How do I not love this guy? I swear every time he opens his mouth it's a vindication of stuff I've been saying for years. Okay, not as many years as he's been saying it evidently but it's creeping me out.

I recently sent an email to a writer I know in the industry where I talked about the parallels between marketing, and evaluating, popular music and computer games - and the differences in how these are dealt with by reviewers and audience. This was just a couple days ago.

In another I sent out just last night, to someone else, I was discussing the evolution of form in computer gaming vs. market pressures and the perception of games as pure product without artistic merit.

This Raph fellow freaks me out. How's he do that? :)

Does he have his own website anywhere? I'd like to read more of his musings.

There's also a Mark Asher interview with him at cgonline that's excellent.

Raph has a website, but he hasn't updated it in some time.

http://www.legendmud.org/raph/

Thanks Mark. That place is a treasure trove. :)

I'm still not sure I buy the "games are art" thing. I'll certainly agree that games CONTAIN art, or that "there's an art to making games," but I don't think I can look at a game, as a THING, and say "this thing is art."

It's like looking at some cars and saying "cars are art." Sure, there's art involved. Along with engineering, marketing, and so on. And I can even look at a car like the Audi TT and call it's style "a work of art." But it's a euphomism. I don't consider cars, as a whole, "art."

We had a pretty good discussion about this a while back here and I came to the conclusion that thinking about camputer games as an artform is only useful in that it gives us new ways to think about and discuss them.

The end result being better and more interesting games ideally.

What's happening now is precisely what Raph talks about when he quotes a reviewer describing his role as essentially that of a 'Car and Driver' reviewer. How does it run? How does it look compared to other similiar cars/games on the market? How will my readership likely react to the features offered or overlooked? Is it just fun, or actually gosh darned fun?

These are very important and relevant questions to any potential purchaser. No doubt.

The question that seems irrelevant or overlooked is 'what does it mean?' And, maybe, that isn't as important to the general consumer. But I'm not the general consumer myself and I'm curious about what the deeper structures are in games. How they interact with the intellect to creat immersive experiences. What does 'story' mean and what does it mean to be an 'author' if the audience's role in generating the interactive experience is an inherently collaborative one?

It's pretty clear these questions are just plain uninteresting to most of the gaming press not to mention the consumers.

However, I think trying to figure out the answers to them will help us better understand what makes one game good and another great without dwelling on technical, consumer, issues that can muck up the big picture.

I've seen academia's attempts to sort this stuff out before and I've seen the journalists give it a go. Raph's one of few that seems to have both a layman's and a bird's eye view of the issues. His main focus is obviously online gaming but many of the ideas he discusses could apply to any form.

Of course, I'm biased. Been saying the similiar stuff myself for a while. :)

Unceremoniously lifted from the Merriam-Webster website:

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Quote:

art - the conscious use of skill and creative imagination especially in the production of aesthetic objects; also : works so produced

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You see? That's the good stuff. What if the designer's artistic vision is finding better ways for letting the player define his own experience.

This is the very secret to the form.

Thinking about a computer game like a novel or a painting is like trying to describe a painting in terms of narrative content.

Computer games are something entirely new. And I agree with Raph again that we're still in the stone age when it comes to understanding what we can do with them. It's not tech dependant. It's conceptual.

He tends to describe issues of freedom and choice vs. structured experience in terms of expositional and impositional spaces. Here I'd disagree. I think the most sublime designs should use creative impositional techniques to setup the terms of expositional experiences. But, god, he's using good, solid, concepts to frame the discussion. :)

This is a whole new medium made up of a different stuff that anything we've thought of as art before.

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Quote:

The question that seems irrelevant or overlooked is 'what does it mean?'

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Yeah, I believe Steve was the first to mention, maybe only one to harp on, the lack of religion or faith in the Sims. For me, it was one of those "why didn't anyone else notice that?" moments. He put the shallow commercialism the game is based on in an even starker context than it was on the surface. Made me think about how much aging, pets, and a better representation of marriage might add to this life-simulator. Add faith, all kinds, and the game would become even more interesting because it'd give you an alternative to making your Sim happier with just a new couch.

-Andrew

As a former art major, I have to say that I do consider computer games to be an art form. Not all of them are good art, but they are art.

I hate the assumption that, simply because games have a critically important technical component, they aren't art. I'll let you guys in on a secret: all art requires technical skill, and some media require more technical skill than do games. Architecture requires a hell of a lot more technical expertise, and employs larger teams to complete projects, but I think you'd be hard pressed to find someone in the art world that would argue that Antonio Gaudi, or Frank Lloyd Wright, or Louis Sullivan weren't artists. Ditto for industrial design. Ditto for film. What is it, exactly, about games that makes them so different?

"In other words, I think it's completely possible to go overboard with the 'art' and spoil the 'game.' For example, the original 'Alone in the Dark' game suffered from an overly "cinematic" camera, which had a bad habit of changing viewpoints during combat sequences. Bleah."

You are confusing art with style, which isn't the same thing. All art is about creating an experience for the viewer (player); the specifics of that experience are less relevant to whether or not the experience is art. Art that goes out of its way to scream in your face "look at me... I'm ART!" is bad art, regardless of the medium.

"Thinking about a computer game like a novel or a painting is like trying to describe a painting in terms of narrative content."

Heh... I'll take that one, too. Lots of paintings can be described in terms of narrative content. In fact, the idea that images are merely a "frozen slice of time" is a relatively contemporary idea, dating back to the late nineteenth/early twentieth century--around the time that photography was just starting to be accepted as a form of art. That's an interesting aside, for all the "games aren't art" people; photography wasn't considered to be art, either, for a very long time. The camera obscura dates back to the sixteenth century (some people would argue that the principle came from Aristotle, but whatever), but it's not until the last hundred years or so that it came to be accepted as a art form in its own right. That was less a failing in the medium than people's unwillingness to accept new things, as far as I'm concerned. I wrote a thesis on that once, drawing parallels between that and the art world's current attitude towards art created on a computer (which is roughly equivalent).

In any event, take a look at Botticelli's Primavera and tell me that paintings are not narrative. Look at the Sistine Chapel ceiling. Look at the Bayeaux Tapestry. Look at any work by the Romantics, or the Pre-Raphaelites, or the Neo-classicists. Look at any of the pre- (or post, for that matter) Renaissance European religious paintings. They use different narrative techniques than books do, but hey--same goes for film.

See, isn't this fun? :)

David: I got nothin' to add. You're right. :)

Bub: There was also some discussion about this on the CGOnline bullitenboards. I think the general concensus was that it was a good idea but that religion, for example, was a difficult idea to simulate in a commercial game without offending somebody in the market. An abstraction might have worked like some source for reward or pleasure other than simple material and social reinforcement.

Ben: Good stuff. :) I think what I was getting at with: "Thinking about a computer game like a novel or a painting is like trying to describe a painting in terms of narrative content" was you what put in much better terms when talking about the difference between 'art' and style. Yes there is narrative content in paintings but it isn't the whole picture - if you'll pardon the pun. The 'how' of it is important.

Computer games are different in that they allow the player to, ideally, pick up a brush himself or experiment with the established (impositional) premise to create narrative content unique to his (expositional) experience.

I've always beleived in the motto that "Great computer games make you sweat." I think some of the greatest computer games are probably best compared to the art of a movie. We can all think of those rare games that pulled us so into the game's world that we were completely lost to anything else, the games that created goosebumps from fear or anticipation or fright. The games that filled you with some eerie feeling of dread, or made you laugh out loud so hard that you had to hit the pause button.

If a book or movie can be considered art, then surely so can some computer games.

Yeah, I agree that games are a very different ball of wax, although the player doesn't ever create the whole experience on their own, which is where the art part comes in. It's a little more like improvisational theater, if you have to compare it to something. The experience is a collaborative effort between the artist (the stage director) and the player (the actor). Tabletop role-playing is very similar in that regard--just replace "GM" for "stage director."

But the stage director/game designer is the person that creates the premise--they are where the ideas come from, the person that gives the actor/player something to react to. And that's an art, I think; it can be a new way of telling stories, or maybe it's more of a regression, if you consider that storytelling was a much more interactive medium before Gutenberg came along and changed everything. It can be a way to express more abstract ideas, too (some games are more puzzle than narrative).

I think another unfair strike against "games as art" is the fact that people in this day and age like to draw distinctions between "art" and "entertainment," as though one precludes the other. Just because games are fun, that doesn't mean they can't also be art. I happen to find the visual arts fun, too, but that doesn't make me think any less of them.

Look at any history of graphic, commercial, design and you'll see names of real artistic movements that influenced trends and fashions. It's hard to draw a line there either.

Though I think the role of a game designer is a bit different from that of a GM. The GM is there, in the flesh, to create a dynamic experience. To offer premise and to react to input from the players. A game designer is making a golem that needs to be able to function as a Game Master without its creator there 'thinking' for it.

As for evoking feelings I'd probably say it'll be a while before we see computer games that can really do as well with this as other media and forms. The reason for this is that intellectual and gut-level thrills are easier to manipulate than emotional ones. Getting a player to jump is easy, getting him to think is hard, getting him to care could be impossible without a multiplayer/social context.

A bad emotional gambit, like bad acting, can have a dramatically opposite effect than the one intended. The contexts for communicating interesting emotions also tend to require a narrative build up or the assumption that the audience will get references without too much trouble. Setting this up seems a bit challenging for an interactive medium unless you're beating a player over the head with a scripted story

From Bauman's review of Messiah:

'What does it say about a developer when they create a game world where all but one female character is an impossibly breasted whore? Literally. One "Commander" character is fully clothed, but she still has the usual Barbie physique. To make matters worse, they're not even attractive whores.'

Oh my.

"As for evoking feelings I'd probably say it'll be a while before we see computer games that can really do as well with this as other media and forms. The reason for this is that intellectual and gut-level thrills are easier to manipulate than emotional ones."

I agree, but this isn't a technical limitation of the genre, per se. Film went through the same growing pains, and eventually matured to the point where film makers said "you know, we could do more with this."

And I think some games really have worked on that level. Not a lot, maybe, but some.

"Getting a player to jump is easy, getting him to think is hard, getting him to care could be impossible without a multiplayer/social context."

Hmmm. I disagree here. Have you ever read a book in which you cared about the characters? Watched a movie in which you cared about the characters? OK, your point is taken - a scripted story is the foundation in books and movies. But I do believe that game designers in all genres have really overlooked this aspect, to the detriment of their products. Sometimes it's the simple things that make a huge difference. For example, in many flight sims your squad mates are just fodder - send THEM in front to catch the surprise AAA trap. But I remember in Falcon 3 how the designers not only allowed you to name your fellow fliers, you could also insert photos of them that would show up with their records. Suddenly that cry of distress was from your best friend, your brother, a buddy from work, etc. and not some guy who's name you struggled to remember. This creats a dramatic tension that doesn't otherwise exists - and at such a small price in programming code. It's a very small part of what we're discussing, but I do believe that if designers would meet and think and discuss ways in which players could greater personalize their game, they would find a huge multiplier in the return in immersion and dramatic tension. After all, the best computer games, in any genre, are the ones that are also the best role playing games.

I'm not about to jump into the whole 'games are art' thing, but...

"But I remember in Falcon 3 how the designers not only allowed you to name your fellow fliers, you could also insert photos of them that would show up with their records. Suddenly that cry of distress was from your best friend, your brother, a buddy from work, etc. and not some guy who's name you struggled to remember."

Excellent point, Jeff. For all the people who aren't flight sims geeks, X-Com might be a better example of how the simple ability to name your characters makes a world of difference. As you note, instant dramatic tension, cheap and easy!

-Tom

"Sometimes it's the simple things that make a huge difference."

Most games from the past included these elements, and I think today's games are really hurt by not having them. Anyone remember Wings, with its amazing storyboards that set up each mission and an experience system that actually let you improve the abilities of your pilot? Or F-14, where you got a permanent callsign based on your performance during a training mission and were constantly getting chewed out for screwing up missions? Or even all the old Microprose sims where you'd fly that perfect mission, limp home, and just *know* you were going to get a well-deserved medal and some R&R? (Or crash on the way home and lose your pilot forever.) In these games and most others from the period there was always something at stake, and that doesn't happen often now.

Most games today act like they don't even know you're there. Those small touches of the past have been replaced by reams of impersonal stats that do nothing to deepen a player's involvement.

Art or not, the best games are those that create personalized stories based on a player's performance and not some preordained script.

I think that is the art. :)

>I hate the assumption that, simply because games have a critically important technical component, they aren't art.

But the converse is true as well. There's an assumption that just because games have lots of artwork in them (visual and aural art), they ARE art.

I think Ben brought up architecture as a technical example of "artwork". And he's absolutely right. Some buildings are among the most inspiring examples of artwork we have. I'll carry the analogy one step further though, I think many games are about as artistic as a tenement building.

-Andrew

Hey there everybody. Sorry to barge in on what looks like a game reviewer's board, but since you're discussing my essay, sort of, I thought I'd point you at Jessica Mulligan's very entertainment-centered editorial at Biting the Hand, over at http://www.skotos.net/articles/BTH_07.html.

A rebuttal essay I wrote should be going upt here soon.

Enjoying the debate, btw. Hi, Mark.

-Raph

I like the architecture analogy, Bub. Games can be art, but they usually aren't. And they are a strange kind of art - like architecture. A building can be really pretty, but if the acoustics of the Sydney Opera House were poor, it would be a failure of function AND art. Likewise, a game must fulfil the function of a game in order to be art.

What is the function of a game? I've written an (unpublished) essay on the strange place of story and plot in game design, the gist of which was that emphasizing the originality or elegance of a game's plot was faint praise if the interface, engine and rules of the game left no room for the player to feel engaged in the plot. As Crawford would say, unless the player feels that his/her decisions matter to the outcome, a plot is more important for novels than games.

The proper question is not "What does it means?", but "What does it do?".

We must also keep in mind that the conventions of most computer games are translations of board or roleplaying equivalents - sometimes in real time, but with distinct units having distinct attributes (or "moves" in chess parlance). Can a set of rules be art? I could argue that the American Constitution and the rules of baseball are works of art, but I'd be ready for a skeptical look or two.

In short...I don't know. I'm just thinking out loud.

There's a rub TSG.
Some argue that computer games are art. I don't, because I ultimately think it doesn't matter. But you're correct in your board game analogy and it represents where I balk on the subject. Are board games art? Is a game as wonderful and deep as Go or Chess (or baseball), a work of art? Or is the "art in games" only something that exists in terms of their presentation?

Interestingly, I have no problem thinking of some of the better game designers as "artists." There is something they do (just a few, mind you) that transcends form and function.

-Andrew

Hey Raph! Good to see you here!

I'm out in San Diego. In fact, I was out at Sony Online.

I'm in The Cave right now, the technological wonder also known as Raphael Liberatore's garage that's stuffed with computers, games and books. Very cool!

Like Aristotle said, imitation is the best flattery... oh wait he said that about art, with imitation being the nature of art. Games, i guess, can be considered art, but not in the sense of any other media. The criteria probably isnt based on emotional romantic notions of the artist (Derek Smart?) but more like on what is are these games imitating?

anyway, im getting lost, games can be art but in what way? thats the question. they obviously dont do anything new in terms of other medias. Our experience with playing games works on another level, imitation of what? asthetics of what? accesible to whom? and if so, what is the meaning? do we live here, now, because it is. yes it is... if you wear red tonite.

what the hell am i writing.. brain fart sorry!

etc

I came to another idea about games as art... it isnt exactly that the games themselves can be considered art, but the various ways they produce a response from players. Like in Kosters evaluating the Bartle thingy... with the Killer, Explorer, Socializer and Achiever archetypes. This can be atrributed to solo games. But that also can be the criteria of the art in games, of how they ascribe certain types of players' responses. The design of who plays what and the response and challenge, exlporation, socilization (real unreal) achivement you get out of the game.

Take example a game like OFP, a recent game that imitates real world combat. If i had to consider games "art" ofp is high on my list in that it doesnt exactly simulate "combat" but takes certain parts of a real experience "combat" and then the designers envision what is neccesary to evoke what would be immersive to it and at the same time keeping it within the realm of playability, of course. There is an art in trying to evoke a response and also trying to make it all seem playable. Its more mechanical than expressive but it can be considered art in some sense. The designer of OFP, in a recent interview envisioned future games with the sole intention of emulating a feeling of loss for an NPC in an action game, saying this was the next step in games (i personally dont think so, but his idea of future game design is of the emotional attachement level). anyway...

Games can't completely be taken in the emotional attachement feeling of art imo. They can refer to life as the Sims does, the art in the imitation is that they give us different experiences of the imitation or a better view of our life in imitation.

Im talking pretentious jumbo poo, but somewhere in this post is some shred of TRUtH! there has to be!

etc

"As for evoking feelings I'd probably say it'll be a while before we see computer games that can really do as well with this as other media and forms. The reason for this is that intellectual and gut-level thrills are easier to manipulate than emotional ones."

A quick anecdote: Having finally found my CD of the HOMM2 expansion disc, I decided to listen to the music in my car while doing errands. I was grinning and humming along to the music once the first city theme music started - and, I remembered all the fun times I had playing that game.

In other words, it evoked fond emotional feelings. Now, is HOMM2 art? To me, it's a billion times more "artsy" than the "jack off on a canvas" modern art scene. It also made me want to strangle the guy who lost my HOMM2 disc, since I want to hear some of the original town music.