Holiday Shopping

It's the second week of December, so here in the USA at least nearly everyone's out buying something.  Hanukkah and Christmas have a tight overlap this year, and in my circle of friends and family there are a surprising number of birthdays between December 24th and December 31st.  Half the internet is all about gift guides, and Game of the Year voting and arguing rings more in the air than "Jingle Bells."  When the big Steam Holiday Sale lands, I, like many others, will find myself stockpiling games to last me through all of the next year.  In short: 'tis the season for consumerism.

There are studies out there showing that actually, money does buy happiness.  To anyone who's gone an extended period without any money (and for me, those were years 1-28 of my life), this is no surprise.  Being poor sucks and surely, the opposite is better.  But one piece of information keeps catching my eye: studies by various psychologists say that if you want your money to buy you happiness you should spend it on experiences, not on things. Do something amazing!  Go to that concert!  Take that vacation!  Throw that party!  Go bungee jumping!

Play that video game?

I was mulling over my Christmas and entertainment budgets blearily in the shower (where all good thinking happens) one recent morning and realized that generally, I put games in the "experiences" category.  Except that literally, video games are things: $5 or $20 or $50 worth of bits and bytes, sent virtually or pressed into a plastic and aluminum disc, a consumer good through and through. And they are a consumer good.  One look at the structure of game studios, at the sheer amount of money involved in creating a AAA game, at the opening-week-sales race, or at the marketing structures around gaming leaves no doubt about that.  But if my $20 buys me 30 or 50 or 100 hours' worth of an emotional journey, is it really just a thing, anymore?

Being pissed off at Anders is definitely an emotional journey.

This year's Thanksgiving sale on Steam allowed me to send several gifts.  To the two friends who received Audiosurf, I thought I was sending the stomach-dropping thrill of that moment when the music soars and the track bottoms out from under you while hanging a sharp right.  The gift to them was of flow and motion.  I wanted them both to be granted the singular experience of finding their favorite music take color and form before their eyes, to ride it and feel its shape in a way different than even the most trained musician's ears do.

To the friend who received Fallout: New Vegas and all its DLC, I was hoping to grant a hundred little experiences of exploration and understanding.  I was giving that moment of stumbling across Chance's map, the shock of discovering Christine, the puzzle of history left behind in a hundred audio logs and forgotten pre-war relics.  I was giving him the chance to choose a future for New Vegas, a chance to look at anarchy and government and war and decide what, if anything, changes.

To the friend who received Bastion, I was giving the gift of Zia's song and the soothing tones of Rucks's narration.  He was granted the history of Caelondia to explore and the tangled, tragic dreams of three people to uncover.  I gave ruined streets to walk and he received a chance to give survivors and a society hope in the face of pointless destruction and damnation.

The first experience: waking up...

To each friend, I hoped to be granting the feelings of discovery, victory, joy, defeat, mastery, color, flow, awe, decision-making, and so much more.  Four people received Steam codes through the ether, but none of them were given "things."

I have always felt that, at their core, games are experience.  The heart and soul of every game is about the players being able to tell themselves, and each other, a story.  Whether it's the immediate, quickly-forgotten, short-term thrill of getting the long block at just the right time, or the strategic thrill of building a city with good infrastructure, or the grim tactical deathmarch (deathsail?) of eliminating the Spanish navy in a 4:1 firefight before your ship is boarded... all are experiences and stories.  A deeply strategic toppling of your opponent, a frenetic scramble to a goal, or something in between; a fairy tale about two brave but not always bright young Wardens; a jarring exploration of an unstable cop's awkward investigations; a chance to be a badass space marine... all stories.   

So: pastime, or thing?

The truth is, it's an unfair question to level at games, or at least to level at games alone.  It's the core of the human experience with art.  If every time I watch the Lord of the Rings DVDs I feel the passion and the pull of that story all over again, if I feel the hope and desire and pain and faith I felt when they were in theaters during a vulnerable time in my life, when I needed them most -- have I bought an item, or an experience?

If Neverwhere and The Hunger Games and The Sun Also Rises and Macbeth and and The Book of Three and "The Sound of Thunder" each make me feel a certain way when read them, if I feel thrills and joy and despair and excitement as I revisit them, and if my readings change as I age and mature and experience my life -- am I holding paper, or am I holding experiences?

It's a trick question; the answer is "both."  Art, I think, was ever thus.

Winning?

Over the holidays last year, my husband and I were visiting my parents.  I was spending some down-time late in the evening on the sofa in their living room with my DS, much as I've done ever since I got my first DS in 2004.

My dad wandered into the room and finding me apparently intent on my little screens, asked, "So... are you winning?"

And although I heard him clearly, my only response was: "Huh?"  I literally didn't understand the question he was asking me -- "winning" was never even on my mind.

I get that games, in their traditional sense, are all a competition.  Chess has a winner and a loser.  So do baseball and backgammon and poker.  You win or lose at roulette or blackjack or even Pong.  But I can't even think of the last time I thought of a video game I was playing in terms of winning or losing.

The games I've played -- even back into the mid-1980s -- are always stories.  You complete a level or a game, but you don't win it.  We win the battles, sure, when we take down that boss, but you don't win Metal Gear Solid or Fallout or even, I think, Super Mario Brothers.

And you most certainly don't win a Professor Layton game, which is what I had in my DS at the time.  I couldn't win at that game any more than I could win at Star Wars or The Hobbit.  I could solve the riddles, and I could complete the story, but... winning?

Every time I have a serious discussion about gaming (and a discussion about serious gaming), I have it reinforced to me that we treat competitive multiplayer gaming as a completely overlapping circle to all gaming, and that's a bad idea.  Sure, they're a Venn diagram with a gigantic overlap in the middle, but single-player narrative gaming is a different beast from, say, hopping onto a Counter-Strike map with some people.  In due time I'll be finished with Mass Effect, just as I finished Bioshock and Fallout: New Vegas, but even as I make the "right" choices along the way, I'm certainly not winning any of them.

So no, dad, sorry: I definitely didn't win.  But I'm pretty sure I haven't lost, either.

Where's this train going, again?

In this space, I've once before questioned how serious, genuinely educational gaming could be tackled.

So far, the answer seems to be: not online, not with jazzy graphics, and not with a digital piece at all, but with serious, thoughtful hands-on games.  Art pieces, as it were.

The Daily Beast has a profile of Brenda Brathwaite and her Holocaust game:

Train ... is not a videogame. It unfolds atop a shattered window. Three model train tracks run diagonally across the broken glass. Game pieces include two stacks of cards, a black typewriter holding the rules, 60 yellow wooden pawns, and six gray model boxcars.

Each turn, players can roll a die and choose to advance their boxcar or load it with pawns; alternatively, they can use a card to speed or slow a boxcar’s progress. Brathwaite’s goal, she says, was to make a game about complicity, and so the rules drop the player not in the shoes of a Holocaust victim but a train conductor who helped make the Nazi system run.

 Brathwaite describes what brought her to create Train and the other five historical, moral pieces in the art series.  She needed a way to make history accessible to her daughter, and used simple tools -- dice, pawns, and an index card -- to make the Middle Passage come to life.  Her ultimate point is a great insight:

“I wanted to do a design exercise to see if you could use game mechanics to express difficult subjects,” Braithwaite says. “Every single atrocity, every single migration of people—there was a system behind it. If you can find that system, you can make a game about it. All games are, is systems.”

We've got this problem with "serious games" because, in part, of the words we've got to work with in English.  "Game," by default, means to us something unserious -- "What is this, some kind of game to you?"  We've created a whole image, a whole term, and a number of industries around the concept that game = entertainment.  Football, Call of Duty, Monopoly -- we don't expect a level of seriousness and depth in anything we call a game, and to do so seems only to diminish the gravity of the topic.

But Brathwaite is right: history's worst days, and mankind's darkest hours, have all been surrounded by systems, either ones put in place deliberately or cultural ones that grew over time.  The better we can understand a game as a system of rules, that participants then use to manipulate slices of reality, and the less we consider game as "pointless pastime," the better a tool gaming will be.

Film and Games: Still Different, Still Art

The big news online for gamers today is that Roger Ebert will let us play on his lawn.  I respect the man, I and respect his willingness to say, "I shouldn't have said that."  He's right; a wise man (or blogger) knows when to shut his mouth and just listen, when the areas of one's expertise have been passed.  

There are a couple of key points in Ebert's own response, though, that show the flaws in his own argument.  He writes: "If you can go through 'every emotional journey available,' doesn't that devalue each and every one of them? Art seeks to lead you to an inevitable conclusion, not a smorgasbord of choices. If next time I have Romeo and Juliet go through the story naked and standing on their hands, would that be way cool, or what?"

That's a valid point, if it's the one you want to make.  (I would disagree, but that's irrelevant.)  But the game that touched off the whole firestorm was Flower.   

Flower is a narrative game.  There are no derivations.  You can choose whether to move clockwise or counterclockwise around a given area, and that's about it.  The game progresses through six distinct stages, with distinct and unchangeable goals in every stage.  There are no alternate endings; the game is entirely linear and tells a very specific emotional story.

The thing is, it's not the kind of story you could convey very well in a standard narrative film.  If it were to be film at all, it would have to be a 15-minute French art-film.  And even then, it wouldn't convey the emotions quite the same way.  The story of Flower is felt by the player, as you exuberantly ride the wind or duck wildly from a storm.  

The games that best fit the "art" mold are the games that use the meta-narrative of player control -- or lack thereof -- to add that extra dimension to the experience.  As a French art-film, Flower would bore the pants off the majority.  As a downloadable PSN game, it entranced players worldwide.

Similarly, there are talks of a Bioshock movie.  Leaving aside the entire seriously problematic genre of "video game adaptations," Bioshock is likely to suffer some of the same problems in a game-to-film transition that Flower would have.  To be sure, you have a human protagonist, which helps a great deal when making an effects blockbuster.

Verbinski is also on-target when saying the movie would have to be a "hard R."  Bioshock is a violent game, but not, generally, a gratuitously violent one.  (Though the player can choose, to a point, to be more or less so.)  But the pivotal scene of Bioshock must be shown in on-screen space.  The viewer absolutely cannot have the option to look away -- because what makes that scene work, in the game, is that the player has no option to look away.  The scene, which I have written about before, is made potent by a meta-narrative of control.  The game wrests control away from you and forces you to stand by, passively, and stare at a monstrosity of a cut-scene unfolding.  And there lies the emotional impact, the art and artistry, of the game.

In order for a film version of Bioshock to have any emotional impact, rather than being another zombie slug-fest, the creators of that film would have to work very hard to come up with something to fill the void left by taking any active control away from the viewer.  An entire film is, by its nature, passive and out of the spectator's control; that hole would likely be the failure point of such a movie.  For that failure point to exist, the interactivity itself must be a point of art.  And Roger Ebert would be a wiser man still if he would allow himself to see that.

Succinctly...

Penny Arcade, of course, put yesterday's rant against Ebert into far more succinct terms than I:

Games Are Art

I've been meaning to start this blog for at least a year now, and Roger Ebert has finally given me the impetus to get going.

Oh, Roger Ebert. You are such an intelligent, well-spoken, and well-educated man; why must you be so stubborn and blind about this?

For starters: if Flower isn't art, then neither is "This is Just to Say," to pick an easy poem. Flower is visual, interactive poetry -- it's program music with PS3 graphics and a controller attached.

A series of other thoughts I had, upon which I will likely expand in later posts:

• Not all art is narrative art. Humans are, at our core, storytellers. But anyone who has seriously studied film (Ebert) will have studied non-narrative film. We also have countless examples of non-narrative static visual arts, accepted into the canon of Western art. You may not like everything at MoMA, but it's generally considered art.


• The correlation to that is, we tend to create our own narratives. Players bring narrative to their gaming experience -- whether it's Tetris or Dragon Age: Origins -- the same way that a viewer standing in front of a Picasso or a reader parsing beat poetry does. We create our gaming stories as either the primary or secondary narrative of our gaming experience. "And then I totally did _______," is as much a story to the player as, "And then his father came back from the dead, and..."


• Available graphics no more exclude games as art than the available cameras of the 1920s exclude those films as art. We value cave paintings; we value ancient Greek murals; we value Monet. We value A Trip to the Moon; we value Avatar (more on that one later). And 8-bit graphics never stopped me from loving Guybrush Threepwood. The nearest easy analogy is animated films: we consider both Snow White and Wall-E to be examples of the art.


• We accept that film is not monolithic. I don't know anyone who would consider Transformers 2 to be high art; but similarly, I don't know anyone who would consider The Godfather or Citizen Kane to be anything but. Star Wars has a place of honor in the film canon, but surely we wouldn't put Manos: The Hands of Fate there. We have similar divisions (if fairly arbitrary) for literature, television, visual arts, and print media: Thriller may be art, in a way Britney Spears may not be. Why should gaming, a scant 30 years into its history, be more monolithic?


• Gaming is barely 30 years into its history. How can a film critic as highly trained as Roger Ebert not remember that film itself was disregarded -- "can never be art" -- decades into its existence? Even after it surged in popularity, even after it became something everyone saw... the genre films of what we consider Hollywood's Golden Age weren't "art" until they were 20 years old or more. Perspective! The first wave of directors who were actually taught "film is art" in film schools were notorious for how they revolutionized the art and changed the industry, when they came into their own in the 1970s. Surely the 30-year-old gamers born at the dawn of our digital entertainment era, just now fully coming into their careers, can bring some of those changes as well? To say nothing of their children, in another three decades.


• Gaming has developed an avant-garde. I forget which of my film professors delivered the lecture, but I remember one of them speaking to the point that the film industry needed the 1960s and 1970s to happen. The advent of independent film and the rise of the avant-garde fed ideas back into film-making that created new approaches, and diversified ways of telling stories. Early film (pre-1920) was mainly all avant-garde in this sense, because the "right" ways hadn't been codified, and the technology was still new. Well, that's where gaming's been: the 1980s were that early, pre-codification period. The 1990s saw the broadening of available home consoles, and the explosion of PC ownership, and created clearly defined gaming genres and acceptable parameters. The early 2000s, with the creation of $60 million AAA titles, raised the bar to entry -- but the networking era (XBox Live, PSN, WiiWare, etc.) has created a distribution venue for smaller, quirkier, independent, or avant-garde games.

And finally, two remaining points: we've seen Avatar and Heavy Rain come out within a few months of each other. The former was a mega-popular film that seemed cribbed directly from gaming, both in content and in technical construction. The latter was a very popular video game that seemed cribbed directly from cinema, both in content and in aesthetic. Like it or not, the two fields are merging.

The last point is the hardest to wrangle, because film students (and presumably students of the other arts) have been discussing it for as long as their programs have existed. Does viewer participation create, enhance, or lessen art? We encourage film students to be active viewers, rather than passive; sometimes, however, we demand they leave their personal baggage at the door. Sometimes, we believe that only the producer has the power of creation, and sometimes we believe that art is contained in what the viewer brings to it.

There's a lot to discuss. That's why there's going to be a whole blog to do it in... Cheers.