Authors: Tom Chatfield
Passage
is a sad, modest, brilliant game, and one that achieves its effects entirely without the aid of a script or anything but the most rudimentary sounds and visuals. It’s an experience that can only be appreciated by the actual process of play – that simply couldn’t be said in any other way. Within a medium that as a whole is so unabashedly a form of mass market entertainment, it’s also a wonderful example of something that many people simply don’t believe exists: the avant-garde.
Financially, this is certainly pretty insignificant. Culturally, though, it is a sign of perhaps the most welcome revelation of all, that gaming is an arena where players’ and designers’ passions can flow along channels as unabashedly ambitious and intellectually bold as they have always done in the other creative arts. This is not a medium that is automatically debarred from engaging with the great, enduring human questions, even if it chooses to do so in miniature rather than epic form.
Jason Rohrer doesn’t prove this on his own, of course. But the milieu to which he belongs is just beginning to come into its own in the online realm of freely distributed browser-based and downloadable games. It’s a realm of often wild, delightful innovations and deeply considered discussions, where miniature games programmed as labours of love by one or two coders can model everything from time-travelling robots (
Chronotron
) to interactive single screens where a woman in a rowing boat falls in love with a young man sitting on the moon (
I wish I were the moon)
. It’s also, most encouragingly of all, connected to the mainstream of gaming by a constant exchange of talent, playtime, uploads, downloads and pet projects that form a creative ecosystem most other media can only watch with mounting envy.
At the other end of the scale, there are different ways in which games are pushing at – and redefining – the limits of their potential as a creative medium. The sector is usually referred to as ‘hard-core’ gaming and includes those titles whose challenges and mechanics are designed to appeal to those with literally thousands of hours of gaming experience under their belts. This can just be a question of unforgiving difficulty, or frenetic action of the most unreflective kind. But it can also be something rather more elaborate – and can, especially in the online world, test the potential of video games not only as artistic creations in their own right, but as mechanisms via which players themselves create and take part in a kind of art.
If
Flower
and
Passage
are the poetry of the game world, the massively multiplayer game
EVE Online
is the
Finnegans Wake
of video gaming, requiring many hundreds of hours of effort if you wish even to begin to grasp its intricacies, and typically demanding a good fifty hours of input before you can start to work out what the true focus and dynamics of the game are.
EVE
is a game of space exploration and trading, and is currently played by over 300,000 people, all of whom inhabit the same virtual galaxy, a place located in the distant future that contains over 7,500 star systems, each with their own planets, moons and space stations.
The basics of the game are a complex matter of learning to fly and equip a spaceship, performing a variety of missions for cash and reputation, gaining wealth and raw materials, exploration, and so on. All these must be mastered before the game’s true heart can be glimpsed: the political and economic manoeuvrings that take place between the vast shifting alliances of players within the game. Much of
EVE’s
richness – and its almost absurd complexity – lies in the twisting history of betrayals, wars, blood feuds and communitarian endeavours that comprise the history of players’ actions over the course of the seven years that the
EVE
galaxy has existed.
If
EVE
is art, the genre it’s most closely aligned to is performance art, with the emergent behaviours and narratives that players themselves have created over time providing a far richer context than any script. One incident that’s still talked about to this day is a ‘heist’ in 2005 in which, over a period of twelve months, one specialist alliance of covert assassins, the Guiding Hand Social Club, infiltrated every level of one of the game’s most powerful player-run corporations, the Ubiqua Seraph. The corporation CEO herself flew an ultra-rare ship of which only two known examples existed in the
EVE
universe, while it controlled a staggering quantity of in-game assets valued at tens of thousands of real-world dollars. The signal was given, and a deadly coordinated attack by the infiltrators wiped out within a matter of hours the CEO herself, her ship, and over $15,000 worth of corporate assets. It was a masterpiece of espionage and planning for which a lucrative in-game contract had been taken out, and was duly paid, by a rival corporation. And it was all entirely within the rules and spirit of the game. In fact, such a plot – involving many hundreds of people unfolding over the best part of a year – was exactly what
EVE
had been created to facilitate.
In the context of both modern media and the arts, the fact that games are a live, shared performance is an increasingly crucial one. First mass production and now mass distribution have had a substantial impact on our relationship with the whole notion of art. Sitting in front of a screen connected to the internet today, it is so easy to browse or purchase a good proportion of all the books ever written, to listen to a similar amount of recorded music and speech, to view images of the finest two-and-three dimensional art in the world’s great museums, to purchase or stream films and television, and so on. Things have never been simpler for those who are content to experience art as a medley of facsimiles, digital copies and searchable text – or harder for those who wish to have confidence in any one object as a meaningful, definitive artistic experience.
This is why live experiences of all kinds have made such a comeback in recent years. From classic bands reforming to go on tour to blockbusting art exhibitions and literary festivals, live art is at an unprecedented premium in an age of cheap, rapid distribution; because it’s seeing something in the flesh, in the present tense, that allows people to feel a connection of authenticity and value, rather than watch it wash over them as just another undifferentiated part of the global information tide.
Video games are thoroughly digital, mass-produced objects. Yet they cannot be consumed passively. To consume a game is by definition to experience it, from moment to moment, as a gradual encounter with a space and a set of ideas; and the art form it most resembles in this respect is one that came to prominence at almost exactly the same time as the first mass-market video games – installation art. One of the world’s finest, and most staggeringly successful, spaces for such art is the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern museum in London. With 3,400 square metres of floor space and five storeys of height, the Turbine Hall is one of the most striking settings for art in the world and, since it was opened in 2000, it has hosted installations including huge stacks of white boxes, a gigantic crack in the floor, an indoors weather system complete with mist and sunshine, and a series of giant steel slides which visitors were encouraged to use. It’s easy enough to see the analogy with a video game here: a realm is marked out as distinct from the rest of the world, as a kind of playground for the senses and the mind; and it’s each individual’s gradual experience and exploration of this space that conjures up its artistic meaning.
It would be foolish to push this analogy too far. And yet, increasingly, the connection between video games and some other important, real-world forms of art is becoming a two-way street. Take one of the most talked-about British theatrical ventures of recent years: the Punchdrunk theatre company, who have staged several hugely popular and critically acclaimed shows in which the audience, rather than sitting passively in front of a live show, are forced to discover the performance they are attending by exploring a particular building or location. The idea of audience interaction is hardly new, but in the hands of Punchdrunk it has taken on an entirely different dimension. Their 2009 show
Tunnel 228
, for example, simply abandoned its audience in a subterranean network of cellars and caverns beneath London’s Waterloo station with little sense of direction or clue as to what was going on. Industrial machinery and disturbing fragments of performance art were scattered around, together with elliptical private codes and clues that most of the audience would never even discover. But the experience was, deliberately, a combination of puzzle, treasure hunt and survival horror.
It’s theatrical immersion of the most disturbing, gripping kind, and, as
Time Out
features writer and critic (and sometime Punchdrunk groupie) Peter Watts observed in his own writings on the topic, it’s also, well, more than a little like a video game. All the tropes are there. They had ‘a sinister, self-enclosed world; atmospheric sound and light; the freedom to explore a vast Tardis-like world within tightly-defined borders; the concept that you have a central “mission” to fulfil, but also the liberty to ignore it if the mood strikes you; the secret doors and curtains concealing hidden treasures, imaginatively created.’ The
Tunnel 228
experience, if not directly inspired by video games, nevertheless shares with them an aesthetic that, like cinema a century ago, has begun to seep out of its original context into art and society as a whole. This is the aesthetic of the interactive space: the audience-generated narrative; the careful mixing of freedom with constraint into a new kind of performance.
It’s become an increasingly common practice in recent years to dismiss the worst and most vacuous kinds of art in other media – in cinema, on television, even in books – as ‘like video games’. What’s usually meant by this is a mindless kind of frenzy: anaesthetising, undifferentiated action involving metal, muscles and guns. Some games do look like this from the outside – and the worst ones play like it, too. But this is a brand of criticism that couldn’t be further from the truth. The frenzy isn’t a sign that games are debasing all other arts to an unprecedented creative depth; it’s a sign that many film-makers, producers and publishers have little concept of what makes the best games so great, or of where the artistic merits of their own media lie. Video games have barely begun to demonstrate their potential, yet already they are changing the way we see the world – and how we conceive ourselves within it.
C
HAPTER
8
Second lives
In September 2009, the first-ever licensed use of the music of the Beatles outside of their own albums and compilations arrived in the form of – what else? – a video game.
The Beatles: Rock Band
was released to what can only be described as hysterical approval and represents the peak, so far, of one of the youngest and most astonishingly successful trends in gaming – its encroachment not only into the music industry, but into the whole notion of lifestyle and media consumption, in a manner far broader and more powerful than anything ever considered the terrain of a ‘game’.
The
Rock Band
games, of which there are now five (plus six expansion ‘track packs’) are essentially an extremely sophisticated offshoot of multimedia karaoke. Players accompany hit songs on vocals, guitars and drums, and are awarded points and feedback for the quality of their performance. It sounds standard enough. Yet, in these games, popular music is being made available for consumption in a form that has never existed before: an interactive form, broken down by instruments and vocals, and complete with a sophisticated interface that will train listeners to play along with every note, record and grade their every effort, and allow them and their friends to get about as close as is humanly possible to the experience of being, for the length of one track, a member of the Beatles.
Rock Band
makes an MP3 recording seem about as limiting and primitive as a wax disk. Along with other similar titles like the
Guitar Hero
and
SingStar
series, it has already revolutionised the music market, having achieved over a billion dollars of sales, 50 million song downloads and 10 million copies sold. And that’s just the
Rock Band
games – and it’s also just the beginning. For the experience these products can offer in comparison to traditional media is simply unrivalled. In an age where the cost of non-interactive media is rapidly tending towards zero, it suggests that such innovations should be pretty much irresistible to any company wanting to offer their consumers a service they can actually charge for. Think of what a customer now expects from even an up-to-date television service. Simply being able to flick between a hundred, or even a thousand, channels is no longer enough. Users expect programmes on-demand; an up-to-date programme schedule and information service; the option of recording and rewinding multiple programmes, of organising their recordings, and setting them days or weeks in advance; they expect to be able to manage their account options, hardware configuration, software set-up and preferences. None of this is a game in any strict sense, yet this is a distinction which is becoming more blurred by the day; for, in every aspect of interaction, it’s video games above all that are both defining expectations and setting the standard for new technology.
Games, moreover, are becoming a seriously revolutionary force for many more fields than music. Take the 2009 game
Ghostbusters
, a product whose relationship with the two hit 1980s
Ghostbusters
films is a little more complex than the old school formula of a bit of interactive shooting and exploring dressed up in images from the film. For a start, the game itself is based around an original script part-written by Dan Aykroyd and Harold Ramis (who wrote and starred in the films) and features the vocal talents of the original cast, not to mention motion-captured computer recreations of their 1980s appearances and an exact reproduction of the musical score. The banter and visuals, in fact, are of a standard that comfortably exceeds many beloved movies of the 1980s and, much like the game’s budget of over $15 million, it’s difficult not to see the finished product as far more than simply the ‘game of the films’. As Aykroyd himself put it in one interview, ‘I’ve seen work on the video game, I’ve watched it progress, my rap now to people is “This is essentially the third movie”.’