Dear Game Developers: Walking Isn't Fun

Recently, I've been trying a bit harder to work through my oversized backlog of unfinished and unplayed games, which is mostly the result of too many impulsive purchases of irresistibly inexpensive bundles. They never put more than the tiniest dent in my wallet but now threaten to take a substantial chunk of my time left on Earth if ever I am to say I've played them all. My admittedly questionable strategy thus far has been guaranteed quantity over probable quality: rather than trying to play the best games first, I've been trying to knock out a lot of short games to make the perceived size of the list itself a bit less intimidating. This means I'm finally trying a lot of the games which I never would have thought to purchase if they hadn't come bundled with more attractive games. Sometimes, these small-scale indie games turn out to be hidden gems (which, if you were wondering, is why I play them at all). Other times, I'm not so lucky.

Last weekend, I spent about two hours playing through Pneuma: Breath of Life — which is better described as a tech demo than a game, just barely avoids classification as a "walking simulator" with the inclusion of a few mechanically interesting but ultimately far-too-easy puzzles, and tries (and fails) to be deep and meaningful in an obnoxiously unoriginal way. To be fair, I feel that the game would have been entirely bearable if not for the protagonist's incessant pseudo-philosophical jabbering and generally unfunny commentary. Alas, however, I played with the speakers turned on.

This weekend, I got to the end of Neverending Nightmares, which has a great visual style and a nice soundtrack, but suffers from an insufficient density of actual, meaningful, engaging gameplay. There are some monsters to avoid and a few items to find, but most rooms hold nothing at all of interest except for the opportunity to watch the slow-moving protagonist drag his feet from one door to the next. Maybe all this emptiness was meant to build suspense and anticipation for the scary parts, but it doesn't quite do that. It just becomes boring. I'd absolutely love a game with the aesthetics of Neverending Nightmares and the gameplay mechanics of Super Ghouls 'n Ghosts, but no such thing exists as far as I know.

I sometimes consider myself to be a connoisseur of unpopular and forgotten games — those which are not quite bad, but arguably mediocre, rough around the edges and unrefined, charming in a way that the "Game of the Year" will never be, and more memorable than yet another highly-polished but necessarily generic blockbuster marketed to the widest possible audience. Although I do enjoy the more mainstream games, which have certainly earned their place at the top, I also appreciate attempts at innovation and originality even when the final product is flawed. Rather than demanding perfection in games, I simply want to see things I've never seen before.

So I guess I consider myself to be a somewhat open-minded individual when it comes to video games. I am, however, rapidly becoming less tolerant of games in which far too much time is spent simply moving from point A to point B. And don't even get me started on games which consist entirely of moving from point A to point B. It's not original; no boundaries are being shattered; it's not 2007 anymore and you're not Jason Rohrer creating Passage. So stop it.

Don't get me wrong; I love what independent developers have done for the game industry, in general. But at some point, developers and consumers of independent games began to believe not only that video games can/should/must be "art" (an opinion with which I do not wholly disagree) but also that video games can/should/must become "art" by being less interactive (which, I think, is ridiculous). The deliberate abandonment of challenge and consequent loss of any engaging gameplay, in favor of light "exploration" (too often of a mostly linear path) and passive "experience" (of moving through the virtual environment of an interactive story), has become far too normal in indie "game" development.

Although I do acknowledge the value of something like Dear Esther (with the stipulation that such products should not be marketed as games at all), I also believe that an interactive experience which requires constant input from the player should be more engaging than Dear Esther is. The player should never be forced to spend more than a minute simply moving from one place to another, with no obstacles or challenges in between. If obstacles or challenges are not desired, then the requirement of constant input from the player is a nuisance. I used to believe that Dear Esther could actually be a good "game" if there were some puzzles to solve along the way, but "Dear Esther with puzzles" is exactly what games like Mind: Path to Thalamus and Pneuma: Breath of Life try to be, and they're not quite effective. Mind: Path to Thalamus at least has some decent puzzles and less of the pointless point-A-to-point-B non-gameplay, but you'll still spend too much time wishing you could walk faster while the narrator philosophizes.

As for games like Neverending Nightmares, I can only assume that developers sometimes run out of ideas and try to beef up the playtime with lots of nothing in between the good parts. This is an awful idea. If your game has 20 minutes of fun, make it a 20-minute game and set the price accordingly. Don't add a bunch of empty rooms and force the player to walk through them. Don't make the game overly repetitive and decrease the player's movement speed. Increased playtime is worth nothing if the extra time spent isn't any fun.

Interactive Fiction

Whenever I write about a topic I've already covered, I'm in fear of accidentally contradicting myself. My thoughts and feelings change over time, and this is perfectly natural, but each finished piece of writing is static (unless and until I feel compelled to go through the trouble of changing it). Each and every post on this blog is a frozen snapshot of my thoughts and feelings at a particular time, and all of those snapshots are displayed simultaneously in the same place. When I do change my mind, and if I don't have the time or the patience to eradicate my outdated thoughts from wherever they were written, it might just look like I'm saying two different things at once.

For example, I might have been too kind to a certain piece of interactive fiction in this post about games as art. I dismissed the criticism that Dear Esther was bad for its lack of gameplay because it's not a game and therefore should not be judged as a game. Dear Esther, I wrote, should be judged instead as a piece of interactive fiction or as a work of art. A direct quote from the other post: "A valid criticism of Dear Esther should focus on what's there — the writing, the visuals, and the music — rather than obsessing over exactly how it's not a game." Even now, I stand by all of these claims about how Dear Esther should be judged, but if I ever implied that Dear Esther comes up smelling like roses when judged in this manner, I'm about to disagree with my former self.

The writing, the visuals, and the music in Dear Esther are all fine. The lack of traditional gameplay elements is also fine. The lack of meaningful interactivity of any kind, however, is less so. Dear Esther is a walk through a virtual landscape set to music and narration, and the act of walking (but nothing else) is left to the player. The experience is interactive in the sense that the player can choose where to walk and where to look within the confines of Dear Esther's explorable space; the problem is that those confines are limiting to the point where the interactivity becomes nothing but a nuisance.

The player can move freely, but aside from a few wide open areas and a couple of briefly diverging paths, there's only one way to go from the beginning to the end. The game has no real exploration, and the player's actions have no real effect on the story. The experience is essentially linear, and yet the player is forced to interact; one cannot get to the end without walking there, a tedious and potentially frustrating task when there's hardly anything to do along the way. Dear Esther might even be better if it would just play itself.

It's a common problem in story-driven games, so-called interactive fiction, and everything in between. The story is there, and the player input is there, but the potential for truly interactive fiction is lost when the player is unable to affect the narrative. If the story is the most important aspect of a product which insists on being interactive, shouldn't the story itself be interactive? It's no surprise that a truly interactive story is a rarity in the typical video game, which is gameplay-driven and includes a story only as a contextual backdrop no matter how obnoxiously that story shoves itself down the player's throat during unskippable cutscenes, but developers should take more care when adding game elements to a story instead of the reverse.

A couple of weeks ago, I played To the Moon, which tells a nice (albeit awkwardly written) story and contains more than enough gameplay to be considered a game. Unfortunately, while it clearly strives to be interactive fiction first and foremost, the interactivity and the fiction do not blend well. The only genuine gameplay consists of occasional puzzles and a few brief mini-games, while the bulk of the player's time is spent alternating between reading dialogue and making sure to click on all the clickable objects in a given area. The game is so heavy with dialogue and so short on meaningful player input that, per click or keystroke, the majority of one's interaction with the game consists of telling the game to continue to the next line of dialogue. Yet, for all this time spent manually moving through the story — I used the word "tedious" in reference to Dear Esther's walking and I think it applies here as well — there's no real interaction with the story itself. The ending is always the same. Player choices sometimes have an effect on a few lines of dialogue, but that's all.

I get it. The developers wanted to tell a very specific story. Not every story will have branching paths and multiple outcomes. However, if the story is to remain static and immutable, two things need to happen. First, the player needs to be able to step away from the story long enough to have a satisfying amount of control over something. For To the Moon, this would mean a lot more puzzles and mini-games, or perhaps a totally new gameplay element. Second, the player needs to be able to sit back and watch when no meaningful input is required. This would turn Dear Esther into a movie, but I guess that's the whole problem with Dear Esther.

My examples so far are pretty extreme, but the problems in Dear Esther and To the Moon are things that all story-driven games need to avoid, and not all of them do a very good job. In my old post on Alan Wake, I mentioned the frustration of needing to follow a character around or simply idle about while listening to dialogue and waiting for the next scripted event. The same thing happens in Half-Life 2, thanks to the developers' decision to forgo cutscenes for the sake of having everything (including story exposition) happen in real-time. Alan Wake and Half-Life 2 both have plenty of gameplay to keep the player entertained, but the occasional need to sit through real-time in-gameplay dialogue always left me wishing that a skippable cutscene were used instead, especially when continual but meaningless player input was required (e.g., when following another character down a linear path).

I'm actually beginning to think that the hybridization of gameplay mechanics with interactive fiction is a failed experiment, and that the game industry should stop insisting on doing it over and over again. Games with excellent gameplay don't need mediocre stories tacked on in the form of unskippable in-game sit-around-and-listen-to-people-talk scenes from which the player cannot walk away. Meanwhile, the "interactive" requirement of an interactive story cannot be adequately satisfied with badly implemented gameplay mechanics, like mini-games and puzzles that occur with the frequency of a cutscene in a traditional game.

You want to make a shooter? Don't annoy the shooter fans with superfluous dialogue and scripted action sequences. You want to make an interactive story? Don't force your customers to play through stupid shooting sections. Am I wrong? I mean, clearly, there's an acceptable balance somewhere, but not many developers find it. Why can't the video game and the interactive story be two distinct things, each with no obligation to step on the other's turf? I guess it's because mashing the two things together broadens the target demographic. Shooter fans buy it for the gunplay, people who like interactive fiction buy it for the role-playing aspects or the built-in dating simulator, and everyone is just barely happy enough to keep playing.

Or maybe it's because interactive fiction just hasn't matured enough to stand on its own without being shoehorned into a traditional game or having a traditional game shoehorned into it. After all, a sufficiently interactive story is probably hard to write. Giving the player a satisfying amount of control within a well structured story sounds pretty difficult, if we assume the player's control must be over some aspect of the story itself.

Perhaps most disappointing of all are games which seem to be built on the premise of a player-controlled branching storyline but end up being almost entirely linear anyway. Playing through the first season of Telltale's The Walking Dead was a great experience, but a lot of the magic was gone when I realized after the fact that the ending I got was the only ending. Player choices determine which characters live or die and, to some extent, the characters' feelings about each other, but the protagonist and his group go to the same places and do the same things regardless. Ultimately, the only thing that changes, as a result of character deaths and the relationships between those who remain, is the dialogue.

Obviously, not every game needs multiple endings in order to have a satisfying story. However, in The Walking Dead, the player's ability to shape the story by making (often binary) decisions is the primary mode of gameplay. The rest is just occasional puzzles, and some shooting sequences which could rightly be called mini-games. When gameplay consists almost entirely of manipulation of the game's story through dialogue and moral choices, the ability to manipulate the story in a substantial and meaningful way is pretty important. The Walking Dead provides more illusion of choice than actual choice... but I guess I wouldn't have known if I'd only played once and never looked back.

Dear Esther & Video Games as Art

Over the weekend, I played through Dear Esther with my girlfriend. I'd bought it from Steam for $2.49 because I was curious, and I'd sent it to her account because I'd (mistakenly) assumed she might ultimately appreciate it more than I would. Alas, while I was pleasantly surprised, she was bewildered and irritated by the apparent pointlessness of the trek across the virtual island that lay before her.

A bit of background (with links) for the uninformed: Dear Esther was originally released in 2008 as a mod for Half-Life 2. Like so many popular mods, these days, it was then remade as a stand-alone release, which was completed in 2012. Unlike most things sold on Steam and discussed on blogs like mine, however, Dear Esther doesn't have any goals or challenges and you can't win or lose. It doesn't really have any "gameplay" at all because it's not a game in any traditional sense. It's more like virtual reality made love to an audiobook, had an illegitimate child, and left that poor bastard on video games' doorstep because no one else would take him. But I mean that in the nicest possible way.

At its core, Dear Esther isn't much more than an interactive story, and the word "interactive" is being used here rather loosely. What you do is walk around in a virtual world, admire the virtual environment, and listen to sporadic snippets of metaphor-laden monologue over a calming soundtrack and the sounds of the ocean waves.

Given the nature of this particular piece of software, which may or may not be considered a "video game" depending on whom you ask, you might say I'd be just as well off if I'd watched a playthrough on YouTube instead of buying it. But even with such minimal interactivity and such a linear experience overall, I think watching someone else play is a poor substitute and misses the point entirely. Even though there's no real "gameplay" here, I'd still be denying myself nearly everything that does make Dear Esther a unique experience if I were simply to watch some other person decide where to go and what to look at. The prosaic monologues are wonderful, but the modest potential for free exploration by the player is likely the sole reason that Dear Esther was turned into a "video game" instead of a short film or a short story.

You might also say I could have played the free Half-Life 2 mod instead of buying the stand-alone product, but the newer version just looks so much nicer, and enjoying some nice-looking stuff is where at least half of the enjoyment lies.

Despite all of this, paying for Dear Esther might seem like a waste. There's a rather stiff limit to the number of hours of enjoyment you can possibly squeeze out of this product. Although each playthrough is supposedly a bit different, due to some randomization in the playback of monologue passages, this only gives it a little more replay value than a movie, and a single playthrough is considerably shorter than average movie length. (The first playthrough should take no more than 90 minutes. Mine clocked in at exactly 90 minutes, but that included some aimless wandering, graphical tweaking, and even pausing to get drinks.) While I'm guilty of impulsively buying Dear Esther at 75% off, and while I'm content with that decision, I wouldn't be so enthusiastic about paying the full price of $9.99 and I can't honestly recommend doing so.

Missing the Point

That being said, I think there's some unwarranted hostility toward Dear Esther that stems not from its quality or from any of its own merits, but from a misunderstanding of its purpose, and from a rejection of the concept of video games as interactive fiction. "That's the dumbest thing ever" was the response of one friend when he was told what Dear Esther is like. Opinions are opinions, so I can't really debate that point, but I do think the context matters: When this conversation took place, my girlfriend had just mentioned a new "video game" that we'd played. This guy was expecting to hear about a game, but then he heard there was no objective, no challenge, and no real gameplay at all. So, yeah, of course that sounds dumb.

The whole problem, I think, is that Dear Esther is considered and treated as a video game, but this is only for lack of a (commonly used) better term. You could call it "interactive fiction" but that might not be sufficient to fully describe such a product, and I don't see the term catching on as a way to describe these things anyway. Instead, I'm tempted to call it a "video non-game" because it really is, precisely, a video game with the game element removed. Actually, I think this might be the best way to describe it. The strong connection to video games is there, but it doesn't leave us expecting something we're not going to get.

When judged as a video game, Dear Esther might be called a failure, but let's be fair: the same thing happens when you judge Lord of the Rings as a romantic comedy. A valid criticism of Dear Esther should focus on what's there — the writing, the visuals, and the music — rather than obsessing over exactly how it's not a game. Unfortunately, so much of the criticism I've encountered takes the latter route and fails to make a relevant point. I can't say I'm surprised that everyone gets stuck on the non-game aspect, though; after all, we're still pressing buttons to make things happen on a screen. It feels like a game, and that's what makes it feel so wrong.

Experimental and atypical releases such as Passage, Flower, The Graveyard, Universe Sandbox, and Dear Esther seem to be expanding the definition of "video game" by really pushing the boundaries that separate this medium from others, and this seems to be happening regardless of whether the creators of these products even choose to refer to them as games at all. The result is that, while video games used to be a subset of games, they now occupy another space entirely. Dear Esther is, arguably, a "video game" — and most people will probably call it one — but it certainly isn't a game at all. Consequently, if people install it expecting a game, they're in for a disappointment. However, this doesn't make it a bad product. It just makes it something other than a game.

The Newest Art Form

But regardless of whether we choose to call them games, Passage and Dear Esther seem to be at the forefront of the movement to have video games recognized as an art form. It seems good enough, for most people, that these video non-games attempt to be something resembling art while existing in a video game-like format. Just as often as they are criticized for not being game-like enough, they are cited as examples in arguments and discussions over the elevation of video games to the status of art — arguments and discussions which, for better or worse, tend to revolve around those artistically driven (but, importantly, secondary) aspects of the medium: story, graphics, music, et cetera.

Bringing this up on a video game forum is like bringing up politics at Thanksgiving dinner; that is, it's a good way to upset everyone. The idea that a video game, of all things, can actually be art isn't just a problem for video game haters; it's also enough to offend some "hardcore gamers" who reject the very notion that story, graphics, music, and intangible things like atmosphere can add anything of value to the medium. Any attempt to create a video game explicitly as a work of art, which unfortunately is most often done at the expense of the quality or amount of traditional gameplay, is obviously going to upset these people, and — referring again to Dear Esther in particular — the outright and total abandonment of the "game" in "video game" is obviously going to drive them crazy. The existence of Dear Esther itself isn't really such a problem, but the paradoxical notion that video non-games are actually the future of the medium is anathema to "hardcore gamers" everywhere.

To be honest, though, I don't think it should be a surprise that we're moving in this direction after so many years of video games with increasingly more emphasis on story, character development, visual effects, and other non-essential, movie-like qualities, often with less focus on conventional gameplay and player freedom. (I think I've discussed such things once or twice before.) Even where core gameplay mechanics have been preserved, video games have already become more like movies (presumably in order to grab larger audiences who might be bored with playing just a game), and maybe we've already passed the point where gameplay mechanics truly become the secondary attraction to the mainstream audience.

Is all of this good or bad? (Does such a distinction exist?) What does the concept of video games as an art form mean for the future of video games? But wait; if we're going to ask that question, we first have to answer a couple of others: Is it even possible for a video game to be a work of art? And should video game developers attempt to be artists? Perhaps these are silly questions — no doubt the idea of treating a video game as a work of art sounds downright ridiculous to a lot of people — but this debate seems to be happening whether we like it or not, so I think it's worth discussing.

To these last two questions, respectively, I'd give a tentative yes and a maybe. Whether a video game created specifically and intentionally as a "work of art" can be good, as a game, is certainly questionable, but if music and literature and acting and photography and, most importantly, film can be treated as art, then... well, I need to be honest: I can't think of a good (objective) reason that video games in general should be excluded. That video games, as a medium, should be considered an art form simply because of how a game can imitate and appropriate other forms of art (i.e., music and acting and writing and film) is a dubious argument at best, but I do believe that a good film would not automatically stop being a work of art simply if interactive (game-like) elements were added to it. Perhaps the new generation of video games, which are often more movie-like than game-like, should be analyzed this way instead. And if video games, at least in theory, have the potential to be works of art, then perhaps developers should strive for this... right? I guess. Whether they know how is another question entirely, but more on that will come later.

Comparisons and Analogies

The opposition to the idea of video games as art is largely (but not entirely) from those who don't believe that expensive electronic toys are deserving of whatever respect or elevated status comes along with inclusion in the invisible list of which things are allowed to be considered art. You might similarly argue that Picasso's paintings are not art just because you dislike them. Beyond personal tastes, however, I have to wonder if there's an actual reason for excluding video games when everything else that claims to be art seems to be accepted without much fuss. You can carefully arrange a bunch of garbage and call it art, and other people will call it art as well, as long as you can say with a straight face that the garbage arrangement means something. Or maybe it means nothing, and that's deep. Who cares? It's art if people say it's art.

It's clear, however, that video games are fundamentally different from all other things which are commonly considered art. The whole point of a video game is player interaction. Most art, meanwhile, is meant to be enjoyed passively, and one might even call this a requirement. Such a rule remains unwritten, however, since no one ever had a reason to include the words "passive" and "non-interactive" in the definition of art before video games tried to nudge their way in. Attempts to redefine the word "art" just for the sake of snubbing video games are confusing and unhelpful.

Other arguments against the notion of "video games as art" come from a comparison of video games to more traditional games. Chess is not art, and neither is football. On the other hand, a great amount of creative work, including visual art, often goes into the creation of many tabletop games, notably those of the collectible card variety. Furthermore, the entire analogy is rather fallacious; I've already pointed out that video games are, perhaps unfortunately, no longer strictly a subset of games, and moreover they can do things that traditional games cannot.

Some even try to argue that video games cannot be art because they're most often created for profit, or because they're most often created by large development teams in large companies. Obviously, though, these arguments allow indie games to slip through the cracks.

Ultimately, these debates never go anywhere because the definition of art is notoriously fuzzy, subjective, and ever-changing. It all boils down to opinion, and that's okay. Words aren't invented by dictionaries; their definitions come from their usage, not the reverse. Arguing semantics in this case is effectively a dead end, and once you get past all that nonsense, the most commonly cited reason for excluding video games in particular from the art world is simply that we haven't yet seen a video game worthy of the same praise as a Shakespeare play or a Rembrandt painting. The implication is often that we never will, even if no specified rules would exclude video games on principle, because the quality of creative work that goes into the most critically acclaimed video games is still supposedly mediocre at best in comparison to, say, the most critically acclaimed films.

Again, the opinion that video games will never be art doesn't just come from old men like Roger Ebert who never played a video game. It comes from within the "gaming" community as well, mostly from those "hardcore gamers" who would argue (perhaps correctly) that the industry needs to return to a strong focus on complex and challenging gameplay, and to stop pandering to casual "gamers" with artsy/cinematic nonsense without even a lose state or a hint of any meaningful challenge. Games shouldn't be movies, the hardcore audience likes to say. If you've perceived a significant decline in the quality of video games over the years — that is, I should clarify, a decline in the quality of everything in video games except for graphics — then you'd probably say this is a compelling argument, and I would strongly agree. However, if we want to push for better gameplay via an end to the game industry's distracting infatuation with film, then we should just do exactly that. The argument about the video game's status as an art form is a separate one entirely.

Even arguing successfully that video games should not be art doesn't exactly prove that they are not or cannot be art, and even arguing successfully that they are not or cannot be art wouldn't keep them from trying to be art. More importantly, the notion of "art" being discussed here might be the wrong one for this context. It is possible, after all, for games to be a kind of "art" without relying on the imitation or appropriation the various aspects of other art forms.

Pixels and Squares

It's with some reluctance that I place myself on the pro-art side of the fence, for a number of reasons. First, regarding the more dubious but more common notion of "games as art" by virtue of their essentially movie-like qualities, I must admit that such a definition of art is valid whether or not it's good for the video game industry.

Although I don't think the potential for the inclusion of non-game-like qualities should be the justification for broadly treating the video game medium as an art form, I do think it's fair to treat an individual video game as a work of art based on whatever kind of arguably artistic work was involved in its creation. That is, although I don't think video games should necessarily be praised for how they simply imitate film and other media, the typical modern video game (like a typical film) is the product of many kinds of creative work — music, writing, acting, and of course the visuals which might be hand-drawn or computer-generated — and regardless of the average quality of all this creative work, it's still there. Picasso is still an artist even if you don't like him.

So how can one say that the culmination of all the artistic work that goes into a video game isn't art? I can't think of a non-feelings-based argument to support such a claim. Short of declaring that none of that work is currently done at a level that qualifies as true art (which leaves the door open for better games to qualify as art in the future), the only way out is to say that it ceases being art once it becomes a game — that even though it contains art in various forms, the finished product is not art because its primary function is to provide the player with a challenge or some entertainment. And I think that's a pretty bizarre thing to say.

But let's just go with it. Let's say it's true: video games cannot be art because they're games. Now we get to ask the really interesting question. What happens when the video game evolves to the point where it's no longer a game, as is the case with Dear Esther? Are we then allowed to call it art? And if so, is there really no point along the continuum from Tetris (pure gameplay) to Dear Esther (pure "art") at which games and art do intersect?

Perhaps the right course of action is to reject everything I just wrote and say that Tetris itself is a work of art already. So far, I've followed the typical course of these "video games as art" debates by analyzing the controversial (and perhaps misguided) idea that video games should be considered art by virtue of the way they incorporate other forms of art, e.g., the writing of the story that provides context to the gameplay, the drawing and modeling that result in the game's graphics, and the production of the soundtrack — but you also could argue (and should argue) that a well-designed game is a work of art by virtue of its design, be it elegant or complex or somewhere in between.

That's probably how the concept of the video game art should be understood in the academic sense. I think games can, and should, be recognized as art for the qualities that actually make them games. The defining feature of the video game as a medium — gameplay — needs to be considered, and perhaps nothing else. If architecture is an art form, then it's not because architects like to hang paintings on the walls of the buildings they design. It's because the talented architect will bring a unique kind of excellence to the actual design of the building itself. The same should be true of video games if they are to achieve that same status.

In truth, regardless of what we might say on occasion about an individual game which incidentally borders on "work of art" territory according to someone's opinion, I think the video game as a medium can never be accepted as an art form unless it is recognized as such for the qualities which make video games what they are. For the video game to be accepted as an form of art, game developers need to do more than paste some audiovisual art on top of some game mechanics. The game design itself — not just the graphics, or the music, or the story — needs to be done at a level that deserves to be called art. If you can remove the interactive elements from a particular game without sacrificing any of what makes that game a work of art, then that game isn't doing anything to promote video games as an art form. It could have done just as well as a movie.

In the colloquial sense, however, most people accept a game as a work of art only if it conveys some meaning and evokes some emotion, and thus pasting audiovisual art on top of game mechanics is perfectly fine. Most video games attempt art status by telling a story, and maybe that's totally legitimate as well. I wouldn't object to classifying Max Payne as a work of art for its narration alone, even though Max Payne achieving "art status" merely by way of its writing does nothing for video games as a medium. In any case, on the subject of video games as art via narrative, I only wish it were more often done much better. The typical story-driven game is an alternating sequence of meaningless challenges and non-interactive cut scenes. They could very often be separated from one another and each do better on their own. If developers want their games to be art — or, perhaps more accurately, if they want their art to be games — they should at least incorporate interactive elements in a way that supplements the supposedly artistic value. Too often, these two aspects of a game just end up sitting side-by-side. Ideally, game developers who want to be artists should just study the art of good design instead of stapling a half-decent game design to a half-decent movie.

All of this is just food for thought, obviously. The question at the heart of all this thought is too subjective (and currently too controversial) for a satisfying answer. If you want an objective definition of the word "art" then I have one observation to share: with few exceptions, a thing is considered art if and only if it was meant to be art, created with artistic intentions by one who fancies oneself an artist. (Whether it's good art is another question entirely.) In other words, the creator does have some say in the matter. In 1915, a Russian guy named Kazimir Malevich painted a black square and called it art, and that black square ended up in an art museum, but that doesn't mean every other black square is also art. And of course, the "consumers" of art also have some say in the matter, because that black square wouldn't have ended up in a museum if nobody else had thought it was worth displaying.

And hey, look, there are video games in an art museum now. It's worth noting that the games featured at MoMA were selected for their ingenious design. They are being appreciated for the qualities that make video games a unique medium, and nothing else. That's a step in the right direction both for gameplay purists and for those who want video games to be taken seriously as an art form. After all, how are video games ever going to get this recognition if the way we're trying to make them more like art is by making them less like games and more like movies? The video game itself cannot be art if individual games only become art by branching out into other established art forms. Indeed the game design itself needs to be recognized as an art form on a fundamental level, with or without all the fancy toppings.

In any case, as with black squares, I would hesitate to hail a video game as a "work of art" if it's known that the developers never had this in mind, but if the developers are passionate about their work and if consumers are passionate about enjoying it, the label fits well enough to elicit no complaints from me. The relevant point, I suppose, is that a video game can be art — the art museum has spoken — and, more importantly, it can still be a good game, too. However, with regard to digital entertainment in which the basic elements typically defining the traditional game are drastically demoted or abandoned entirely in favor of other types of artistic expression, I really think we need to update our terminology. In other words, if Dear Esther isn't a game, it shouldn't be called a "video game" either.

Wrong Direction

The fact that Dear Esther and similar releases are considered to be video games, by many, is terrifying to the rest of us because it amplifies the perception that these overly cinematic, overly linear, sometimes pretentiously artsy experiences, devoid of any challenge or depth in gameplay, are the future of our hobby.

There are those who really would argue, instead, that Dear Esther is an extreme example of where video games should be headed. Some say that video games should do more than simply challenge the player — that they should convey a deeper meaning and tell a better story — and that's totally fine, as long as we're talking about supplementing the gameplay, not removing it. Otherwise, the argument is really just a roundabout way of saying "I've realized that I don't even like video games and I need something else to do with this controller I bought" — something else like interactive fiction, perhaps. So why don't we make that, and call it that, instead of pushing to change video games into that? Apparently because, even when people realize that all they care about is the storyline, they still seem unusually desperate to call themselves "gamers" despite the fact that their ideal "video game" is hardly a video game at all. They just really want their nerd cred or something.

Perhaps this is what the industry gets for having attempted for so many years to fit deep story and deep gameplay into the same product. The prospect of an interactive story inevitably attracts people who — let's be honest — just aren't interested in playing real video games. I'm referring, of course, to the "casual gamers" who really do see challenge as an unnecessary obstacle that should be removed so that people who aren't any good at video games can still enjoy what's left of them. To be honest, this worries me. If players see challenging gameplay itself as a nuisance, and developers cater to them by making challenging gameplay optional, we're coming awfully close to throwing out one of the most fundamental properties of the video game as we once knew it.

I think we'd all be better off if we just allowed interactive fiction to become its own thing, with its own audience, instead of allowing the entire industry to be dragged in the wrong direction. It seems to be going in that direction either way, in its attempts to hook that casual (non-)gamer audience, but we shouldn't legitimize this by expanding the definition of "video game" to such an extent that people who buy interactive movies get to call themselves gamers.