‘> The Painting is Firmly Attached to the Wall’: The Frustrating Art of Art Games

Gamers are notoriously bad at dealing with loosely-termed ‘art games’. Myself included. With the recent releases of The Graveyard by Auriea Harvey & Michaël Samyn, and The Jackyard by Richard Hofmeier, I thought I’d attempt to take a somewhat broader view of ‘art games’, and try to understand exactly what an art game is.

In this article I take on the very common problem of players becoming bored or frustrated by “art games”. I try to spin some new language around games that help us understand how they relate to art, and vice-versa, all in the hope that more gamers have the opportunity to take on any kind of game without quitting in frustration.

I don’t begrudge gamers for having difficulty with understanding art – almost everyone does. Gamers came up with these responses to The Graveyard and The Jackyard (culled from various sources):

“Am I right in saying that Tale of Tales don’t make “games”, rather, they make “interactive experiences”, because it would be crass to call their works “games”?
Sigh.”

“That wasn’t very fun.”

“I think ‘interactive experience’ is a fair name for it; there’s very little which is traditionally game-like about it. Anyway, not really worth playing, I think. There’s just an awkward camera, a slow walk, and a quiet song.”

“The camera is actually sort of central to what I don’t like about the game; that they give you the pretense of a world you can walk about and explore, and then the inexplicably broken camera is the excuse that keeps you from being able to explore it at all. So I immediately fight with it, walking off the screen till I can’t see the lady any more and am afraid I’m stuck on something back there.”

“Does anyone know what to do???
(Except walking around?)”

“Certainly interesting, but seems very short.”

Common to all of these comments is the sense that games are about immediacy: action, reaction, novelty, responsiveness, control, like, dislike, etc. For a large majority of gamers, games are about immediate and momentary enjoyment. Games that don’t respond with immediate feedback, give the player a sense of exploration or achievement, or give the player complete control over the character, are often reviewed as boring or frustrating experiences. To some degree that accounts for why the great majority, 99.999% of all games created today, are player-driven action games. These kinds of games put the player in the hot seat and hand over the keys to an on-screen representation of themselves. “Interaction” is understood as something active, something that the player does and the game responds to.

In other forms of art, interaction is often understood differently. Viewing a painting, listening to music, or reading poetry is also thought of as an interactive experience – between the viewer-listener-reader and the art piece. “Interactivity” in this case is predicated upon the idea that the artist produces a work that engages the audience’s imaginations and feelings. Ultimately, the responsibility for engaging with a work of art is in the hands of the audience – the artist has no “say” in determining what our experiences are. The art piece is a public artifact in an imaginative dialogue with an audience.

Video and computer games are held against a different standard of interactivity. “Interactivity” in games mean that the computer must provide the player with the illusion that the computer is “responding” to the player’s choices. When that illusion is frustrated, for instance because the character cannot “do” what the player wants her/him to do, players often feel that their sense of dialogue with the game is destroyed. In this form of immediate activity the player is in a literal dialogue with the game. In many ways video games imitate or represent real-world dialogical interaction. Action-reaction. Decision-consequence.

The point is that in imaginative dialogues the audience shoulders the great responsibility of the interpretive work. In video games, the great bulk of interpretive work is done by the computer. In the first, the audience gains a sense of closeness with the piece through the imagination – the symbols in the work of art evoke imagery and feelings for us. In video games, the sense of closeness is based upon a physicalistic metaphor – if I push against a box on the screen it better damned move! The meaning of what is happening is progressively and literally shaped by the computer, in response to the player’s actions.

This is why games like The Graveyard and The Jackyard often receive such (empty) criticism. Many gamers don’t want to interact with a piece through an imaginative dialogue, they want the kinds of literal dialogues that they’ve become accustomed to. So-called “art games” often play at the more imaginative end of the tension between imagination and immediacy – art games require the player to make some kind of interpretive judgment in order to determine what is meaningful, and rely much less upon the elements of literal dialogue to shape meanings.

True, we speak in relative terms here. There are many games that play at the tension between imagination and literal interactivity, and many of these accomplish the feat marvelously. Interactive fiction games often deliver interactivity through the imagination. Sandbox games provide an open environment where the imagination can be expressed through interactivity. Somewhere closer to the middle are role-playing games such as Planescape: Torment and Wasteland that put the player in the midst of the action, yet provide a living and breathing landscape that defies total control.

Near the imaginative end of the spectrum is The Jackyard. Richard Hofmeier does a great job of exploiting and frustrating the expectations of the literal gamer. The game is full of obstacles that aren’t puzzles to be solved, art images that simply exist for their aesthetic qualities, and a coal-colored palette that is deeply integrated with its equally stark musical score. The world that Richard has produced is an artifact for our exploration and understanding, by prodding at artistic expression through the language of game. Determining how and if his work achieves what it is trying to do is your work as the player. So temporarily put aside your preconceptions (or not) and give The Jackyard and The Graveyard a go. Post your comments on the games, and let’s try to figure out together what the heck they mean.

Once we’ve started to develop this new language of art in games, I suspect that “game criticism” and “game reviews” will be much more interesting than a reviewer’s opinion.