Video games have reached a point where developers can create virtually anything they want. From massive worlds to explore to incredibly realistic graphics, the sky is the limit. But is having a virtually unlimited scope a good thing? During a keynote presentation at the Montreal International Game Summit, Ed Fries, former VP of game publishing for Microsoft, argued this might not be the case. Since his time at MS, which included cofounding the Xbox project, Fries has founded several start-ups. He currently runs a company called Figure Prints that turns your World of Warcraft character into a 3D sculpture, and even develops games for the Atari 2600 on the side. Ars had a chance to sit down with Fries to discuss the role of games as an art form and how constraint can help breed new ideas.

The "games as an art form" debate is somewhat contentious, but according to Fries it's one that shouldn't be overlooked, especially if we want to look at the medium as anything more than just a collection of commercial products.

"I don’t think we can ignore art when we talk about games unless we want to just be purely about making money," he told Ars. "Look at film. There's certainly very commercial films that you would never call art, but there's also a really rich community of people who make art films. Why don't we have more of that in the game business? What can we do to encourage that? I think Hollywood's connected those two together in a way, so that ideas can bubble out of the art world of their community and into the commercial world. There's commercial painting, there's commercial writing, so I don't think they have to be at odds with each other."

Fries likened the development of games to that of painting. Once painters were able to create realistic images, the medium began to stagnate and become boring because everyone began doing the same thing: recreating reality through painting. Likewise, now that games have the ability to create incredibly realistic experiences, the majority are doing just that. Painting managed to break free from this path thanks to movements like impressionism, which imposed artificial limitations on the artist. And Fries believes games may have to do the same thing.

"Pick some aspects to constrain and see what comes from that, see what creativity comes from that, see what kind of room for interpretation comes from that," he told Ars. "The art world couldn't just jump to impressionism—they had to get everywhere else first and then they could go to impressionism. Maybe that's true for games. Maybe we're at that point now where we can do everything really well, and so now we have to ask ourselves what do we want to do to make things look different. Or are we going to just let all games blur together and look like the same kinds of characters, the same kinds of stories, the same kinds of visuals?"

Fries is a man who knows a thing or two about constraint, having created Halo 2600, a re-imagining of Halo on the Atari 2600. During the process of developing the game, Fries was forced to make a number of decisions he otherwise wouldn't have made, simply to get around the hardware's limitations. He had what he describes as a "weird encounter with beauty" during development. Of course, the constraints put on a game don't have to be as extreme as re-creating a modern blockbuster on a 30-year-old console. They can be something as simple as a visual change. Fries gave a relatively recent example: what would happen if you tried to make a game entirely out of yarn?

The problem, however, is that these types of games are risky. And the current model for most publishers and developers is to avoid risk.

"I'm a little concerned about what's happened," Fries told Ars. "Because I work a lot with console developers and what's happening is they're either getting big or they're going away. And so they're moving up into these movie-like budgets. So you got Bungie spending $100 million, Call of Duty $100 million, that kind of thing. That's almost completely the domain of sequels. And then you're losing the games in the sort of mid-range.

"The 10 to 20 million dollar kinds of titles are getting really difficult to sign with publishers. In the past, those were where the $100 million games came from. That was like the bubbling community of trying things, and most of them failed, but a few become really popular. So if you're not investing in that space, from a publisher point of view, and generating IP there and owning it, where do your new things come from when people get sick of playing Halo 14 or whatever?"

But it's not all doom and gloom. The advent of new platforms like the iPhone and console downloadable services has opened up a new route for independent developers to create games often without the aid of a major publisher, allowing them to try out new ideas in order to see what works.

"What's exciting is we're getting closer to digital distribution as a way for game developers to work directly with their customers," Fries explained. "Will these [indie] games be able to get big enough to where they're interesting again, like these [mainstream] games? From a character and story and budget point of view?"