Video Game Art - Book Excerpt
Introduction

Imagine if, to date, nothing had ever been written about film. No analyses of set design, no discussion of Russian theories of editing or the significance of color in French film, not a word about how our perception of Sherlock Holmes was altered for all time by Basil Rathbone’s nose. Were this the case, it would be hard, if not impossible, to know where to begin talking about such a vast and differentiated medium. And yet this is almost precisely the situation we face today with video games.

In the past few years, consumers have spent more on video games worldwide than they have on film. By the end of next year, the game industry will eclipse even the music industry in gross revenues and by 2008 it will be making more than both music and film combined. Even if we take these numbers as only the roughest of guides, they tell us something important: video games are now the de facto dominant art form in the world.

In spite of this, there has been almost nothing written about the medium. In the last few years, a very small handful of universities have created tiny departments of video game studies, there are one or two issues of journals that focus on thinking about the cultural impact and significance of game content, and there have been a variety of art collections published on the work of an individual game or game series. But this is all. For an industry employing literally tens of thousands of artists, designers, writers, and musicians all over the world, it seems incredibly under represented when we consider the enormous film theory or music sections at our local bookstores.

Although perhaps this under representation is not surprising when we consider the history of the industry and its relatively recent meteoric rise to the world’s most popular form of media. Video games are called "games" for a reason. At the very least, the medium began and developed for some time without artistic pretensions. Unlike film, which started by imitating photography (and thereby painting) and theater, pioneer video games were nothing more than a few monochromatic boxes or lines. The first games like “Tennis for Two,” (a 1958 laboratory experiment created by a Manhattan Project scientist) “Spacewar!” (the first arcade game, 1971) and “Pong,”(1975) used symbols for people, balls, or even spaceships and aliens, that were so simple, they could only be considered “art” by the most abstract minimalist. They were revolutionary because of their interactivity, because they were an invention that could respond to its user, because they could offer tests of skill that previously had always required another human being. This element of interactivity, the truly distinctive component of video games that sets it apart from other forms, is also, as we shall see, at the heart of many of the artistic and narrative choices games make today. It's true that very early on, even with the medium's limitations, design icons like “Pac-man” (the first video game protagonist, created in 1980) or “Space Invaders” emerged to become permanent parts of our worldwide cultural heritage, but the origins of games, their excuse and their inspiration, still lay with gaming, not art. They still depended on their interactivity to hold people’s interest to subject matter that was visually and narratively more simplistic than a children’s book. It is thus unremarkable that, at their outset, they were considered little more than entertainment, little more than a novelty, and unworthy of serious contemplation from a cultural or artistic perspective.

Recently, however, as part of their ascendancy to the top of the competition for our entertainment dollar, they have crossed the technological threshold necessary for them to make the move from brilliant design to burgeoning Eighth Lively Art (perhaps the liveliest of all!) As the medium most closely tied to technological advancement for its execution - more so, even, than film - the boundaries of its limitations have exploded outwards exponentially, exactly in sync with advances in electronic engineering. As computer processing speeds and storage capacities increase, more environments, more people, more creatures, more detail can be displayed than ever before and longer stories can be told. In addition, as programmers understand better and better how to manipulate the power of the computer, more imaginative interactions can be created among all of these components of games. Today, the scope of video games extends to representing entire 3-dimensional universes on a single DVD, from cars to pets to clothing to the social dynamics of group relationships. Thanks to progress in technology, it is now more or less true that if we can dream it, it can be made a gaming reality. And in this extension of scope, art has happened in two distinct ways.

The first, most obvious way is in the components of games that correspond more or less to traditional media. For example, set virtually free of storage restrictions in the last five years, the writing, the music, and the "set design," of games have all progressed by leaps and bounds. Today, game developers may employ dozens of writers for a single title who compose 20-50 hour scripts involving sometimes hundreds of characters. Game development also now includes teams of many artists and designers, as well as experts in various fields such as architecture or military engineering, who all work together to ensure that the “fantastic” experience of a game is as “real” as possible. One need only compare, for example, the writing of “The Chronicles of Riddick” game with “The Chronicles of Riddick” film to see that games may have eclipsed movies not just in terms of how much money they make, but also in terms of the quality of their more traditional elements, like writing. In addition, beyond these elements of game production that are clearly related to already established art forms, there are also artistic elements that are unique to games but could still, conceivably, be seen as extensions of traditional forms. For example, there are entire teams whose job it is to create characters – and not simply the way they look, but the way their faces express emotion, how they move, how they react. Another example of such an element might be designing levels for games – what do areas in the game look like and how do they work as places in which the game might be played? Elements of game design such as these have also come into their own thanks to faster and faster processing speeds and more and more storage, but they too might still be considered offshoots of other, established art forms such as illustration or sculpture.

The second, and perhaps more interesting, way in which games have recently made the leap from entertainment to art is in terms of the overall experience of the game. Just as we can talk about the various artistic elements that make up a film - the cinematography, the screenwriting, and so on - but also talk about whole films as works of art, in recent years the same has slowly begun to be true for games. And because games are the world's first truly interactive art form, it is on this topic that there is plenty to be discussed, debated, and analyzed for the very first time.

As mentioned above, games are set apart from all other media by their reactivity - they constantly change and shift in response to input. They are an active experience requiring at least one participant, not a viewer or a reader or a listener who remains passive, but a "player." The implications of this distinction are both far-reaching and profound and we will be examining some of them in this book. The difference, for example, between the experience of simply reading about a protagonist in a narrative and being a protagonist in a narrative is far from trivial. It has complex implications for the way character identification and plot threads function that have yet to be well explored and understood. The same is true, as another example, for the difference between the function of settings in games and settings in traditional narratives. In games, the setting is something constantly interacted with, not simply a backdrop as it often is in traditional storytelling.

But beyond these differences that interactivity creates between elements of video games and those same elements of traditional arts, if we also look at specific games as a whole and attempt to determine if they are works of art rather than simply works of entertainment, we quickly realize interactivity also makes this distinction not immediately apparent or intuitive. For instance, one of the best recent examples of a game that demands to be taken seriously as a work of art is “Katamari Damacy.” Here, players roll a small, “sticky” ball around a messy room or town in an attempt to pick things up and make their ball as big as possible within a time limit. This game has extremely limited narrative elements and is quite simple, if brilliant, in its concept and gameplay. It might, in fact, be seen initially to bear closer resemblance to a toy than a work of art. But spending more than 20 minutes with the Katamari (the name of the sticky ball) will convince all but the most hardened skeptic that its interactivity synthesizes the sum of its beautiful parts - its spectacular design and music for example - into an artistic whole unlike anything found in other media. Another excellent example of a game that, as a whole, might be considered art, is “Rez.” On its surface, “Rez” appears to be little more than a three-dimensional version of Space Invaders. But again, through its interactivity, it transcends that oversimplification as the brilliant graphic design, music, and pace all constantly mutate in response to the player’s actions.

Furthermore, as we better understand the effects of interactivity on our experience of art, it will be interesting to see what we might then learn about traditional, passive artforms by comparison with games. What do the differences between the new and unique interactive medium of video games and more traditional mediums reveal about the nature of art itself? What might they tell us about why artistic endeavor and experience is so compelling, so essential to our daily lives? For example, let us assume there is a direct link between the popularity of games and their ability, granted by interactivity, to immerse us as never before in alternate realities. The ability to do this effectively is also an essential part of certain traditional narrative media, notably fiction and film, so what then does the success of games imply about the relative importance of immersion (and perhaps escapism) as a component of art in general? By asking questions like this one as we think about games more seriously, we can also then reveal interesting new ways of understanding both traditional forms and art as a whole.

However, given the volume of material, where do we begin?

I believe the answer can only be: Somewhere. Yes, it is true there is already an unfathomable amount of work to be analyzed, that games are perhaps unique in human history because, as an entirely original form of art, they have grown to their current proportions and significance in a mere twenty-five years. But in much the same way a good game provides a tutorial level at its outset so new players can learn its rules, mythos, and objectives, this book will attempt to cover a little bit of everything in the hopes of generating further discussion about what must eventually come to be seen as the artistic medium of the new millennium.

Starting by touching on character and some of the issues it raises both for the protagonist and antagonist, we will then take a look at how environment in games acts both similarly and differently than environment in other, usually narrative, experiences, move along to touch on the inanimate in games and its uses (for example physical items like keys or swords as plot drivers), and finally look at several diverse topics deserving of attention but falling into their own unique categories, such as the influence of animation on game design.

If art is all we can dream, games are the ultimate fulfillment of that potential, the ultimate departure from reality into spaces of our own creation. And if art is a journey into the human mind and soul, games take us further on that journey than most of us had ever imagined possible. I would like to believe this book is also the beginning of a journey, a journey others will decide to continue.