This is a bit difficult, since everyone has a different definition of the word art. What I'll focus on is a key aspect of art: the communication of emotions to a person through the art object.
Participation
The obvious difference between video games and, for example, films is that games are interactive. Viewers experience a film by passively sitting and watching a screen, taking in a fully formed, singular work. In a game, the player has influence over the path that the game takes; she has a part in creating the work of art herself.
Creation of Art
Rez
One of my favorite games is Rez. It takes the 1980s-era idea of a hacker―a technological wizard, who dons goggles and gloves to dive into cyberspace and steal his way through firewalls into virtual fortresses to acquire secret treasure caches of mysterious bits―and turns it into a game. If you've ever read Neuromancer or Snow Crash you know what I'm talking about. It was originally released on the Dreamcast, then the PS2, but these versions are pretty rare to find. Luckily, an HD update of the game can be found on Xbox Live Arcade for the 360.
It's also a music game!
Rez is a rail shooter. Think of it as a very pure, minimalistic version of Star Fox. The video will show you what I mean. However, the video doesn't really give you the full experience. In order to get that, you have to play the game yourself.
If you pay close attention to the video, you will notice that every player action that takes place will trigger a sound effect (and also a text description of the action, in the top-left corner of the screen). When you lock onto an enemy, there is a percussive click. When you release your shots, you hear a synthesized vocal "aahh". New musical cues begin when (if) you destroy the cube that lets you progress to the next part of the level. Every aspect of the game is designed to give you audiovisual feedback that echoes the gameplay that you are seeing. Even your character pulses in tune to beat.
In addition, Rez has one of the most perfectly fitting uses of the controller vibration function. The tactile experience of holding it in your hands parellels the experience given by the audio. And it doesn't just have to be your hands. The game's sequel, Child of Eden, even sends vibration to all four of the controllers. The intention is that you put one in each pocket, and rest your feet on one, while you control the game with the fourth.
To bring this back to the main topic, the key point here is that it is the player that brings the game to life. To everyone but the player, the experience is nothing more than a music video. However, the player himself is enveloped in sensory input from his eyes, ears, and body that comes directly from the movement that his thumbs make. When I play Rez, I get a feeling of wonder. The interactive aspect of Rez is essential for me to experience that emotion.
It's also a music game!
If you pay close attention to the video, you will notice that every player action that takes place will trigger a sound effect (and also a text description of the action, in the top-left corner of the screen). When you lock onto an enemy, there is a percussive click. When you release your shots, you hear a synthesized vocal "aahh". New musical cues begin when (if) you destroy the cube that lets you progress to the next part of the level. Every aspect of the game is designed to give you audiovisual feedback that echoes the gameplay that you are seeing. Even your character pulses in tune to beat.
In addition, Rez has one of the most perfectly fitting uses of the controller vibration function. The tactile experience of holding it in your hands parellels the experience given by the audio. And it doesn't just have to be your hands. The game's sequel, Child of Eden, even sends vibration to all four of the controllers. The intention is that you put one in each pocket, and rest your feet on one, while you control the game with the fourth.
To bring this back to the main topic, the key point here is that it is the player that brings the game to life. To everyone but the player, the experience is nothing more than a music video. However, the player himself is enveloped in sensory input from his eyes, ears, and body that comes directly from the movement that his thumbs make. When I play Rez, I get a feeling of wonder. The interactive aspect of Rez is essential for me to experience that emotion.
Story Involvement
Most games have some sort of story that is told to the player. Sometimes the story is as linear and unchanging as a movie, sometimes it branches out widely depending on player choices. A branching story is a concept that has actually been around for at least 40 years in the form of Choose Your Own Adventure books. A key difference between those books and video games is that in the books you are choosing the path that you would like the narrative to travel along, whereas in the games you are actually performing the choices that you make, yourself.
Morality
In video games where you can make plot choices, I have often found myself unable to pick a specific choice, for emotional reasons. Despite the knowledge that the game world is entirely artificial, I find it very difficult to play the role of an evil character. My sense of morality survives in the virtual world, with the way that I treat fictional people.
Everyone who has played a Bioware RPG probably knows what I'm talking about.
Mass Effect 2
As an example, I'm going to use Mass Effect 2. This is one of the more famous scenes from the game and features very minor spoilers.
In the Mass Effect series, you are Shepard, the leader of a team that's out to save the universe. The game is very story-heavy, with lengthy cinematic conversations that let you pick different dialog choices, depending on your preferences. The game's notion of morality is not the typical good-evil dichotomy, but is a bit subtler. One on side you can play as a Paragon, where you are a goody-two-shoes who colors within the lines; the other option is to play as a Renegade, where you do whatever it takes to achieve your goals. Either way, you still play a "good" person who wants to save everyone from the evil antagonists. Some dialog choices are labelled specifically as blue (Paragon) or red (Renegade), letting you determine the approach you want to take to deal with a situation.
The reason I picked Mass Effect 2 for this is that it introduced a mechanic that doesn't let you sit and think about your options. If you look at about 50s into the video, there is a red mouse icon that appears in the bottom left corner of the screen. That icon means that you can make a Renegade action (because it is red) at that instant, but if you wait more than a couple seconds, the moment will pass and you won't be able to go down that route anymore.
I think this is really a genius approach to story-telling. In order to have Shepard make the choices that you want him to make, you can't sit back and think slowly and rationally about the options. You don't have enough time to have your brain process what's going on, you need to react immediately. You have to immerse yourself in the game from an emotional perspective, so that you can use your intuition and gut reaction to guide your course of action. In the example above, when I was playing the game, I used my personal feeling towards the enemy soldier to decide whether to throw him out the window. I feel a burst of adrenaline every time I see that option come up. The game puts you on the spot in a way that could never happen in a non-interactive piece of art. A painting or a movie can't force you to make a decision in the moment. This can create anxiety or surprise in a player that increases the immersion that she feels.
Consequences and Reactions
Baldur's Gate II
Baldur's Gate II is another Bioware game that is commonly viewed as one of the best RPGs of all time. The morality system is much greyer than in Mass Effect. The game is based of Dungeons and Dragons, so there is a good-neutral-evil split. However, none of your choices are labelled as such, and you are free to act however you desire at any given time and your decisions are quite important in how the plots and subplots develop and how other characters view you.
The next few paragraphs will completely spoil one sidequest (my favorite one, in fact) in the game, so skip to the next section if you want.
In BGII, you encounter many of your compatriots from the first game. All of them have their own subplots and sidequests and most of them can join your party, if you can get them to want to do so. At one point you encounter Xzar, a mage who was a party member from the first game. In BGI, he was the constant companion of Montaron, a thief; in fact, you could not actually separate the two of them, unless one died. You needed to either have both or neither of them in your party. In BGII, when you encounter Xzar, he is alone, which is a bit surprising.
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| Xzar | Montaron |
Xzar asks you to help him save Montaron, who had snuck into a nearby mansion and hadn't come out. The owners of the mansion are quite powerful, so this was a major problem for them. Once you get into the mansion, you find evidence that Montaron has been turned into a bird. You have the opportunity to catch the bird and bring it back to Xzar, so he can remove the bird transformation spell.
I did all of this, following along like a good little protagonist. You have to understand that these games train you to do what the NPCs want. They give you quests, you do them, you get rewards. That is how the world works. It's a kind of Skinner Box.
I gave the bird to Xzar, he cast his spell, and it turned back into a person. However, the person that it becomes is not Montaron at all, but someone else. This unknown stranger immediately stabs Xzar, killing him, before you can even react. It turns out that the entire quest was a ploy created by the owners of the mansion to assassinate Xzar and that you've been manipulated all along.
Being manipulated by an NPC is quite common in games. However, there is almost always some sort of foreshadowing that lets you know that this is the case. The villain's tone of voice, or visual appearance, or dialog will give away the fact that all is not as it seems. This is also a common trope in movies, where the hero gets betrayed by his shifty accomplice. In this instance, I had no idea what was about to happen.
My initial reaction was to stare at my screen in shock for a few seconds. After that, I had to scroll up and read the dialog history to confirm what had just happened. Then I just looked at my hands and thought, "what did I just do?"
It was my actions that caused an ally to die, all because I was too easily deceived. I felt a bit uncomfortable with regret about my decisions. Of course, then I smiled, because of how cool it was that a video game could induce such an emotion in me. Most forms of art can't instill regret in an audience; one only empathizes with a character that feels regret, or retrieves a memory that causes that emotion. Non-interactive art pieces can't create agency in people who experience them, because they are purely voyeuristic and non-participatory. Without agency, there is no way to get people to perform actions that they view as wrong. That agency also deepens the emotional feelings of the audience (the players) because they have personal involvement in the events that take place.
Braid
Major spoilers of Braid follow. Please do not read this section if you think you might play this game, but have not. This will ruin the story for you entirely.
Braid is a platformer whose characters, environments, and story come straight from the original Mario Bros. games, but with a painted visual style.
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| "Mario" and "Yoshi" |
The major game mechanic is the manipulation of time. You can rewind time at any...uh...time and use that ability in order to solve a series of puzzles.
The story of the game has you searching for a princess, who you have to save from some unknown evil. Every chapter begins with books that talk of her and every chapter ends with a Yoshi-analog who mentions her. It very clearly plays like a high-art Mario parody and the player is meant to view himself in the role of the standard heroic savior. However, the princess doesn't even appear until the very end of the game.
When you first see the princess, she is being chased by an evil knight and asks you for help. She starts running along the top of the screen, away from the knight, while you run along the bottom, trying to keep up with her. Along the way, she'll trigger switches to remove obstacles from your path. When you get to the very end, time freezes.
The only option you have at that point is to hold the rewind button down. You then view what just happened, but in reverse. This time, the princess is running away from you, dropping obstacles in your path to stop you! The knight actually arrives to save her and he is the one that she asks for help. It turns out that you are, in fact, the antagonist, trying to capture the princess.
Every aspect of the story that you have experienced is turned on its head. The text that appeared to be normal exposition of your desire to save the princess, now takes on a creepy and sinister tone. You were the bad guy.
I really love Braid and wish I could play it again for the first time. There are many movies that feature a plot twist at the end, but they don't touch me in as personal a way as Braid does. I was the evil one and everything I was working for was wrong, even though I thought that, at the time, I was trying to help. The game puts the player in a participatory role in evil acts in a way that non-interactive media can not do.
It reminds me of the amazing WWII miniseries, Band of Brothers. This video may be disturbing.
This is a bit of an extreme example, I know. I feel like I got a very small glimpse of what it would have been like for those German citizens to see a concentration camp for the first time and realize that that was they had been supporting throughout the war; to have a hand in something that goes against one's deepest moral code.
I didn't expect to end on a sad note, but, oh well.
To be continued with: Mechanics as Art.
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