On Provoking Emotions Via Games 108
N'Gai Croal, poster at the Newsweek LevelUp blog, moonlights today in a column for Next Geneartion discussing the success games have had in provoking emotional responses. More specifically, he talks about the fact that mostly games are fairly bad at this. Citing a few notable exceptions (Final Fantasy VII, BioShock), he raises again the notion of 'games as art' as they relate to emotion: "Shadow Of The Colossus wasn't a blockbuster, but the frequency with which it's cited in 'are games art?' debates indicates both a medium still in its aesthetic infancy and a videogame that punched above its weight. BioShock won't sell like Gears Of War, but it already feels as though it's going to be one of this generation's most influential games. And if Mass Effect can deliver on its early promise of confronting players with thorny moral choices and the consequences of their actions, perhaps other creators will see that making the player feel bad can be a good thing after all. "
Here's an idea. (Score:5, Insightful)
Arrange them on canvas.
Sell it to a museum for $millions as an "authentic warhol tribute."
Movie posters are considered "art." Movie boxes are considered "art." So are the movies inside.
How many video games have to come with posters and boxes before the thing inside is viewed as art as well?
come on (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:You muust Euthanise it! (Score:4, Insightful)
There are many places where games cross over into other genres of art and can make something of themselves under that category. Via sound, art, cinematics, story, they can become art just like music, paintings, movies, books...but how about art as a game?
Portals defy reality and show us in real-time an impossible world with impossible gameplay. A big part of the wonder in Portal was that your brain now was now wrestling with a wholly unfamiliar phenomenon and this gameplay, most importantly, is interactive. It's a game.
So this distinction of the portals is where I would point to when using Portal as an example of games as art. Because without the idiosyncratic traits of games being art, then it's just looking at already recognized facets of art in the game and then pointing them out as art, which is only showing that games contain that kind of art, not that gaming itself can be a form of art.
Re:You muust Euthanise it! (Score:5, Insightful)
What Portal has: unique, groundbreaking gameplay (well, aside from Narbuncular Drop, which pioneered the idea), great voice acting, good plot/writing (not incredibly involved, but surprising for what I expected was a simple puzzler).
What Portal doesn't have: flashy new graphics.
Are you suggesting the latter is somehow more important than the former? Really? That's pretty sad, if that's the case.
Single-player Doom was great for this... (Score:4, Insightful)
Some of them still do.
Re:Games don't have good story (Score:5, Insightful)
$50,000 cutscenes are one way of presenting story.
So are in-game events.
So are random notes you find in the game environment that hint at what happened.
So are NPC dialogues.
Games that have $50,000 budgets for CG doesn't mean that they have $50,000 stories. It just means that they thought the best way to present their story was with massive FMV. (hint: They're usually wrong.)
I know the moderators will punish me for this one, but people always say Half-life had an excellent story.
In my opinion, these people are on crack. Half-life's story sucked. Seriously. Think about it. Story: "We accidentally made a portal, and it kinda goes to the world of evil aliens, so they invaded. Hooray! This guy in powered armor killed an implausible number of them, and ended the invasion! We're saved!"
Where have I heard that story before? Oh yeah. Doom. Which people seldom accuse of being the height of literature.
What Half-life DID have (and had in spades) was PRESENTATION. It presented the story extremely well by never breaking first-person view, and "showing, not telling". So even though the story was utter crap, it was fun to have told to you, because they were telling it in a way that was completely novel at the time, and that you could explore and trigger at your own pace. The story didn't feel like it was being TOLD to you, it felt like it was HAPPENING to you.
So yeah, games can be art because of the interaction, but they can also be art because of the story they are presenting, through the interaction. I think I basically agree with your point - if you take a game, and just throw some unchanging story in between levels, then you have Final Fantasy, or, as I like to call it, "graphic novels punctuated by minigames". But there are also games that have been art specifically BECAUSE of their story, and the way the game made you feel like you were in charge of it and calling the shots, and that it felt awesome.
Planescape:Torment is a good example of a game that was like this.
Games can also be art when they present a story that is mostly static, but that is presented in a way that lets the player explore it and all the ramifications. Mind Forever Voyaging is a good example of this.
Heck, games can even be art based purely on their visual presentation. I think you could make an excellent case for Okami, purely on the grounds of its graphical style alone.
Sorry, I'm getting a bit far afield here. Back to the point: Games can be art because of the story. Or just about anything else. The interaction isn't the art in itself; the interaction is the "special sauce" that lets you explore the aspect of it that IS art, and makes it more than it was originally, due to the personal connection. Whether that aspect is story, graphics, or who knows what. Just because some studio dropped $50k on trying to make some flashy FMVs as a misguided attempt to cover up the fact that their story wasn't good, doesn't mean that games can't be art because of story.
Re:You muust Euthanise it! (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:You muust Euthanise it! (Score:3, Insightful)
In fact, the Weighted Companion Cube chamber is one of the most cleverly emotionally manipulative media moments I've ever come across. I mean, Hollywood's got emotion-manipulating down to an art and science but that room in Portal blew right past it.
Because, of course, who would ascribe thought or emotion to the cube if GLaDOS didn't tell you not to? And would you mind incinerating the cube as much if she didn't tell you to "euthanize" it? I genuinely pouted at my computer when I had to put the cube in the fire. The Weighted Companion Cube is, after all, your first ally in the game. And Portal manages to make you feel iffy about sacrificing an inanimate object for your own gain.
I also got chills the first time I heard one of the shooting turret things tell me, "I don't blame you."
Re:You muust Euthanise it! (Score:3, Insightful)
It's a false front (Score:3, Insightful)
If the cost of saving Spira is allowing Yuna to die, why the hell isn't it my choice to make? Why does the game present such a moral dilemma just to have the game decide for me? Why is it that after discovering that Kohint will disappear after I destroy the Wind Fish, the game presents me with no alternative? That isn't realistic, at least not to me. It's never me playing the role or connecting with the characters. I might like them, but considering that I have zero power to decide what happens in the world, I may as well be watching a movie.
I think games will become more emotional once you get the power that video games promise. That you and only you can decide how and why you want to save the world. Or even *if* you think that saving the world is a good idea. It's supposed to be me playing the role -- let me play in the sandbox and decide that some actions are right and some are wrong. Put up a consequence, make me suffer for a bad choice. Just let me choose.
Re:You muust Euthanise it! (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps by current definitions, yes. But maybe this is a new form of art: something that was not possible until modern day. For example, Rube Goldberg machines [wikipedia.org] are art because of their unnecessary complexity. So here, a machine has become art because it's nature has been twisted in an unusual way. Also, the result of mathematic manipulations like the spirograph [google.com] are now considered art. Such is also the case with purely virtual manipulations of math such as fractals [google.com]. Part of the reason these things are artistic is because they are not judged merely by their mathematical qualities, but based on aesthetic qualities.
I think, if you ask a level designer or a game designer, they will tell you that what they do is art. That's probably fair, since they are "designers" not "level engineers" or "game engineers." What they do is come-up with unique ideas, and draw them given a special set of tools made by a "software engineer." The tools they use are no different from using Adobe Illustrator to draw.
You are right that a hypercube is not art. However, a hypercube can be art [deviantart.com] if it is manipulated in an artistic way. I think that game levels are like that. This doesn't mean that game levels are "high art" but there is certainly an artistic nature to them.