I like the article but it left out one of my favorite things unique to video games, ludonarrative dissonance — the phenomenon that the actions you perpetrate as a character can be entirely antithetical to the internal moral state of the character or the motivational state for achieving a certain goal.
One example is the recent Tomb Raider reboot. You play as a distressed teenage girl who is shipwrecked on a dangerous island with no survival skills or knowledge of self-defense or hunting.
Yet later in the game you are brutally murdering hundreds of enemy combatants by stabbing them with a homemade ax, shooting them with arrows in the head, lighting them on fire.
On one hand you are just trying to survive, find missing people, gain intelligence about the island you’re on. Needing to kill someone would only happen in an extreme situation, and you would be desperate to run and hide or use weapons to incapacitate rather than kill. On the other hand you function nearly as a harbinger of brutal and complete annihilation for the groups of enemy foot soldiers, mowing down hundreds of them, using anything in the environment to brutally kill them.
You aren’t a fallen anti-hero in the game’s world though. You are the thumbs-up, wholly moral protagonist, but the actions you perpetrate go far beyond anything justifiable for mere survival.
I think this effect is also something unique to specifically video game story telling, because it’s very hard to depict a character acting directly antithetically to the moral character the reader/viewer is supposed to believe they really represent, without entering some type of morality surrealism.
But in the game, since you are asked to be the agent who perpetrates the irreconcilable actions, you are more willing to engage the dissonance aspect, and feel like the brutal, unjustifiable actions don’t negate the character, since you “had to” do it to complete the game.
The Uncharted series also contains a lot of ludonarrative dissonance, as you are a cheeky Indiana Jones character who at root is a “good guy” just out for treasure, but who ends up brutally murdering thousands of bad guys along the way in over the top, morally indefensible ways.
The Metal Gear franchise has components, especially with the Raiden character, that touch on it too.
If you're referencing the amount of absurdity that can only be conveyed in video games then I agree. Ludonarrative dissonance is the uncanny valley of gameplay plus story telling.
Huh? I don’t see how they are related. Many games ask you to complete objectives using means that are perfectly in-character, and there would be no ludonarrative dissonance. But as a medium, video game storytelling creates a unique opportunity for optionally using ludonarrative dissonance as a factor.
There's this part that is a strength of video games:
"One of the most fundamental principles of storytelling is to have a protagonist with whom the audience identifies... Video games are better at establishing a connection between the audience and the narrative subjects ... because ... the audience does not merely passively observe characters, but rather actively controls them."
However, curation is also a core component of storytelling. And fundamentally, it's hard to force a player to look in a particular direction inside a video game (hence the need for cinematic cut scenes, where the medium reverts to a movie format). IMHO, this is the biggest weakness of VR, and if somebody can figure out a solution to this, they will have created the next entertainment format.
Ebert was right: games are not art. Video games can be composed of many different art forms, but the core game-ness and interactivity that make a game is not art. The rules or game-logic of chess and League of Legends are not art.
Instead, games are more akin to novel mediums, like musical instruments. A guitar is not inherently artistic--it could be crafted by an artisan and composed with beautiful visual design, but it could equally be produced in a factory without a hint of human emotion. Both cases are still a guitar; they have the core feature of interactivity: tap a string, hear a sound.
Therefore, while games are not art, playing a game is art. Art in the sense that the artist is expressing themselves, or performing, on a medium of their choice. Obviously, this varies across games depending on how interactive they actually are (as opposed to being mainly movies). Many enthusiasts of chess see a grandmaster's performance as art, both as a performance art and a persistant art form (there are books written on single games or even moves, albeit the latter from a purely analytical perspective).
To me, shoehorning games into a box of art-as-products is not compelling, and counterproductive to understanding games and the video game industry. That is, the AAA industry is infamously bad to work in relative to other software subindustries--it's certainly no game designer' paradise, a free-spirited realm of artistry. AAA video games are massive feats of engineering, not works of art (notwithstanding the obvious components of visual and audio design). And on the consumer side, we see the continued growth of esports, livestreaming, and other niche performance mediums like speedrunning.
I completely agree about the performance art aspect of games, but I disagree that this means the game design itself is not art. Play within the ruleset is made possible by the deliberate constraints proposed by the designer, who (if skilled) has considered the range of performances encouraged and allowed. Plenty of art is deliberately ambiguous; ceding some part of the work to a participant doesn't immediately kill the author.
I can't comment on how useful this is for understanding the industry, but it is essential for looking at the works.
What you describe sounds a lot more like "engineering" than "art". Defining art as "making things" is not very helpful IMHO, because then everyone and everything is an artist/art and the terms lose meaning.
Game development is a massively complex undertaking[1] and designers' self-expression will quickly cede to the large number of technological and engineering concerns.
I do tend to err on the side of inclusivity, but I don't think it becomes meaningless to say that anything can be art. Is there anything physical that can't be made as sculpture? There is engineering and craft in most art to realize it in a permanent form. I disagree that unbridled self-expression is a requirement, heck limitation is often the enabler.
Maybe I'm missing your point, though, and it sounds like I'm saying everyone with a paintbrush is an artist. Certainly many games, even those much less complicated than your game engine diagram, are just made to "work": look pretty, hook players, shift units, sell replays. But I think we can criticize these games for what they lack just as we would for poor visible or audible aspects. We can recognize the existence of an "art film" on the same spectrum as a popcorn-munching AAA blockbuster, if maybe at the shallow end.
I'm not very well-versed in this argument, though I know it has been going on for a long time, sorry if I'm boring you with the easily-rebuttable stuff. I may be trying, as a former game developer and hobbyist game designer, to appropriate something that is better understood much differently. If art has to be the pure expression of one mind, unfiltererd through commercial necessity, engineering, and cooperation, then I have it wrong. I wonder if there's a better term for whatever it is I mean, entertainment doesn't seem to do it justice.
(Edit) fwiw I am trying to understand where you're coming from, too, sorry if this got too argumentative. I was intrigued by your observations about playing games and just a bit confused why you seem to reject game design as an art, as small a part of the whole product as it is.
So if you don't look at a piece of visual art directly is it art? Your argument is heavily flawed. The constituents of art are intention and material of which video games have both. Interactivity is a facet of the medium, not the medium itself which contains ideas, challenges and aesthetic representations of things.
Art can be pure self-expression, with no intent of providing a product with any meaning. This is perfectly compatible with my argument of play-as-art.
"Interactivity is a facet of the medium, not the medium itself which contains ideas, challenges and aesthetic representations of things."
Not quite sure what you are trying to say here, but you seem to be underestimating just how abstract interactive systems are. "Ideas, challenges and aesthetic representations" are not necessary for an interactive system, though they are frequently paired because the former features help us engage with and better communicate the game or system. You can take an interactive system and represent it in a million different ways, but the underlying "gameplay" is isomorphic.
I don't think "power fantasy" is central at all to the appeal of videogames. Rather, the things that can really easily be modeled by computers happen to be... casting rays from point a to point b, changing an objects position based on its heading and speed, bouncing two things off of each other, or, to put it simply keeping track of a bunch of values that interact in a linear fashion...
There just isn't a whole lot more you can do well other than having the stuff on screen either bump into each other, shoot each other, or punch each other, or move and jump around (preferably all at the same time if you want something fun). I don't really find anything empowering about the whole process, it is just interesting to see stuff happen on screen and solve little puzzles and there isn't really any other type of game available.
If we had a tea party simulator where you poured tea for virtual friends and had riveting virtual conversations I'm sure that would be insanely popular (I'd play it just after I finish this game about ordering lots of dudes to run around a map and shoot each other). It's just that we don't have it because your virtual friend needs to be something like a strong AI to carry out a riveting conversation.
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[ 2.9 ms ] story [ 41.9 ms ] threadOne example is the recent Tomb Raider reboot. You play as a distressed teenage girl who is shipwrecked on a dangerous island with no survival skills or knowledge of self-defense or hunting.
Yet later in the game you are brutally murdering hundreds of enemy combatants by stabbing them with a homemade ax, shooting them with arrows in the head, lighting them on fire.
On one hand you are just trying to survive, find missing people, gain intelligence about the island you’re on. Needing to kill someone would only happen in an extreme situation, and you would be desperate to run and hide or use weapons to incapacitate rather than kill. On the other hand you function nearly as a harbinger of brutal and complete annihilation for the groups of enemy foot soldiers, mowing down hundreds of them, using anything in the environment to brutally kill them.
You aren’t a fallen anti-hero in the game’s world though. You are the thumbs-up, wholly moral protagonist, but the actions you perpetrate go far beyond anything justifiable for mere survival.
I think this effect is also something unique to specifically video game story telling, because it’s very hard to depict a character acting directly antithetically to the moral character the reader/viewer is supposed to believe they really represent, without entering some type of morality surrealism.
But in the game, since you are asked to be the agent who perpetrates the irreconcilable actions, you are more willing to engage the dissonance aspect, and feel like the brutal, unjustifiable actions don’t negate the character, since you “had to” do it to complete the game.
The Uncharted series also contains a lot of ludonarrative dissonance, as you are a cheeky Indiana Jones character who at root is a “good guy” just out for treasure, but who ends up brutally murdering thousands of bad guys along the way in over the top, morally indefensible ways.
The Metal Gear franchise has components, especially with the Raiden character, that touch on it too.
However, curation is also a core component of storytelling. And fundamentally, it's hard to force a player to look in a particular direction inside a video game (hence the need for cinematic cut scenes, where the medium reverts to a movie format). IMHO, this is the biggest weakness of VR, and if somebody can figure out a solution to this, they will have created the next entertainment format.
Instead, games are more akin to novel mediums, like musical instruments. A guitar is not inherently artistic--it could be crafted by an artisan and composed with beautiful visual design, but it could equally be produced in a factory without a hint of human emotion. Both cases are still a guitar; they have the core feature of interactivity: tap a string, hear a sound.
Therefore, while games are not art, playing a game is art. Art in the sense that the artist is expressing themselves, or performing, on a medium of their choice. Obviously, this varies across games depending on how interactive they actually are (as opposed to being mainly movies). Many enthusiasts of chess see a grandmaster's performance as art, both as a performance art and a persistant art form (there are books written on single games or even moves, albeit the latter from a purely analytical perspective).
To me, shoehorning games into a box of art-as-products is not compelling, and counterproductive to understanding games and the video game industry. That is, the AAA industry is infamously bad to work in relative to other software subindustries--it's certainly no game designer' paradise, a free-spirited realm of artistry. AAA video games are massive feats of engineering, not works of art (notwithstanding the obvious components of visual and audio design). And on the consumer side, we see the continued growth of esports, livestreaming, and other niche performance mediums like speedrunning.
I can't comment on how useful this is for understanding the industry, but it is essential for looking at the works.
Game development is a massively complex undertaking[1] and designers' self-expression will quickly cede to the large number of technological and engineering concerns.
[1] http://www.gameenginebook.com/img/fig-runtime-arch.jpg
Maybe I'm missing your point, though, and it sounds like I'm saying everyone with a paintbrush is an artist. Certainly many games, even those much less complicated than your game engine diagram, are just made to "work": look pretty, hook players, shift units, sell replays. But I think we can criticize these games for what they lack just as we would for poor visible or audible aspects. We can recognize the existence of an "art film" on the same spectrum as a popcorn-munching AAA blockbuster, if maybe at the shallow end.
I'm not very well-versed in this argument, though I know it has been going on for a long time, sorry if I'm boring you with the easily-rebuttable stuff. I may be trying, as a former game developer and hobbyist game designer, to appropriate something that is better understood much differently. If art has to be the pure expression of one mind, unfiltererd through commercial necessity, engineering, and cooperation, then I have it wrong. I wonder if there's a better term for whatever it is I mean, entertainment doesn't seem to do it justice.
(Edit) fwiw I am trying to understand where you're coming from, too, sorry if this got too argumentative. I was intrigued by your observations about playing games and just a bit confused why you seem to reject game design as an art, as small a part of the whole product as it is.
"Interactivity is a facet of the medium, not the medium itself which contains ideas, challenges and aesthetic representations of things."
Not quite sure what you are trying to say here, but you seem to be underestimating just how abstract interactive systems are. "Ideas, challenges and aesthetic representations" are not necessary for an interactive system, though they are frequently paired because the former features help us engage with and better communicate the game or system. You can take an interactive system and represent it in a million different ways, but the underlying "gameplay" is isomorphic.
There just isn't a whole lot more you can do well other than having the stuff on screen either bump into each other, shoot each other, or punch each other, or move and jump around (preferably all at the same time if you want something fun). I don't really find anything empowering about the whole process, it is just interesting to see stuff happen on screen and solve little puzzles and there isn't really any other type of game available.
If we had a tea party simulator where you poured tea for virtual friends and had riveting virtual conversations I'm sure that would be insanely popular (I'd play it just after I finish this game about ordering lots of dudes to run around a map and shoot each other). It's just that we don't have it because your virtual friend needs to be something like a strong AI to carry out a riveting conversation.