Authors: Tom Chatfield
Players in a well-made game relish not only its appearance and its immediate thrills, but their experience of it as a conceptual and even an architectural space: something to be inhabited and savoured in its details, whether these are niceties of script or more abstract features of level design. Another favourite game, Rhianna notes, is the exploration-intensive 2005 game
Psychonauts
, which ‘took level design as story to a whole new plateau, while managing to be both funny and emotionally moving at the same time’. The artistry here is almost a collaborative process between a game’s creators and the player, whose explorations bring surprise, delight, learning and gradual mastery within a space that is finely balanced between freedom and constraint. It is an experience, at its best, pitched somewhere between walking into a story and swinging through a playground. And it is something that remains barely in its infancy as far as future potential is concerned.
One man pushing hard against existing conceptions of what it means to experience a game artistically is Jenova Chen, the co-founder and creative director of California-based games studio thatgamecompany. Chen’s is a young firm whose mission, as he sees it, is breathtakingly simple: to produce games that are ‘beneficial and relevant to adult life; that can touch you as books, films and music can’. Now in his late twenties, Chen was born and raised in Shanghai, where he played computer games and learned to program from the age of eight. He still remembers the first time a game truly affected him: when, at the age of thirteen, he played a famous Chinese adventure game called
The Legend of Sword and Fairy
. It is, he told me, ‘a game that has deeply affected a whole generation of Chinese. Its plot, especially the ending, has moved many players to tears; near the end of the game, one of the female lead characters sacrifices her life. As a kid who at the time was forbidden from watching any adult television or films, or from reading any mature novels, I had never experienced high-level literature or art. So this game was my very first encounter with a deep sense of loss and grief, and because of that very first moment it had a great impact on me.’
Chen went on to excel at both computing and visual arts at school before taking a degree in computing in China. Having graduated, like many of China’s ablest students he applied for a master’s degree in the United States. By chance, this was in 2003, just a year after the University of Southern California had started offering a new course in interactive media. They suggested Chen apply, which he did; and the result was something that, as he put it, changed his life. ‘After I came to the US, the University of Southern California took all of us on the course to the 2004 Game Developers Conference in California. This was my first time, and I saw over 20,000 people from all around the world gathered together, sharing ideas about games and giving lectures. It was just a very, very vivid scene. There was a lot of positive energy. My parents had always said I could never make a career by playing games, and I had thought when I was in China that making games was somehow shameful, like making pornography. But seeing this industry and this conference and all these passionate people, I told myself that this was an industry worthy of respect, worthy of academic study. It was something that could bring my parents a sense of honour.’
Chen completed his studies, founded his company, and the rest is history. He has now made three commercial games –
Cloud, flOw
and
Flower
– and each has been driven above all by his belief in games as a medium worthy of pride and excellence. Each has also been, in its way, a reworking of the same central principle, that games are ‘for’ many more people than currently think of themselves as gamers, and that the great task of game development is to bring the gaming experience to those millions of people who believe that video games are a shallow, foolish waste of time, and not for them. Chen is out, in other words, to prove these people wrong in the best manner possible – by presenting them with games that will change the way they think. ‘Outside the traditional games market,’ he tells me, ‘is a huge other market full of people ready to enjoy interactive experiences: but no one has been making them for these people. So the question is, how do you design a game so that it will allow both new and old gamers to enjoy it in their own ways?’
Part of the answer is also the title of Chen’s second game,
flOw
, a name he took from the psychological theory of the same name. As Chen sees it, ‘You have to find a way to make the game adaptive, so that different players can enjoy it in their own way. That is the thing about interactive media, that they have the power to read input from a player and then to adapt. The flow experience describes how a person engaged in an activity finds that their ability and the challenge have reached a state of balance, at which point they enter a state where they start to lose themselves in the process.’ It’s an idea more usually associated with performance and creation than artistic appreciation. For Chen, though, it embodies the possibility of a truly immersive game, one in which any player is transported effortlessly into a state where discovery and exploration aren’t so much about a battle for mastery (as in the
Tetris
model of play) as about an open-ended, constant series of actions and responses. The intention is to lead players not towards victory or loss, but to allow these constant shifting signals and responses themselves to become an artistic experience.
Chen’s latest game,
Flower
, is the first true fulfilment of these ambitions, a work whose genesis sounds closer to that of a poem or a painting than an interactive entertainment. ‘I grew up in Shanghai, a huge city, one of the world’s biggest and most polluted. Then I came to America and, one day, I was driving from Los Angeles to San Francisco, and I saw endless fields of green grass, and rows and rows of windmill farms. And I was shocked, because in the twenty-four years of life I had had up until then, I had never seen a scene like this. So I started to think about a game; and I thought, wouldn’t it be nice to turn a console into a portal, so you could enter this virtual room that allows you to enjoy the endless green fields of nature.’
The development process was driven in its initial stages by an exploration of this feeling of wonder and escape into nature. ‘We initially focused on the feeling of being completely surrounded and embraced by nature: every individual blade of grass, the details on every flower. I was very interested in combining flowers with green fields of grass, to create a kind of exaggerated, crafted version of my impressions of nature. But then, after we accomplished this in virtual space, I started to feel there was something missing. Spending five or ten minutes in this space was awesome, but after this you felt something vital missing; it started to feel lonely, unsafe, strange, because there was nothing human in your sight. So I started to do concept art, these views of flowers with a little house or city added in the distance; and eventually, the game evolved into this love-letter towards both nature and the urban life, and trying to reach a harmony between the two.’
The actual experience of playing
Flower
is at once incredibly simple and compelling. Players control a petal from a single flower, and must move it around a shimmering landscape of fields and a gradually approaching city by directing a wind to blow it along, gathering other petals from other flowers as they go. Touch a button on the control pad to make the wind blow harder; let go to soften it; gently shift the controller in the air to change directions. You can, as I did on my first turn, simply trace eddies in the air, or gust between tens of thousands of blades of grass. Or you can press further into the world of the game and begin to learn how the landscape of both city and fields is altered by your touch, springing into light and life as you pass.
‘We want the player to feel like they are healing,’ Chen says, ‘that they are creating life and energy and spreading light and love.’ If this sounds hopelessly naive, it is important to remember that the sophistication of a game experience depends not so much on its conceptual complexity as on the intricacy of its execution. In
Flower
, immense effort has gone into making something that appears simple and beautiful but is minutely reactive and adaptable. Here, the sensation of flow – of immersion in the task of illumination and exploration – connects to some of those fundamental emotions that are the basis of all enduring art: its ability to enthral and transport its audience, to stir in them a heightened sense of time and place.
Still, an important question remains. What can’t games do artistically? On the one hand, work such as Chen’s points to a huge potential audience for whole new genres of game. On the other hand, there are certain limitations inherent in the very fabric of an interactive medium, perhaps the most important of which is also the most basic: its lack of inevitability. As the tech-savvy critic and author Steven Poole has argued in his book
Trigger Happy
(2000), ‘great stories depend for their effect on irreversibility – and this is because life, too, is irreversible. The pity and terror that Aristotle says we feel as spectators to a tragedy are clearly dependent on our apprehension of circumstances that cannot be undone.’ Games have only a limited, and often incidental, ability to convey such feelings, and this limitation reinforces an obvious point: that the invention of a new medium does not invalidate the need for or the value of older media. But it also raises the spectre of an important objection to games as a whole, that in their absorbing unreality, they somehow become less and less life-like as they create more and more engrossing alternative worlds; and that the kind of pleasure they offer is fundamentally one of escape rather than of engagement. As such, it might be felt that games cannot engage lastingly with many of the greatest and most enduring themes of art: the distinctly physical issues of violence, injustice, suffering, love, hatred; the creation of life and its ending.
Can games touch upon these themes profoundly? It seems reasonable to point out that death, injury, violence and suffering are not of course ‘real’ within any form of art – this being the point of art in the first place. In terms of form and constraint, moreover, a growing number of game designers motivated explicitly by ‘artistic’ intentions are beginning to challenge the point Poole raises, that the lack of formal restrictions and irreversibility is a deficiency wired into their very being.
One such designer is Jason Rohrer, whose minimalistic game
Passage
is an explicit riposte to the argument that video games are unable to engage meaningfully with mortality. In some ways,
Passage
is even more akin to a poem than
Flower
. It’s a game that always takes exactly five minutes to play, that occupies so little room that it fits into less disk space than a single medium-sized photographic image (less than 500kb), and that is controlled simply by using the arrow keys on a computer keyboard to move through a blocky, maze-like landscape that can only be seen as a narrow passage of visibility ahead and behind at the centre of an otherwise entirely blank screen. The graphics are approximately as sophisticated as those from a late-1980s computer game.
What, then, is its point? In one sense, the point is points: these appear at the top right corner of your narrow passage of visibility, and are gained by every step taken and by the sporadic discovery of treasure chests. The points, though, serve little good in the long run. Every game lasts exactly five minutes, with the character’s position within
Passage’s
narrow landscape inexorably shifting from left to right across the screen no matter where he is moved within it, and then the game is over. A tiny grave suddenly appears, indicating that he has expired. Sometimes, if a particular route has been chosen, a player will have been joined for most of their journey by a female companion; but she always dies too, just before the player. After a few mystifying games, it becomes a curiously moving experience to play – exploring this narrow world as time ticks away, watching the darkness creeping towards your character, gathering points or simply strolling beside a companion as the identical end approaches at the same irresistible pace every time.
Passage
is a
memento mori
– a game created in order to remind us that we will die. And, because to many people that will seem an exceedingly strange thing for a video game to do, Jason Rohrer has devoted a page of his website to explaining exactly why he made it. ‘It presents an entire life, from young adulthood through old age and death, in the span of five minutes,’ he writes. ‘Of course, it’s a
game
, not a painting or a film, so the choices that you make as the player are crucial. There’s no “right” way to play
Passage
, just as there’s no right way to interpret it. However, I had specific intentions for the various mechanics and features that I included.’
‘As you age in the game, your character moves closer and closer to the right edge of the screen. Upon reaching that edge, your character [a tiny male figure] dies.’ Appropriately enough, the further along in your life you are, the more you are able to see behind you and the less ahead. Then, there’s your spouse, who you can choose either to walk into and join with, or simply avoid. ‘You have the option of joining up with a spouse on your journey … Once you team up with her, however, you must travel together, and you are not as agile as you were when you were single. Some rewards deep in the maze will no longer be reachable if you’re with your spouse. You simply cannot fit through narrow paths when you are walking side-by-side … On the other hand, exploring the world is more enjoyable with a companion, and you’ll reap a larger reward from exploration if she’s along. When she dies, though, your grief will slow you down considerably.’ Finally, there remain the points in the top right-hand corners, which you’re free to expend as much or as little effort as you like collecting. Although, as Rohrer notes, it’s a mission his game loads with a cold irony. ‘In the end, death is still coming for you. Your score looks pretty meaningless hovering there above your little tombstone …
Passage
is a game in which you die only once, at the very end, and you are powerless to stave off this inevitable loss.’