The Ant Nest

[This is the second part of a two-part post. The first part can be found here.]

When attacking tomorrow’s games, there are two major strands to Roger Ebert’s arguments.

Firstly, he gives a glimpse of the manner in which he considers film and literature to constitute art: “Video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic.” What is the purpose of art? To help us learn something about ourselves or the world around us, it seems.

It’s here that Ebert’s “absence of evidence is evidence of absence” assertion stumbles. Janet Murray presents the argument that Ebert seeks in her book Hamlet on the Holodeck. She draws on Star Trek’s Holodeck as an example of a possible end destination for a narrative interactive experience (and hence as one of tomorrow’s video games). In particular, she points to Captain Janeway’s (of Star Trek: Voyager) experiences in the Holodeck and illustrates how the narrative constructions of the Holodeck, in which Janeway takes part, act to do exactly what Ebert seeks - how they help Janeway learn about herself and her circumstances, repeatedly throughout the series.

I regret that I don’t have access to a copy of the book at present or else I would pick out some appropriate quotes, but Murray constructs this argument in the very first chapter. The only direct quotation I have to hand is: “The holonovel offers a model of an art form that is based on the most powerful technology of sensory illusion imaginable but is nevertheless continuous with the larger human tradition of storytelling.”

The second major strand concerns this quote:

Video games by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control.

This isn’t exactly a unique perspective, but what is revealing is the different ways you can choose to approach this conflict.

Does it imply that player choices destroy the opportunity for authorship on the part of the designer? That certainly seems to be the implication when Ebert talks about games as being an act of “craftsmanship”. There are clear parallels to me here with the legislative attacks on video games, which argue they are exempt from First Amendment protection since they are not ’speech’, and Jack Thompson’s infamous insistences that games are merely killing-simulators.

There seems to be a wide perception that games simply seek to provide increasingly accurate simulations of reality. You can almost forgive someone unfamiliar with games for reaching this conclusion, since their experience of video games will likely be entirely visual and from that perspective, most games really do simply seek to recreate a greater and greater degree of realism (or at least, photorealism, which is largely equated with realism in our culture).

Ron Gilbert sees this as a failure by the industry to promote the authors behind the games. I agree with him that this is certainly a strong solution, since our culture very closely equates the prominent individual (as director or writer) with authorship and very rarely acknowledges the authorship of the group or of the anonymous.

But really, even the most incidental of enquiries into the body of video games around today makes it clear that the designer(s) exerts some degree of authorship on the experience. The quirky humour of Hideo Kojima in Metal Gear Solid; the cheeky, irreverent attitude of Rockstar North in the Grand Theft Auto series; the playful, safe tones of Mario created by Shigeru Miyamoto; all these traces of authorship shine through even the most fleeting encounters with the games in question.

The conflict, then, seems to me better illuminated when you consider that the player and the designer are in a state of shared authorship. Is it really a conflict or is partnership a more appropriate description? Is this sharing additive or diluting, with regards the artistic expression of the final work?

When you consider artistic expression as storytelling (which is clearly what Ebert has in mind when he compares games to film and literature), then there is plenty to be said for ‘conflict’. It’s easy to see this in today’s games. When the storytelling comes in, the interactivity goes out (most commonly, via the cutscene). From an abstract perspective, the conflict is evident too. Traditional storytelling is built on a strong foundation of narrative coincidence, but choice and a multiplicity of outcomes seems to stand in direct opposite to chance and coincidence.

Will Wright regularly acknowledges the conflict (for instance, in this recent interview), but from his perspective, the conflict is irrelevant - gaming isn’t meant to be a storytelling medium. As toys, his games represent what I believe is the true artistic opportunity of the medium. Games are a medium for storymaking as a collaboration between the designer and the player.

This approach is most evident in his work, for example The Sims, where every aspect of the game is concerned with it, but that’s not to say that every game has to be as freeform as his. Games are the ultimate hybrid medium, able to call on other media at will, be it cinema through cutscenes, or radio plays through the audio logs scattered through System Shock 2 and Doom 3, or theatre through the scripted sequences of Half-Life, or literature through the written books and notes scattered throughout the world of many RPGs.

Thus games can call on this storymaking to varying degrees (while assembling it into a hybrid with these other media). In a linear ‘thrill-ride’ first person shooter, the storymaking takes place at the microlevel of the game experience - the second to second moments of the story, the run-and-gun - while the designer keeps tight control over the macrolevel of the story. “Emergent gameplay” is a buzzword for describing what happens when the designer sets up the game to allow the player a greater input into the storymaking. “Orthogonal unit differentiation” (powerpoint via) describes how a designer can set up the game to make the potential stories the player can make, more interesting. Etc.

To say that player choices damage authorial control is to treat games as a purely storytelling medium, but, as I hope I have just demonstrated, that’s an inadequate and constrictive lens through which to view games. Player choices bring an authorially collaborative aspect to games, which renders comparison against media without collaboration (film and literature) inadequate.

To my mind, it seems more appropriate and informative to seek a comparison with a medium that also supports collaboration. One such medium would be music (a medium that Ebert acknowledges as art). There’s a necessary requirement that a composer’s work be played by a musician in order to be fully appreciated (sure there are experts who will say they can read a manuscript and appreciate its qualities, but equally, there are experts who can appreciate a game’s qualities without needing to take the controller and play it). This is an act of collaboration and the potential exists for that collaboration to dilute the composer’s original artistic intent.

However, though I’m no authority on music theory, I’ve never heard anyone posit an argument that this collaboration denies the possibility for the composer to be an artist or for a composition to be art, so I struggle to see the validity of the same argument being made against games. Certainly one could argue that it takes a talented musician to bring out the best of a particular composition to an audience. However, since, with games, the player is ‘musician’ and audience rolled into one, that argument collapses to one of accessibility - that one has to have a certain standard of ability or understanding to fully appreciate the artistry of a particular work. That argument about accessibility holds true of certainly film and literature and probably all media, so I don’t see it holding any relevance here.

So where does that leave this debate? As I indicated in the first part of this post, I find a direct question like “are games art?” to be a distracting and disorienting one and I am happy to leave to it to others more inclined to the challenge. However, I have yet to come across a successful argument that games are not art and arguments such as Chris Remo’s comments (in Part 1 or here) on Pikmin offer up a genuine insight into the ways in which they can be artistically expressive. Ebert’s arguments about player choice or games’ failure to “make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic” do not hold up to closer scrutiny and so, to my mind, the medium of video games remain, at the very least, not not art.