Video Games Are Not Art

"It's not porn, it's art!"

So goes the excuse for a film director to fill up his movie with nudity and sex. I wonder, then, how many egotistical game developers will scoff at the idea of producing a mere "game" and instead proclaim that their work is high art on par with Paradise Lost.



If you were paying attention to the debacle surrounding Mass Effect 3's ending, you'll recognise the "games are art" statement for what it is: a self-serving dodge by BioWare to deflect criticism regarding the game's ending by appealing to people's belief in "artistic integrity" and their desire to have art be expressed without meddling. It also betokens that BioWare is operating under the "Artist as God" mentality, which believes that the artist outranks the audience and under no circumstances should the artist change his work to appeal to the plebes. The problem is, that's not how it works: the audience is the artist's master; it is their vote on the quality of the artist's work that determines whether it ultimately succeeds or fails. Every artist must produce what his patron wants, if they don't, they're doomed to be ignored and forgotten.

But I digress. Rather than get bogged down in some tedious debate about what the definition of "art" is, I'd like to point what, if they are not art, games actually are. And video games are...and I don't think I'm going out on a limb or sounding overly pretentious when I say this...games. I'll say it again, in case you missed it:

Video games are games.

They are are interactive activity in which the player strives to overcome some obstacle, whether that obstacle is inherent to the game itself or takes the form of another competing player. Hence, chess, poker, football, Monopoly, Scrabble, Dungeons & Dragons, and Battleship are all examples of games, and I've never heard anyone attempting to defend any of these things as art. They are not something "produced" as part of some form of artistic expression, but rather an activity people engage in for enjoyment. In that regard, video games are less like art and more like toys, not in the sense that they are for children, but that are interactive objects designed to provide enjoyment through that interaction.

Now, games may include things that, by themselves, might be considered art. It may have graphics. It may have music. It may have a story. All these things might be considered "art" in isolation. But in a game, they are nothing but supporting elements to the central core, which is pure gameplay. A great many classic games had little or no story and only rudimentary graphics. If you gave Super Mario Bros. a backstory that rivaled War & Peace in depth, it would still not change the fact that you're playing Super Mario Bros., any more than imagining that my game of Monopoly is actually a metaphor for the global financial crisis will change the fact that I'm still playing Monopoly. If there's one lesson I'd love to drill into the heads of every game developer out there, it's that story serves gameplay, just like graphics, music, or sound.

Not that you'd know that, given the sorry state of modern gaming, which has unashamedly embraced the "games are art!" meme and taken a "Story First" approach to game design, which holds that the purpose of a game is not to provide compelling gameplay, but instead to tell a story. BioWare has clearly drunk this particular brand of Kool-Aid, as their recent titles have seen their gameplay become progressively dumbed down while ever more attention is lavished on cutscenes. One can hardly experience the opening moments of Mass Effect 3 and not be reminded of the worst sort of Michael Bay-esque Hollywood tripe. Just what was Mass Effect 3 supposed to be, anyway? A game, or a movie? A great many games these days don't seem to know what they want to be.

The problem with this "Story First" approach is that the interactive nature of games can kill your narrative flow flat. Imagine, if you will, the famous opening scene of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Indiana Jones creeps forward towards the idol...then is riddled with arrows when he accidentally steps on a pressure plate. Then you see him attempting to leap over a chasm...only to misjudge and plummet to his doom. Then he's running away from the giant boulder...only to stumble and be crushed into a fine paste. Finally, on the fourth try he manages to escape from the tomb without getting killed.

See the problem? The possibility that the player can fail can kill any momentum the narrative has built up. That's not a problem if your game's story is a simple "Rescue the princess!" affair, but if you've got some deep, ponderous story that you want to tell, then it becomes an issue. The first way to get around the possibility of the player failing (and bringing to the story to a screeching halt) is to make the game so easy and unchallenging that the player cannot fail unless he tries to. But games are about overcoming a challenge, and without a challenge, where's the enjoyment? The second method is to keep the gameplay and story segments separate, with all of the story playing out in non-interactive cutscenes. The problem with this approach is that it reduces the status of the gameplay to that mere filler - some tedious task the player must perform in order to get the next tidbit of story. This was clearly the approach that Square-Enix took when making Final Fantasy XIII, a game that was widely criticised for amounting to little more than, "Walk forward, watch cutscene."

I'll say it again: story serves gameplay, not the other way around. Even in the typically narrative-focussed RPG genre this is the case. Consider Fallout 1 & 2, widely regarded as some of the best RPGs ever made...why is that? It's not because of their story, since each game has a very basic plot. In the first game, it's "Find the water chip, stop the super mutants!" and in the second it's "Find the GECK, stop the Enclave!" No, the reason that Fallout is considered the gold standard for RPGs is the depth of its gameplay, and how the game world provides an unprecedented level of reactivity to the sort of character you choose to create. Compare this to the wretched Dragon Age II, which was filled to the brim with "story" yet featured utterly mindless, repetitive gameplay that was totally divorced from the story to the point where players wondered what the point of them even showing up was. As one player put it, "Why not just make a tick box for Hawke's personality at character creation, and just watch cutscenes?"

The thing is, we've been here before. In the 1990s, the technology of CD-ROM discs gave birth to the genre of FMV games, which appeared on both the PC and CD-based game consoles such as the Sega-CD and 3DO. With few exceptions, these FMV games were terrible, panned by both players and critics alike (back when game critics had integrity and weren't just external PR for publishers). The complaint was always the same: a bunch of cutscenes didn't make up for poor gameplay, and the gameplay itself was just some shallow affair to bide the player's time between cutscenes. And really, I could say the exact same thing about Mass Effect 3. It's truly the spiritual successor to all those godawful FMV games, which born from the idea that games ought to be "art" instead of just being games.

Video games are not art. The more they try to be "art" the more they stop being games and merely become something else, such as a semi-interactive movie or visual novel. But we already have movies and visual novels, so why should games throw away what makes them unique in favour of trying to be something they never were in the first place? As a closing point, consider the game New Super Mario Bros. Wii. It sold over 20 million copies (about ten times as much as Mass Effect title) and it did so without fancy graphics and with only the barest minimum of story. All it had going for it was great gameplay. And great gameplay will sell a hell of a lot more copies than any amount of "artistic integrity."