The Art of Video Games

Elite special forces unit FOXHOUND operative “Raiden” has been captured. He must find a way to get out of enemy clutches and return to his primary objective, saving the president from a terrorist attack on a large oil rig. After being rescued by a friend on the inside, Raiden struggles to find a way out of enemy territory, as all of his possessions were stolen by the enemy. As he stumbles his way through the base, his colonel calls him and starts saying strange things. “Turn the game console off right now, Raiden!” “Don’t worry, it's a game. It's a game like usual.” Raiden does not know what the colonel is talking about, but you, the individual currently playing the video game Metal Gear Solid 2 (MGS2), will be terrified.

With video games being one of the highest-grossing industries in the world, it is often a topic of great debate whether or not they have a real position in the art space. The scenario above is one of the first ever examples of what is commonly referred to as a “4th wall break” and is one of the many ways that video games have established themselves as a unique art form over the past 30 years. 4th wall breaks are defined as when a character acknowledges the existence of the audience, and though they exist in film and TV such as Deadpool or Fleabag, they have a unique existence in video games. In MGS2 for example, the game tricks you into thinking your console has crashed in the middle of a fight. Video games often play with 4th wall breaks in ways that other forms of media typically do not, creating truly unique moments and stories. This is just one of many techniques used in telling stories in video games that differentiates the medium from other media. Yet despite such moments, whether video games are considered art is a widely debated topic. So, how do video games establish themselves as a unique form of storytelling and entertainment?

Gabriel Winslow-Yost’s essay “Video Games: The Secret Life” provides some interesting insight into the topic. The essay explores how video games are gripping to an audience, and their unique place as an artistic medium by looking at the book “Gamelife: A Memoir” by Michael W. Clune and “God in the Machine: Video Games as a Spiritual Pursuit” by Liel Liebovitz. Winslow-Yost discusses how video games limit us in the actions we can take, the worlds we can explore, and the tasks we must complete, making a compartmentalized version of life that is easy to understand and extremely repeatable. It is also easy for a video game to isolate one or many ideas for a player to walk away with, even unintentionally. This is exemplified by Clune’s experience overdosing on heroin: “The bag of white powder dropped from my fingers, I fell back on the bed.... And when the stars came through the transparent hotel room walls, I recognized the feeling. I recognized it from Elite.”. Elite is a video game Clune had previously played in middle school. The repetition of death in Elite taught Clune about death, and when he finally faced it in real life, it felt like he already knew the feeling. In other words, although Elite is merely a spaceship game and nowhere close to a heroin overdose, it allowed him to experience a similar feeling of loss and reaching an end thousands of times, much like his overdose.

This idea of learning about real life topics through a video game, especially through repetition, can be further expanded when game developers choose what ideas their players walk away with. One of the most critical parts of MGS2 is that it is a game that predicts how the player thinks, and uses this knowledge to its advantage. For example, the developers of MGS2 knew that the player would likely feel the familiarity of picking up weapons, fighting kooky villains, and sneaking around a high security military base as the same feeling in any other tactical espionage action game, similar to how Clune was able to recognize the feeling of death. This exact compartmentalized world is one many people playing this game had experienced many times over, so it was effectively able to subvert the players’ expectations by giving heavy social commentary and twists in the story that a typical game of this genre would not give. This ensures that the player remembers these moments, because they were the moments that did not fit within the familiar feeling of tactical espionage action games. Skilled game developers are then able to use this feature of video games, this idea of repetition in a limited world, to control how their players think about and remember the story they are presenting.

The beauty of this idea is also that if the participant has never played a game of this genre, they get a completely new experience that the developer didn’t foresee. Winslow-Yost concludes his essay by stating “Descriptions of video games, especially ones aimed at people who don’t play, tend to focus on what the game is ‘about,’ on the setting and events it depicts, as if it were a novel or a film. But the experience of playing a game grows and shifts, gaining implications and intensities as it meets the mind of each player.”. This is one of the most interesting parts of the video game story, that even if the developers fail to manipulate the player as predicted, it still creates a completely new experience for that player, whether that be based on previous experience, the amount of time it took to play the game, or any number of different factors, every player’s experience will be different.

Another idea that is relevant is the idea of agency. In a video game, the choices the player makes are their own at any given time. This directly differentiates a video game from something like a book or a movie, since someone playing a video game is constantly making decisions as they play (Winslow-Yost). This idea is explored more deeply in “Games: Agency as Art” by C. Thi Nguyen. Nguyen dives into the idea of agency in video games, or the ability for the player of the game to shape their own experience through the idea of agency as an expression of art. Nguyen specifically states “Games, then, are a unique social technology. They are a method for inscribing forms of agency into [artificial] vessels: for recording them, pre-serving them, and passing them around. And we possess a special ability: we can be fluid with our agency, and we can submerge ourselves in alternate agencies designed by another. In other words, we can use games to communicate forms of agency.”. Not only are games a form of storytelling, but they are also a way for us to communicate in different ways, for us to be agents in each setting, and though Nguyen speaks of games in general, this applies to Metal Gear Solid 2 as well.

But just as before, the best game designers can predict the actions of the player even in this setting a large percentage of the time. An example of this is the video game Far Cry 3, which leverages agency in a way only video games can. It is typical in an open world game such as Far Cry 3 to kill people, often glorified in most cases. However, in Far Cry 3, this typically mundane and common feature goes on to affect the protagonist as a character, slowly driving him to madness as the game progresses. Far Cry 3 uses player agency against the player to tell its story, essentially saying that it can bet on the player taking an action such as killing lots of enemies, and then giving the player an unexpected negative consequence when they do. And once again, if they do not decide to kill lots of enemies, the player experience then becomes completely unique and unpredictable.

This idea of the truly unpredictable experience is at the heart of the art of video games; that even the greatest game designers and developers cannot truly predict what path a player will take in their video game and what that player will take away from it. And this idea is more important today than ever before. Art is a crucial part of how humans communicate with each other, and video games play an important role in that, allowing individuals to create their own story, their own experience, and share these with others not only to connect but to learn. Clune’s memoir is a collection of seven games which shaped who he is throughout his life. This idea of shaping and learning highlights video games as a crucial tool for us to shape who we are in a way entirely unique to us—something that no other art form can truly do in such a specific and interactive way. Art has the ability to instill feelings and emotions in the viewer, which is precisely what makes it art in the first place. Video games are the deepest form of this, making the player feel the emotions of another person to the deepest extent we can technologically achieve right now. Video games are one of the most important and deep forms of art that we currently possess.

Works Cited