“Perhaps the end is not yet written.”
-Atrus, Myst
Dear reader, what tales make you think? What stories make you question? What landscapes spark your imagination?
I am sure if you were to list out everything that inspires these feelings, the list would include many books, many movies, some music and paintings, but I doubt the list would contain a single video game.
Video games get a bad rap for being lazy entertainment, and, to be honest, most are. Still, the suggestion that video games could be art draws out peals of derisive laughter. Nothing prevents cinema from being an art form despite the many Hollywood shoot-’em-ups that come out each year, yet somehow the presence of trite sports titles and showy shooters excludes video games from the same consideration.
I do not believe it. Not only could video games be considered art, several already deserve the title. Of course, art borders on being indefinable. What is art to one person might not be art to another. A quality that makes one thing art might not be present in another piece.
To me, an important aspect of art – all art – is the critical medium. By this I mean that the work evokes a specific feeling in the viewer/reader/player that would not be there if one changed formats. A hack-and-slash video game could be translated into a hack-and-slash movie without changing the experience evoked; neither one would be art. Words are critical to a novel, and great novels use words for more than just their denotation; pictures are critical to a movie, and great movies use pictures to evoke feelings beyond what is simply on the screen. For example, the movie “O Brother, Where Art Thou?” tinted individual frames in order to evoke “bluer” or “browner” settings, something which cannot be done in a non-visual medium.
Video games also contain something as critical to their being as words to a novel: interactivity. Truly great, artistic games capitalize on interactivity to do things not possible in a non-interactive format.
Some games capitalize on that by exploring new aspects of interactivity. When the 64-bit systems game out, some developers used the new processing power to take games from two dimensions into three. Many games kept the gameplay the same but added a new direction to travel. On the other hand, Super Mario 64 became a rollicking adventure through a new truly three-dimensional landscape, taking full advantage of all the new possibilities: flat lands, vertical climbs, flight, mazes that traveled up, down, and around. If there was something new to explore, it was explored. Super Mario 64 still stands out as one of the best games of its generation for this reason.
Some games use interactivity to enhance the plot. In the Myst series, for example, the plot is driven by the player’s understanding of how the various worlds and puzzles work. If someone tried to retell Myst as a book, the result would be exposition with all the excitement of watching paint dry. In these games, interactivity can even reinforce an overarching theme: the bleak and desolate landscapes of the Myst games offer themselves as ideal spots for the games’ theme of redemption, and Final Fantasy X’s theme of making one’s own destiny is literally felt by the player who repeats a journey made by others before only to break free of the repeating chain of events.
Other games use interactivity to transport the player into the realm of the game. Shadow of the Colossus sets the player into the middle of massive, sprawling “forbidden land,” armed only with a sword, bow and arrows, a horse, and a mission to slay 16 massive colossi in order to resurrect a girl from the dead; the result is a game that makes the player feel like the hero of an ancient myth. Morrowind also drops the player into a magical land and gives them free reign to go where they will and do what they like: there is always the option to follow the game’s loose plot propelling the player’s character to saviorhood, or the player could instead insinuate him or herself into local politics, join a guild, or become a vigilante.
Perhaps the best thing that can be said about such artistic games is that their replay value is not dependent on trying to get a new high score, but on trying to explore the universe of the game even more.
Games like these are, unfortunately, rare. The majority of games, like the majority of movies and the majority of novels, are commercialized and stacked with so many explosions and crude jokes that any hope for artistic merit is drowned. It is no more fair to judge all video games by these hack jobs than it is to judge all movies by Doom or Resident Evil.
And yes, I am fully aware of the irony.
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