Pulling Rabbits: The problem with video games

The "games as art" debate is over. We won. Roger Ebert, who sparked off the debate, posted a rebuttal to his earlier statements that games never be art. So, yay for games? Well, not quite. Although I defended games' artistic value in an earlier article, I find myself resenting them more and more. And this has mostly to do with their lack of artistic value.

Yes, there are games that are art. Without a doubt. There's Braid, there's Shadow of the Collosus and there's the works of Jason Rohrer. And that's really about it. There are some more examples, but like the aforementioned they are mostly either relatively obscure or didn't exactly sell well. There is a crowd for art games, but they are vastly overshadowed by the legions of players who are dedicated to Halo, Call of Duty and World of Warcraft. If you'd want to play, full-time, every genuinely artistic video game, and I mean every single one ever made, you could probably do so in a month. If you're slow. For comparison: if you want to watch every single artmovie that was made since 1972 (the year Pong was released) you'd be quick if you're done in half a year. And movies usually take a fraction of the time a game takes to complete. You'd probably never get done if you started on the books, assuming you read the newly released ones as well.

The major problem with games is that they explore only a tiny fractions of all human experiences. In games that star human characters they mostly just fight each other to the death. If a game even has dialogue for the player to partake in (and that's a big if) the themes of sexuality, boredom, pointless violence or rascism (to name just a few) aren't very likely to be dealt with in a mature and thoughtprovoking way. The state of diversity in games is even worse. I'm not saying that every game should explore these things, but they are simply a part of how human beings behave. If a game wants to go the extra mile, it has to address at least some of issues other then violence.

But that's where the crux of the issue might lie: games are, by their very nature almost, very bad at this. Allow me to explain.

     First off, a games must be winnable, and winning the game must feel good. And as it turns out, most human experiences translate very badly into terms of winning and losing. Have you ever truly "won" a fight with a loved one? Have you ever really "won" at having a relationship? It's pretty clear that talking about situations like that in simple terms of winning and losing removes every nuance from them. Nuance which is crucial for properly portraying situations like these. The win/lose mechanism can even break a carefully built up nuance, something many players of the otherwise great game Ico might recognize. The absolute worst examples of this problem are the moral choice system which every game and their dog seems to have nowadays. Good and evil are some of the most difficult and fickle concepts in human society, over which philosophers have broken their heads for centuries. Simply reducing the choice in a situation to "good" (help the kitten from the tree while singing Morning has Broken) or "asshole" (set the tree on fire with a flamethrower that plays Slayer) isn't merely oversimplification. It's just plain stupid.

This picture tells the entire moral argument of Bioshock:

do I play evil which helps me play better or do I play good with a tactical disadvantage? 

 Secondly, most games nowadays are expected to have a certain length. If you can complete a game in a single three-hour sitting, most people feel cheated. Considering how expensive games are, this is completely understandable. But this also means that games can't really venture into deep emotional territory. Even if they find a way around the problem that people will get up and leave halfway and it will be practically impossible to build up emotion that way, it's unlikely that gamers will want to play a game that makes them depressed every time they get back to it. You'll sit down to get kicked in the balls once, but you won't sit down to get kicked in the balls three times in a row.

Thirdly, games allow for very little interpretation on the part of player. When you watch a warfilm as a pacifist, you can still take away a message of the futility of war from it. When you're actually forced to play the war, that becomes a little harder. I quit playing both Modern Warfare games after less then an hour because of this. In the first there was a part when I had to shoot NPCs in their sleep, in the second it was after the infamous No Russian mission. You can disgust a character in a movie or a book for his actions, but when you actively control this character things become a little more difficult. This argument doesn't really apply to RPG's, but the more freedom you give a player the more noticeable the things you can't do become. This what made me quit playing Mass Effect.

The most common solution to these problems is simply replacing human characters by aliens or fantasy monsters. Which, to be fair, is probably the best solution. The Super Mario games, for example, don't have the slightest pretension of artistic value, yet they are still universally loved. And you know why? Because they're fun. And this is very important: there is nothing wrong with simply being fun. Fun is good. I'm pro-fun in every medium there is. So, am I saying that games should simply give up any attempts to be artistic? No, of course not. But what I'm saying is that they shouldn't have the pretension of making any statement about the human condition when they're really not.

I have hopes for games as an artistic medium. Interaction with what you're exploring is something that's really new to media, and it offers a lot of genuinely fascinating possibilities. However, if game designers continue to fine-tune something that they will never be able to perfect, instead of coming up with genuinely interesting new ways of playing, I doubt there will ever be a mainstream game that has the emotional and intellectual complexity of a Citizen Kane, or even an Inception. I don't know how to fix this problem, but I definitely know there's something broken.

Alias

Because there are no really good songs about video games, here is some music from video games. Played by a guitar orchestra.

We All Go A Little Mad Sometimes

(This essay was published before on the website www.blikonline.nl)

Nerds zijn mensen die zich graag opwinden over dingen. Over slechte sequels, over mensen die Star Wars en Star Trek door elkaar halen en over alle meisjes die niet gecharmeerd zijn van hun verzameling zeldzame Pokemon. Maar waar ze zich nog wel het meest druk over maken zijn mensen die hun hobby “niet begrijpen”. Dus toen Roger Ebert, misschien wel de meest invloedrijke filmcriticus aller tijden, zich nogal sterk uitliet tegen videogames als kunstvorm brak de hel los. De fora stonden roodgloeiend van mensen die riepen dat Ebert te oud was, dat hij er niks van snapte en dat hij de elke voeling met de jongere generatie was verloren. En die reacties waren nog beleefd.

Maar de vraag “zijn games kunst?” is er een die al langere tijd speelt. De voorstanders argumenteren meestal dat als Warhol’s soepblikken kunst zijn, Shadow of the Colossus dit ook is. Tegenstanders zeggen vaak dat als de Mona Lisa kunst is, Gears of War dit niet is. De vraag is dus eerder “wat is kunst?” dan “zijn games kunst?”.

Maar eigenlijk is dit een vreemde discussie. Zijn “boeken” immers kunst? Zijn “schilderijen” dat? Nee, niet per definitie. Maar duidelijk wel als ze een bepaalde mate van artistieke kwaliteit hebben. Anders spreken we niet van literatuur maar van lectuur, en niet van kunst maar van broddelwerk. De vraag zou dan eigenlijk moeten zijn: zijn er games die als kunst kwalificeren? En het antwoord daarop: absoluut. Zelfs binnen de lange cultuurhistorische traditie.

Neem bijvoorbeeld het cultspel Psychonauts. Gemaakt in 2005 door Double Fine, en absoluut een aanrader. Wat dit spel zo bijzonder maakt is de opzet: de levels spelen zich af in de hoofden van de mensen om je heen. Met een klein deurtje dring je letterlijk hun hersenen binnen en zie je hoe ze nadenken. De eerste helft van het spel zijn dit je vrienden en leraren, maar de tweede helft van het spel moet je een gekkenhuis doorzoeken. En dus letterlijk de geesten van de bewoners binnendringen om ze van hun mentale problemen te verlossen. Freud zou er verzot op zijn.

De artistieke relevantie van dit spel is dat dit een absoluut unieke manier is om tegen het concept van waanzin aan te kijken. Dit idee is in de kunst vaak voorgekomen, en vele grote kunstenaars hebben zich eraan gewaagd. Om het te omschrijven zijn ongeveer 3 manieren gebruikt: het laten zien van de gek in zijn omgang met anderen (Psycho, Blue Velvet), het tonen van de gedachtewereld van de gek (De Schreeuw van Munch) en spreken vanuit het perspectief van de gek (de pedofiel in Lolita van Nabokov, de cynicus in Aantekeningen vanuit het Ondergrondse van Dostojevski).

Maar wat Psychonauts doet is een normaal persoon (de speler) mengen met de verstoorde gedachtewereld van de gek. Maar in de context van het spel is die gedachtewereld de harde werkelijkheid. Natuurlijk bevindt je je het in het hoofd van een paranoïde postbode, maar als je je niet aan zijn eigen verzonnen regels houdt ben je wel mooi Game Over.

Het level (en daarmee het onderbewuste) van deze postbode ziet eruit als een doodgewone Amerikaanse suburb: losstaande huisjes, witte hekjes, plastic flamingo’s en gigantische auto’s op de oprit. Wellicht is het zelfs iets te gewoon. Maar als je deze wereld binnenstapt merk je al snel dat er iets niet orde is. Overal zitten camera’s: in de brandblussers, in de vuilnisemmers, en zelfs in de plastic flamingo’s. Ook de bewoners van de wijk zijn opmerkelijk. Gekleed in lange regenjassen en gleufhoeden proberen deze geheim agenten zich voor te doen als gewone voorbijgangers. Zo staan ze bij een open riool met gootsteenontstoppers te zwaaien en roepen ze dingen als “Look at that woman’s breasts. They are large”.

Buiten het feit dat dit bijzonder grappig is, wordt hiermee ook een complete wereld geschapen waarin alle paranoia die degene wiens hoofd je bent binnengedrongen zich manifesteert. En binnen deze voorwaarden moet jij je een weg zien te banen. En hoewel de wereld om je heen misschien gek is geworden, ben jij toch echt degene die hier de afwijkende is.

Welcome to the madhouse.

Alias

The music today is presented by mr. Leonard Cohen, who wrote this from the perspective of a madman. A madman from the RAF, to be precise. Also, the song is AWESOME.

Shadow of the Colosus

I have just completed playing this game, and let me tell you: everything you have heard about it is true. This game is a WORK OF ART.

So, what's this game about? Well, basically, you are on a quest to revive the girl you love. To do this you have to defeat 16 giant enemies known as Colossi. To kill them, you first have to travel to them on your horse, find them, climb on them (yes, they are that big) and stab certain weak spots on their bodies. Sounds shallow? That's part of what makes this game so incredibly great.

The design is incredibly beautiful in it's simplicity. Because the game has you worry about so little (fuck you, sidequests) you have all the time on horseback traveling to think about the game. Why am I doing this, exactly? The colossi are massive and imposing, of course, but they mostly won't attack you unless you attack them first. And even then, given the scale of things, it's more like they want to swat the fly that is you then actually kill you because they hate you. Killing them is always accompanied by dramatic music, and it is actually rather sad to see these magnificent creatures pummel to the ground. Should you really be doing this?

The gameplay is great as well. The horseback rides can get a little long, but the fights with the Colossi are incredible. Their scale alone makes them genuinely terrifying: I was scared shitless of these beasts more then once. You have to find some way to climb them, and this part of the game is probably it's best. Climbing through the fur of one of these gigantic appearances is something you have NEVER experienced yet, and probably never will. The fight to hold on while one of these beings tries to shake you off is indescribable.

This might sound a little too epic. It's not. Everything about this game is epic: the Colossi themselves, the immense land you have to drive through, the art design, the landscapes... Everything adds to the impression that you're really doing that shall be remembered, and in a style that is completely different from the usual epicness (read long texts about big monsters with silly names while the editor makes sure everything is still as much Lord of the Rings as possible).

I could go on for hours about the beauty and brilliance of this game, but I think I got my point across. If you have a playstation 2 or 3, you owe it to yourself to buy, borrow or STEAL it.



YES, IT IS THAT GOOD.

Keep up the good work, Team Ico.

Alias.


For our usual music flick, I give you: The Antlers!