That old question again
Tuesday, March 9, 2010 at 1:07AM This post is just getting less and less timely. On the other hand, this question is timeless.
"Birth of an Icon" - found at FreakingNews.com
That said, the event which sparked this post happened almost a year ago now. So after reading this new post by Mark Danger Chen, which deeply abuts the themes of postmodernity which this here post is really about, I figured I'd better just hurry up and get this thing out the door today.
While I wasn't able to make GDC last year, like virtually everyone else (who works in or around games) I was promptly informed by colleagues and blog posts about Heather Chaplin's now infamous rant regarding perpetual adolescence in games (or really perpetual adolescents in the games industry). A lot of the argument and dialogue which followed focused in on the "games as art" question, and this prompted me to start this blog post stem since I have a few things to say about both games and art. Of course, since I started writing this post there's already been an Art History of Games conference. Even before that, Ian Bogost took a hacksaw to the entire debate over at Kotaku by problematizing art while making a case for what he calls proceduralist games. Still, since I've been writing this post for over a year I'm going to finish it, and hopefully rearticulate what I think are the core issues here in a useful way.
This Is Not a Pipe by Genée Cosden, shirt available at threadless.com
IMHO, the long and the short of it is that there are choices we each make regarding how we engage with the aesthetic world, but that most of the people who are waiting for some flagship "Citizen Kane" moment in which games transcend their quotidian shackles and suddenly become a higher form of human experience have totally missed the boat. In addition, I believe you have to take the long view if you want to talk about art meaningfully in the present day, and that doing so leaves you with particularly difficult choices especially when considering recent digital games.
This is the point where, before proceeding any further, I need to mention that my BA was in studio art at U.C. San Diego, with an emphasis on conceptual art in the form of installation work. The faculty at U.C.S.D. don't necessarily provide their students with blazing technical skills, but they do provide them with a pretty exceptional orientation to what the pursuit of art is about, and just how sticky the underlying questions of human aesthetic experience can be. Whatever my artistic background prior to that program, coming out on the other side of it has left me with the conviction that the Postmodern movements have permanently reframed both historical and contemporary practices of art.
But what does that mean? A couple things (arguably more, but I'm going to focus on two). First, it means that the individual as audience is as important as the individual as artist when it comes to understanding aesthetic experiences. Specific interpretations of the consequences of this move vary, but one inescapable outcome is that if you're making art or even making something which you don't intend to be art, you really have no guarantee over how it will be perceived by contemporary audiences, and even less assurance about how potential audiences of the future might perceive it. Basically, the aesthetic experience cannot be an objective one, and this realization is an inherent consequence of the postmodern in art.
The second consequence of the Postmodern movements I'd like to emphasize is one which is often highlighted first in art history, namely the conflation of, or boundary erasure between, high and low art. Pop artists like Warhol of course exemplify this, but much like the inherent subjectivity of the artistic experience we can pin a lot of the credit or blame for this push on Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp of course retired from art to a career in chess, but what if any bearing that might have on the question of video games and art I leave up to you as a reader to consider on your own. I won't belabor this particular point, but I mention it because it's really a key starting point for recognizing that games are and have been art for a long time already.
Mario Mushroom stained glass from radianceart.com
Allow me to draw on a couple of specific historical examples which might seem completely unrelated to games, but provide some perspective on the matter of interpreting artifact as art. Paleolithic cave paintings from locations like Lascaux and Chauvet are often the starting place for art history survey courses and the textbooks they rely on. Yet we have absolutely no way of knowing what the intention of the prehistoric "artist" was. In fact, recent work by Neuroarthistorian John Onians calls into question even our most basic assumptions that these paintings served a narrative purpose of some sort. Whether Onians reinterpretation is correct or not, it forces us to seriously reconsider notions we held as to the purpose these works served for their creators, effectively putting us back at square one. By contrast, the stained glass of the great Gothic cathedrals and intricate mosaics of their Byzantine counterparts were created with a purpose more or less known to us, but one nearly as removed from the role of art in contemporary life as the work of our inscrutable Paleolithic predecessors is. In short, some of the most impactful work in the history of art resides within that stream of history based on a combination of surface features of the artifact, and interpretive moves made by the “audience” long after the cultural framework in which the artifact resided has faded to indistinct record or dissolved entirely. You can probably guess that I am hinting here at an argument for considering video games through the lens of a hypothetical far future art historian or anthropologist. You can take this argument to its logical conclusion, but I only sketch the vaguest outline of it here so as to move forward into more interesting questions regarding how to approach games as art in a way which is both more meaningful and productive than either a supposed objective rejection of games as art or a completely subjective perspective on the topic can allow for.
Don Piraro gives us a prime example of the gap between the intent and interpretation of artifacts
For all that the Postmodern movements have reshaped the landscape of art production, there is a strange persistence of a Classicist, (or at least Classically influenced) perspective on art in general. For many, the idea persists that art is still lives and nudes represented in oil paints or marble. Even if these media are not the literal constraints which are often imposed upon artifact by audience, few outside of specific cultural enclaves are interested in playing the Postmodern game, and most are likely unaware that there are actual rules by which the game of art is played such that the context of the presentation and other explicit markers of the artist’s intent can become standards for understanding an artist’s work. I’m not trying to unwrap the various cultural or “D”iscourse vectors that create this conservative trend, but I do believe that it is this attitude among large segments of the contemporary audience that continues to relegate video games to the edges of aesthetic experience when they have in fact become one of the most central media for creating these experiences in the world today.
(there will be more images and links in this post later, but for now I've just gotta post the damn thing)
Incidentally, I recognize that I’m using this phrase “aesthetic experience” a whole lot in this post and I haven’t exactly defined what I mean by it. Essentially, I’m using this term as a way of pushing past the limitations that come from thinking of how we experience art only in terms of crafted artifacts like Expressionist watercolors and “foreign films”. Basically, if we begin to think about the nature of the experiences we have when interacting with more traditional modes of art, we can develop a more functional groundwork for understanding what it is that art does for us (incidentally, I’m also not trying to take ownership of this concept, just deploying it here without citation). From here, we stand a much better chance of making sense of how video games do and do not function as artistic artifacts in our lives.
Hopefully I’ve established the groundwork for my speculations firmly enough that I can get to the heart of the argument now. Ideally at this point, if you’ve read this far, you are nodding to yourself saying, “Yes, yes, I see where he’s going with this. Different games can be artistic objects for different individuals at different times.” If so, great because this post is running long and I need to make a little jump here. The core question is, given the impact of postmodernity on art in general, why are so many folks (both developers and players) so unwilling to acknowledge that games as artifacts are inherently art-full, and capable of acting as works of art? Apart from conservative tendencies I’ve pointed at, I have a theory about this and it involves the seductive nature of moving pictures.
Indeed, at this point I come back to that sad perennial question, “When will there be a Citizen Kane of games?” The medium in which this question is framed is very telling. When we talk about games as art, the desire seems to always be to draw tight loops between art in the cinema and art on the console (or PC, or mobile, or handheld). I think this is a fundamental error. In fact cinematic artifacts provide a particularly bad framework for considering contemporary games because audience engagement is fundamentally different. Audiences generally engage with games iteratively. Games can be casual in which case audiences play them repeatedly in small sittings constructing micro-narratives. Games can be multiplayer experiences (massive or micro, competitive or cooperative, online or in room) in which case the audience engages in slightly longer, but still generally iterative, experiences of play. Or games can be structured around a big narrative in which case most players will play them over a period of days if not weeks or months. Film, by contrast, is not really engaged with in this manner. The primary artifact of a film is experienced as a singularity, and while repeated viewings can and do occur they are not an essential feature of the medium. Furthermore, even in these instances, repeated viewings can at best be compared to second and third playthroughs of big narrative games, and already the parallel is broken. The viewer leaves the theater with a desire to revisit the experience, but it is an experience that is already concluded. New viewings add layers, but no new story is revealed. When you leave an RPG or FPS in the middle of the story, the experience is fundamentally different. If your mind is still with the game, it may be probing a particular challenge you got hung up on, or speculating on which direction the story will bend next.
In this sense a literary perspective is oddly more suitable for looking at games, or at least for looking at games with a big narrative. Quite aside from the fact that branching narratives existed in print first and informed certain types of game design, the reader of a book like the player of a game passes in between the narrative of the work and narrative of their life. You put a compelling book down because other duties call, and its characters and settings reside in your head not frozen in time, but reaching out in a half dozen possible directions, your mind aching to provide possible choices they might make in the next chapter or the one after that . . . while, at least that’s how I read books. At any rate, my point here is simply that big narrative games, the type of games which we want to be more film like, will never be film like when they are at their best. Taken in this light, it’s easy to see where many mainstream games have already succeeded as a narrative art form. Before moving on to specifics though, I have to note that if you are willing to consider games through a framework of conceptual art, this more literary perspective is far from necessary. It should suffice that players have powerful aesthetic experiences when gaming through which they construct player narratives of their experience. In this light, games with big narratives are arguably less important in the landscape of contemporary art than their competitive and casual counterparts.
Moving on, if one does assume a literary perspective it’s easy enough to see where there have been some phenomenal successes in terms of games as art. Flower is of course a recent stand out, but this is almost too easy. There’s a reason why Bogost has sought to label games like Flower and Passage proceduralist, as they represent a specific genre of very “artsy” game, working to achieve a specific affect. They achieve it by leaning on specific affordances of the medium and ignoring other conventions, but games don’t have to do this in such extreme manners in order to be effective artistic works. Braid provides a more crystallized example, and in fact Braid includes the most elusive feature of effective narrative game design, but I’ll come to this in a moment. Personally, I think that Portal is actually the painfully obvious choice for one of the great works of art to date using video games as a medium, and I actually find it quite ironic that there was yet another outcry about “Where is the Citizen Kane of games” when Portal had already been released. That said, let me elaborate on why it is that most games with a big narrative fail where only a handful have succeeded. Before proceeding further, please note that there will be spoilers. This is unavoidable, but I’m so far behind on my gaming that this shouldn’t be a problem for most gaming readers.
The bottom line here is that endings are hard. This is true in writing, but if the evidence is any indicator it’s even truer in writing and designing games. Consider a handful of examples:
- I'm currently playing Borderlands DLC and loving it. The game is artful and unique even as it has some profound failings. That said, the ending of the primary narrative is so fundamentally disjunctive that I almost wanted to stop playing after I got there. On the one hand it involves a final fight with a tentacular pseudo-Lovecraftian travesty that is a near complete departure from the primary fiction, but possibly more importantly the mechanics of this boss fight are almost entirely unlike those employed at any other point in the game (except in so far as they involve shooting).
- I played through Shadow Complex in the first couple of days of 2010. I thoroughly enjoyed it as a played experience (yes I am a fan of platformers), and it was generally awesome. The final fight however was nonsense. Don't get me wrong, the entire Shadow Complex narrative is pretty much nonsense (albeit fun nonsense at times), but as with Borderlands it felt as if the designers had lost their loadstone when it came time to close out the game. Play is what constructs the most important part of the narrative of games as I’ve alluded to previously and will detail a bit more before I’m done, and when you bring new mechanics into an encounter that don’t feel like what the character does it can be even worse than blowing up the game’s storyline with some random dues ex machina crap where the random hand of the writer corrects a story that’s gone wildly out of tilt.
- In so far as narrative failings go, even one of my favorite games of all time Beyond Good and Evil demanded in the end that Jade be not only an expert photographer, martial artist, and gymnast, but that she be a super powered interstellar deity upon whose decisions the fate of the entire galaxy rests. The narrative wasn’t necessarily completely disjointed in this case, but I’m pretty sure that game could’ve had a solid ending without rising to such hyperbolic levels. After all, even comic books have successfully moved away from traditional super hero stories and often times have achieved commercial success in the process.
At any rate, this is the point where I say as clearly as possible that understanding narrative in games means understanding the played experience. If I didn't believe it beforehand, Drew Davidson certainly proved it to me 3 1/2 years ago when I saw him perform a close read of Sands of Time at GLS 3.0. Ignoring the player narrative and interpreting only the writing of the game artifact is to totally misunderstand the framework through which one can intelligibly speak about games and art. To put it another way, the total disengagement from the primary mechanics of previous game play (including prior boss fights) during the final engagement displays a profound misunderstanding of what your player is likely to feel when they are about to reach the climax of the narrative. Just to be extra clear here, what the player feels is extremely important in considering games as art. That’s what this whole aesthetic experience thing is about right, the ability to create something that evokes powerful feelings in the audience?
There were more things I was going to write here, but the truth is I need to sit on some of these concepts before trying to articulate them more fully. In fact, some of the stuff I’ve written here was definitely not quite ready for prime time. Then again, that’s a big part of why I have this blog. That way the 5 of you who read it sometimes can pick fights with me over my half baked ideas. More importantly, I’ve been writing this damn post for a year now and it’s about time that I posted it and let it float on downstream.
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Also, I was a studio art major, too! You know what this means, we need to take over the world.
Indeed! World domination is now inevitable . . . after dissertation writing is done ;)
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