Art Games

After my last zillion essays about GamerGate stuff, I want to move back into talking about game design proper. A good segue, I think, is to talk a little bit about “art games” - in particular, this recurring accusation that something is “not actually a game”.

Part of the reason I want to write about this is because I have a perspective on the issue that most people don’t experience. Most of the things I make are comics with interactive elements - I was doing this way back in 2006, and started doing it harder once MS Paint Adventures created an actual audience for this stuff. I like to talk about the role nonlinearity can play as a storytelling device, and encourage people to explore interactive elements in the place of “generic” comics. Eventually, however, an interesting accusation was levied against me:

The things I was making weren't actually comics, but games. Essentially, the opposite of what critics say about art games.

If you read my blog, you know how I feel about the subjectivity of language. I personally don’t care if the stuff I create is labeled as a comic or a game or a story or whatever; at its core, it is all just entertainment media. However, the label we slap on something does carry one very real ramification: it decides what the work is compared to. That, I think, is really the core idea behind why many art games fight for the label of “game”.

The current go-to example of “not actually a game” is Gone Home. Controversy has developed around it, since on one side you have people saying that it is a boundary-breaking experiment in redefining what a game can be and who it can star, while the other side says it’s not actually a game at all.

Let’s imagine for a minute, though, that we just accept the subjectivity of definition and tell the critic “okay, so it’s not a game”. Instead, let’s look at Gone Home through a literary lens.

All of a sudden, the game is a lot less special. Like I’ve mentioned in earlier essays, the Tragic Lesbian Story is so overdone right now in writing that it’s practically a joke. It’s become so ubiquitous that I think a lot of us want to see a story about happy lesbians, or even just a story acknowledging that homosexual characters can, in fact, have a conflict in their life other than homophobia and forbidden love. Gone Home’s choice to present its story through visual evidence rather than narration is interesting, but it basically mirrors the emphasis on subtext and “show don’t tell” that is necessary for prose writing to even be considered readable. On a literary level, you could make an argument that Gone Home is tame and maybe even socially regressive.



Presenting Gone Home or similar media as being a “game” is a way to circumvent this. Let’s not deny it: the quality of writing in most games is low. They’re being judged and marketed primarily on their gameplay value and visuals, meaning storywriting is usually just an added bonus. To a market of dedicated gamers who are primarily exposed to the themes and standards of game writing, a tragic lesbian story is going to be something very original. To someone in a field with a greater emphasis on writing, however, works such as this are going to be much more generic and susceptible to criticism.

I think the important thing to understand is what when someone claims that something “isn’t a game” (or, in the case of my work, is a game), that doesn’t mean it is bad. Rather, it means that the person thinks it should be judged by standards more appropriate to what it is. If something lacks gameplay but has a lot of writing, for example, it makes sense to judge it by literary standards. Similarly, if something has gameplay, even if it’s not the focus, it makes sense to compare that element to other games. There will even be times when something just falls outside of a person’s interest - a person who cares solely about gameplay mechanics and dismisses something like Dear Esther as “not a game” probably has no interest in playing it for the story. They care about things with gameplay, and everything else is just “not for them”.

When it comes down to it, the title of “game” is a marketing thing. You have a demographic of people who follow and purchase games, and certain ideas that are commonplace in other mediums are likely to be new to them. By presenting them to this audience, you will have done something original in their eyes. The drawback of this tactic is that you will encounter some people who have less interest in the new direction and disregard the new product. It’s a simple tradeoff.

The attitude perpetuated by a lot of people who make “boundary-breaking art games” bothers me, though. Like, there are these all-too-common claims that games need to mature as an art form, or need to be more accepting of new ideas. Yet, these accusations seem to only arise as a defense of games that can’t compete with similar non-game media.

There are a lot of games out there already that go outside the usual stereotypes of a game and are just really good no matter what you consider them. To The Moon, pictured above, is a beautifully written piece of highly emotional science fiction that remains original and spectacular even if you compare it to books and movies. Visual novels like the Phoenix Wright series have a similar focus on writing, and maintain a large mainstream audience despite having very limited “game” qualities. You can even find popular fanworks of them, like the MLP-crossover Turnabout Storm, which maintain an audience despite literally having the interactivity removed.

There are a lot of games that actually use their gameplay to amplify quality writing. On the lower-budget end of things, Dys4ia stands as one of my favorite examples of interactivity-aided storytelling, using gameplay mechanics as a metaphor for the creator’s experiences. On the higher budget end of things, the game Bastion builds up to an incredibly moving scene that only has its impact because of interactivity and nonlinearity (if you don’t know what scene I’m talking about, stop reading right now and buy Bastion).

These things are good regardless of whether you consider them games or stories or whatever. They’re amazingly executed, and while none of them will appeal to everyone - gamers may get bored with something like Phoenix Wright, whereas non-gamers may get frustrated with something like Bastion - they deliver their ideas to their target audience well. They don’t need to be called “games” to be considered good, and they’re not just a watered-down version of the genres they draw elements from.

I guess the takehome message I really want to send here is that you don’t get to decide other people’s categorization of your work. Calling something a “game” may get gamers to look into it, but a certain number of them are going to say “this isn’t a game” and either disregard it or judge it by different standards. Similarly, if you’re bringing new elements to a medium, you have to be prepared to be judged by the medium you are stealing them from. My comic’s short little platformer Katia: Take Control was largely well-regarded by artists and writers for how it looked or fit into the story, but its slippy controls got a lot of criticism from gamers. That’s just sort of how medium-straddling goes.

In the end, it’s all Media and Target Audiences. You can make comics with moving parts or games without them and you’re ultimately just changing around the groups who will be interested in your work. Something that appeals to someone will appeal to them no matter what it is called.