Cav's Place

A recent IGN article once again brought up the topic of games as an art form, but the author’s opinion differed greatly from what you’d expect to see on a gaming site, as he not only stated clearly and firmly that games are not art, but also that they shouldn’t be. His stance was that video games should be treated just like any other type of games, with their main purpose being to simply provide people with a medium and a set of rules that stimulate imaginative play and playful interaction. He even went as far as quoting a comparison between games and a ball and stated that the narrative, visual style or character motivations present in video games can and likely should be entirely optional, without having any effect on the actual gameplay.
Needless to say, I find such a view not only deeply flawed but also dangerous. Admittedly, AAA titles put far too much emphasis on the visual aspect and an increasingly worrying number of “games” are becoming increasingly “cinematic” by reducing player choice and even interactivity, but the need to hold back the rush to one extreme certainly doesn’t mean anyone should be praising the other. Or, of course, anyone should be free to express whatever views they hold, but those that’d have particularly damaging effects in the long run if they’d somehow end up being adopted need to be fought against and thoroughly defeated, so those expressing them won’t be given a chance to gather that critical mass of converts and allies necessary to create the change they’re advocating.

My view is that computer games and, despite my hatred of consoles, video games in general, are the closest the regular person can currently get to immersing themselves in another world, to temporarily trading their life for another. As such, they can, and should, create an immersive experience, allowing the player to truly feel like they are part of the game world and that their choices have significant consequences. Yes, the rules and mechanics are also important, but good video games should start from creating believable worlds or alternate realities, featuring believable and solid narratives and characters, setting goals that the players will be able to relate to and offering a large amount of control and a vast array of choices that truly impact those worlds or alternate realities.
The outrageous costs mean that you can’t reasonably expect any games except those with the biggest budgets to offer you the feeling of being transported into a good movie and granted complete control of one or more of the characters, but there’s no reason to expect any less than the feeling of being granted complete control of one or more of the characters of a good book. The rules and mechanics should come after establishing the world, narrative, characters and motives, which will afterwards be fleshed out further by also developing the visual and aural aspects as much as possible, within the limits of the available time and budget, in order to get the immersion and sense of escapism to the greatest possible levels.

There will come a time when highly developed virtual reality systems will become readily available and affordable, at which point what we currently consider video games will have to step down from their current position, but at the moment they’re by far the best method we have of opening portals to other worlds, other lives or even simply other possibilities for ourselves. Movies grant the viewer nothing more than the entirely passive role of an observer of another’s vision, while books may allow the reader to imagine the events in ways that they can better relate to, but still grant no control whatsoever over the story or the characters. Video games, on the other hand, can take the best from other forms of art and add this layer of interactivity and freedom of choice on top of that, taking a good part of the control and decisions away from the author and placing them into the hands of the player. If that doesn’t mean that they can, and most definitely should, be art, then I don’t know what does.
Unfortunately, there’s a whole lot of bad art out there, not to mention that, as I said above, some games are starting to try to mimic movies so much that they’re taking away the control and choices from the player and handing them back to the author. However, the way to fix that is definitely not to run away from the entire concept of games as art and strive for a return to the simplicity of games as toys, but quite the contrary. We need to encourage those aspects that can turn video games into art, but at the same time emphasize the fact that, unlike it happens with other art forms, the user should never be relegated to the role of a passive observer, but must always be active and entirely, or almost entirely, in control of at least the actions of the main character, group, faction or other clearly active element.

In the end, this, and not rules or mechanics, is what sets video games apart: Unlike movies and books, video games should allow the player to be in control of their destiny and, ultimately, of the conclusion of the story. And unlike toys or generic board games, video games should offer the player a good narrative, goals they can relate to, and perhaps most importantly, a feeling of immersion. They are, and will continue to be until those virtual reality machines will show up in everyone’s homes, the ultimate form of escapism… And escapism definitely is, and has always been, much needed, not only because this world we have created for ourselves is so terrible that anyone who’s not equally rotten to the core will be quickly driven to insanity if not allowed to take frequent breaks from actually living in it, but also because, even in a perfect world, humans would still need to explore, experiment and, to also tackle that idiotic debate about the influence violent games may have, to let off some steam in an entirely harmless manner, without putting themselves or others at risk.