April 30, 2013

Games as Art

So, it's been only a scant two months since my last post. Mostly because I discovered something interesting: a job gets in the way of my previous writing style.

It used to be, another day off. Which NES game am I going to gripe about today? I'd find a comically bad one, play it while snagging a bunch of screenshots and then write about it right afterwards.
Then I'd find random stuff on Google Images and write funny captions to them.
Having a job complicated that quite a bit. Since I'd come home, sit down and if I was going to play a game, I was going to enjoy it. I didn't have time to play crap.

Well, that's not true.

Just recently, for some reason (which I'm sure is inspired by Game Grumps) I decided to play Sonic 06 again, but this time, to completion. Upon playing it again, I was surprised by how playable it was. Provided that you knew exactly what was going to happen. And, having watched the Game Grumps struggle through every level twice now (still working on Silver) I knew it all by heart.

It never ceases to amaze me how bad the Game Grumps are at playing games. Due to them talking about random crap that is barely even funny, they miss out on golden moments in the game, instructions, or even basic patterns needed (to quote Egoraptor) "to live and to... be..." But the really amazing thing is that I continue to watch them for some reason. They're entertaining somehow. Even when they're frustratingly bad at simple tasks.

But that's beside the point. I promised myself that I'd wait at least another year before writing in depth about Sonic again.

No, today is a much meatier discussion that me and my friend had recently.

I discovered that a close friend of mine, someone I grew up with and was practically a brother to me, doesn't like Earthbound. This actually took me off guard since much of our childhood consisted of us playing it during sleep overs and thoroughly enjoying the writing and game in general.
Ah ha ha ha ha!


Recently he finally played it all the way through and found several aspects of the game to be irritating. And I discovered that he and I diverge greatly on the subject of rating games. Whereas I judge a game on pretty much everything included in the game (graphics, story, gameplay, music, etc) he judges primarily on whether or not he thought it was fun. Earthbound ranked a solid 5/10 for him. He admitted to loving the story, the music and the graphics, the gameplay was too cut and dried for him. To be fair, I knew he was biased against Dragon Warrior-esque RPGs from the get go, but this was a real eye-opener to me. Since I have it on pretty good authority that the game is far from average, as he claims.

This got us talking about the medium of video games in general. And I think that the big difference that we have is that when he pops in a game, he wants to have fun. Pure and unadulterated fun. For me, I go for immersion. I like to be swept away to a different world. A world of magic, or aliens, or incredibly awesome psychic hedgehogs from the future.
Yeah, I drew that.
But this opened up a large can of worms that had never before been in our friendship. Now, sometimes I can't tell if he's just trolling me or not, but he acts pretty scornful of the concept of video games as art. I wholeheartedly believe that games can be art, but admit that scant few are.

This is a discussion raging on somewhere else. We have people throwing up games like Shadow of the Colossus or ICO to demonstrate that they can be art. Then you have people like Roger Ebert saying that they'll never be art. I'm sure the same argument raged about movies, plays, books, and even story telling in general back their respectful haydays.

But video games are interesting since they have the perfect vantage point to be art. Since my definition of art is any piece intended to make you feel a certain emotion, games have a way of touching you that no other medium can. They make you the character. Or you control him. You live in that world. You decide what happens and you can get invested in the happenings like no other medium. It's a lot easier for a plot twist to impact you since it's you doing it. Imagine Bioshock's big twist ("Would you kindly?") if it were in a book or movie. It would lose almost all of its impact since it'd be up to the narrator or actor in question to depict to us that strange mixture of feelings of being both violated and manipulated at the same time. It wouldn't work. Bioshock used the medium of interactivity, coupled with the standard convention of quest-based obstacles to suddenly pull the rug out from the observer (the player). Every move that the player has made has been without question. You thought that it was just because you were playing a game. Suddenly the game asks you why you would do these things, and then tells you that you had no choice. The player character was mentally conditioned to follow the phrase "Would you kindly?" and without realizing it, the player was too. Blindly following the next objective that was always asked of you following the trigger phrase.

This was an awesome moment where we got a sneak-peek behind the curtain and understood a little about the possibilities that games offer over movies or books.
"Would you kindly buy the sequel?"
A book is a great illustrative device to paint a world from a certain point of view. There can be sparse detail or enormous amounts of it. Try reading Bram Stoker's Dracula to see what I mean. There was a time when books were something of more story-driven poetry, it seems. It was there to paint a picture with words more than to tell a story. And so, older books tend to be verbose and hard to read now because we just don't get into that much detail any more. And part of that is because we now have movies.

Movies deal with the imagery itself. If a book needed to have a really scary setting or imagery to convey the feeling it was trying to establish, it would have to be really longwinded. This causes the more modern reader to skim through paragraphs of sheer descriptions just to move the story along. A movie allows the story to move unhindered by needless descriptions by using a visual medium to demonstrate... well... the visuals. Instead of having a character describe Dracula has being pale with a thick mustache, we can simply call up a picture instead.
Somewhere along the way, vampires learned to shave.
Now this is a great medium to show off impressive visuals. Large explosions and flashy gadgets are a lot more fun to look at then to read about.

But early movies were terrible. They were badly paced, the acting was sub-par, and the camera techniques were practically non-existant. It was like someone just recorded a live play. Which of course, was exactly it. Plays, in turn, were just people acting out what was in a written story. Which is why we study plays in English class as part of the curriculum while we only watch movies when the teacher needs a nap.

Eventually, people realized that there was more you could do with a visual medium than just watch people stiltedly rehearsing lines at one another, moving for little or no reason across the stage with big sweeping gestures. And that was when people started realizing that you can tell a distinct story in a movie than one in a book.
Even if you use the same title.
Now, I would hesitate to call early movies art. But there are a lot of purists who say I'm wrong about that. And I'll grant that I'm woefully ignorant about early movies, since I don't find them entertaining. But I do understand that I share the same feeling about games. And I am starting to come around to the idea of why people might not enjoy Final Fantasy VI when compared to Final Fantasy XIII based solely on quality and entertainment.

But, here's the thing. Even though we're well into our third or fourth decade of having video games, we're just now starting to break out with ideas that challenge the way we conceive the interaction with these things. But most of the best games, with the best story telling, still rely heavily on concepts from movies. The cutscene for instance. Taking away interactivity so the game can show us something cool or pretty. There was a time when you were rewarded with a cutscene in a game. Now it's commonplace. It's not a unique story-telling device. In fact, it's a horrible one when the main defining purpose of a video game is interactivity. This is abundantly clear in movie-based games from the PSX era. If you beat the game or a level, you'd be treated to a low-quality clip of the actual movie. At some point, every kid had to ask himself why he rented the game itself instead of the movie. Especially since the gameplay of movie games are usually in the pits. But we all rented Spider-Man at some point, right?

The point is, video games are at a very early age as far as art goes. Just like movies borrowed heavily from conventions used on stage. And stage conventions relied heavily on conventions used in literature, video games are still relying heavily on conventions used in film. But we're now just coming to a point where we might actually be able to start doing things that can't be done via film or literature, due to the unique aspect that games bring to the table.

Bioshock used an interesting way to tell the narrative, not by coming up with anything new or revolutionary, but by using an outdated form of entertainment, the radio-drama. By having us listen to the recordings of people living in Rapture, we began to understand the events that unfolded before. This was a step up, as far as immersion and interactivity went, from using a cutscene or "flash-back". Instead of having a long, drawn-out explanation of the world Rapture was from a non-interactive movie, we were given the narrative as we could see the after-math of the events. So when we first see the banners for the New Year's party that was attacked, we can continue to poke around and look at the set while someone else gives us some information that is relevant to the story, while not going out of their way and saying, "It was 1958 when the Splicers attacked the New Year's Eve party. Splicers are people..." It helped build immersion by finding left-overs instead of straight up exposition. Allowing you to naturally understand the story like you would in real life.

Movies and books can do this too, but it's much harder. Books can often give too much exposition, because too little and the plot seems to come out of nowhere. Movies can do it too, but have to be careful. If a movie goes out of its way to hold on one plot point too long or one set piece too long, it will tip people off that it's relevant to the plot. Video games, where you interact within the story might give you an opportunity to learn about the world its set in without having to yank the camera away and force you to understand something.

That's why Bioshock has a much better story-telling mechanic than, say, Skyrim. Skyrim has a lot of story, but it's given to you in large info-dumps (books) or by listening to other characters. You rarely learn more about the setting by actually playing the game. By which I mean, you wouldn't really understand the struggle between the Stormcloaks and the Imperialists if you didn't actively talk to people. And that is a large part of the overall plot of the game. Whereas in Bioshock, you can get an idea of what happened in Rapture, even if you were to take out all the dialogue in the game.

This is a hallmark that most, if not all, games should shoot for.

But the problem is that games are funded in much the same way a movie is. So producers are less likely to spend money on a game that isn't a sure return of investment. Which in turn means that if a game can be like a blockbuster movie, then that game will get funding. If the game is deep and thoughtful and really makes you think about the way you interact with it, but isn't exactly marketable, that game will go in the "nice idea" category to be picked over when the company gets really desperate. (It's happened before, Square)

But, here's where video games are starting to take off on their own. Independent developers, which are small groups of people or small companies, are really starting to bloom. Now with marketing and distribution mostly handled via clients like Steam or Xbox Live Arcade, it's less costly and therefore less risky to take a chance on a game that deals with something as strange as, say, traveling back in time. Games are starting to evolve on their own merits, and that's great for me.

In the end, though, I feel like I'm a purist when it comes to games. Just like someone can watch a "classic movie" and think it's way better than anything coming out now, I can play an older game and appreciate it often times more so than a blockbuster game that's more recent. But, that doesn't mean we can't be tolerant of what is after-all something good. For example: I doubt that I would like Casablanca. Much to the shock of many, I just can't get into a black-and-white movie very easily, much less a drama. But, it would be near sacrilege for me to say it was an "average movie". I might not understand the appeal to it, but I wouldn't ever go so far as to say that.

And in the same vein, my friend is dead wrong about Earthbound.
True genius is never appreciated...