League of Legend is to Shadowrun what the NHL is to The Lord of the Ring.
Humor me for a minute, and let me tell you a story.
A few years ago, before working in the video game industry, I found myself, with a few of my coworkers, stuck on a train for six hours because of a business trip. Six hours in a train is a long time and I remember asking for a first class seat so I could plug my laptop. Not that I wanted to work, mind you, but I wanted to play. My hope was that those six hours would be enough for me to wrap up my Shadowrun campaign… In retrospect, they weren’t; but that’s beyond the point of this post.
At some point during the trip, one of my coworker passed by and stopped by my seat, asking me what I was playing. My explanations were quickly met with a confused face and that simple answer: “I only know of League of Legends, because a friend of mine plays it”. That single answer shut down any hope I might have had at spending a few hours discussing video games with a kindred spirit.
My coworker simply wanted to be nice with me but unfortunately he wasn’t really into video games. That’s OK. His answer made me think though. How would you describe a game like Shadowrun to someone that only ever played games like League of Legends ?
More often than not, I like to make the point that video games are art. This is a pretty much done argument for me. Admittedly, this could still raise a debate among certain circles, but I always dismissed that as the rambling of people being unfamiliar with the video game scene. The same debate has been held about cinema and comics and I thought there was nothing new about it. But if I have to be honest, this is not totally true. There’s something different about video games that need to be addressed by gamers and the gaming industry alike.
Video games, as an industry, suffers from a lack of vocabulary. We have our genre and sub-genre, we have our technical terms, we have our own lingo, but we fail to have the words to differentiate two crucial things: the medium and the content.
Here’s the first sentence of the Wikipedia article about cinematography:
“ Cinematography (…) is the science or art of motion-picture photography and filming either electronically by means of an image sensor, or chemically by means of a light-sensitive material such as film stock” (emphasis mine).
Cinematography is the art, motion picture photography, and filming is the corresponding medium .
By contrast this is the first sentence of the Wikipedia article about video game:
“A video game is an electronic game that involves interaction with a user interface to generate visual feedback on a two- or three-dimensional video display device such as a TV screen, virtual reality headset or computer monitor”.
Video games are reduced to their medium, without any consideration for the process or intents behind them.
Put otherwise, would you argue that motion-picture photography and filming is intrinsically an art form ? I would not. Else, you would have to argue that security footages are a form of art. Sure it could be subverted, but that’s a fringe case, one that is interesting precisely because it gives artistic intent to something that usually falls outside of cinematography. If you consider a video game only through its medium, you would have a hard time arguing that it is a piece of art. A medium is just a technical description of how to store and interact with content, it cannot constitute an art form by itself.
Some games are pieces of art, of this I defy you to convince me otherwise. However, as for any potential artistic field, not all game can equally be called artistic. Some are very much the stuff of art while other never transcend their medium. Some games are meant to be a common ground for competition (e-sports), other are meant to be the framework of epic saga stretching over decades (MMO). This is but two examples out of many. The common denominator being that, usually, game developers do not put artistic considerations at the center of their creative process when working on those games.
If I am walking on eggshells here it is for a good reason. I don’t want to make a leap and say that some games are intrinsically artistic and other are not. As with many thing, this lies in a spectrum.
Take architecture for instance, Hegel’s first fine art. Buildings are the medium of architecture. If you are lost in a forest and building yourself a shed for the night, chances are you are you are not trying to make art. At the other end of the spectrum, you have creations like the cathedrals, for which their intended use is largely overshadowed by their artistic nature. Even more so today, when most people visit cathedrals to admire them, not to pray. The exact same thing exists for video games. Some serve a practical purpose while others goes beyond that. Keep in mind though that whether something is perceived or not as art, is very much a subjective matters. Although your wooden shed may be born out of absolute necessity, other might argue it is art.
When I play a fighting game, it’s not because I seek and artistic experience. I do it because I want to play a sport. That is not to say fighting games are not art. FighterZ is my favorite fighting game right now precisely because of its artistic side. But as a whole, that is not the main reason why I play it. Conversely, I do not play the excellent Transistor because I particularly enjoy its gameplay loop or find its core mechanics challenging. I play it because I want an aesthetic experience. That is not to say the gameplay loop and the mechanics are bad; or that I don’t enjoy them. In both case it’s just that, for me, one aspects of the game dominate the other, and this is what ultimately keeps me playing. Same as with Architecture really, you might visit a wooden shed because you find it lovely, or you may just seek shelter from a storm. Eventually, this is irrelevant of the artistic quality of the shed. The fact that someone might be drawn to it not because they seek shelter, but because they find it attractive is what matters.
I spend a lot of time playing games. Sometimes I can play for 12 hours straight. When I talk about that, one remark I invariably hear from my non-gamer friends is this one: “Don’t you get bored, always doing the same thing ?”. I usually just evade the question because honestly, I much prefer playing games than getting into an argument about video games. One things I could answer though is: “Don’t you get tired, reading all day ?”. Because that’s a thing, we — as adult — spend most of our time reading.
We read the newspaper, we read books, we read the internet, we read status update. Most of our interaction with the world is through reading. Would that make you a literature critics ? Hell no ! Because reading is the act of consuming a medium — written text — which is shared across a multitude of activities. Sometimes you read to learn, sometime to live an adventure, and sometimes to know what happens within your social circles. All those activities are tied to a different experience, there is no monotony in going from one to the other, yet they all involve reading. From an external point of view, you are just reading words.
Video games are not different. Of course, if I play the exact same game for 12 hours straight I will get bored (most of the time). But that’s not what I am (usually) doing. When I spend a day playing, it usually involves very different games. Maybe for two hours I will be a war general moving troops on a battlefield, then I will be a teenage girl trying to come to terms with her own insecurities, then I will take part in a friendly amateur competition, and so on and so forth. What is important is that games are that many windows to other worlds, to other experiences. From my desk, I will probably experience more diversity than most people on an average day.
Does this argument feels familiar ? Well, it’s because the exact same one has been made for literature 160 years ago.
In the end, one question remains. What should we call “the art and science of making video games”. Game design is only a small part of it and as far as I know we lack a proper term for the whole package.
I like to think of the art of making video games as something at the crossroad of architecture, cinema and literature. We borrow a bit from all of this, on top of some technical background from the software engineering world. Honestly, you just have to look at the words we use to see our multi-cultural heritage. We work in studios, we call ourselves developers, designers and games directors, we have a sub-genre that is called visual novel.
In 2018 the video game industry far exceeded the movie industry in revenue generated, yet it is a lot less considered in the the public opinion. There are many reasons for this, but one is that you cannot promote something you can’t name. We, as developer and as gamer, need to come up with a name for our craft and passion.
When all is said and done, video game is too broad of a term if referring to a type of content. Because of this, it is at best used to describe a medium and nothing more. Not all written text is literature, not all buildings are cathedrals and not all movies are Thrillers. In the same fashion, not all games are the same. Where you have novels, magazines and newspapers, we have RPGs, fighting games and MMOs.
To ask someone how Shadowrun compares with League of Legend is to ask someone how Peter Jackson’s Lords of the Ring relates to the NHL’s latest broadcast. Both are played on a computer, and both are watched on a TV screen; that’s pretty all they have in common. I don’t blame my co-worker though, he is a nice guy and a good friend. If anything, his question was but a symptom of how we (gamers and developers alike) have failed to dispel the misconceptions around video games for the past 50 years.
