Games Aren’t Games
Like human sexuality in the mind of someone ashamed of their search history, a video game’s story and gameplay are frequently treated as two discrete and diametric opposites. There is a superficial assumption that one is playing a game while in control of their avatar, but when that control is restricted or taken away outright, the “game” (i.e., the interactive essence that makes a video game a game) has been halted in distasteful service of the story. My disagreement rests within the definition of art (a sentence I’ve too often employed in the past, in argument or while avoiding incarceration). I am comfortable defining art as anything which seeks to elicit an emotional reaction from those who experience it. Story, in the case of video games or any other art form, is merely one tool utilized toward that end.
Games are art, that’s a notion that is, while not entirely without its hotheaded disputants, generally uncontroversial; particularly when it is time to defend the medium from Roger Ebert’s wandering ghost. And games are art because of the multitudinous facets of creativity which inhabit them — including (but not necessitating) anything from story, performance, graphic design, music and sound design, to the sheer elegance of their technical programming. And a game’s artistic merit isn’t housed in any of these singular aspects, it is the sum total of these disciplines that provokes feeling — the way a script is elevated by its delivery or the way, robbed of the context of a beautiful sparrow, “tweeting” is just an annoying habit of shitty, spoiled teenagers.
The futile irony is that story and gameplay are not two monoliths, they’re two applications of artistic skill which make games emotionally resonant. The true opposition at the heart of the matter, and the bitter pill that players have to swallow, is between games and art. These are the two nearly mutually exclusive concepts surrounding video games; and under scrutiny and despite their vestigial eponym, video games, in being works of art, are inherently not games.
Venture to define games. We could probably agree that their basic tenets include something skill-based, with an element of competition and the ability to end in either a state of success or loss. Chess, football, escaping a swarm of bees you’ve agitated on a whim, these fit into the classic definition of a game. On the surface, video games do as well, but consider, truly, how much skill is necessary in games. Yes, you can accuse the industry of sandpapering down skill requirements in its continuing efforts to ostracize hardcore gamers from the far more lucrative market of Kinect-savvy grandmas, but can we say that skill and coordination is a tacit requisite of video games?
Likewise, how often do you lose a game? Really. Is dying in a video game actually a fail state, or a momentary setback? Contrary to the phrase as popularized by arcade machines, Bill Paxton, and signs held by early-2000s WWE audiences, a “game over” is never truly the end of a game. In virtually all cases, it’s a charade to impart the feeling of risk to the player. The game is not at stake in the way a bout of checkers would end once one participant loses all their pieces and dysfunctionally hurls the board into the nearby credenza or an unsuccessful foot chase by the local constable would empower Jack the Ripper to strike again the next morning — the only thing at stake is your time. But players, being children, demand this arbitrary contrivance in order to maintain the illusion of video games being as chess, to be won or lost, in much the way an infant demands the shared delusion that the small spoon invading its mouth is actually an airplane.
Pong is a game. No frills, purely utilitarian. A traditional game, transmitted through video. The motherfucker to my right? Art. As soon as game developers had the technical ability to infuse the new found form of “the video game” (not to be confused with The Video Game, video gaming’s gritty reboot) with illustrative sounds and visuals, they did, and video games became something different. Artists contributed graphic design which is, by its very nature, meant to evoke feeling in the player — even if it is just, as in the case of Pac-Man and his ghosts, simple amusement and a compulsion to drop in quarters.
Take what we consider to be pure in this modern, sullied age where curmudgeonly forum-goers contend that games try too hard to emulate films — Mario. Nintendo games. Held high as a franchise with no pretenses, only existent to provide the player fun. Now imagine a level of Super Mario Galaxy, or a faded memory of Mario Bros. 3 (unless you still play that game today like some stunted weirdo), and strip away the music. No “Into the Galaxy,” or “Airship.” Load up World 1–1 in your mind without “doot doot”-ing the first few bars like a grinning moron, or reliving the satisfaction of slaughtering that first Goomba with his menacing, racially-caricaturing, thick-browed eyes. Imagine Mario (if you feel like spending the rest of your night tearfully wallowing in the despair of a thought experiment gone horribly, tragically awry) without the whimsical, incoherent vocalizations of Charles Martinet.
These are all gameplay-inessential elements which are as intrinsic to the experiences and shared reverence for Mario as the act of jumping. Video games have, for decades, been employing such things in order to trick you into engaging with an art form while you erroneously believe you’re devoting your time to the far nobler and more dignified act of playing a game.
Dark Souls’ staunch and unforgivingmechanics would lack all of their punch if the experience of navigating your way through the game wasn’t a harrowing, mystifying nightmare on account of its grim locales, progressively more audacious skeletons, and its torrent of incomprehensible NPCs laughing at your plight. RPGs request nearly unendurable amounts of time in order to establish a bond between the player and its characters. Shooters propel technical innovation forward on a yearly basis in order to give you the emotional sensations and stimulation of being on a battlefield (or answering a call of duty, or receiving a medal of honor, or performing Tom Clancy’s ghost recon, whatever).
“But what about eSports?” you ask. “Those are exclusively competitive, skill-based, and individual instances do end with winning or losing.”
Fuck eSports.
