Yesterday, Polygon printed a book exerpt by Phil Owen that made what I consider to be the ultimate rookie mistake in the ‘are games art?’ discussion. They suggested that game designers and developers are failing at art because games do not do some things as well, such as storytelling, as the movies. While this is, in fact, true, it’s also a very silly point of view. It’s roughly akin to saying ‘movies can’t give detailed prose as well as books can, so they fail at art!’ or ‘music doesn’t do character development the way that television does, so it fails as art!’

Each genre or medium of communication and art has its own strengths and weaknesses. Each has elements that are true challenges for that genre, and other areas where it simply crushes other genres. Television didn’t really succeed until it stopped trying to be radio, for example, and embraced doing visual things that it does well. It took a while for TV to mature as well – some would argue that the genre took sixty years to mature, and didn’t fully until the advent of premium television and rise of quality serial television. Even that was a product of the times — binge-watching on Netflix makes serial television a net positive, where in previous decades it was more likely to bewilder viewers and push them away.

Gaming does some things very well – most notably interactivity. And while some people, including my old colleagues at BioWare, will keep continuing to improve the story experience in games, storytelling in games will never be as good as it is in the movies. The visual quality of avatars will never match the nuance of actual human actors, and the lack of control of pacing makes it devilishly hard to maintain control of the emotional beats. But even in story, when the genre embraces what its good at — interactivity, such as making truly impactful moral choices — you can start to see the stories that games tell actually provide experiences that challenge and emotionally move players in ways that movies never can.

Long-time readers will know this is a reprise of an old article I wrote for Game Developer Magazine called ‘The Art of Fun’.

From here, though, things get a little more bizarre. Owen goes on then to complain, effectively, that gathering scrap in Last of Us and the reload mechanic in Gears of War detract from the art by not being realistic. This is interesting to me because I’ve long railed about how realism should be abandoned if it doesn’t serve the overall game experience, and games aren’t alone in being deserving of treatment. Movies, for example, freely go off of realism all the time if it suits their purpose. They tighten dialog. They cut everything extranous to the narrative. They cut off rough edges that detract from the story. And they use symbolism heavily: Rosebud from Citizen Kane. The Briefcase in Pulp Fiction. The Red Dress in Schindler’s List. Fucking everything in 2001. These symbols act as abstraction to explore, explain or call attention to the tale the movie is attempting to tell.

The gameplay mechanics described in this article are exactly that: symbolic abstractions. The gathering of scrap to make a weapon that breaks quickly is meant to underscore a sense of scarcity, frailty and desperation. This narrative would not have been sold so well if Joel could just use the same unbreakable knife for the whole game. Similarly, the Gears of War reload mechanic underscores a sense of rhythm and flow – it creates an experience of being ‘in the zone’ – and his suggestion that perhaps players should drop clips and be forced to fumble with them would make for a more realistic game, but one that was decidedly unenjoyable, due to how hard it is to do things like change focus and manipulate the camera on a standard console controller. The ability to create these very hands-on experiences to help create these emotional states in ways that movies can’t is actually testament to what games do well, despite their very real limitations. In short, Owen sees these as bugs, and I see them as features.

From there, Owen veers into derision about “thirty seconds of fun”. To wit:

The lead designer on Gears was Cliff Bleszinski, or Cliffy B, and he often extols the virtue of “the thirty seconds of fun” that you repeat over and over for as long as the game lasts — one of the more obnoxious concepts of mainstream game theory.

This is roughly akin to saying ‘NOT ART!’ because great movies cut all extraneous scenes to the plot, that books should have a trackable number of strongly distinct characters, or that network television programs should be written with commercial breaks in mind. Each genre has its own needs, its own minimum bar to cross, in order to keep the audience’s engagement maintained. For video games, that engagement is based on activity loops within activity loops, that slowly move players up the engagement and skill ladder. It is the very engine of the medium that keeps players focused and interactive with the genre. Certainly, there are games that lack this sort of activity-loop based structure — just as there are art films with no dialogue and books that require a character guide to track what’s going on — but describing this as something holding the genre back seems ridiculous to me. It’s far more likely to be true that a more sophisticated knowledge, understanding of activity loops will result in deeper, more intricate gameplay capable of telling much more fascinating stories with their mechanics.

In short, I don’t mind when people discuss whether games are art, or whether or not some games have more artistic merit than others (a fact that is certainly true for other media – no one thinks that movies aren’t art because somehow Porky’s invalidates Citizen Kane). However, reading Owen’s book, I get the sense that he just doesn’t have a very sophisticated view of how the art of video games actually is special, unique, and already capable of amazing things.