Games as Art

Roger Ebert (whose intellect I greatly appreciate) has created a bit of a kerfuffle by declaring that video games can never be art.

The basic disagreements seem to come down to a) arbitrary definitions of art and b) an unclear distinction between the act of playing and the items played with.

While playing a game of chess might not be art, the chess set itself could be art. Playing catch with the Mona Lisa might not be art (performance artists might disagree) but the Mona Lisa itself is, I think, art. Still, if dance can be art, why not the act of playing a game? Can figure skating be art, but not hockey?

That's a slightly poor analogy, but perhaps this is the central problem: video games don't fit any of the traditional categories we would stick things into. Campfire stories to books to radio. Street performance to stage to movies. Games don't really fit.

Maybe games are ultimately the extension of playing make-believe with a big chunk of art (even if it's only preschooler level art) latched on the side.

I don't know if games are art. I'm quite sure there is, or can be, art IN games. Personally I think arguing one way or the other falls between stupid and pointless. So I'll stop now.

Game Haters

There are certain people in the world who are Game Haters. They hate computer and video games, the Grand Theft Auto series in particular, and would love to have them all banned.

The thinking seems to go something like, "Video games take over your mind and turn otherwise good and kind human beings into precision killers."

Curiously, this line of reasoning seems to come from the Christian right. If I am not completely mistaken, I would expect this group to have some concept of free will ingrained into their theology, otherwise the concepts of sin and salvation become a little hard to sell.

So, which is it going to be? Are people free to make their own choices, or are these people actually suggesting that video games (of all things) are a powerful force that can literally bypass an individual's God-given free will?

OK, OK, even I can't tell where the sarcasm ends and the reality begins in the above. It just struck me as clear hypocrisy the other day - that a group that depends on free will to have any validity in their beliefs apparently also believes that there are tools of absolute mind control. Since I figure they're pretty much as wrong as it is possible to be wrong, on pretty well all counts, perhaps I should not be surprised. I just wish someone in the media would call them on it.

Game Violence

I was reading something about game violence recently. Aside from the fact that I find the entire "debate" irritating for reasons I might get into later, the interesting thing I got thinking about was the different types of violence in the world and, similarly, in games.

You basically have different situations that would generally be considered more or less acceptable:

1. Intentional harm of the innocent (murder)
   
2. Coincidental harm of the innocent (knew it was likely, manslaughter)
   
3. Mutual oppositional violence (war)
4. Defensive violence (repel invaders)
   
5. Accidental harm of the innocent (no idea it would happen)
   
6. Mutual permitted violence (boxing)

There may be other shades of it in there. The main point of interest was the lumping of a sport such as boxing under the "violence" label as though it was the same thing as playing a serial killer.

The interesting thing that occurs to me after writing a list in diminishing order of severity leads me to think about what the West is doing in the Middle East. We're being sold the "war in Iraq" as a war (severity 3), but really that's not quite right. The people in the country are repelling invaders (severity 4), but the US is fighting an unjustified war of aggression, which is pretty much murder (severity 1).

Now, to say the US should pull out right now, or even on a timetable, is a much more difficult issue. They should not be there, and I've maintained that since long before they even were there. They've made a right nasty mess of the Iraq and potentially ruined the US economy with massive debt, but there isn't any good way out now. That is why any nation worth any respect whatsoever doesn't involve itself in wars of aggression.

Recently Played: Crysis

Crysis is an exercise in so many things gone right, and so many things gone wrong. At one point my son made a comment to the effect that, "They made a movie out of this game!" He didn't mean cheap Hollywood derivative crap. There are moments in the game as visually stunning and epic as any movie, which is really saying something. I partially shrug at the whole "nanosuit" thing, which basically means your character can choose between armor, speed, strength or stealth. Only one can be selected at a time, and each drains power at a different rate depending what you are doing (getting shot, sprinting, hitting things or moving, respectively). As a sci-fi theme it isn't exactly inspired, but it does let you approach any of your objectives from a lot of different angles - speed in shooting, or sneak through without raising any suspicion.

The system requirements are astronomical. Now, I have a hard time faulting them for that, because the game does look fantastic. On the flip side, Half-Life 2: Episode Two also looks fantastic and doesn't grind my moderate-to-high performance system (Intel Quad Core 6600, nVidia 8600GTS) to dust. I think there must be a balance there that wasn't sufficiently met.

But the really bad stuff is the bugs. I've seen exactly the same issues reported by others (but curiously, not by everyone) so it's not just me. Some are genuine bugs, some are design issues, but here we go:

• Several bugs that prevent missions from advancing. In particular, some "death animations" for enemies don't work all the time, leaving them hanging in the air. This would be just a graphical glitch, except in several circumstances this also prevents the proper events from getting triggered and allowing you to continue through the game, forcing you to load an old save game. (Either by fortunate chance or good design, the game does save your progress in individual files, rather than overwriting the same one, so you can go back fairly easily.)
• Cutscenes are often very, very slow, much worse than the rest of the game for some reason. Occasionally they will simply pause for seconds at a time, causing the audio to go completely out of sync with the visuals.
• The end-game involved dying. A lot. Which is fine, except it was almost always for completely random reasons. Game designers figured out that was a bad idea many years ago, what it's doing in one of the most high-profile modern games is beyond me.
• The end-game didn't exactly communicate objectives well. You get the Stupid Big Gun at the end, then go off to defeat the Super Big Bad Guy, but you can't use the Stupid Big Gun against it for some reason. After defeating Super Big Bad Guy through conventional means (which takes forever and gives little indication that you're actually doing any damage), Big Daddy Super Big Bad Guy comes out, where you CAN use the Stupid Big Gun, but only in a very specific way. Since BDSBBG is a big pushover compared to SBBG, if the whole thing wasn't presented with such style it would be immensely disappointing, instead of merely being underwhelming.
• Did I mention the end-game involved a lot of dying? So while you're stumbling around trying to figure out what you're supposed to be doing, you tend to get killed a lot, without any idea if it's because there's a bug in the game (since we established that is a problem), you're not doing it right (which is possible, it's all explained so poorly), or you just suck.
• The end-game is really where the framerate issues become a problem, because despite having acceptable framerates on medium settings for the whole game, even with everything on low settings the whole thing turns into a slideshow at the very end, compounding all of the above problems.

I loved this game on the whole. Still, as was a common complaint with its predecessor Far Cry, it starts off marvelously, then just takes a wrong turn at the end, which is really unfortunate. Now, maybe I'll come back to it in two years with more computing power and a few patches and be blown away. If only they could have spent another couple weeks fixing the bugs.

Recently Played: Bioshock (PC)

I recently finished playing BioShock.

Overall, it is an excellent game, probably the best game of the year so far. That said, I keep thinking back to my previous gaming obsession, The Elder Scrolls IV: Oblivion, and somehow it was never quite as captivating. I logged over 100 hours in Oblivion and mostly stopped playing in order to get some sort of a life back (World of Warcraft players, I salute and pity you). BioShock clocked in at probably one fifth of that time, but somehow there was never that compulsion to play, that planning your life around figuring when you can get back to the game.

What's good about BioShock? The graphics are amazing, certainly. The Big Daddy is simply an awesome character, perhaps one of the most memorable characters I have seen in years. The setting is very cool, an underwater city in 1920s art deco style. The sense that Something Very Bad has happened is ever-present - there is scarcely any part of the city that is not falling apart in some way, leaks and rubble everywhere. Thinking back on the sterile environments of most games of even a few years ago really makes an impression as to how far games have come even recently.

Still, I just don't feel as excited about the game as I think I should. Maybe it's because the story gets a little derailed after the main plot twist (and the story was a little confusing to begin with). Maybe it's that the final boss battle is such a departure from the rest of the game. (Really, the ending of the game is a bit of a letdown.) Maybe it's because the game takes control away from the player at some key moments, most notably at the end. Really, the places where control is taken away are exactly the points in the game where giving player a choice would have made the game great. (Note to self: After the final big boss battle, do not take control away from the player and end the game immediately.)

Maybe it's because, despite one attempt at allowing the player to make a moral choice, the game forces you to do some rather questionable things in order to advance. That linearity to the game is really the biggest weakness. At the end of each level, the game's transportation system will allow you to travel to any of the previous environments, but there doesn't seem to be any compelling reason to do so.

All of the ingredients are there to have an open ended game with multiple solutions to each problem (the easy, evil road, or the hard, good road) but they were never executed on. I really have to suspect that that is the game that was originally designed, but could not be achieved for reasons of money or time. Being a game developer I have an immense amount of sympathy and understand as to why those things may not have panned out as expected. Certainly the pressure to get the game out the door, especially one as good as this, would be immense. Maybe I'm just disappointed that what could have been an all-time classic (as I would expect Oblivion to be considered) will go down as one of many games-of-the-year that are all too quickly forgotten.


Buy it, enjoy it, just don't expect it to change your life.

See also: Zero Punctuation Review of BioShock