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[Finishing up our Art History of Games coverage - here's Part 1 and Part 2 -- and this one has the ever-controversial Tale Of Tales guys kicking off a ruckus, as well as Celia Pearce weaving some absurdist art references into a look at art and games.]

At the Art History of Games conference, Tale of Tales, the indie studio behind The Path, argues that "games are not art," and "largely a waste of time." Meanwhile, one professor examines where art and play have collided.

Tale of Tales: Games "Not Art," Largely A "Waste Of Time"

Tales of Tales has never been shy about making bold statements. At The Art History of Games conference in Atlanta, GA last week, Michael Samyn and Auriea Harvey, who also worked on The Path, which many pigeon hole as an "art game," laid out their case for why video games are not and never will be art, and why games are never going to evolve.

"One thing need to be said first, we're not trying to not fit in on purpose," said Samyn. Instead, he maintained that they had tried to carve out a place for Tale of Tales in the game industry but room was never made for them. Samyn and Harvey listed the problems they have with games. Games, according to Tale of Tales, were not beautiful enough, or immersive enough, or welcoming enough for a large audience.

Harvey announced, "some of the members of the audience are confused," as he displayed a presentation slide that boldly said: GAMES ARE NOT ART. Samyn then argued that play was driven by a biological need, and that over time play had been turned into games. On the other hand, art was not created out of a physical need but in a search for higher purposes.

Unfortunately, according to Harvey, art is dead. After the rise of Modernism art has been co-opted by capitalism and restrictive forms of government. The speakers maintained that the real artists were no longer working in the art world, but instead were experimenting in the less explored corners of the internet.

Samyn then dug in further, intoning, "Beside a few noble attempts, video games are overwhelmingly a waste of time." Video games have stopped evolving, Samyn continued, and the reason that games could not get their act together was that they lacked guidance. Those that controlled the game industry weren't interested in changing, they were too comfortable with the way things were.

However, they said, old media that featured one-way communication was not enough. Computers offered the way forward for art, but at this point it is being held hostage by the video game industry. The speakers then switched from addressed to audience to a tone that implied that they were talking beyond the room.

Samyn announced that they, Tales of Tales, could not be stopped. They would continue to take games and rip out their "stupid rules" and goals. He promised that after eviscerating games they would breathe new life into the carcass, creating something new.

"Our time has come." Samyn said.

Harvey responded: "Make love, not games."

The two creators also announced that they were starting a project to organize all the people all over the world that were creating what they called "not games." The movement would be maintained on a series of blogs and forums, featuring conversations, screenshots of projects, as well as festivals with particular rules to guide the production of these new, 'not games'.

Tale of Tales' work to date includes The Path, the unreleased project 8, its first "anti-game" Endless Forest, Fatale, and its first iPhone project, the in-development Vanitas, commissioned by The Art History of Games conference.

When Art And Games Collide

While the subject of art and games has a lot of discussion that surrounds it, often it's without doing the hard legwork of actually compiling a list of the different instances in which the two worlds have collided. At the Art History of Games conference, professor Celia Pearce attempted to do just that, giving a long and thorough survey of participatory and game art from the beginning of the 20th century to the present day.

Appearing in several lectures beforehand, Pearce clarified the connection between the famous artist, Marcel Duchamp, and games. Famously obsessed with chess, the French artist also made art as if it was a game, often playing with constraints, such as doing on entire painting while cross-eyed. Pointing to Duchamp's readymades -- already-manufactured pieces that simply bore Duchamp's signature, including a bicycle wheel and even a urinal -- Pearce pointed out that "the procedurality of the readymades was more important than their status as objects."

Touching on the Fluxus movement, Pearce talked about the composer John Cage, who would often give himself rulesets for how to perform his different pieces, even going to the extent of physically modifying the pianos he would play. A friend and collaborator of John Cage was David Tudor, who would build musical instruments out of electronic devices that were never meant to produce music.

"This is playful art," Pearce pointed out, "not necessary games, but structured play."

Pearce touched on more modern perspective in game design, such as the New Games Movement, which created outdoor games that were not directly competitive. She connected this to the work of Frank Lantz, the co-founder of the game studio area/code, who created games such as Pac Manhattan, in which familiar video games and types of games were scaled up to the point where they became something like performance art pieces.

Parallel to the New Game Movement and Lantz's Big Games is the beginning of video game art, such as the game Alien Garden, which was designed by Bernie DeKoven and programmed by Jaron Lanier. Mods and hacks also played a huge role in early video game art. One of the first exhibitions of game art was actually an online show called "Cracking the Maze" which featured, among other pieces, the modification of different games to add female characters.

Interestingly, Pearce said, at the same time Counter-Strike, a mod of Half Life that is not considered game art, was showing the mods could actually be more popular than the games they were modifying. The two perspectives on moding collided however with the game art piece "Velvet Strike", which allowed the player's gun to fire graffiti all over the walls during a Counter-Strike match.

Pearce finished by pointing the audience towards latest wave of game art, such as Mary Flanagan's piece Giant Joystick. A recreation of an Atari joystick scaled up to 8 ft. 9-11 Survivor is a game that lets the player explore the terrible choices of a person trapped in one of the damaged Twin Towers.

Finally, Pearce pointed to the recent and strong overlap between the art games and indie games. Works like Unfinished Swan, Gravitation, Moon Stories, and The Path, are all the inheritors of a long tradition of both art and games. This meeting of the art game movement and the indie game movement is important in bringing art games to more eyes and finding more possibilities to explore in indie games.

[Charles J Pratt is a freelance game designer and a researcher at NYU's new Game Center.]

Tale of Tales, the Belgian indie developer behind controversial horror game The Path, announced that Salome, the biblical heroine of its next project Fatale, was designed, modeled, and textured by former Silent Hill CGI director Takayoshi Sato.

Sato managed characted design, CGI sequences, and environment for the first two titles from Konami's survival horror series before jumping to Electronic Arts to work on GoldenEye: Rogue Agent and canceled Command & Conquer first-person shooter Tiberium. He now serves as art director of defense contractor Applied Research Associates's Virtual Heroes Division.

Tale of Tales believes that Sato's talents help capture the many interpretations of the woman who would demand the head of John the Baptist, from the "teenager who falls in love with the wrong man at the wrong time", to Oscare Wilde's depiction of "a mad woman, lurking in the shadows of our souls, a selfish, passionate, willful creature who will stop at nothing to get what she wants."

"We've always admired Mr. Sato's work," says Fatale's designers and Tale of Tales's founders Auriea Harvey and Michael Samyn. "In fact, if it wasn't for his masterful work in Silent Hill 1 and 2, we would probably never have started making videogames. Takayoshi Sato designs characters the way a novelist describes them or a sculptor carves them: their personality is expressed in their appearance and they are covered with very recognizable details.

"He does not design superheroes or puppets, but real people, people you want to know, people you want to be close to. The style we are aiming for with Fatale is more naturalistic than anything we have made so far. But we want to retain the magical quality and openness to interpretation that is characteristic of our work. Takayoshi is one of the few designers in the world capable of pulling this off. We asked him. And he said yes. We couldn't be happier!"

Tale of Tales is three months into the Fatale's production, and the game is scheduled to release October 5th. You can see the studio's first preview of Salome below:

Tale of Tales, developers of the recent controversial horror game The Path, have announced details about their next game, codenamed 'Fatale'.

Auriea Harvey and Michael Samyn of Tale of Tales explain:

""Fatale" is based on the legend of Salomé, who, 2000 years ago, demanded the head of John the Baptist as a reward for dancing for her stepfather, King Herod. Oscar Wilde's 1891 interpretation of Salomé as a young woman in love with the prophet is the main inspiration for the project.

In "Fatale" you will be able to explore the scene of this momentous historical event, experiencing the story through the emotions and thoughts of the characters involved."

The guys say the game will be similar to their 2008 indie title 'The Graveyard' and will revolve around the ideas of paintings depicting a frozen moment in time and "fatal
woman who lures men to their downfall".

The game is due for release on 5 October 2009, which is apparently the 78th anniversary of the first public performance of Salomé in English (due to the play's portrayal of certain biblical figures, it was banned from the British stage for almost 50 years). For all the art fans out there, the above image is “Salomé” by Lucien Lévy Dhurmer, 1896. Continue reading

['Diamond In The Rough' is a regularly scheduled GameSetWatch-exclusive opinion column by Tom Cross focusing on aspects of games that stand out, for reasons good and bad. This week, Tom looks at calls for video game design reform in the areas of narrative and story.]

Recently, bloggers, gamers, game designers have been discussing the future of video games as they’d like to see it. Some of the more intriguing conversations they’re having concern emergent narratives, authorial control, and story making as opposed to storytelling.

Notable bloggers and game designers, Doug Church, Michael Samyn, and Steve Gaynor, have argued that traditional narrative modes of in-game storytelling need to be replaced with newer methods. Church (albeit back at GDC 2000!) argues that we should "abdicate authorship"++ altogether, while Gaynor and Samyn argue, in their more recent and suggestive articles, that video games are a medium uniquely able to create a new tablet for user-created content, termed “story space,” and that the narratives that come from this will be “emergent.”**+

This article will examine the assumptions and statements already made about these topics. Next week’s article will conclude by exploring their flaws and strengths, and ultimately the potential, both good and bad, of their ideas. A final article will bring my discussion to its conclusion, using an older game to point the way forward for narrative in games.

For Church and Gaynor, plain old “narrative” is outdated. According to Gaynor, it’s not what videogames are best positioned to do anyway, being a rigid, static structure of author-generated, pre-arranged meaning. To them, sticking to old, narrative forms in videogames just hampers designers’ creativity, and worse, the result is stale and uninteresting to gamers. We are, in other words, tired of the same old thing. For gamers today, narratives and stories are almost always jokes. Even the well-made ones painfully telegraph their intentions hours in advance and never do anything really surprising.

Gaynor suggests as an alternative what he calls “the immersion model of meaning,” and contrasts it to linear, “cinematic” techniques:

The immersion model of meaning arises from design focus along two primary axes: providing a believable, populated, internally consistent, freely-navigable gameworld for the player's avatar to inhabit, and robust tools of interactivity that allow the player to build a personal identity within that gameworld through his own actions.*

While this is perhaps an immediately compelling rhetoric, it rests on a dismissal of narrative as “linear” that fails to account for what narrative really is, generating a straw man “cinematic” model only to banish it as quickly as possible. Without a robust definition of “narrative,” the supposedly unwieldy thing at the center of the old method of video game meaning creation, the “immersion model of meaning” signifies next to nothing, because it’s not clear what job it’s taking over from, or what kind of “meaning” it is setting out to produce or replace.

Making Thing Clearer

According to Gaynor, the problem is that games attempt to recreate filmic narratives. Here, he explains what’s wrong with this:

Video games are already capable of doing these things [associated with emergent narratives]; they are far less capable of providing the authored pacing, composed framing and predictable event flow of film to convey a linear narrative, and yet this is almost always a central focus in character-driven games. Embracing the immersion model of meaning requires the designer never think of the game as a story, but as a place filled with people and things that the player is free to engage with at his own pace and on his own terms.*

The problem with this definition of the “immersion model of meaning” and narrative is that it requires us to assume that “narrative always consists of something as rigid as “authored pacing, composed framing, and predictable event flow” (predictable to whom? On what bases? Etcetera). Narrative does not have to be linear. In fact, in my view, when it is treated properly in video games, narrative is multi-noded, self-reliant and fluctual, the opposite of linear.

In the video game medium, very often a narrative consists of multiple actors, who all follow their own desires and attempt to achieve what they want, dynamically rather than statically. In a game like Westwood’s Blade Runner, this kind of system is modeled procedurally. Actors exist in the simulation, acting independently from the player, and only when the player actively inserts themselves into the path of the actor (or the path of a series of repercussions instigated by that actor) does the player become aware of the actor. It is by no means a complete or fluid simulation. Many characters still wait to be activated by the PC, and cannot continue with their agendas without being triggered. Still, the illusion of NPC autonomy is present in Blade Runner in a way not seen in other games.

As Long as Androids Pretend to Dream...

This is narrative, and it is not static. Narrative is a system of occurrences, each with their own meaning. The reader, viewer or player witnesses or experiences these events, and concludes that they are connected or related to each other, both in their beginnings and their endings (and the decisions and events that connect the two). Clint Hocking points out on Gaynor’s blog, “I think it was EM Forster who said "The King died and then the Queen died is a story, but the King died and then the Queen died OF GRIEF is a PLOT."

Hocking’s language is usefully suggestive because it reminds us of Peter Brooks’s argument, in Reading for the Plot, that “plot” is not just a static, reified “thing,” separable from the totality of the story that we read or view, but the center of any story. Plot is the “design and intention of narrative, a structure for those meanings that are developed through temporal succession” (Brooks 12). Narrative is thus a whole whose parts imply each other’s existence. Readers, viewers and players of any narrative see it for what it is, and are thus interested in following the narrative to its conclusion. Narrative does not need to be linear. To assume that the multiple narrative threads simultaneously existing in a game (more advanced than Blade Runner) are something other than narrative is both incorrect and unhelpful.

While this article will examine the broader, initial claims (and calls for action) implicit in the desire for new kinds of storytelling, and in particular the narratives that are supposed to emerge from story spaces, it is meant to introduce a wider critique, one that addresses our preconceptions of what “narrative” and “linearity” mean in games today, and in what we hope they will be in future, less heavily scripted (and thus artificially “storied”) games. I think that there is an alternative to Gaynor’s extreme vision of authorial retreat and emergent game narratives.

There’s a future for “emergent narratives” not just in story spaces and their ilk, but in further developments in narrative proper. Thus, I want to claim that “narrative” is and always will be distinct from the kind of storytelling that we will see in story spaces, and that the future that both narratives and story spaces have in gaming will allow exciting, “emergent” narrative forms in both categories, not just the more freeform, less scripted world of story spaces. I also think that there are crucial aspects of storytelling that can only be accomplished with the aid of narrative, and can’t with largely user-generated content from story spaces. But to make this claim, we need more fully explore what’s meant by “emerging narrative” and “story space,” and get a better sense of what narrative really is, and how it differs from the first two.

How Far can the Story Space Take Us?

Story spaces (as defined by Gaynor) are a notion that allows for more flexibility, more player decision and reaction, and thus (one hopes) player-video game connection. Story spaces are new—they have all the flavor of narrative, but none of the obvious, clunky structure, because while they may be organized and scripted by the designer, they allow the user to create stories unaided. In a story space, a designer steps back, creating malleable, highly reaction-capable NPCs and environments, and creates as wide and deep a field of interactions as possible. The player can then create stories far more meaningful than any a set of canned branching narrative might provide.

Story space for Gaynor is the possibility provided by a certain kind of game design. As he says:

Fictional content--setting, characters, backstory-- is useful inasmuch as it creates context for what the player chooses to do. This is ambient content, not linear narrative in any traditional sense. The creators of a gameworld should be lauded for their ability to believably render an intriguing fictional place-- the world itself and the characters in it. However the value in a game is not to be found in its ability at storytelling, but in its potential for storymaking.**

For Gaynor, a world that follows a path of multiple, interconnected, possibly unrelated settings, people and histories is just “fictional content.” It is, when implemented in a non- structured, non-restrictive, non-linear way, the ultimate space within which to have unique, “storymaking” experiences. I think that Gaynor is right to name these elements as key to making interesting gameplay experiences and sessions, but that his definition of narrative and “storymaking” are underexplained and overemphasized.

It’s nice to say that we’ll give users tools to make stories in the future, and that video games are bad at delivering already-written stories (as Gaynor does), but it’s confusing and misleading if we don’t have a clear idea of what narrative is and what story spaces might do to dislodge narrative from the control of the author and give it to the reader. Without some idea of what we’re talking about, that rhetoric is just rhetoric—empowering-sounding and exciting, to be sure, but not helpful in trying to understand what games do now and what they might do in the future.

You can see where the terms “emergent narrative” and “authorial control” become important to this argument. Authorial control is what the designer needs to give up in order for this amazing new set of experiences to occur. Gaynor believes that once this control has been given up and a believable, deep, and rule-bound world has been created in its place sans narrative shackles, “emergent narrative” can occur. While the designer’s craft is as important as ever (especially when creating a world that obviates the need for structured story nodes and narrative tracks), it needs to be lighter, more deft, and less obvious to the player.

The new stories and narratives a player can create in such a game space are the emergent narratives so key to these arguments. An emergent narrative is the sense (and story) that a player would create using the stimuli provided by this hypothetical game. From these actions and reactions the player creates her own story, her own emergent narrative.

Assumptions and Assertions

Supposedly, if content comes from the user, then the designer disappears into the background, letting the user run with the storytelling tools the designer has given her. Ideally, Gaynor writes,

Video games at their best abdicate authorial control to the player, and with it shift the locus of the experience from the raw potential onscreen to the hands and mind of the individual. At the end of the day, the play of the game belongs to you. The greatest aspiration of a game designer is merely to set the stage.***

This is an admirable goal, but Gaynor makes a universal claim about video games and video game design that isn’t always true. Not all video games benefit from abdication of authorial control. I think that multivalent, independently acting narrative nodes could be combined in one complicated game to provide the illusion of a fictional world completely at the power of its own citizens. A designer would create these myriad actors so that each one had a purpose, place, and reason for being there. Thus, the advent of a carefully scripted and directed NPC upon the scene is not the illusion breaking, transparent thing that Gaynor rejects, but the entry of one more narrative node to the mix. This is a goal aspired to by many games, approached by few, and mastered by none. No matter how much credit we give the most forward-looking of games, they fail on fundamental levels to provide the bright future described by these writers.

They fail not just because they haven’t attempted to produce Gaynor’s new storytelling, but because the vision Gaynor puts forward, as exciting as it is, isn’t storytelling, and isn’t the future of videogame narrative. To a certain extent, that’s Gaynor’s point—in with the new, out with the old, and good riddance. But like many polemicists entranced with a new idea, Gaynor supposes that “narrative” was an old category that has to change into the vaguely imagined “story space,” failing to see that videogame narrative in the older, proper sense—stories—is a different thing from what he’s envisioning.

The future of narrative, in short, is not story space. Story space will happen, and should, but it would be limited to think that the two can’t coexist, or that narrative can’t go to exciting new places on its own terms. As I’ve suggested, the failure to imagine both possibilities, either/or rather than both/and thinking, is typical of the heated rhetoric of novelty, in video games as in any other art—but, as in other fields, we owe it to ourselves as self-conscious gamers to understand a little better the reality of what we’re being presented with, and sort the value of story spaces out from the totalizing rhetoric that sees story spaces as the only future of game narrative.

In my next column, I’ll examine the possibilities for the future of narrative in games, and how that future relates to Gaynor’s conceptions of narrative, story space, and plot.

Below are the relevant articles, along with related reading (from Michael Samyn of Tale of Tales).

* The Immersion Model of Meaning
** Storymaking
*** Being There
+ The Challenge of Non-Linearity
++ A Peek into Game Design

[Tom Cross writes for Gametopius and Popmatters, and blogs about video games at shouldntbegaming.wordpress.com. You can contact him at romain47 at gmail dot com.]