Is Art Games? Turning the debate around

So much time has been spent now talking about how we can have games taken seriously as an art form, yet so little conclusion has come of it. I would like to demonstrate something that, in my opinion, demonstrates how we can adjust the way we look at games, and the way we treat them, so that we might better understand the medium of interaction. Rather than attempt to demonstrate the ways in which games are an art form, I would like to demonstrate how we can view the world of art as a game in itself.

The phrase "art must be challenging" is a tad controversial within the art world. Certainly, the extremes of the modernist art produced under this mantra may have proven to be the downfall of modern visual art, but the fact remains that without a challenge to our perceptions, without making us think about our perceptions of reality, art is not so much art as entertainment.

For art to truly engage the viewer, then, it needs to challenge them just enough that they "get it" without being turned off. Following this logic, the key to creating accessible (and hopefully popular) art would be to strike a balance between understandable imagery and challenging content - between what a viewer would find "easy" to process, and what would be difficult.

Compare this to this image, used by Jesper Juul in his paper "Fear of Failure: The Many Meanings of Failure in Video Games":

"A Better Flow": Noah Folstein, 2004

With this diagram, Folstein (and, by extension, Juul) show the optimum difficulty level increase wherein a game will reach be at its most engaging to the player. A game that is too hard is impossible to play, yet a game that is too easy offers no challenge, thus teaching nothing, thus imbuing no sense of fun in the player.

Let us now briefly address an argument from the opposite direction. Within the gaming world, there is much debate on the subject of Shared Authorship - the idea that a game's story should be viewed as something created in partnership between a game's designer and the player of a game. Quite where the line between these two elements of authorship should lie is a subject worthy of a great deal of discussion.

Now, read this quote from Marcel Duchamps, herald of the modern art movement:

The creative act is not performed by the artist alone; the spectator brings the work in contact with the external world by deciphering and interpreting its inner qualifications and thus adds his contribution to the creative act.

If Duchamps is correct, art - and specifically the process of appreciating, understanding, and/or being moved by art, also shares the parallel of shared authorship with games.

In short, then, I believe that the appreciation and understanding of an art form is a game - just as socializing, learning, and almost every activity that involves the process of interaction - either physical or emotional - is also a game. Understanding just how and why this happens is key to understanding how we can better exploit the games we make, and produce a deeper and more meaningful experience.

Game Critique: Paper Moon

What follows is my first attempt to critique a game from a critical/academic standpoint. For this, I have chosen Blursts's recently released "Paper Moon".

I would like to start by saying that I thoroughly enjoyed the game, and feel it is a marvelous achievement of which the Blurst team should be proud. I hope that they appreciate the nature of what I am doing here, and why I feel it is necessary to look at games in this way. Thus I will not be discussing how much "fun" I had playing the game, or quantifying the experience in any way, but looking at how it is constructed compared to what we know about the concepts of game design.

I would also like to point out that I am not qualified enough to fully critique and assess the value of Paper Moon as an aesthetic experience, and if anyone out there feels they could provide this, I would enjoy reading it.

Paper Moon, then, is one of many games which attempts to build on the time-honoured tradition of the "2-Dimensional platform game". To the standard format, it adds the ability to "pop" pieces of the scenery between 3 frames on a 3rd axis (akin to the way in which a player moves in the third axis in Little Big Planet).

This twist on the genre works well, enhancing the exploration aspect that is the primary rewarding action in all platformers. It displays not only an understanding of the central concepts, but an embracing and exploiting of the limitations of the 2 dimensional platform genre.

The game's controls are the simple standard for the genre, and Blurst use them well, not complicating them. Control of the player's character is fluid and easily understood, and the game mechanics are communicated well through aesthetic touches and cryptic hints.

The Blurst team have managed to reap a satisfying number of interactions from a small number of interactive elements. The game's elements comprise:

• The player character (able to move left and right and jump)
• Enemy characters, who "kill" the player character on contact
• Static scenery, with which both players and enemies collide
• "Poppable" scenery, with which the player and enemies collide only when it is in the central plane.

From this, Blurst have also produced a combat dynamic - by timing "pops" of the scenery, you can "kill" enemies by catching them in the motion of the scenery. While utilised heavily within the game's puzzles, this dynamic feels emergent enough to be rewarding to the player, as do most of Paper Moon's puzzles.

The game also features a branching pathway - shown clearly on the map displayed between sections of the game. These two diverging routes are balanced in such a way that neither route feels easier or more challenging than the other, or offers any different way of playing the game. As such, they allow the player some degree of self-expression and choice in how they explore the game, but not any difference in experience.

This is all driven by a vague narrative, open to interpretation. Based on current thinking on shared authorship within games, the player is not given a particularly strong drive to reach their intended goal. While the goal itself is made clear enough through the aesthetics of the game, the narrative overtones suggest a more driven experience was intended. In terms of modern thinking on shared authorship, Paper Moon feels dissonant - the game is clearly designer-driven in terms of story, and falls mostly on the side of the designer in its gameplay also, but yet does not give the player a particularly driving story element to push them through to the end.

Paper Moon's reward/fail system is rounded out by returning the player to a checkpoint on an instance of player "death" (a subject of much recent debate) without any further punishment. Interestingly, they use this as a transportation method to allow the player to solve puzzles. Communication of this to the player is not laboured - a cryptic but direct hint was given at the only point where use of the method was necessary - and the slight nature of the punishment allows the player the freedom to explore the possibilities involved. The checkpoints are spaced well enough to maintain the player's interest and reduce - but not completely remove - instances of the player having to repeat the composition phase of earlier play, which would lead to a lowered (but not lost) frustration in the player.

This, however, leads to the game's primary flaw. The game's only failure condition is a timer, which ticks down constantly during play, and can only be rejuvenated with the collection of bonuses within the environment. This comes as a two-fold flaw in the game design - in terms of Hocking's Compose/Execute cycle, this represents a complete drop from execution, and a repeat of previous composition, which would lead to frustration on the part of the player - as well as being something which the player cannot prepare for fully in the composition phase. It also stands in opposition to the player's main rewarding behaviour - that of exploration and experimentation within the game.

In terms of Koster's Theory Of Fun, the game's short length does it many favours - the limited interactions are exploited as far as possible, but repetition of already-learned skills is, towards the end of the game, being repeated with no increment to required skill level. Had the game been any longer, interactions would have become stale, and players would likely have drifted into complacency, as show on Noah Falstein's diagram of game flow (which can be seen here in Jesper Juul's study on failure). As it is, the game seems to manage to maintain a solid learning curve and flow.

All in all, Paper Moon offers a degree of originality in the otherwise stale 2-dimensional platform genre, with a good understanding of a player's desires and goals. The movement and exploration at the core of the game feel mostly free and open to self-expression on the part of the player, but yet at times it seems to eager to punish the player for this, putting its failure conditions at odds with the gameplay goals. Blurst show a great understanding of the values of game design, and it will be interesting to see where they go from here.