games: The Path
It’s a question that’s long plagued the doodling industry.
Are drawings art?
Experts say that some drawings can become pieces of art if they’re particularly good, others say that all drawings are art - it’s just that a lot of it is rubbish. Like this drawing of a tiny badger in an eggcup that I did.
A lot of people ask whether games are art, too. I can exclusively reveal today that the definitive answer is:
Maybe.
They might be. One thing’s for sure - games are like loads of drawings shown one after the other 30 times a second, so in a way they’re like Turbo Art.
Anyway, Tale of Tales have made a game that’s going to set off an flurry of industry-insider blogs that haven’t been seen since Braid. The Path takes the classic tale of Red Riding Hood, and turns it into a disturbing, slightly unplayable journey around a forest. The instructions are simple. Choose one of the six red girls, take her to grandmother’s house, and don’t stray from the path. Follow those instructions, and you’ll make it safely to your grandmother’s house after a minute or so. Game over.
That’s considered a failure. The Path isn’t about obeying the rules. It’s about exploration. It’s not saying that exploration is good; just that people do explore, and bad things happen to people. There’s no morality - just a atmospheric assortment of discoveries, flowers to pick, and ways to die.
Eventually, you’ll find the Wolf. It’s not a real wolf, because this is art. Whatever form the wolf takes, and whatever it does to you - it’s all open to interpretation - it leaves you unconscious outside your grandmother’s house. You drag yourself to your feet, and walk incredibly slowly to the house, where the second part of the game takes place. That’s an on-rails tour of the creepy hallucinations in the house - with your controls limited to “press any key to continue”. It’s not like that if you follow the path, and don’t meet the wolf. Are you dead? What happened? What’s going on?
ART?!
Although the minimal controls work in some areas of the game, the fact the game takes so much away from you can leave you feeling slightly impatient.
For example, when you’re close to an item of interest, the game prevents you from running. Clearly, the writers didn’t want you making the game look stupid by running around a piano. But it feels incredibly restrictive regardless.
It’s definitely worth getting The Path - it’s available on the PC for download from Steam, Direct2Drive and Metaboli. You won’t play anything else like it, and if you want to talk about whether games are art with your fancy mates, it’s something you absolutely have to play. No stars, but a very nice drawing of some.
Are games art? Oh no, here comes a mega-rant.
First of all is that stumbling block of it - by its nature - being a combination of established artforms into an industry. Of course, film has already jumped that one and is now accepted as an art form.
Second is a problem that is difficult because it depends on the person viewing it. What IS art? Does it have to have a purpose? I would say yes. What KIND of a purpose? I would say to convey an idea, whatever that idea is. An art piece that is only meant to annoy is indeed art. I would even call Warhol an artist, though it peeves me to do so. “to entertain” in itself is not an “idea” to be conveyed, so many films and certainly most games are not art, though they may be terrific forms of entertainment!
Third is simply the problem of acceptance. Most of society doesn’t accept The Game as art, so it simply isn’t.
If you look at how films and games compare, you can walk into any film, even the blockbusters, and have an enriching experience. Film has evolved through several waves of renewal and deconstruction by various art movements (Avant Garde, New Wave, etc) and has come out of it with the sense that anything can happen and that they are full of ideas. Films are entertainment and art, in equal measure. Games are still new. At the moment, to make a comparison, we’re around the age of Eisenstein’s theories of montage and the avant-garde’s deconstruction of What Is Cinematic. The indie games like Braid, Flower, Noby Noby Boy and The Path all try to push the idea of what constitutes a game. There’s a game called Execution where the only way to win is to not execute. Though they’re nowhere near as extreme, these are the avant-gardists of the game medium. But around this time, films were already beginning to be accepted as an art. Why are they different?
I think one key problem is that while films have a close kinship with books in that they are fully linear narratives (you start in the beginning and move toward the end, though the linearity of what comes within that can be jumbled.) that have a very clear-cut beginning-middle-end structure most of the time. This makes film easier to accept, because BOOKS are already accepted. Games go and throw the concept of interactivity into the loop, and no matter how linear the game is made to be (even games like Linear RPG, which is meant to be as linear as you possibly can get) there is an inherent aspect of non-linearity, and that non-linearity is entirely in the hands of the consumer! Don’t want to move forward in Pitfall? Go to and fro on the same screen, jumping the same hurdles! You can actually “rewind” it and it will keep moving forward. This is a bit weird, and I’m not even sure even -I- understand what I’m talking about now, so I’ll get on with some semblance of a conclusion.
Are games art? I wouldn’t say “maybe”, I would say “Sometimes”. The problem is that games are first and foremost entertainment. There are brave souls who’ve been championing games as an art form, but until we see their ideas bleed more heavily into mainstream gaming culture, I would not say that the medium of games is an art form just yet. A definite part of the “culture” term, yes, but not an art form. It’s too rooted in “entertainment” for now. Just look at the once-promising game Love, which looked to become an esoteric and peaceful walk through an expressionist painting that you could change the landscape of, but then turned into an action-strategy game with deformable environments.
Personally, I think it’s actually kind of useless to call entire media art or not. Surely, art can come from any medium? If forks are not an art form, can not an individual fork BE art anyway? So rather than discuss “are games art?” maybe we should be asking ourselves “is this particular game art?”. I know, I just ranted for ages and then finished by saying that my entire rant is useless. I’m like that. ^_^