Hoo boy.
Since I like being in way over my head, today I’m going to tackle (more like bump into its burly shins and get knocked out) the idea of video games as an art form. Now, half of you just recoiled at me saying ‘of course they’re an art form,’ while the other half reacted in kind with ‘no fucking way.’ I’d say there’s credence to both sides, and as I’m one who finds merit in extremity in reactions more often than in ‘correctness’ (read: I like a lot of shitty things in addition to all the awesome stuff I like), I find it fascinating that there doesn’t tend to be a middle ground in this. So, you’re probably expecting me to have a succinct declarative statement to take away from this as a morsel summary so you don’t have to remember the rest of my dumb words, so here goes:
Both sides are wrong and fuck you.
I’m going to take a stand here of utmost controversy: video games are an art form, but they’re not a very good one. They’re in a strange transitory stage, akin to that of the novelty films of the earliest era of cinema, such as the infamous (possibly anecdotal/untrue) incident where people were convinced that a train was going to legitimately run them over in the theatre during a showing of the Lumière brothers’ L’arrivée d’un train en gare de La Ciotat. I’m going to use this as a hinge for my argument, in that it solidifies an ideal moment when the immersive qualities of a medium surpass the vehicle of the medium itself- that is, the physical theatre, seats, projector, and the fact that it’s simply light being thrown onto a wall through celluloid do not get in the way of the audience’s belief of the events occurring in front of them. Obviously, the train story that’s probably fake but I don’t feel like fact checking is an extreme example, which is why I use it to come back to video games’ main stumbling block, which is twofold: the construct of the game’s mechanics themselves and the physical machines running them. Essentially, it boils down to the fact that we haven’t created an easy enough to use system to by and large surpass the basic building blocks and keep the suspension of disbelief intact on a massive scale, or at least enough of a scale to where the notion of interactive media being art isn’t mostly scoffed at. Honestly, who can blame a lot of people? Most who are unfamiliar with it only see the surface, the most popular games, which tend to be of the First Person Modern Warfare Kill Everyone For America Shooter variety. Delve deeper, and you get titles like Resident Evil, The Elder Scrolls, (to say nothing of the cartoonier games like Mario and The Legend of Zelda series, although Majora’s Mask is a step forward as a whole) Yes, there are fantastically written games like the Mass Effect or Deus Ex series, but these tend to a) be action oriented (which is fine, we want that ‘fun’ thing) and b) have a fairly large divide between gameplay and story, which spells bad news for every other series as they’re some of the most successful at it so far.
Problems with Game Construction
By their very nature, all games will have a stumbling block to immersion, which is the game itself. It needs to be playable. Without guide rails to keep you on the right track (to an extent at least, as in the ability to control something, period) it would just be a mess of polygons with no real purpose. The interactive facet demands an input, or else it obviously isn’t an interactive medium anymore, and this input comes in the form of menus, meters, Heads Up Displays, and all manner of things clogging up the screen. These hurt the immersion, but they’re a necessity, so the best games can do is integrate them (like Dead Space’s ‘RIG’ holographic health meter) or hide them (like the Silent Hill series). Quick Time Events do not help with this.
Problems with Physical Input
There was a time where I saw motion control as a potential light for this whole argument. That light was snuffed out with Kinectimals and horrible design from all three major systems. Controllers, another necessary facet of games (for without them it is just a movie or a frozen start menu) are possibly the biggest barrier in immersion- you can make the connection with the character and movements subconsciously, but at the end of the day you’re steering around some guy with a couple of twiddly sticks and brightly colored buttons. Again, there really isn’t a way around this, but it’s a problem nonetheless.
For comparison, I’ll use my two favorite games: Resident Evil 4 and Silent Hill 2, the paragon of why many video games are justifiably not artistic and one of the most sincere attempts at thought provoking and emotional narrative in a video game respectively.
Resident Evil 4 is fun, silly, ridiculous, and not in the slightest emotionally resonant. It’s an action movie in game form, and all of the increasingly ridiculous thrills that entails. This is because it was made with an audience looking for a fun experience in mind, not one craving some sort of emotional experience. To compare, some of my favorite movies, like There Will Be Blood and Mulholland Drive, are works with emotional resonance. Whether it’s Daniel Plainview’s harrowing final encounter with Eli Sunday or Naomi Watts’ character’s (it’s…complicated) final nightmarish confrontation with who her character really was are both examples of phenomenally powerful and artistic film, but they’re not exactly happy-go-lucky bouncy works. They’re slow, they can be a bit draining, but they’re also ultimately worthwhile. Tarantino showed us recently (as he is wont to do) how a movie can be an over the top roller coaster ride with various styles coming in and out of play and still be one of the best cinematic experiences you’ll have with Django Unchained, but he’s by and large a bit of an exception. For the rest, a more apt comparison would be Michael Bay: fun, mindless things that don’t require much thought or emotional attachment whatsoever but have a widespread appeal and arguably little if any artistic merit. The reason I use film instead of literature or music is because it is easily the closest in form to video games. In fact, it’s something of an annoying trend in video games lately to attempt to gain some sort of legitimacy by being ‘cinematic’ (read: long cutscenes with cuh-razy “camera” angles) often at the expense of ‘fun’.
Silent Hill 2, on the other hand, is like the movies I mentioned: slow, creeping, draining, and it’s for similar reasons to both. There Will Be Blood’s gritty, dust covered desert and sludgy mire of oil reflect the mood of the film perfectly, specifically the Daniel Plainview character: slow, gruff, calculated, and ultimately an unnervingly overwhelming personality. Similarly, Mulholland Drive’s deliberate (and ultimately more sparing than most remember) use of the surreal furthers its own purpose as an abstract expression of Hollywood disillusionment and identity crises, to name a few things. Again, it too is a rather slow paced work that ultimately builds to an explosive climax at the end that gives the payoff for all the waiting and confusion.
Am I saying Silent Hill 2 is on the level of these movies? No, but it does certain things right in a similar way and as such is an example of the potential that video games can have. Team Silent (the guys who made Silent Hills 1-4) was very meticulous and dedicated in their game design. Akira Yamaoka, the sound designer and composer of he soundtrack of the game, recorded himself taking over 100 different footsteps on different surfaces. The environment design team went to various derelict housing developments to get the right feel for how the town would morph into a downtrodden haven of urban decay. The attempts at realism and immersion are deliberate, and serve to make the game itself coalesce better as a work. The town’s oppressive fog, strange creatures with just a hint of humanity to them, the depressive decaying Otherworld, and the soon-apparent lack of sanity of the protagonist are all in place to serve the narrative, which makes for a more compelling experience than say, Silent Hill Homecoming, where the fog was just kind of there and the monsters had absolutely jack fuckall to do with anything in the story, nor did the environments, or even some of the characters. The lack of an HUD is also notable, though there is still the usual pause screen, items to pick up, etc. etc. The medium will never escape these things, so the best it can do is integrate them in a way that works towards a point other than gameplay.
It’s far from perfect though. The controls are clunky and often frustrating, the voice acting is mostly laughably bad, and you will end up dying a fair amount in all likelihood. But this illustrates the point perfectly: it is in transition. It’s aspiring to be a work of artistic merit, but it doesn’t have the means yet. It’s good to remember that what seems infantile now may evolve into something that we couldn’t have even fathomed years before, and I hope interactive media gets to that point, though it probably won’t be with a handheld controller.