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On Game Developers and Legitimacy
Gamasutra is running a feature by game developer Brian Green on how he and his colleagues are still striving for legitimacy and respect as part of a medium that's still commonly thought of by many as "for kids" and "potentially harmful to kids." He notes that while financial legitimacy is no longer in question, artistic and cultural legitimacy are taking more time. Green makes some interesting parallels to the early movie and comic book industries, and points out that moral outrage against comic books did significant damage to the medium's growth in the US.
"... in the United States there was a 'moral panic' about the corrupting influences of comic books on children, as there often is with many 'new' media. The government threatened to enact laws to censor comic books, for the good of the children. (Does that sound familiar to game developers?) The industry reacted by enacting their own regulations, the Comics Code Authority (CCA). The Comics Code Authority heavily restricted the content that comics could contain. For example, the words 'horror' and 'terror' were not allowed in the titles of comics. Werewolves, vampires, zombies, and similar creatures of the night were forbidden."
Define art.
Your definition will either include videogames or exclude a good amount of things everybody considers art.
A critically acclaimed video game turned movie will go a long way towards legitimacy.
Heroscape, it's like legos combined with anachronistic wargames.
We've had movies based on games, games based on comics, games based on movies and TV shows, movies based on TV shows, games based on books, and soundtracks for all of them (but comics of course). Everything has been intertwined for years. And only the most idiotic of individuals could possibly isolate any one of these media and consider them not to be works of art.
Chrono Trigger. Street Fighter II. Virtua Fighter. Starcraft. Metal Gear Solid. Art?
Games are some of highest forms of art in existence as they include:
- writing: storyline, plot twists, character history and back story
- visual art: graphics, design, characters, creatures, environments
- animated art: motion capture, cartoon animation
- special effects: rag doll physics, explosions, stop motion (Max Payne), complex lighting
- sound: sound effects, samples, ambient noise, environmental sounds, foley noise
- music: original and licensed music, Chrono Trigger has amazing original music, Grand Theft Auto has amazing licensed music
- acting: voice acting, including many AAA games having Hollywood level talent
Are games considered brilliant works of art? David? Mona Lisa? Sistine Chapel? Are they considered as exceptional art because of the difficulty of the work?
What about the difficulty in creating an original title such as Half Life? Or Starcraft? Or Chrono Trigger?
David wasn't the first statue, Mona Lisa not the first painting, Sistine Chapel not the first mural, Starcraft not the first RTS, Half Life not the first FPS, Chrono Trigger not the first RPG, but they are standouts, works of a art, and unique accomplishments. And much time, thought, and effort went into the making of all them.
Just look at the balance of Street Fighter II (which took fifteen years), or Starcraft (still being balanced every day in Korea and Blizzard HQ), or Virtua Fighter (Sega revises the arcade versions several times). Is there not an art of game balance?
Balancing Virtua Fighter, where you have a cast of 19 extremely different characters that fight in different ways, or Starcraft where three completely unique races competing on different maps with different starting locations. Is there not an art to balancing those games? If it was a science then each character would be the same, each race the same.
And level design. It's EXACTLY like set design but more imaginative as you aren't confined to real world physics. Cliff Blezinski designed some of the most amazing architecture I have ever seen. What buildings did he create? None. He made levels, amazing levels, in Unreal Tournament. Levels that are works of art. (UT1 also had an amazing soundtrack).
Directing an in game cut scene is exactly like directing a scene in a movie (except the actors don't talk back). Look at Final Fantasy X or Metal Gear Solid 4.
Creating a game soundtrack is the same as making one for a film or television show. Look at Grand Theft Auto, Chrono Trigger, Halo.
Creating the 3D models for characters in game is the same as carving a statue. The characters in Virtua Fighter 5R are extraordinary when you see them moving on an HDTV monitor at the arcade.
Writing a script or character for a game is the same as writing one for a book or comic. Solid Snake & Niko Bellic have fuller lives and stories than some of the longest running television characters.
Animating a character and his or her in game moves is the same as animating a character for an animated or 3D movie. The animations for Virtua Fighter 5R are just as impressive or better than Toy Story or Wall-E. VF5R moves at a blazing 60fps and the animations are fluid and jaw dropping.
Cinema is art, music is art, television is art, painting or photography is art, writing is art, and so are games.
"The most virtuous are those who content themselves with being virtuous without seeking to appear so."
Plato
My parents didn't have to worry about what comics I bicycled up to the corner convenience store to buy.
"Internet censorship is a good thing! My parents don't have to worry about what websites I'm visiting!"
"TV censorship is a good thing! My parents don't have to worry about what I'm watching!"
Maybe your parents should have worried about what you were buying? Maybe, as parents, that's their job? I certainly see it as part of my job to watch over what my daughters are seeing.
The problem with gaming being seen solely as the preserve of kids, is that I, a 41 year old, am restricted to content that's been approved for 18 and under. As a game developer as well as a player, I get that from both sides. I can't work on a game with a plot that's too involved, or the kiddies won't get it. I can't show too much emotion between two NPCs, or someone might think it's sexual tension and ban the game.
The lack of respect for games puts us in a vicious circle where we can't do anything that would let us confront the player, and at the same time, we're not given respect because we never do confront the player.
I work in the "Games Industry", so I'll throw in my two cents.
Part of our problem is that the high profile titles are still stuck in what I'll call the Sitcom and Movie Of The Week phase. We have lots of heavily promoted titles that, to an outside observer, are only midly different (my mother would not be able to tell the difference between L4D and Fallout 3, just as I can't tell the difference between Fraiser and The King of Queens), and the production and release of these titles is largely driven by profitibility.
There are smatterings of "art" games, and it is my belief that these games are the ones that will bring legitimacy to the industry, although it's going to be an uphill battle. Let me take this sentence apart, because I want to clarify what I mean and why I'm making this argument.
A game like Emily Short's "Galatea", which is a text based game (ostensibly "Interactive Fiction"), is art, if solely for the beauty of the prose and the exploratory nature of the interaction. There are a vast array of possible conversations that the player can have with the title character, and these are mature, adult conversations, with depth and emotion fitting of any high quality published novel. But barely anyone knows about this game outside of the IF and Academic community.
Another game is Johnathan Blow's "Braid", which I began playing for the third (fourth?) time again last night. Not only is it beautiful, fun, polished, and unique, but the time-manipulation gameplay ties in with the plot in an almost magical fashion. Who, or what, is The Princess, and how exactly does she fit into the timespace continuum? Even after I put down the controller, I find myself thinking about the story far more than the button mashing or the puzzles.
But these two games also reveal part of the challenge, in that a game in the purest sense, as James Earnest (of Cheapass Games) used to attempt to impress upon me often, doesn't care about plot or story or pretty graphics. A game is about rules and play and fun, and that's it. So intertwining the game play aspect with the story aspect is the real challenge for legitimacy, because it's through story and narrative that people develop an emotional connection to the content, but it's via interaction that they experience this narrative.
I think there are a handful of approaches that are starting to tie interaction and dynamic narrative together. Fallout 3 (which I haven't played, admittedly) and Fable 2 are probably good examples, although they're perhaps the modern day "Die Hard" equivalents: yes, romance drives the plot, but it's really about guns and explosions. Cultural legitimacy, when playing a certain video games becomes the mass-populace in-thing to do because there is a positive (or at least thoughtful and broadly appealing) common experience to be had, this is probably at least another decade off. I think we need to see more Braids and Galateas, and better Fables that are less about sword slashing and more about our inner conflicts as human beings, before we get there. I think we need development teams who are more artists and storytellers than algorithmic optomizers, and I think we need to make games that take more risks and fail not simply because the framerate was poor or the textures were blocky, but because they tried to teach us something about what it means to be human and just wound up being weird.
Those are the mistakes we need to make in the industry, so that we can learn from them. Only when we understand how to merge interaction with introspection will video games be legitimate forms of art and entertainment.