FunEffect.com

[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.]

[In this opinion column. which already caused a bit of a ruckus over on Gamasutra, academic Lewis Pulsipher muses on ways to enjoy games without the focus on success, failure and competition, asserting that users must have that option if games are ever to be as inclusive as movies.]

Video games won’t be as widely accepted as film unless we find ways to allow participation by those who don’t want to be challenged by their entertainment, and who don’t want to have to work to be entertained.

Chess masters not only play a lot of chess, they study the strategy and the standard openings, memorizing a vast number of lines of play. They have to, in order to succeed. When I was 15 years old, I was an avid board gamer, though not a regular chess player; faced with the prospect of much more study, I “retired” from playing chess because, as I told people, it was “too much like work.”

Video games are at a crossroads. Despite what the hardcore call “dumbing down”, many video games are “too much like work” for too many people. If we’re to make video games as ubiquitous as movies, what can we do about this?

Beating The Game, Missing The Journey?

Traditionally, video games have been challenge-based. The idea was that the player, interacting with the computer, is entertained by learning how to overcome the challenges and, in the end, “beat the game.” Playing such games, which might more accurately be called interactive puzzles where only one player is involved, is a learning experience.

Raph Koster, theorizing about fun in games, goes so far as to say that “Fun” is learning in a safe environment (such as a video game). People learn how to overcome the challenges in video games until they master the game.

This challenge/learning paradigm has helped video games become a common form of entertainment, yet as the size of the game-playing public expands, the challenges have been watered down to be acceptable to the additional players. Hardcore gamer complaints that the game Spore is “too easy”, or that World of Warcraft is “for noobs”, are typical.

At some point, the challenge paradigm no longer works for the next group of potential players. God of War creator David Jaffe explained, "I don’t want to be challenged by my entertainment, here’s my 60 bucks, entertain me or go away. Hardcore gamers want to be challenged and emerge as bad ass gamers, but that isn’t fun for me." (This quote is highly expurgated.)

Yet my observation of gamers who boast about “beating the game” is that they often appear not to have enjoyed the journey -- that is, even for them, sometimes the game is more like work than fun.

Hardcore game players are accustomed to being challenged. Viewers of movies, which are passive experiences, are rarely challenged.

Far more people watch movies than play video games. Roughly speaking, a movie that grosses $200 million domestically is seen by more than 20 million Americans, and many more people in other countries, in a month or two, far outreaching the audience of the most successful video games. That doesn’t count how many will watch the DVD or see it on television.

How can video games approach this kind of audience? What can video game designers do to accommodate those who don’t want to be challenged by their games, who may only be interested in the story they’re being told, who won’t play games that are “too much like work”?

Removing the Focus on Challenges

One way is to offer an alternative to competitive “challenges” as the basis for a game. Many definitions of “game” include the idea of challenges and player actions, but we already see successful “video games” that have removed the onus of “failure to compete.” Wii Fit and Wii Music immediately come to mind, and the former is one of the best-selling “video games” ever.

However, I’m not suggesting that we need to abandon the challenge basis of games, I’m just looking for ways to let those who “don’t like work” to participate in such games.

Early video games had no story to speak of, and to this day in many games the story is just an excuse to get to the action. But many games include stories of sufficient interest to be praised for their own sake. At some point a player may want to "ride along" and “see what happens”, to enjoy the story. Can you do that with a video game?

At this time, not without a lot of action that many people call work. Should these folks instead be watching movies? Movies that resemble video games are often panned by film critics, but recently the well-known critic Roger Ebert said, about the movie Terminator Salvation, "It gives you all the pleasure of a video game without the bother of having to play it." (He gave it three stars out of four, quite a bit better than the Metacritic average -- this was not a criticism.)

Is a future of video games actually movies like this? Or can we enable video games to challenge those who like to be challenged, but accommodate those who just want to ride along?

Mitigating Failure

This requires us to find some way to either remove the disadvantage of failure from the game, or make failure less likely.

We see evidence of “easification” all over the video game map. Some games now help you aim your gun, some automatically heal you when you save, and so forth. “Bad-ass gamers” sneer at these features, but they’re there to allow people to do less “work” while playing the game.

MMOs like World of Warcraft have made playing much easier, much less challenging, in order to appeal to a larger group of players. “Old-timers” complain, but you can’t argue with the financial benefits to the publisher and studio.

We’ve seen the effects of failure mitigated in video games for decades. When you fail, ordinarily you “die”. Older games gave you several “lives”, and ways to earn more, to let you avoid most of the disadvantages of “death”.

Newer games provide the ability to save a game, sometimes automatically, so that when you fail (usually, “die”) you can go back to the last save and continue. In effect, you have unlimited “lives”. In the new Prince of Persia game, instead of the prince dying when he screws up, he's rescued by his magical companion, though this still takes him back to the last Save just as though he'd died. Yet it feels less “negative.”

Even this failure, however, entails work, as a player must go through a part of the game he’s already traversed in order to reach the point where he failed.
Haven’t we now reached a level of technology where we can have "constant saving" and you can decide where you want to continue from, so you don't have to replay anything if you don't want to?

Games can do something like Photoshop and 3ds Max: Let a player hit the “undo” key (usually Control-Z) when he gets in trouble or fails, and go back a few actions, or a minute, or five minutes, whatever interval he chooses, to resume the game at a point before the failure.

Yes, it’ll take a lot of computing power. Initially, the “constant undo” capability might extend back only to the second-newest save. Nonetheless, if a game can record a movie of everything that is happening, as some games can, a player should be able to, in effect, rewind that movie to where you want to restart. And we’ve removed some of the work.

"Autopilot" Mode

“Undo” will help reduce the tedium of game playing, but doesn’t do anything for the people who just aren’t interested in being strongly challenged by a game. For them we need an “autopilot” mode -- like Nintendo's upcoming Demo Play feature.

When the player runs up against a challenge that is too hard, or that just doesn’t appeal, or the player’s having a slow day and just wants to watch, then the game should have an autopilot mode so that the player can watch the game overcome the challenge(s), and he then continues on to the next part. When he feels like playing he can turn off autopilot and continue.

This is a true autopilot, not a tutorial, not a “show me how to do it”. The game will actually play through the section and continue until the player wants to play further, from that point: he’ll not go back to that challenge unless he wants to.

If the “player” is more interested in watching than playing, the entire game can be played on autopilot. In linear games this will work pretty well. In “sandbox” games the player may still need to make a decision about which way to go or what choice to make at various points, and the autopilot can pause and let him choose. But the primary purpose of autopilot will be to overcome specific challenges the player doesn’t want to deal with, rather than to play the entire game through.

So if I’m playing a game with the kind of puzzles I despise, I can let the autopilot take over, then go on with the enjoyable parts of the game. If a game has the occasional “twitch” section, I can let the game take care of it. And those who aren’t “real gamers” will enjoy “all the pleasure of a video game without the bother of having to play it."

Those who like to do will still be able to play the game that way; those who like to watch will also be able to play. And the sales of video games will increase as the market broadens. Someday, then, some best-selling video games might match the best-selling movies in audience size.

So we remove work from games, we remove “failure” from games. The hardcore will be disgusted at such wimpiness, but we’ve been working toward this in video games for decades, why not finish what we started? After all, they’re games, not tests of manhood (or womanhood).

Face it, in the great scheme of things it doesn’t matter whether you took only four hours to “beat the game”. It doesn’t matter whether you have 10,000 “achievement” points (as if those “achievements” amount to anything in real-life terms!).

It doesn’t matter that you’re a “bad-ass gamer”. The “interactive” way isn’t any “better” or more praiseworthy or more productive than the less interactive ways I’m proposing. People just want to enjoy video games, and we can offer more ways to enjoy them as computers become more and more powerful.

We’ll still have multi-sided games, where there are several human interests and the players write their own story, to challenge the hard core. Good human players are harder to beat than mere computers.

[GameSetLinks is GameSetWatch's daily link round-up post, culling from hundreds of weblogs and outlets to compile the most interesting longform writing, links, and criticism on the art and culture of video games.]

Racking up the links as the week progresses, GameSetLinks this time starts out with a rather sweet tale about how playing games helps two members of a family relate -- exactly the kind of humanistic writing that we hope gets done more and more recently, as people realize that games are a social tool as well as a high-score magnet.

Also in this set - Eurogamer folks on embargo fun, Raph Koster points out a 'build your own board game' site of note, James Silva on why you should give Xbox Live Indie Games a good shake, some more 'Gaming Made Me', narrative and gameplay have a good old ruckus yet again, and more.

Slow dive:

Plants vs. Zombies– a Tale of Two Sisters « Play as Life
A touching story about human relationships compared and enhanced through games.

QBlog: 'Meanwhile, Back in 1976'
'I wonder what ghastly stereotypes in bad wigs German magazines use when advertising conferences in the UK? Or maybe they don't think this kind of embarrassing sexism/racism is just a bit of fun like MCV seems to?'

Raph’s Website » The Game Crafter: Cafepress for board games!
This has been all over the place, thanks to Raph for reminding me to link it: 'The short form: CafePress for board game designers.'

The RAM Raider: Eurogamer Editor Tom Bramwell On Embargos
Maximum respect to Eurogamer/Bramwell for trying to talk through this super-thorny review issue.

Retro Interview - Javier Maldonado on Masq | The Reticule
Masq is a primitive, really odd, but compelling story engine type thing - a good review here. (Also notable because it was 'discovered' by the press.)

Gaming Made Me - The Quixotic Engineer
Continuing the 'Gaming Made Me' RPS series on Matthew Gallant's site: 'What’s interesting about the series is the contrast between how unremarkable many of these games are in a larger sense and how important they are on a personal level.'

A word about Xbox Live Community Games/Indie Games « Ska Studios
Some counterspin here from Dishwasher dev James Silva, and I kiiinda agree: 'Quit complaining. XBLCG is a great platform, but it’s not a magical money generator (unless you make yet-another-massage-game). Just making a game does not guarantee you success and wealth and fame and happiness, but putting that game out on XBLCG definitely gives you a sweet head start.'

The Play’s the Thing « Spectre Collie
Great summing up of the Twitter design kerfuffle over Denis Dyack's Develop talk: 'If you put the narrative in front of the gameplay, you are no longer making a game. You’re making a movie.'