Category: Thoughts

This is a thought that I wanted to elaborate on later but a recent post on Raph Koster’s blog prompted me to talk about it now. The post is about that really good violinist playing in the subway ignored by a thousand passers-by. Somehow, Raph thinks this is relevant to games. And I can see how he would think that.

I think this is about the apparent conflict between the goals of a game and the enjoyment one might find along the path, in those “little niceties” that the artists in the basement of the game developers have added to fluff things up. This conflict is another case of mistaking an opportunity for a problem. Remove the goals from games, and the problem disappears. It’s as simple as that.

Silmple is obviously relative. It’s in fact probably a lot harder to design an environment where people can enjoy the journey instead of hurrying towards the goal. In the case of music, this environment is a concert hall in which performances are organized. A lot of work, indeed. But well worth it, if you ask me. As opposed to walking from the metro to your office in the morning, sitting down in the opera with your wife in the evening is a very convenient situation for enjoying beautiful music.

The original thought was this:

Everyone enjoys a beautiful photograph, a beautiful drawing, a beautiful painting. So why should a realtime piece need to be a game before you can enjoy it? Can it not just be beautiful?

In the discussions triggered by our recent post about reviewing games, the topic of consumer advice came up regularly. The function of the game review was to tell the potential customer whether or not the game was worth the price asked for it. Hence the desire, I guess, for a more or less objective analysis of a game. And since a game’s structure (aka gameplay) is about the only thing that can be judged objectively, all the other elements are disregarded or underappreciated.

I remember a pathetic moment in the 1Up Show (I believe it was Episode 02/23, view the segment in question here.) where one of the journalists exclaimed that Flow -yes, thatgame again- wasn’t worth the 8 Dollars Sony was asking for it.

Eight Dollars… that would be six Euros. I can buy 3 or 4 loafs of bread with that. Or a single beer in a bar, maybe two if it’s a cheap bar. It might just get me a cinema ticket, but not my date. Or I could spend it on a set of postcards in the second hand bookstore, a magazine perhaps (not a glossy one though). I don’t think I can buy underwear for that price. But I could get some cookies.

What’s up with gamers and their money?

Why are they so skimpy when it comes to games? As far as I can tell, people who play games -and especially those who can afford a PS3 and the HDTV- are plenty rich. It’s not like they cannot afford buying a game that they might end up not liking. Even only vaguely entertaining games give plenty of value for money, in comparison to books, cinema, food, transportation, clothing, etc.

How many times are you heart broken when leaving the cinema realizing that the film you saw wasn’t that good? Do you wish you could get your money back after being disappointed with a novel’s plot? No. You paid the money for the experience. With no garantees. Somebody offered you a product or a service. And you take the risk. You can afford it.
But not when it comes to games. When it comes to games, we need to know exactly if it’s going to be “worth our money”, even if it only costs a measly 6 Euros.

Why is that?

I might read movie reviews to see if anything good is coming out. The truth actually is that I never read movie reviews. I just go to the cinema if the stills and story appeal to me. If not, I don’t go to the cinema. Gamers seem to work in a different way. To game does not seem like an optional activity. They need to game! And so they need the review basically not to recommend a game to them, but to tell them which games they should not spend their money on. Because they will buy a game.

Is this why they are so skimpy? Are they looking for the cheapest fix?

And if it really is about value for money, would you pay 200 Euros for Halo, or 300 for Grand Theft Auto or Spore? Surely, considering the work that goes into these products, and the glowing reviews, they would be worth every penny!

The pricing policy also has effects on the design of the game. In a world where the price of a game is relatively low, a developer can only make an ambitious game if it is going to appeal to the masses. If gamers would be prepared to be pay more for a game, then the designers would be able to work in a much more focussed way without caring about mass appeal. They could make a game just for you, or you and your friends!

But would a gamer pay more for a better game? I think not.

Somehow this leaves a bitter aftertaste in mouth that we don’t think very highly of this form of entertainment. That basically, deep down, we all know that all games suck…

There’s two nagging issues in the games industry that keep coming up: the desire to create more artistic games and the desire to access a broader market. Some would say these issues are related. They certainly are when we consider how the industry tries to solve them: by analysing the “problem” and then coming up with logical constructions that will lead to the desired result. In other words: they try to program the solution.

This should come as no surprise given that many leading positions in the games industry are filled by programmers. Programmers are very creative people. They can deal with immense problems, chop them down to little pieces, solve each one seperately and when they’re done a fully working product comes out. It’s almost like magic. I think they like doing this. It must be very satisfying. I think they like it so much that they see problems everywhere: problems they can solve.

But what if something is not a problem?

20th Century artist Marcel Duchamp is famous for saying “Il n’y a pas de solution parce qu’il n’y a pas de problème” (there is no solution because there is no problem). There is a lot of truth to be found in this enigma. For one thing, it tells us that if we can stop seeing an issue as a problem, there is no need to solve it. Programmers don’t like this. Because they love solving problems. Artists, on the other hand, are very good at looking at things from different angles. In other words: things that are a problem to some are an opportunity to others.

In the concrete case of there being too little art in games, the programmer’s solution is to develop constructions with all the ingredients of art put in their proper relationships that if set in motion cannot do anything but produce art. In other words: they attempt to create art-producing machines. Amazing! Except that what these machine bring forth, can only be considered artistically interesting by a very generous audience (preferably consisting of peers).

If we stop looking at this issue as a problem, however, and start seeing it as an opportunity, the “solution” is very simple. We don’t need to create art-producing machines. We already have art-producing humans! All we need to do is to ensure that more artists can make games. The same applies to broadening the market: ensure that more women can make games. Just let them in and give them the proper tools and we don’t need to worry our pretty little oh-so-smart programmers’ heads about it no more.

There’s a strong desire in the games industry to see games as an artistic medium. You often hear questions like “Are games art?” and you get answers that go from a radical “no”, over to “some games are art” and “they might be, some day” to “yes, absolutely, all games are art”. And then, inevitably somebody brings up the notion of bad art…

One of the things that confuses me when people in the games industry discuss this issue, is what kind of art they are referring to. It often doesn’t have much to do with what can be seen in museums and galleries nowadays. Perhaps, they are referring to “popular” art forms such as film and comic strips rather than to the highly conceptual constructions that are on display in museums of contemporary art.

Game developers, perhaps as a result of limited art education, seem to think of art as something that expresses an idea or an emotion. This is a concept from the nineteenth century that has long been abandoned by contemporary art. Only the other night, I heard an artist define art as “objects or situations that provoke cultural discussion”. Defined as such, games are most undeniably art! Especially games like Grand Theft Auto, Postal, Bully, Rule of Rose, etc. But that is not the point: the point is that, apparently, contemporary artists can simply make up any definition for the word art that suits them. So the question whether or not something belongs in a category that anybody can redefine whenever they see fit, seems absurd.

In games-related discussions about art, however, people seem to skip over that whole modern art era and stick quite closely to dictionary definitions like

“the conscious use of skill and creative imagination especially in the production of aesthetic objects”
Merriam-Webster

“the quality, production, expression, or realm, according to aesthetic principles, of what is beautiful, appealing, or of more than ordinary significance”
Dictionary.com

“a visual object or experience consciously created through an expression of skill or imagination”
Encyclopaedia Britannica

“that which is made with the intention of stimulating the human senses as well as the human mind and or spirit”
Wikipedia

Don’t get me wrong: I personally am a lot more comfortable with notion of art as an expression of something, art as something that is beautiful and meaningful. I did have an art education. I have even produced art, lots of it, both analog and digital. Contemporary art, no less: ironic, clever, non-emotional, discussion-provoking, and all that. And I have abandoned that practice. One day, I consciously decided that I would just ignore most of the art made in the 20th century and find inspiration in a pre-modern art practice. Game technology seemed like the perfect tool for landscape painting and storytelling. Hence my choice.

But is that art?
In the contemporary sense of the word, it certainly is not. This sort of art practice only exists in popular and amateur arts these days. The “museum-quality art” is very very different. That is not to say that there is no interest: our Endless Forest has been shown many times in contemporary (media) art exhibitions. But it seems to be an exception: art curators and critics tend to prefer art about games over actual games.

This is nothing to be sorry about. The contemporary arts scene is a very marginal one, even if it still seems to act as a validator for culture. With our games, our popular-culture-games, we can reach a much wider audience of people who are actually paying attention to our work.

Point 6 of our Realtime Art Manifesto says Don’t make games and The rule-based structure and competitive elements in traditional game design stand in the way of expressiveness and summarizes with Express yourself through interactivity. While this has always been more of a guideline and a desire than a factual truth, we have recently found proof for this claim from an unexpected place.

Rod Humble, an executive producer at Electronic Arts, has made a game. Or more to the point, he has constructed a work of art with game rules. It’s a very simple game but is has captured the imaginations of at least half a dozen bloggers ( Arthouse Games, Joystiq, Indygamer, TIG Source, Man Bytes Blog, Raph Koster, Jonathan Blow ). Probably precisely because of its explicit purpose of trying to express something -a story, a set of opinions- through game rules only, and its apparent success at doing just that.

I, however, beg to differ.

The first response we had here was to feel pity for Rod’s wife. In his game, she is represented as a pink square that gets bigger when she collides with her husband while the latter gets smaller. This may be a naughty reference to human sexuality but nevertheless, it made us worry about their marriage. Later this was confirmed by Raph Koster saying that “He did report that his wife didn’t like the rules.” I bet she didn’t. He just made her look like a self inflating idiot in front of the whole world!

I’m sure that’s not what he meant. And this is the core of the problem.
Game rules, by their very nature, live on a very abstract plain. They are mathematical expressions of relationships between objects. These relationships are completely and utterly logical. They have to be. Otherwise the game breaks. This severe logic is detrimental when trying to express something about the human condition with its inherent messiness, contradictions and ambiguity. As a result, game rules are only capable of expressing a very specific story, a story without layers of meaning or freedom of interpretation.
And it gets worse. Because of their extreme abstraction, game rules are only capable of telling this very specific story in very general terms. When you do that, all poetry gets lost and with it all depth and aspiration to universality.

That being said, I applaud the attempt. I want to see it as one step in the right direction. The direction of telling stories through interactivity. And I hope that the failure of The Marriage (which is the name of this game) to express anything but a banal generalisation of something that is obviously of very deep concern to the author, stimulates us to take the next step. To abandon this strange obsession with games and their rules.

Interactivity is capable of so much more than games. New media artists like Lia and Dextro have been working with this for years. And while they share a formal language with Rod Humble to some extent, the work of these internationally renowned artists provokes a lot more rich and diverse emotions.

Not that I am advocating any kind of puritanism in art. I don’t think laying bare the very concepts of art and limiting art to its very core is a good idea. The computer gives us a an unprecented array of media that we can all use simultaneously to express things in the most sensuous and spectacular ways ever imagined. Why limit ourselves with this wealth at our disposal?

So as a final example, I want to leave you with the work of Alex Mayhew. Way back in 1997 already, he made a CD Rom in Peter Gabriel’s Realworld Studios called “Ceremony of Innocence“. Like The Marriage, it uses interaction as a form of expression to talk about a relationship. However, it does not limit itself to the mechanics but touches all your senses at once. Ceremony of Innocence does not limit itself to gameplay either. It allows interactivity to be free. Playful interactions that express so much more than strict game rules can. Alex is still very active today. Visit his website for more information and some beautiful little experiments with interactivity.