Games and art

Thought:

TV and movies (and music) can turn their mood on a dime, or excavate an emotion to extraordinary depths - thanks to editing, which is a unique feature of recorded media. There can be an extraordinary intellectual and emotional thrill to the swift juxtaposition of compelling, contrasting images and sounds. (Watch the intro to Space:1999 if you don't believe me. And it's not like this technique was invented in 1975, or that it belongs there - you have no idea how pleased I was to see it crop up in the new Battlestar Galactica.)

Live theatre basically can't do this, because you can't completely recompose the scene in a split-second. I enjoyed some of the attempts in the play "Tear The Curtain" to innovate in this respect in Vancouver last year, using projected movie clips to show closeups of scenes being rendered live on stage, but unfortunately the form far outpaced the content... and that's about the only example that comes to mind, because it costs a fortune, and live theatre doesn't usually have that kind of money.

On the other hand, if you want to talk about a medium which does have the money... I work in computer games, where we often have budgets of $20-30m, and I find it fascinating that mainstream computer games, which can do this, and have the wherewithal... usually don't. Hence the striking, standout nature of the few which do, e.g. the G-Man visions in the Half-Life games.

Often the problem is a sadly pedestrian technical issue: the speed at which assets can be streamed from the disk means there are limits to how big a high-quality world you can build up and tear down in a split-second.

But games *can* cheaply cut the camera, change the lighting, edit the music - and all with the same perfect timing you'd expect from recorded media. They can also do the more languid, elegant effects like sweeping the light sources to suggest the fast passage of time while a character sits or lies still and ignores it... fading back and forth between two sequences set at different times in the same room, viewed in the same tracking shot*... and playing with localized time distortion, sharpening the focus on a single character in real time while the crowd blurs into motion, to suggest dissociation or isolation.

They can... they just don't. And isn't that a shame. Because this kind of experimentation with the reality of place and time, often relating it to a character's state of mind - lifting you out of the linear progression of time and using tricks and tools to force you to understand how reality appears to someone else, or to use paradox and impossibility to render emotions in your mind - is one of the things which for me defines and poeticises televisual art. And I think its absence in computer games is one reason why it's kinda easy for me to see Roger Ebert's point, and side with him in dismissing most games as 'not art', scratching my head and asking exactly when the medium will indicate an interest in being, or even the ability to be, 'art' in more than theory plus a handful of scattered examples - which are usually feted and derided in equal measure by people in the industry.

You can point at a number of brilliant storytelling tools used by TV shows in the last few years (the in-place flashbacks of Mad Men, the endings of Six Feet Under and The Sopranos, the tortured solipsism of Life On Mars, the increasingly sophisticated use of time as a weapon against the future - or to heal the past - in Doctor Who). But I'm not clear on where you would point to such innovation in storytelling in games - even in their cutscenes, let alone integrated into their gameplay - beyond the ever-reliable example of Braid (considerable spoilers here btw). To find previous examples of storytelling which has cleverly moved me, I think I'd have to go back as far as text adventures.

(This is not to discount the achieving of emotional effect through good writing presented straightforwardly - e.g. Beyond Good And Evil... spoilers there too, but if you do watch it, you'll probably note that the emotional content comes through despite old-fashioned graphics and slidey animations; the French know what they're doing. But the point is, it achieves the effect without innovation; it uses old tools well.)

Some argue that the imposition of storytelling in games is an attempt to make computer games something they're not, and that ultimately games allow the construction of your own narratives - and I think that's kinda true but also kinda useless in this discussion. Most people's narrative skills are pretty flimsy, and if they're being exercised during gameplay, they're going to be improvisational, and thus tend towards comedy. (Hardly anyone ever posts a sad YouTube clip about something which happened to them through "emergent gameplay in a sandbox environment", and adding an operatic soundtrack to something funny doesn't make it tragic.) There's not really such a thing as "improvisational tragedy", because tragedy relies far more on devices such as foreshadowing, which need planning. And tragedy, and our response to it, is where art truly lives. Hence the success of Braid - and for that matter Half-Life, which is amongst many other things the tragedy of Gordon Freeman (and which also, it's just struck me, might be the inspiration for Source Code, which is that rare thing, a tragedy which manages to extend itself into redemption).

It's not like I'm not fully convinced of the entertainment value of computer games, after thirty years playing and programming them - but entertainment isn't the same as art, and mainstream computer games aren't cutting it as art for me. Which is a bit lame, considering movies and TV had managed it by their fortieth birthday.

Thoughts?


* An otherwise dull FPS called Project Snowblind did this in one cutscene - it looked great.