Celeste O' Neill, our newest columnest from the UK, makes her GamePlasma debut with her latest article. Titled "Videogames: The artistic Development of a Mainstream Medium", it takes a look at video games and how they have evolved into much more than just toys.

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Video Games: The Artistic Development of a Mainstream Medium
Wednesday, September 17, 2008 – by Celeste O'Neill, Contributing Writer

Like any fledgling medium, the videogame industry has experienced its fair share of teething problems. Indeed, there is many a critic who would have happily seen the medium remain a blubbering mess of E.T.-style toddler tantrums and Custer’s Revenge-shaped attention seeking. Nonetheless, the industry has pushed through these difficult years of ‘toddlerdom’ into the more interesting realm of ‘adolescence’, bringing with it the inevitable growing pains that such a progression entails. This tender time is made no better by the catcalls resonating from the industry’s peers, mostly regarding its coveting of the respect and approbation attributed to more formally recognised art forms. And whilst this desire is indeed present, it is not the obtaining of such a revered cultural position that is primarily sought by the industry; it is the legitimate earning of it.

Although a concept that may remain alien to the odd Luddite, it is generally accepted that a number of videogames are of significant artistic merit. Art can be roughly defined as any piece of work produced by the artist with the intent to convey thoughts, ideas, or emotions to the viewer. By this definition, videogames are the quintessence of an artistic medium. Its state-changing properties can be directly channelled into the player’s perceptional field via their interaction with the concepts translated digitally within the game.

Such a discriminative account is in vast contrast to conservative views of the industry. The expressive properties of videogames have most often been likened to those seen within other artistic media, such as cinema and literature. Although videogames do indeed share several traits with their sister arts, it can be argued that the medium can exist apart from others, and therefore should be recognised as an inimitable art form in its own right. This can best be demonstrated in two ways; firstly through an examination of the attributes characterizing a videogame and which distinguishes it from other media, and secondly through acknowledging the shortcomings of the medium with a particular accent on its potential to develop into something even more divergent. These concepts will here be addressed in turn.

The DNA of videogames

Concentrate, here comes the science bit: videogames can be distilled to reveal a number of essential properties. As observed by Mark J. P. Wolf and Bernard Perron1, there are four characteristics consistently alluded to throughout videogame literature. These are algorithm, player activity, interface, and graphics. In order for something to exist as a videogame then, these properties need to be simultaneously present. Now consider that these properties are all specific to the videogame. Algorithms are not exploited by the viewer in any other medium, nor are they inherent in one’s experience in any other way. Player activity, arguably the most signature feature of a videogame, is not found in any other artistic medium; although viewer-interaction has on occasion been embodied in works of other media these have always been rather static or facile in nature, for example participatory theatre.  The complex interaction between ‘viewer’ and ‘author’ calls for an interface construction within videogames not found in any other art form. Lastly, digital representation in games performs the same function as do the words in a piece of literature or the moving image in a cinematic performance. However, the ways in which they differ is in their form; graphics are a digital representation or abstraction of an infinite number of ‘realities’.

Still reading? Ok, great. These points are important to consider as they demonstrate the active role that the viewer adopts in relation to material presented in a videogame, which in itself separates the medium from any other. It also implies the physical manifestations of the viewer’s ideas within the artistic work itself, translated via visceral reaction.

The infusion of narrative in videogames

The superficial similarity of the videogame to film has somewhat worked against the medium. Cut scenes, the traditional port for narrative delivery in games, have historically remained non-interactive. However, this is not necessarily down to choice; cut scenes represent one of the biggest shortcomings within the medium, i.e. the inability to deliver narrative to the player by truly interactive means. Some game designers have experimented with less restrictive methods of delivering narrative, a stellar example being 2K Boston/2K Australia’s Bioshock. This game included only two instances of visually- and auditorily-transmitted narrative, throughout which the player retains full control over their avatar. A further example is Valve Corporation’s soon to be released ‘zombie-battling’ game, Left 4 Dead, with its complete omission of cut scenes. However will Valve incorporate sufficiently explicit depictions of brain bashing and gut guzzling into the game? Left 4 Dead is essentially executed through cooperative play, and screenshots suggest enough in-game action to quench the blood-thirst of even Romero himself. It is through examples such as these that videogames can be seen to differentiate themselves from other forms of artistic media.

Directing any kind of criticism towards such innovative method seems almost ungrateful. However, such examples remain a long way off from providing true interactive experiences to players via narrative delivery executed in real time. Further limitations of the medium concern inapt application of narrative to games. As Crawford2 astutely points out, adventure games whose style is primarily narrative have failed to achieve their interactivity-based goals due to their being non-narrative by nature. He takes the seminal game Myst as an example to demonstrate this point, asserting that here there are essentially two distinct types of media included together on the same CD Rom – gameplay and digital cinematics – which remain completely isolated from one another in terms of the game’s execution. An inappropriate reliance on cross-media properties could perhaps be at fault here. As Crawford asserts, “These are, at heart, attempts to plug interactive storytelling into a medium that has no architectural slot in which the storytelling might be plugged”.

It therefore follows that the videogame industry will not fully come into its own until it devises ways around the problems posed by current interactive narrative techniques, either through the development of ‘true’ interactive tools or a restructuring of narrative-delivery in games altogether. Rather than leaving the reader feeling despondent, Crawford proposes his Erasmatron Storytelling Engine as a starting point to address such issues (see below).

Whilst in-game narrative is a facet demanding attention, this is not to suggest a game need be narrative-driven in order to be considered art. The case of Left for Dead 2 detailed above goes some way toward demonstrating this point. The 2001 release Rez is perhaps a better example. Developed by Sega’s in-house team, United Game Artists, Rez is hailed as an artistic masterpiece by both gamers and industry luminaries alike. It is completely non-narrative-based and somewhat non-linear; the game takes the form of a rail shooter emitting interesting sounds and colourful visuals when enemies are eliminated. And whilst some may deem unforgivable the fact that these sound effects are primarily executed through trance music, the game’s artistic merit is nonetheless clear.

Realizing artistic merit through solution

Placed within such practical context, statements concerning the unique artistic calibre of videogames appear underscored. So why is it that they can still so readily be dismissed from being deemed legitimate art? Of primary concern is the relatively poor standard of much of the material that is released. Asserting that a large proportion of games already within the marketplace has been governed by factors set apart from those concerned with innovation is easily done. Game characteristics associated with low risk are more readily embraced by a number of publishers, e.g. IP already existing within the marketplace. This will come as no surprise to the avid player of Square Enix’s Final Fantasy series, whose biography might contain more references to the franchise than to anything else. Although such effects may well be down to industry politics, the inevitable result is that the industry’s public image as a whole is downgraded. The industry is further anchored by the problems posed through trying to achieve ‘true’ interaction in videogames, which is an obvious target for critics, as detailed above.

Of further consideration is the perceived appeal of videogames to a somewhat immature audience. This conception derives directly from the industry’s roots, along with the intrinsic element of play in videogames. However this notion is somewhat outdated considering the average gamer is now 35 years of age in the US3. A further and somewhat conjectural rationale for videogames’ low position on the artistic hierarchy is that, historically speaking, we are accustomed to crediting an artistic work to a sole individual, even where a vast number of people have contributed to the piece such as is the case within the film industry. Videogames therefore present atypical characteristics that challenge society’s existing beliefs of what constitutes an art form.

However, such obstacles met by the industry only go toward demonstrating its complex nature. It is only by jumping these hurdles that the medium can be propelled further forward into its own arena of cultural value. Accounts of other popular art forms suggest that public perceptions of the youth-targeted nature of videogames should be relatively easily remedied in the future. For instance, it is now widely accepted that Manga and other forms of Japanese Anime are considered to be of significant cultural merit to Japan’s adult population, despite the fact the genre expresses itself through animation, a technique traditionally aimed at children.

One facet Manga has always had going for it however is its rendering of complex stories. If the videogame is ever to fulfil its artistic potential, it has to distinguish itself from such media. Developer employment of programs such as Crawford’s Erasmatron Storytelling Engine can go some way towards tackling the problems concerning static narrative within games. The Erasmatron is a program that allows a developer to fuse laws of drama into the game, such as which ‘actors’ (i.e. non-player characters) will interact with which ‘props’ (items in the game) through any given actions at a particular ‘stage’ (game area). The program also minimises the amount of demand placed on the designer through its use of innovative technological techniques.  For instance, the program removes the possibility of syntax errors during programming via a simple point-and-click system for language input4. Of most significance however is the program’s name; anything that sounds like a type of super villain’s annihilation device will surely do its job.

Despite such observations, the videogame industry does already exhibit its own selling points, perhaps one of the most noteworthy being digital distribution. This has proven to provide a low risk outlet of creative and innovative material for developers. The low costs attached to developing a game for digital rather than retail release affords designers scope to create games associated with a higher risk of failure within the mainstream market. This is largely owing to the fact that the third-party publisher is not present in process. Furthermore, games released digitally will readily reach the hardcore gaming communities through which they might thrive. Releases downloadable for PlayStation 3 such as Dark Mist and PixelJunk Eden, two conceivably risky projects due to their somewhat archaic styles, have seen commercial success through digital release. A more recent example is the game Siren: Blood Curse, which has been released for download onto the PlayStation 3 through PlayStation Network. Although technically the third title in the Forbidden Siren franchise, SCE Japan has been able to experiment with episodic content, as the game is constructed into twelve distinct episodes downloadable as four chapters.

Conclusion

The future of videogames looks golden. The industry has largely limited itself to conventions established within other media, thereby neglecting the realm of medium-specific possibilities that it contains. But recent innovation seen in this respect demonstrates that in tackling these issues, true accreditation from its neighbouring media can be earned. As sure as the Final Fantasy series will never be that which it states, the following is a certainty; the naive days of childhood are over, and the medium of the videogame is about to grow some balls.