the very engine of the medium that keeps players focused and interactive with the genre. Certainly, there are games that lack this sort of activity-loop based structure — just as there are art films with no dialogue and books that require a character guide to track what’s going on — but describing this as something holding the genre back seems ridiculous to me. It’s far more likely to be true that a more sophisticated knowledge, understanding of activity loops will result in deeper, more intricate gameplay capable of telling much more fascinating stories with their mechanics.
In short, I don’t mind when people discuss whether games are art, or whether or not some games have more artistic merit than others (a fact that is certainly true for other media – no one thinks that movies aren’t art because somehow Porky’s invalidates Citizen Kane). However, reading Owen’s book, I get the sense that he just doesn’t have a very sophisticated view of how the art of video games actually is special, unique, and already capable of amazing things.
The article was certainly disappointing. I’ll give credit though to the commenters (and I’m sure those moderating the comments) as there was plenty of solid discussion and reasoning about where the author’s thesis seems to be lacking.
I think he took a narrow view of movies, too. I can’t claim to have done exhaustive analysis, but I would bet that if you searched, you’d find plenty of movies in which people had allergies because they… had allergies. A cough or sneeze can be an indication that an ailment is going to be discovered — or it can be a way to illustrate that a character has a chronic issue that may or may not have direct bearing on the film.
Generally speaking, I find it annoying when games inconsistently apply mechanics. If being struck pushes back my casting time, I think it should push back NPC casting time. If I have access to explosives in a game, I think I should be able to use them to blow open doors or locked areas. I much prefer the “Setting off a charge will bring all enemies running and possibly destroy the room contents” method of encouraging players not to do this sort of thing, as opposed to the “You piled 50 C4 charges against the door… and nothing happened” method of design.
But games use simplified mechanics to create atmosphere, upgradability, and to support the notion that players can do what *they* want.
There’s an axiom I can’t recall about maps: The more you make a map look like the area you are representing on the page, the less useful it actually is as a map. Eventually it becomes hopelessly covered in data points. It can no longer be used for getting around.
Great games capture flexibility and choice without requiring rigid application of real-life rules.
Somewhat to my surprise, I’m actually going to defend that excerpt a bit.
To my mind, what makes this article LOOK like every other “why aren’t games more like movies?” article is that Owen is heavily prioritizing storytelling over mechanics in his discussion of what’s relevant to a game’s artistic aspirations, and conflating “story” with “art” much too often. But he seems to acknowledge several times (implicitly or explicitly) that this is his own personal preference, not a requirement for art. His ultimate point–that very often, a game’s gameplay is not oriented toward the same artistic goals as a game’s narrative–stands.
So while lines like “The shivs exist as an element of challenge for the player, but they are not part of the art created by the writers and designers at Naughty Dog.” and “In games, the text is compartmentalized, and the gameplay is a separate entity that rarely is trying to communicate anything at all.” make me cringe, he’s still correctly identified the disease even while confusing many of the symptoms. How often in AAA games does the core gameplay loop REALLY reinforce the core narrative themes, and vice versa?
I’d be curious to see the entire book; I’d expect a frustrating read, but there might be some good stuff in there as well. Or maybe not, but I thought it deserved some defense.
What Alexander said.
I think that when people complain about realism, they usually mean consistency/coherence and as said above, it is a major problem especially in larger games. Want it or not, gameplay, or crafting, or probably even things like inventory management, do tell the player something about their characters and the world they inhabit. And more often than not, these things totally contradict each other.
So the problem with games is not that they are bad at storytelling, it is that they are inadverently telling several conflicting stories at the same time. In fact games are awesome at storytelling because they alone can tell us a story through personal experience and humans tend to trust their experience more than any other source of information.
Here’s what I learned games can do that movies can’t.
Leave you wondering whether the creator is being sincere or utterly facetious about what fantasy the game invites you to live out. Not just watch, because movies only ever have one perspective, one set of events, one narrative from beginning to end.
This is a game about rubbing down another naked man in the shower. And if you continue, then the weird shit begins.
http://www.blog.radiator.debacle.us/2015/09/rinse-and-repeat.html
It’s funny, because within any genre – books, film, television, popular music and video games – most of the content produced is ephemeral, fashionable and for the moment. 95% of anything is crap.
Of course many works can transcend this. This is true of games, and the main point is to judge them for what they are, not as “failures to be movies”.
One of my favourite pieces of entertainment has the Mass Effect series. I find it as satisfying as any other pop-culture franchise I enjoy: I rate it up there with Buffy (TV), Harry Potter (books) and Star Wars (film).
I found the characterisation, narrative and world building deeply engrossing and comparable to any science-fiction works in film, TV or books. The voice acting was brilliant, and the supporting cast just wonderful. The series as imbued with humour, pathos and drama.
For those who’ve played the series, that scene towards the end of ME3 were Garrus and Shepard take pot shots at target and banter is just beautiful. You’ve been following these characters for years and it’s just beautifully done. For me it writing, acting and characterisation equal to anything I’ve seen in film/TV. Link here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kRSsHBZqidg
What’s interesting in this tiny vignette is you have the choice to hit or miss the target: this prompts a different ending to the scene, thus prompting a different emotional response from the player.
The line “I Am Garrus Vakarain and this is now my Favorite Spot on the Citadel” had me in hysterics.
I really can’t help but feel you completely missed the point of the original article. You start out by claiming it made the rookie mistake of saying games aren’t art because they don’t do storytelling well, but the original article said nothing remotely like that.
What it was saying was that storytelling and gameplay in games do not integrate into a single whole. They are separate worlds, and thus the work as a whole doesn’t work as art, because it is two different and unrelated things stuck together. This has nothing to do with how good or bad the storytelling is, it would be true no matter how brilliant the storytelling is.
He’s saying that games are like watching 2001 while solving Rubik’s cube. Both can be brilliant and engrossing experiences, but there’s little to be gained and much to be lost by doing them at the same time.
I still contend that “_____ is not art,” is a cry for attention. Nothing more. There can be no fruitful discussion with someone so closed-minded as to suggest something like MONKEY ISLAND or JOURNEY couldn’t possibly be considered “art.”
More than that, I don’t think most people who give attention to those who say “X is not Y” when X is something they care about and Y is a designation of significance that they don’t commonly use to describe X themselves, actually spend much time thinking about the topic. Whether Gaemz R RT is real has no bearing on why most people play games.
That to me is worth talking about. If the art in games matters, then why do so few who play games seek out ways to challenge their own ideas, to look for new experiences and fresh ways to see made-up worlds or situations that could not exist in our reality? If there is art in games, why does it necessarily figure in to how you approach the games you play? And if it doesn’t actually figure, then why does anyone purport to care?
John Henderson, that is deep. I think videogames give us direct control of how much MORE ART can be squeezed out of said content. Think back to the early days of Music Video, I’m positive there were nay-sayers that thought MTV was ruining Musical Art and that the videos themselves were not Art.
I’ve played Street Fighter II competitively in Honolulu, Denver, LA, and San Francisco. The way certain pro(s) play the game is another layer of ART. Much the same way the violin, itself, was a piece of Art… that made beautiful sounding Art… and later was used in a Music Video creating yet more Art.
And I knew of play-style Art in fighting games long before EBERT trolled us all with the “Games are not Art,” proto-clickbait. How could that even be truthful if Justin Wong’s SF2-playstyle is nested-Art from a source that isn’t even Art?
Heck, even selling Art *is* an art. I digress. Me? I don’t think it’s Art until someone argues about its artfulness; which ends the entire debate–if only in my mind.
Films may be art. Movies aren’t art. Please let’s use the M-word sparingly.
“Cinema” is art.
Preferably preceded by “the”. For extra snobbery, insist the better word is “kinema”. Or fall back on charmingly archaic terms like “picture-play” or formal ones like “motion picture” (just make sure to pronounce it “pic-toor”).
The play is the art of games, the rest are supporting tools. Compare the hours of enjoyment people have had with Monopoly to the “artistic” content. People may ohh and ahh a few seconds after seeing new art in a deck of cards, after that it’s all about game. The latest trend is the “retro gaming” where too many assume it’s about making the wonderful pixel art, it’s not. Retro gaming is about a return to game play and inclusion by having low system requirements rather than pushing games into immersion by cinematic experience with the high hardware requirements that go with it.
Many gamers have been fighting against that trend since the 90s. There’s a very large group of people between the worst of the “casuals” that just want to kill 5 minutes at a time and those that don’t blink at putting in 2k for a system and playing 200 hours on a very involved game at 100fps on 3 screens. Minecraft hit that group, involved as you want, low requirements and new and interesting game play. It wasn’t about the “retro style” for many at all.
An interesting read, and while I could be quick to dismiss Phil Owen as an elitist cultural snob (how dare games have aspiration to art) I think I’ll just place him in an ever growing category of ‘People who are too literal’.
If you don’t like game mechanics why not just watch other peoples play-throughs on You Tube or Twitch? From the explosion of game streamers it seems to be a viable form of entertainment in its own right.
I can guess how this need for literal behaviour arises, the higher fidelity of graphics means it is a lot harder to make the disconnect from how an item works in the real world and how it works in the game world.
Oh, and it seems everyone’s favorite consumer revolt is having a beef with Owen’s article for some reason, and have included it in their newest operation, #OpPolyGone (aren’t they clever?).
Oh, apparently it’s because they’ve taken offense at his peddling his own book by offering an excerpt.
Anyway, they’ve flooded the FTC with complaints.