Games v. Art v. Time

I was hoping to avoid entering the "Games as Art" debate, because I felt that the question was (a) insulting and (b) obvious. Of course games are art. Or, rather, they can be, if that's what they strive for. Film is an art form, but I defy anyone to defend a piece of shit like, say, "Transformers 2" as art. Similarly, Roger Ebert saying that games can never be art is, ultimately, meaningless; no matter how smart he is, or erudite, he has not actually played any games, and therefore his argument - however well-constructed - is irrelevant. My personal opinion is that if you haven't experienced a thing, you are not inherently qualified to have your judgment matter.

But I had an epiphany of sorts last night and I figured I might as well bring it up, especially as I was a bit surprised at what side of the fence I ended up on. Let me set the scene, then, as the prelude has everything to do with the conclusion.

A great deal of my down time yesterday at work was spent reading various Rock Paper Shotgun articles about the 10 year anniversary of Deus Ex; this one is as good a place to start as any. Deus Ex - at least the first one - is still held as a pinnacle of game design; it did the whole "choice" thing long before Peter Molyneux and Bioware started offering it as a bullet point. You could pretty much do anything you wanted to - you could be stealthy, you could be lethal, you could be manipulative, and the game responded in turn. I, like a few of the participants in the RPS article above, played and enjoyed the game when it first game out, but hadn't played it since. And so, by the time I got home last night, Steam had put both Deus Ex 1 and 2 on sale for a ridiculously low price - I think they were $5 combined - and I felt obligated to download them and re-experience a masterpiece.

Let me offer up a quote from the RPS article now, because it's somewhat crucial to my eventual point:

I want to cling to my memories and experience, not have it tainted by age, creakiness and other people’s bluster. Even looking in on it last night, I was horrified by how not-huge the levels seemed now. I didn’t want to destroy their grandeur in my memory, so I couldn’t stay for long.

So while I was downloading the Deus Ex games, my wife and I watched Wipeout (ridiculous TV, not art) and then, because we're in that weird point of our Netflix queue where the movies we have are good, classic movies that we're never in the mood to watch, we decided to watch "Visions of Light," a documentary about the history of cinematography that I'd heard was great.

If you've read this blog with any sort of regularity, you'll know that I am a graphics whore. This also extends to film - my favorite directors (Kubrick, Gilliam, Jeunet, Gondry, the Coens, etc.) are all absolutely brilliant with the camera and use it as much as anything else to tell the story. I am a big big fan of Gordon Willis, Conrad Hall and Roger Deakins; the biggest reason why I liked the most recent Harry Potter movie was that it was shot by the same guy who did Amelie, which is one of my all-time favorites.

Anyway, so this documentary was really, really fascinating. It covered a general history of American cinematography, and showed lots of out-of-context clips which did a terrific job of illustrating the cinematographer's relationship to the art of storytelling. There were a few notable omissions - no mention at all of Eisenstein's influence, which seemed surprising, and only one Hitchcock movie ("Rebecca", which wasn't even identified as a Hitchcock film). And, of course, the film was released in 1993, which was right around the time when CGI really started to become prominent, and the transition from film to digital would seem to be as big a technological leap as the transition from black & white to color. But I digress; the documentary was really just about the evolution of the form through the years, from early silent films to the noir period of the 40s and 50s, and then to the Scorcese films of the 70s, with some specific examples of absolutely fantastic shots and how they were designed and filmed.

And one of the films that was brought up, again and again, was Citizen Kane. Citizen Kane is rightly held up as one of the greatest films ever made, and a great deal of the film's genius is due to the cinematography of Gregg Toland - indeed, Orson Welles placed Toland's name and credit right next to his, as a rightly-deserved tribute to his contributions. Just about every cinematographer interviewed in the movie held up Toland's work as the pinnacle of the profession, and as a deep influence on every film that followed.

Here's the thing: Citizen Kane still holds up. If you watch it now, nearly 70 years after its release, it doesn't seem nearly as stodgy or stiff as a lot of films from that era can, and most of its camera moves and shots are still breathtaking and jaw-dropping. It is, in short, timeless.

And this is where it started to occur to me that this notion of "timelessness" has a lot to do with the games as art debate. Because here's the thing: if you play the original Deus Ex now, as I did last night, it's.... kinda terrible. It's clunky, it's poorly acted, it's ugly. It's relative ugliness is perhaps unfair - 10 years is an eternity these days in terms of technology - but, still, if you took today's Call of Duty-playing teenager and sat him or her down in front of Deus Ex, they would probably say "this sucks" about 5 to 10 minutes in, and move on. And this is important, because Deus Ex wasn't just another first person shooter; it was incredibly ambitious and state-of-the-art for its time, and now, only 10 years later, it feels like an ancient relic.

The thing about "great art", I think, is that it can be appreciated and enjoyed regardless of when one is experiencing it. Shakespeare is still resonant today, even if the language can sound foreign. Mozart and Bach can still stir one's emotions; Michelangelo and Picasso can still inspire awe and wonder.

Gaming, however, is hampered by a multitude of artistic difficulties. One could certainly make the very valid point that the vast majority of games have absolutely no intention to be art. They may be beautiful to look at, but they are ultimately meant to exist as product. But there's more to it than that. 2 points to consider:

1. The technology used to make (and play) games is evolving at such a rapid pace that there's no real "constant." Simply in terms of graphics, a game that looks fantastic now will eventually look shitty in a few years; but if you just factor in how a game controls, a game that you loved dearly 5 years ago is damn near unplayable now. Your memories of playing Goldeneye in college 10 years ago will not stand up to the reality of playing Goldeneye now, not after Halo and Call of Duty and everything else. Shit, my memories of GTA3 are all that game has going for it now that GTA4 has come and gone, and my experience with Red Dead Redemption has made GTA4 seem archaic in many respects.
   
   
2. Moreover, a game that you loved dearly 5 years ago is probably on a console that doesn't work anymore, or that you no longer have hooked up to your television - or that you are no longer able to hook up to your television. I still have my Dreamcast and a somewhat large library of Dreamcast games, but I'm not sure that I can get them to work with my HDTV without going out and buying cables (not to mention that it's also a near certainty that the VMUs in my Dreamcast controllers are dead). It saddens me to know that I'll probably never get to play Skies of Arcadia again, simply because I can't. But in a way, that's good, because my memories of Skies of Arcadia do not seem to include the relentless frequency of random encounters...

So then. What now?

I was about to predict that within the next 5-10 years, the technology curve will flatten out to the extent that it will not necessarily matter how many trillions of polygons you can render per second; the human brain is only capable of processing so much. 3D may or may not take off; I think it will, eventually, but not next year (which is what Sony seems to think); I personally don't anticipate buying a new 3D HDTV until (a) the price comes way down and (b) there's enough content to support it, and I think that (a) and (b) are still a few years off. But what the hell do I know - I didn't understand the Wii, either, and the whole concept of Natal/Kinect seems more like science fiction than something I'm going to be using in a matter of months. Still, though, at a certain point, there's only so many pixels the human eye can process; games will eventually reach a finite level of graphical fidelity.

Which means that creativity will have to take over. That's what it's always done, in every artistic discipline; the rules are laid out, the forms are given shape, the boundaries are drawn, and that's when the artists can truly shine, because to break the rules will finally mean something. This is not to dismiss the truly outstanding artistic achievements in today's games, of which there are many; it is only to say that once there is a standard form, a form that doesn't require a new television and console and controller and eyewear every year, a form that every designer and artist and programmer can actually work with for more than six months without getting antiquated - it's at that point that I think we can expect truly amazing things to happen. It is at that point that we can finally have our Citizen Kane.

(I apologize if my conclusion is a little rushed; the US just scored against Albania and I'm dreaming of naming my future child Donovan.)

Modern Warfare 2

*SPOILERS AHEAD*

For years now, there's been a growing discussion about the importance of Story, specifically as it applies to videogames. The people having that discussion also may bring up the concept of Art, as in: "Are videogames art?" As the game industry grows larger and fights for legitimacy in the public eye, this question becomes important, even if it's not necessarily relevant.

A lot of great game franchises have been ruined by Story. The Tony Hawk franchise is a perfect example; the first few games really just focused on capturing the experience of skateboarding, and to that end they succeeded mightily. Eventually, though, as the game kept churning out sequels with marginal technical improvements and the need to innovate became stronger, the game developed a story mode. And that's really where the franchise fell apart, for me. I didn't care about being a little skate punk, I didn't need to stick it to the man, etc.; all I wanted to was skate, and do the things that I couldn't do in real life. I suppose I could've hung in if the story was at least told well, but it was bland and unoriginal. What was I supposed to expect? The developers had been making a skateboarding game, but now they were supposed to tell me a story? How do those particular disciplines mesh?

Then there's games like Brutal Legend, which is so focused on its story and the design of the world you play in that the actual gameplay feels like an afterthought. Sometimes that works, sometimes that doesn't. On the opposite side of that spectrum, a game like Borderlands has almost no story to speak of, but the gameplay is so well-designed and focused that it almost doesn't even matter that there's no story-driven motivation.

And then there are franchises like Metal Gear, where the story is so central to the experience that there's almost no actual game to play; a 10 minute action sequence will be followed by a 40-minute cut scene, and then you'll walk down a hallway and another 30-minute cut scene will ensue. I'm not going to get into MGS's story quality, because that's an entirely different 10,000-word blogpost, and in any event I've already written about it.

But story quality is important, and that's my real bone to pick with Modern Warfare 2.

The Call of Duty franchise's defining characteristic has been its scripted events. You'll play as an American soldier, and then after a big "event" you'll switch perspectives and then play as a British soldier, or a Russian soldier, etc. Call of Duty 4, which moved the franchise out of the trenches of WW2 and into modern day, kept this perspective-switching intact but also took it in intriguing and shocking new directions; the very beginning of the game features your character suddenly being executed, and the end of the game features your character dying in a nuclear holocaust. This whole idea of watching yourself die, totally powerless to save yourself, was unnerving and visceral and powerful.

The stakes for MW2, then, were set very high. How could the game's developers manage to top the jaw-dropping moments of the first game? The answer to this question was, unfortunately, "if some is good, more is better."

The "airport level", as it's been called, is genuinely controversial, and rightly so. You play an American soldier, undercover, who somehow has managed to be inserted into a Russian terrorist cell right next to "the most dangerous man in the world." The scene begins in darkness; you hear the sound of guns being loaded. The lights fade up; you see that you are in an elevator. The most dangerous man in the world says a few words, and then the doors open, and you see that you're in an airport, and you and your fellow terrorist are slowly walking through the airport, killing everyone you see. The creepiest thing about this sequence isn't the killing of civilians, or the obvious parallel to 9/11 and the lingering paranoia about airport security; it's the fact that you're all walking so slowly, making sure you're all taking the time to kill as many people as possible. You don't even have to pull the trigger during this sequence; the rest of your gang members will do all the killing for you. The lingering sense of dread is almost overwhelming; it's disturbing and uncomfortable.

So this is all shocking, and this occurs only about 1-2 hours into the game. But this isn't where the level ends. After you get out of the airport, you're back to shooting police and soldiers trying to stop you, and then the level ends with the Most Dangerous Man In The World suddenly revealing at the very last possible moment that he knows you were an American the whole time, and shooting you in the head.

Let's set aside for the moment that your identity as an American sets off a chain reaction that plunges the U.S. and Russia into a global conflict that eventually sees you, among other things, staging an assault to reclaim the White House in the wake of an aborted nuclear missile attack on Washington D.C., and let us instead examine the other ways in which your player character is suddenly killed at the last possible moment in an unforeseen twist. Your character is also in a helicopter that gets shot down and when you wake up you are trapped in the wreckage, with no bullets; an enemy helicopter approaches, and the screen goes white.

Then, for no apparent reason, your perspective shifts and suddenly you're an astronaut doing a space walk by the International Space Station, watching a nuclear missle's arc cross the horizon. This is shocking enough - that's probably why they put it in the commercial - but suddenly the missile is detonated and the electro-magnetic pulse generated by the missile's explosion sends you flying out into space.

And then, the scene flashes back to you being trapped under the helicopter wreckage - it turns out that the EMP happened directly overhead, and so everything electronic in the area suddenly conks out, and the helicopter that was about to kill you crashes, and so you escape. Hooray! Except that it turns out later that, after you've raided the Most Dangerous Man in The World's safehouse and retrieved valuable "intel", you're shot in the head by the main U.S. General in charge of the war effort, who then also sets you on fire.

And THEN, you're in the desert, for some reason - I'm not even sure who the "you" is, at this point, since "you" have already died several times - and you're chasing this same U.S. General, who manages to get into a helicopter from a moving speedboat, and then you manage to shoot the helicopter down, and it explodes, and then your speedboat falls over a cliff, and somehow you survive, and as it turns out the U.S. General also survived, and then he stabs you in the chest with a knife, and then eventually you regain the strength to pull the knife out of your chest and throw it (the knife) directly into the General's eyeball. And then the credits roll, while people walk around in a museum, presumably showcasing certain famous scenes of the war, which are really quite violent for a kid-friendly museum.

This is all to say that the story is so over the top that it becomes melodramatic and nonsensical and just plain weird. And the thing that really makes it ridiculous is that, at least in my experience, you die a lot during the campaign. The game is hard; it only takes a few bullets to put you down, and there are a lot of enemies who fire a lot of bullets. The game has a relatively generous checkpoint system, as well as recharging health, but therein lies the breaking of the suspension of disbelief - I've already been shot a hundred thousand times in the course of this level; why shouldn't I recover from being shot in the head at close range? Again?

The game part of the game is, of course, expertly well done. It's graphically impressive, the weapons feel incredibly powerful, the atmosphere is charged and violent and unsettling. The rag-doll animation following a kill shot is especially unsettling; people just drop. And then of course there's the multiplayer suite, which I dabbled in briefly last night and which better people than me can pontificate on. It's all very well done, and it's certainly worth a purchase, which is maybe a ridiculous thing to say given that anyone reading this probably already owns it.

But the story... wow. Here's a suggestion for the sequel, which was inevitable even before it was set up by the game's surprisingly clunky cliffhanger of an ending: maybe don't kill the player character as much. It's already been done far more than is necessary, and it ceases to mean anything since it's not like your character even says anything, or is even clearly identifiable. There were a number of times during the campaign where someone would shout something to someone, and it took me a while to realize that they were shouting at me.

On an unrelated note, a hypothetical question: who kills more people, Nathan Drake in Uncharted 2, or your player character(s) in Modern Warfare 2? I could probably actually look this up and get real numbers, but off the top of my head it seems like the numbers would probably be pretty close.