Rantings: Why Games Should Be Art

Subtitle: Why I really hope Raph Koster is wrong.

Oh, don't get me wrong, I don't mean about everything. I'm impressed by a lot of what he has to say, and while I disagree on the details of his Theory of Fun For Game Design novel and the principal behind it (he mostly focuses on one kind of fun, while I have brought up a good 4-6 or so of them earlier in my bloggings,) but I respect him as a scholar of the industry. There is one thing he said, though. I unfortunately don't have the link or a citation, so I have to paraphrase here, but it's the concept behind the statement that matters anyway. He said, approximately, that the age of the single player game is dying or dead.

That, frankly, terrifies me. Now, it doesn't mean an end to every genre that I love, since narrative games can be cooperative or even competitive, but nonetheless it represents a disturbing trend in games. The industry, if the experts are to be believed, is undergoing a major shift. The day of narrative gameplay, of the cutscene, of levels and bosses and the linear dramatic arc, are dying. In this brave new world, we won't be reduced to emulating the language of cinema! We'll have customized characters, settings and stories! We'll have emergent gameplay! We'll let the players tell the stories they want!

Great. So when's Lost on?

That's a little cynical, but this is not a happy scenario for me. And frankly, it represents to me a step in the wrong direction. Oh, sure, we can stand to kill a few of our sacred cows in this industry. The non-skippable, unpausable dialogues and walls of text that last for minutes on end have to go, for one. But we're giving up too much of what we earned as a respectable medium. In a time when prominent politicians are desperately trying to treat video games as obscenity or the equivalent of drugs, when they claim we have no artistic value and never will, we're happily tripping all over ourselves to prove just that.

Narrative or not, video games will mostly be art. It's too late to go back to Pong levels of presentation. There will always be settings, beauty and horror, and visual and aural expression on par with movies. But if this becomes background for what strictly revolves gameplay, we lose our chance to tell a story, to create ideas and emotions with our worlds beyond the surface.

And let's not pretend this is about emulating cinema. The stories cinema tell were emulated from stage, which emulated literature, which emulated spoken word. Story and narration are older than writing, than civilization. Why should we divorce ourselves from that?

But isn't that what people want, the designers ask? Shouldn't they have the right to tell their own stories? Of course they can, and there should be games and game settings that accomodate that. But this should not be universal, or even the dominant part of gaming.

And there are two very good reasons why it shouldn't. First, while it's entirely true that games can be a great way for people to tell their own stories, there already is a place that does this expertly: real life. People's stories are told everywhere. It happens when you first meet someone. It happens when something funny happens on the train. It also happens in every game every made, from sports to chess to board games to tabletop games like Dungeons and Dragons (though these tabletop RPGs often are also narrative games to some degree.) If we give up our attempt to "emulate cinemas," we simply ape another common human tendency since before civilizatin, and one we already exclusively focussed on in our industry's infancy. Of course, people already can tell these stories for the cost of a basketball, or a few pencils and paper, or for free. We're charging them $50-60 for the same thing in a prettier environment. That's a risk I'm not so sure we can afford.

Secondly, people don't always want these stories, they want written ones. After all, they're creating their own stories 24 hours a day already, so why would they only want more of the same. What they're looking for is meaning. No, to clarify, what we're looking for is meaning; in fact, most storytellers become even more obsessed with stories to ensure what they say is new and gain more proficiency in the telling. We want to know that there are stories of heroism and horror at the archetypal level, stories that reflect on our own lives and help us fine the reason and purpose for them. Look to any other medium and you'll see this response. Remember when interactive movies were about to become the next big thing in the 90s? It's a clever concept, but of course it didn't work. And "choose your own adventure" style books never got out of the children’s' genre.

It's even happening in games. I mentioned before that while sports are not art, many aspects of them, from cheerleading to touchdown dances, are. This sort of thing is precisely why these things exist. A sport, especially a professional one, is meaningless. People slightly related to you in terms of living distance might defeat people not in physical proximity, and their victory will have no meaning on your life and will not be caused by you in the slightest. But give those teams names, and locations, and traditions, and histories, and you imbue them with meaning. It becomes a matter of scrappy underdogs rising up to defeat villains, or the value and honor of your city, or what it means to call yourself a fan. Ironically, as we scramble to take this meaning from games, the infinitely profitable sports industry, containing fans so dedicated it puts all but the most hardcore MMO players to shame, learned how to do the exact opposite.

So ends part two of my "Games ARE art!" rantings, which honestly are one of the main reasons I began this ranting sub-section. Stay tuned in two weeks for the conclusion, where I will discuss why, even if we accept video games are art and should remain so at a narrative level, video games are special as their own medium and its designers shouldn't bother making movies and other more traditional forms of art. In other words, why I think video games are better artistically than movies or television. It should be fun!