Shadows on the Screen: What’s an “Art Game,” Anyway?

During the past month’s Games Developer’s Conference, critic Heather Chaplain argued that the youth of video games shouldn’t be blamed for topical immaturity in the medium. The game devs themselves, she says, are “fucking adolescents.”

The rant spurred responses from industry notable David Jaffe and fellow game critic Leigh Alexander. Both write at length about the specific accusation of Chaplain that the “boys club” of game developers are somehow less then men, caught up in immature fantasies and incapable of living adult lives. Both Leigh and David knock the argument to the ground pretty well, but ad hominem attacks are a little less interesting to me than the cause of Chaplain’s outburst. The long and short of it is that she’s sick of mainstream gaming being almost entirely made up of action heroes and sports figures. Leigh sums up the position nicely:

Things that we hold up as groundbreaking in terms of story, immersion, emotion here in the West, are what — Oblivion? Mass Effect? Half-Life? Let me be enormously clear, here: Those are great games, and I have the highest genuine respect for the teams behind them and the way in which they try to further human interaction in their very high-quality work.

But plainly: That’s nerd stuff.

Those games, along with BioShock and the Fallout series are among my favorite games of all time. A large part of why they’ve reached that status is due to the relative complexity of their narratives, settings, and characters. In each a promise of the medium seems fulfilled, or at least realized in part. BioShock subtlety tells us that it’s aware that it is a video game, not by breaking the fourth wall but by analogizing mechanics of play with narrative elements. Mass Effect’s dialog trees present cinematic pacing to each of the game’s hundreds of conversations. Fallout 3 unabashedly follows a setting to its logical conclusion, turning the nation’s Capital and it surroundings into a dreary, heavy place to be in – even when you “succeed.” I absolutely love what these games do.

But I love them the same way that I love Brian Michael Bendis’ and Ed Brubaker’s runs on Daredevil. I hold them up in respect to other storytelling in the medium, not to storytelling in any medium. Leigh took flack for the comic argument, and understandably. There are hundreds of amazing graphic novels and short length works in the comic medium that have nothing to do with capes, robots, zombies or aliens. Hell, there are pages in books like The Walking Dead that I would hold up in the same regard that I value works like The Road. But not the whole thing all at once.

These are genre works. They make me grin at witty one-liners, gasp at the special effects, and cheer when the space ship blows up at the end. When they make me think or feel emotionally they do it by using the shortcut that being a genre work provides. Science Fiction films make me ready to believe in humanity’s ability to create. Horror games prime me for realizations about the vastness of human experience and how alone we are in it. Calling their comic “Criminal” makes me ready to hear Ed Brubaker and Sean Phillips lecture me on aberrant social behavior, and the psychology of those who resist it. These works aren’t objectively less valuable, they’re just less subtle. Silent Hill 2 creeps me out, but it would make its point better minus the monsters. It’s just that for all of my love of robots with laser eyes, I value subtlety in my art more than I do spectacle.

David Jaffe’s response is eloquent in its simplicity and necessity: “I don’t WANT to be an artist.” My initial response is curt, but probably a bit arrogant: That’s acceptable. It’s fine to like Michael Bay films instead of Michel Gondry ones, and I won’t argue with you if you tell me that you’ve given both a fair shot and you just like Coldplay more that the Pixies.

My second thought is: “He’s wrong. He’s lying to us or to himself. He does want to be an artist, he just doesn’t like our definition of art.” Hell, in his discussion of canceled action title Heartland, he actually says that he hoped that even the insensitive demographic “would still feel something that came close to an emotional response.” Heartland was going to use game mechanics to make us hurt. And his desire for technical prowess reveals why it is that Jaffe hates Chaplain’s idea of “art.” When Alexander, Chaplain and often myself, speak about art games – we’re referring entirely to story. We’re whining about space marines, and guys like him are taking gigantic steps forward into how the video game as an artifact feels in our hands as we operate it. And he’s sick of us calling up Orson Welles’ masterpiece in our argument:

By the way, regarding Citizen Kane-

saying we have not had the game version of Citizen Kane simply shows a possible lack of genuine understanding of our field (or perhaps you just don’t understand what made Citizen Kane so special for its time). See, we may very well have HAD our Citizen Kane. It was probably GTA3 or MARIO 64 because what I recall from USC film classes was what made CK so special was Wells being the first director to move the camera in innovative ways that told the story in a fresh way. What made CK so special was it marked the first time directors started making movies like MOVIES versus filming stage plays.

He’s right to a degree. Welles did move and use the camera in a unique new way. But he didn’t use that technique to film paint drying. He used it to reinforce themes of human isolation, the decay of value in the pursuit of that value, and the separation (or closeness, it’s debatable) of our old age and youth. It wasn’t just mechanical technique, it was a synthesis of storytelling, camera work, acting, set design, editing, sound work, and all the rest of the things that go into a film. Welles did all of that at once, utilizing all of the parts of a medium to create a cohesive and unique whole. I’m sorry, but if Mario 64 and GTA3 are our Citizen Kane, it isn’t because they let the camera move the way we might want it to. To see that “cameras” were involved in Kane and also those games, and then draw the argument that cameras are what make a work artful… well, it’s less than reductionist, it’s just silly.

The reason that people like Leigh Alexander and Heather Chaplain argue for more mature, non-genre, games is because guys like David Jaffe have the technical side of this down pat. Games do exist that manage to blend the two creatively, with some success. Jaffe himself mentions Flower, Braid, and Passage (which you should really check out if you haven’t.) But these games aren’t mainstream successes. They don’t get advertising campaigns the way big budget action games do. The argument can be made that art house films also don’t get marketing support (or aren’t produced by the big studios anyway), but after a little pushing that falls apart too. In film (and theater, and books, and comics) there are at least three tiers: big budget popcorn flick summer blockbusters, indie/art house films, and somewhere in between the Fall season Oscar-bait dramas. That last distinction doesn’t exist in gaming.

Jaffe and others will argue that it doesn’t exist because there is no audience. They’re making what the people want. I think that even if they wanted to, they couldn’t make that sort of game and get the same support from the big publishers that they’d get for making a sequel to a proven action franchise. This shouldn’t be surprising. Hell, it only validates our Citizen Kane comparison. Studio heads at RKO were constantly trying to see what Welles was up t with that budget of his. But with a unique contract that assured his complete control of the set (something he’d never have again,) Welles was able to produce Citizen Kane exactly as he wanted to (which, by the way, ended up being a film that barely made its budget back during the initial release.)

Is that what it would take for EA or Ubisoft or Activision to produce an “art game”? A rogue dev team, comprised of  gifted individuals and lead by a nonpareil of game design , driven only by their desire to produce their work? If in that situation a team could produce the type of games that Alexander, Chaplain, and I want then it isn’t developers who should be blamed at all, but the publishers who demand only profit and never art. Under those conditions the best you can do is Silent Hill 2, BioShock, Mass Effect, Fallout 3. That’s damn good relative to the competition, but imagine Ken Levine under no pressure, “a master at leisure.” My not-so-secret hope is that he’s there now, or if not him someone else, and that in a year this post will be meaningless.

Shadows on the Screen is a weekly column by OneLastContinue.com US/Canada Editor Austin Walker focusing on questions about games-as-art, design theory, and industry convention. It updates every Tuesday afternoon. You can reach the author at AustinWalker@OneLastContinue.com