Are videogames art?
Simple question, eh? Most gamers would answer with a resounding yes, others (such as Roger Ebert) say no.
Frankly I think it's pointless.
For one thing, the question assumes that everyone agrees on what art is. This is not true. You ask a thousand different people that question and you will get a thousand different answers. In fact, if one reads
Roger Ebert's rebuttal to Clive Barker's comments, you see that their difference is much deeper than whether or not videogames are art - they disagree on what art is. Ebert wants a single coherent experience, whereas Barker bestows the title on anything which creates a profoundly moving experience. Even among general accepted visions of Art, there are differences. A Jackson Pollock piece is considered Art for far different reasons than the Mona Lisa.
Another problem is that most people who are upset at Ebert over his comments confuse Artistry with Craftsmanship. There are a lot of really well done games out there. That does not necessarily mean that they are Art.
So my definition of a game that qualifies as art would be the following: A interactive work which conveys a message, both through content
and game mechanics. The last part is particularly important. In my definition, in order for a game to be art, the mechanics have to mesh with the message. Why? Because otherwise your message becomes window dressing. Let's take the critical darling
Bioshock as an example.
CASE STUDY: BIOSHOCK
Spoilers on the game Bioshock will appear in the following few paragraphs.
Quick crash course for those unfamiliar with the title:
Bioshock is a first person shooter developed by Irrational Games (the studio was bought by 2K and the name changed to 2K Boston, a slap in the face to the team, really.) It is touted as a "spiritual successor" to
System Shock 2, widely hailed as one of the greatest games of all time.
Backstory:
Bioshock is set in Rapture, an underwater Utopia built by a man named Ayn Rand - er, Andrew Ryan, sorry- who was quite a fan of laissez-faire style capitalism. Rapture had little to no regulation (apart from basics like "don't kill people or take their stuff") and no such thing as taxes. It was a free society, where the only thing deciding succes was personal skill and ambition. Unfortunately, that all went to hell when parasites were discovered on the ocean flor that contained a mysterious substance called Adam, which allowed genetic manipulation. With this people could change anything they wanted about themselves, from their appearance to wether or not they could shet things on fire with their mind. Unfortunately, a man named Frank Fontaine controlled the supply of Adam, which made him extremely powerful. Ryan, fearing that Adam would destroy his precious city, began betraying his own principles and made the substance illegal. Things went downhill from there, especially as people discovered that tinkering with your genes made you completely insane, craving more and more Adam. Eventually the city descends into utter chaos, which is when the player crashes into the ocean right next to the lighthouse which houses the entrance to Rapture.
Gameplay: The player follows a linear path through rapture, killing any splicers he runs across and following the directions of a man named Atlas (subtle) who tells him what to do via a radio.
There a variety of ways to do this. Conventional firearms are present throughout the game, as are plasmids.
One of the big selling points of the game were Plasmids, essentially magic spells (plotwise powers granted through genetic mutation). These include electric bolt (which also electrifies water), pyrokenisis, telekinesis, plasmids which disable security cameras, and plasmids which enrage enemies into attacking their neighbors. There are also "tonics", which are Plasmids that are always on. These generally involve increasing damage done, reducing damage taken, and increasing the effectiveness of certain weapons or plasmids. A player is limited in how many plasmids and tonics they can have, but can purchase slots for both as well as the actual abilities themselves from vending machines scattered around the game, using Adam. The player's primary source of Adam is the Little Sisters, who are little girls genetically engineered to harvest and store Adam. In order to harvest them, the player has to kill their protector (the dudes in diving gear in pretty much every screenshot of the game) and then either "kill" the girl for lots of Adam, or "save" her by removing the parasite for slightly less Adam. The girls themselves are invincible, the parasites in them healing them instantly until you rip them out of their bodies.
In addition to killing things, the player can hack most machinery. Hacking is a minigame (basically a version of the classic
pipe game) that, if successfully accomplished, allows you to turn turrets against enemies, boobytrap health stations, and get stuff cheaper from vending machines.
Finally, if a player dies, he is revived in "Vita-Chambers" with half health. Enemies, however remain at the status they were before the player died. Essentially there's no penalty for dying.
Critique:
Let me start by saying that
Bioshock's setting is absolutely inspired. The underwater city of Rapture is hauntingly beautiful, superbly designed, and refreshingly unique. The story is also intriguing, about a man who started a city with grand ideals, and then became corrupted by power and betrayed those ideals in order to cling to authority. Andrew Ryan's death is moving, in part because of the shocking revelation you recieve, and in part because it is his redemption, his refusal to sacrifice the last belief he hasn't gone back on - "A man chooses, a slave obeys."
With all of this wonderful backstory and setting, people have been raving about Bioshock, hailing it as the dawn of a new age of videogames. There's just one tiny problem.
Bioshock is not about how men can become inhuman for the sake of survival or power.
Bioshock is about shooting things. There's an old axiom of hollywood: "The story comes first." Well videogames also have an axoim: "The gameplay comes first." This is true not only of design, but of conveying a message.
In order to find out what a game is saying (not necessarily what the designers are trying to say, which is sometimes completely different), all you have to do is break down what you spend your time doing. In
Bioshock, what you do is run around and kill everything in sight, upgrade your ability to kill things, then resume killing things, occaisionally interacting with an object that will open the door and allow you to continue killing things. Everything in the game, from Plasmids to item fabrication, revolves around the player killing the inhabitants of Rapture. Hell, there's not even a modicum of deciding
what to kill, the only non-enemies you encounter are invincible. There's not even the threat of death, as magical respawn points litter each level. So what message does
Bioshock convey? Certainly not the high-minded (and quite good) narrative that it wraps itself in.
Bioshock's message is if it moves, kill it.
Bioshock's much touted "morality" is pathetic. Do you slaughter little girls for your own benefit? Or do you "save" them by killing their protectors, removing their invincibility, then casting them off to roam a underwater hellhole populated by mutant freaks who will kill them on sight? Even then, there is no tangible loss to doing what's right - you are rewarded quite well for saving little girls, in fact, you gain unique plasmids. So the choice is less "what are you willing to do to survive?" and more "are you a sadistic killer of children?"
Now this wasn't the original plan for
Bioshock. The original concept was for Rapture to be an of open world where fighting splicers would be an extremely risky buisiness, death would be just around the corner, and getting in a fight would be entirely avoidable. Unfortunately, the designers erred on the side of mass consumption, and significantly simplified the content of the game in order to cater to the bottom denominator.
So what would
Bioshock have to do differently in order to meet my definition of art? Let's say we wanted
Bioshock to convey the following message both in story and gameplay:
Every man has his principles, but each principle has a point where it is overridden by self-preservation. Also, he who fights the monster must be careful not to become the monster. Storywise, Andrew Ryan's principles of free market and no regulation were cast aside when he began to lose power. Gameplaywise, several things could be done:
1) Make the Little Sisters as human as possible, and the only way to get Adam from them would be to actually kill them. Not in a cutscene that fades to black at the moment, but actually making the player pull the trigger (or click the mouse, in this case) and end their life.
2) Make Adam vital.
Bioshock is easily beaten with the very first weapon you pick up (the wrench) and the very first plasmid you find laying on the ground (the electric bolt.) These two weapons, used in conjunction, are extremely effective. The only real reason to purchase other plasmids is to play around with new ways of killing things. Make hacking an ability upgraded by Adam, forcing a player to spend limited resources wisely.
3) Make confrontations deadly. An encounter with a splicer should always be potentially deadly.
4) Make ammunition scarcer.
5) If you must have a way to save the little sisters, then make it be an resource-intensive process that forces you to use up precious supplies for altruism.
6) Make the player susceptible to splicer madness. Currently the player can load up on genetic mutations with no ill effect. It would have much more impact if each Plasmid gained added a cost of some kind, either a requirement to consume Adam or suffer damage, or insanity effects, or someting else entirely.
7) No free revival. Ideally no revival at all.
8) Instead of a linear path through multiple locations, have the locations all interconnect, with multiple paths to allow a player to try and avoid large packs of splicers.
So what would these changes give us?
A game where the player is thrust into hell underwater, where powerful mutants roam looking for their next Adam fix. At first, the player can get by without plasmids, but in order to escape, he has to travel deeper and deeper into the depths of rapture, where more powerful enemies force him to modify his DNA in order to complete. Ideally the player would gradually feel more and more inadequte, until even the most principled of gamers breaks down and slaughters a little sister - "Just one, only because I must to survive, no more after this," etc. The player could go to town with upgrading himself, becoming super powerful but also having a nearly unsatiable apetite for Adam, or he could squander precious resources in order to save the little sisters. Thus, the gameplay mechanics would reinforce the themes in the plot, and you would have Art.
Now, would such a game have sold nearly as well as
Bioshock did? Of course not. Art is generally not suited to mass consumption, and frankly such a game would be kind of depressing. It's certainly not fantastical escapist entertainment. But it would be brilliant - a game about a city of people who were pushed until they broke, pushing a player until he broke - that's art.
There's another aspect of
Bioshock that's heralded as brilliant, and that's its meta narrative. In
Bioshock, you are forced to do things that most sane people would not do in order to progress the plot. One infamous example is the first plasmid you recieve. It's a brass syringe, laying on the damp floor of a decrepit underwater city, and you're told to inject yourself with the contents.
For all you know, that could be filled with sewer waste, and yet you can't proceed until you pick it up and stick it in your arm.
Later, it's explained that you are a mutant created by Frank Fontaine to assasinate Adam Ryan, and that you literally have to obey any command proceeded by the words "Would You Kindly..."
It's absolutely brilliant. After all, in all games you are forced to perform certain actions in order to continure, because there's a limit to how much can be programed in and if you don't progress, the game sort of just stops.
Bioshock acknowledges this, then incorporates this aspect of gameplaying into the plot. Why am I doing what the strange man on the radio is telling me to do? Why can't I just put the damn thing down and wander around on my own? Because I physically can't, I'm brainwashed into doing what he says, and of course I have no idea, because I'm brainwashed. It's pure genius. In fact,
Bioshock could do none of the things I mentioned above and it would
still be art if it managed to pull this off. Unfortunately, it doesn't.
Towards the end of the game, you are released from this mental control, and yet you still have to do
exactly what someone else tells you to do. Despite being released from your brainwashing, you still follow someone else's orders to the letter. Plotwise, there's no real reason to. No longer being compelled to follow orders, you could just grab a radio, hed back to the surface, and get your ass out of crazy town. Instead, you have to help save the little sisters. In doing so, you do more insane things, like turn yourself into a big daddy (an irreversible process that goes away in the next scene.) And thus, the brilliant meta narrative falls on its face. In order to make it work, they would have had to open the last bit of the game up. Honestly, even a simple choice would have done: You could help save the little sisters, or you head back to the Bathysphere and go to the surface, abandoning everyone in the crazy underwater city to their fate. Any kind of choice.
Alas, instead of being groundbreaking, the endgame is completely cliché, ending in a lame escort mission followed by a shitty boss fight (the two most overused and despised techniques in game making.) Bioshock is nothing more than a standard FPS in a pretty package. So close, and yet so very far from being art.
LABORIOUSLY LONG CASE STUDY OVER
Of course,
Bioshock wasn't meant to be art, and its unfair to fault it for pandering to the masses.
Bioshock was fun, stylish, and very well done. I liked Bioshock a good deal. I don't feel it is a spiritual successor to
System Shock 2 in any way other than it ripped off mechanics and plotlines to the point of being plagiaristic, but that doesn't mean it was a bad game. On the contrary, it's a great game. It just could have been so much more (and was going to be, if you listened to Ken Levine's pre release promises to fans of SS2.)
In a nutshell, that's the main reason why most videogames can't be art - they're built for mass appeal and big sales, not message or impact. Gaming is still a commercial enterprise, and thanks to gluttonous addiction to graphical technology the cost to produce a "competitive" title is far beyond anyone without publisher support - and publishers don't like innovation. It's not a guaranteed return.
There are other obstacles to games being recognized as high art - they require a large time commitment, specialized skill sets, and have a tiny tiny shelf life. How many people can pack into a theater to watch a movie? Plus, if you miss the theatrical run, there's a DVD release out in a few weeks. Hell, we can watch movies over a century old on DVD, but we can't play games from 5 years ago on Windows Vista.
Books can take more time commitment, but reading is something most people do when they're young. Controlling an FPS can be quite difficult if you didn't grow up doing it. And really, if most
gamers can't even finish all their games, how can we get others to make the commitment?
I'll touch more on these later, as this post is freakin' massive already, but let me wrap up with this statement:
I disagree with Mr. Ebert. I believe the the fact that games are interactive is not preventing them from being art, but in fact makes them the most revolutionary and exciting form of art that Man has yet to experience. I agree with him that the vast majority of games on the market are not art, but I maintain that the medium itself is full of potential just waiting to be tapped.
Next time, I'll write about other impediments to games being accepted as art, as well as critique a game that I
do believe is a work of art.
