More Responses to Ebert

Lots of excellent responses to Ebert's article on why video games can never be art have  been cropping up since he posted it. Here are the best ones I've seen since posting my own response:

Kellee Santiago responds, explaining the talk that she gave at USC and critiquing Ebert's response to the arguments she presented in said talk.

Adam Serwer offers his perspective on the American Prospect blog.

Brian Ashcraft presents a thorough analysis of Ebert's authority as a film critic and lack of authority as a video game critic on Kotaku.

NaviFairy of GayGamer.net takes issue with Ebert's claim that you always "win" a video game.

On a lighter note, Kirk Hamilton of Gamer Melodico has put together a flow chart which Ebert should consult the next time he sits down to write about video games.

Over at IGN, Mike Thomsen points out some of the illuminating artistic criticism that has been written by actual video game critics, and eloquently explains some of the key differences between video games and other games.

Though they certainly don't need me to link to them, Penny Arcade has offered some concise commentary, both in blog and comic form.

Send us an e-mail or comment with your favorite posts or your own responses, and we'll endeavor to compile all the best arguments here.

Why Roger Ebert Is Wrong About Video Games

by Daniel Bullard-Bates

“Obviously, I’m hopelessly handicapped because of my love of cinema…”

Roger Ebert

After reading Roger Ebert’s new diatribe against video games as an art form, I wrote an obnoxiously long, point-by-point response to his arguments. Re-reading it in a less heated state, however, I found that I continued to return to one point in particular, which may be more valuable than any other in understanding Ebert’s close-mindedness. The simple response to Ebert is this: He doesn’t know very much about video games.

Virtue in Virtual Worlds

by Daniel Bullard-Bates

When I read last week that Jason Rohrer was making a game for the DS based on the trading of conflict diamonds, I could hardly believe it. I found this shocking because game developers tend to shy away from subjects charged with social and political controversy. The gaming market usually greets socially relevant games with either public outcry or near-total disinterest. Hence, it is no surprise when developers scurry away from controversial subjects. But just like well-done documentaries and films on difficult topics are valuable and important parts of the world of cinema, well-made games that are not afraid to tackle complex issues should have a place in the world of video games.

When Six Days in Fallujah was announced, the controversy over depicting war in a documentary-like, realistic manner was so intense that the project was dropped by its publisher, Konami. After losing that support, the developers were forced to lay off employees, and may now face complete financial failure. All this was the result of trying to portray war in a realistic way, while franchises like Call of Duty continue to make unrealistic, over-simplified war games at incredible profits.

Other games that attempt to confront real social issues are greeted with little to no attention. Games for Change is a group devoted to making socially relevant games with an activist bent, but it is a struggle to find an audience for their kind of material. This is partly because most of the games made with a specific activist goal in mind are overly focused on the message, allowing the gameplay to fall by the wayside. The other problem facing Games for Change and similar endeavors is the mentality of the video gaming audience: many gamers say that they just want their games to be fun. Video games are an escapist pastime for many, and social messages are not something they wish to grapple with in their leisure time. It is clear that games with social messages need to offer more than a moral imperative. The gameplay, controls, visuals and so on are as important in these games as they are in any other, if not more so due to the potentially smaller audience and the desire to express a particular point.

Flower is an example of a game that is beautiful to behold and fun to play, while managing to successfully pack a social message into the mix. It works because the actual playing of the game does not force the player to confront any social or political issues. Even if the conflict between nature and technology holds no interest to you, and replacing dirty energy sources like coal and oil with wind power strikes no chords, Flower’s controls and level design are simple, fun and intuitive. And if those other things do interest you, if you want more relevance and thought from your games, then Flower delivers an experience almost unheard of in the world of interactive entertainment. This additional level to Flower is so well integrated into the concept and gameplay that it enhances the experience instead of distracting from it.

A game that successfully balances gameplay and social relevance offers something more than entertainment; it improves the artistic medium as a whole. It is by no means necessary that every game published tackles complex and controversial issues, but when they do so successfully it has the potential to make video games more relevant and important than they have been in the past. More than that, a well-done game with a positive social message could improve the world: if just a few people have decided to support wind power initiatives as a result of playing Flower, that is a testament to the social power of video games. If just a few people become more discerning in their jewelry purchases as a result of Jason Rohrer’s upcoming game about conflict diamonds, that will be a great success for the game and for the medium.

This raises a larger question, frequently recurring in the realm of artistic creation: does the artist have a social responsibility in what he creates? Does the creation of art that appeals to prurient or violent interests harm society and the artist? Is difficult, morally challenging art essentially more valuable and important?

There is certainly great value in making art that can change minds and educate people on the troubles and triumphs of the world around them. And every time the world of video games expands in new directions, it becomes a more legitimate and exciting form of art.

Reflections with Jonathan Blow

by Daniel Bullard-Bates

Having finished Braid this week in the Monthly Game Club, we're left with many questions about the meaning of the game. One thing is certain, however: Braid stands as a profound example of the quality and polish possible in the world of independent games, and the level of intelligence possible in all video games, independent or otherwise. Jonathan Blow, the developer and designer of the game, was kind enough to answer a few questions for us on being an independent game developer, the role of interactivity in games, and the inspiration for Braid.
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Your game was independently made, but first released on Xbox Live Arcade. Would you share a few thoughts with us on being an independent game designer working with a huge corporation like Microsoft?

Whenever dealing with a company like this, you usually work with a (relatively) small division. I don't really know what kinds of politics goes on there, because for the most part Microsoft is good at isolating developers from that. Usually I would be dealing with just 1 or 2 people, and spending most of my time making the game. Because they had done a lot of Arcade titles before Braid, they did a pretty good job of ushering games through the approval and certification process with minimal BS. I did have one episode late in development where someone on the Microsoft side who I had never talked to decided to monkey with the game at the last minute in an unexpected way, and that was a very negative experience, but ultimately I decided to go ahead and release the game on XBLA anyway. Largely, though, it was a hands-off experience: my job was to make a good game, and the job of the guys I talked to at Microsoft was to help me get that game onto their service.

How do you think services like Xbox Live Arcade, Playstation Network, and WiiWare are affecting the independent gaming world?

It's definitely a positive thing that independent game developers have these places to sell games where they can find a large audience and where the piracy rate is relatively low -- it means that it's much more feasible now to make a living as an independent developer than it was 10 years ago.

Braid has been cited as an example in the continued debate about whether video games can be art. What do video games need to do to be taken seriously as an artistic medium?

All that needs to happen is for game developers to do more-serious work. The appreciation will come from that, naturally. Right now, the work isn't there. Most of what we do as an industry is about pandering and infantilism. If enough of us just stop doing that, we will find that there is an audience out there that takes us seriously.

How does interactivity change the ways ideas or stories are explored?

It just leads to the contemplation of a different field of ideas than something like film or music does. I can't say how that is "changed" from another medium because they aren't necessarily related that closely. There are connections, sure, but each one is in its own right a wide and deep body of stuff that can't be easily summarized. That's why we use these media to explore these things! If I can just say what the point is, then we don't need games in the first place.

Braid uses a number of innovative game mechanics; did the story inspire the gameplay, or vice versa?

The whole thing came to mind at roughly the same time. I would say that maybe the gameplay idea came first, by a very thin hair, but it was a very general idea -- that the way time behaves would change from world to world, though I didn't know what those behaviors would be, and in fact had very different ideas about these time behaviors initially than what ended up in the game. But as soon as I had that concept, I knew that I wanted the game to be done in the tradition of Italo Calvino's book Invisible Cities and Alan Lightman's book Einstein's Dreams, and that there would be textual pieces introducing each world.

One thing a number of people have said, when being critical of the game, is that they wish that the story parts happened in cut-scenes or were otherwise integrated into the gameplay. When they say this, I detect some kind of sentiment that, hey, now that we *can* have cut-scenes or pieces of story dribbled to us during the primary gameplay (as in Bioshock), that these are the only valid way to do things, that somehow text is obsolete. But that is a bit silly. The book has not gone away, and the way subjects are explored in literature are different than how they happen in dialogue or in pictures. It's a different medium, it has a different grain, and it's perfectly valid to use that grain if you want to. (And if a designer does not know this fact, then he is going to work with an incomplete toolbox!)

From the very first day, Braid was conceived as a videogame with its story presented in the tradition of a few books that I respect, and maybe a film or two.

Do you have any advice for aspiring independent game developers?

The most important thing is to make games and get them done. The second most important thing is to ensure that those games are the best things that you can make, whatever that means to you. Unfortunately these two goals are in conflict.

Would you like to share with us what you're working on now?

Every time I answer this question, it's something different. I have four different games that I have taken to the prototype stage since finishing Braid. I keep changing my mind about which game is really my next project, so I would just be misleading you if I gave a concrete answer here!

Reflections with Tale of Tales

by C.T. Hutt

As I mentioned in my last post, I’ve been corresponding with Michael Samyn and Auriea Harvey, the directors and founders of Tale of Tales, about their runaway success with The Path and about video games and the arts. In a medium that is too often hampered by convention, it’s a real pleasure to see a few luminaries pushing the boundaries and challenging the status quo both in the art world and in the gaming community. It’s an even greater pleasure when they take the time to share some reflections with us.
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What do you feel is the principle characteristic video games bring to the art world?

That's a very big question. And also a rather ambiguous one. The "art world" could mean either the entire universe of artistic practices and the spectrum of experiences that people can have with art. Or it could mean the established community that surrounds contemporary fine art today: the galleries, museums, artists and collectors.

The distinction matters to us because we feel that the two have rarely been more opposed. Contemporary fine art seems to be all about negating the very thing that art has meant for centuries. The modernist avant-garde has turned into the new salon.

We have always been inclined towards a more traditional form of art making. We enjoy figuration, narrative, beauty, even spectacle. As a result we could never get comfortable in the gallery space. The internet, and later games, have offered us an opportunity to address our audience directly, without the need of filters like museums, galleries or critics. And we're not the only ones. If it were up to the establishment, art would have all but disappeared from this planet due to its extreme elitism. But thanks to the computer and its ubiquity, new channels have opened for the creation and enjoyment of new forms of art.

On top of that, videogames, or the interactive medium in general, offers a new way of art making that is more suitable to our post-modern sensibilities. The older media are perfect for one-directional straightforward mass communication. But this doesn't seem to fit with the world anymore. People are not that easily defined anymore. And we don't accept simple truths so easily anymore. Newer computer-based media are capable of dealing with this richness, the ambiguity and the highly personal and intimate atmosphere that contemporary communication requires.

We also believe that videogames technology offers the potential to realize the dream of many artists of involving the viewer in the artwork as an essential part of it. So far, this has always been a theoretical premise that happened mostly in the imagination of the viewer. But now we can make this a lot more real. Now we really can put the viewer inside of our painting and we really can make art that is about him or her. Artworks become collaborative environments where the experience consists of a continuous flow between artwork and viewer.

What is the greatest challenge independent video game publishers currently face?

Probably remaining independent. Mostly remaining independent of commerce. In fact, not many independent developers succeed in that at all. And many, if not most, seem to consider their practice to be a commercial one. As a result, the independent scene is not doing much in terms of pushing the medium forward. We should be out there, exploring deeply in the potential of the medium. But most of us are happy to stick to tried-and-true ideas and we merrily re-use retro-genres.

Obviously it's not easy. And I'm sure many are trying to find a compromise. But we can do better. We think there should be more non-commercial support for research of the videogame medium as a creative technology.

Recently, there has been a surge of interest in independent video games such as The Path and Braid. Do you think this will last? Has it affected your work in anyway?

It seems that everybody who is involved with videogames feels that the medium is capable of much more than we are currently seeing. As a result, it would only be logical that games like Braid and The Path get a lot of attention. They may not go very far or may be very flawed, but they show us a slight fragment of what we all dream of as the future of games. This interest will last as long as the dream exists.

The interest as such hasn't affected our work much. Maybe it sounds arrogant, but we know what we're doing. We have a job to do and we're doing it. We're very interested in seeing how other people respond to what we make. But we're not quite ready to change direction yet. There's a lot of work left to be done.

That being said, it's been quite encouraging to see how positive most of the games press has been in their response to The Path. We had never seriously considered a future for ourselves within the games industry. We had always assumed that the industry was perfectly content making hardcore games for hardcore gamers. But things may be changing. We used to be firmly on Chris Crawford's side when he claimed that the future of the interactive medium lies outside of videogames. But we're not so sure anymore. Maybe there is room for expansion. We'll see.

Do you agree that more mainstream publishers are, in a way, hindered by their own success?

Obviously their success does not hinder them in their goals of making money. Though it may hinder them, in the long run, in establishing a stable business.

Because, in the long run, the current practice of extreme competition in a cramped space cannot continue. It is already the case that the majority of all games published never returns on investment. The survival of the industry depends on the small amount of games that become hits. When achieving that hit status is the only way to make a profit, you have an industry that contains many more losers than winners. And that's not healthy. It only makes the big companies get bigger and the small ones disappear. And that's the straight road to oblivion.

The commercial success of the videogame format also hinders the creative development of the medium in our opinion. Contemporary videogames are the descendants of pinball and arcade games. Those were forms of entertainment designed to please the player and keep him spending money as long as possible. And still to this very day, many consider the defining characteristic of videogames to be "fun". So when everybody is enjoying themselves and paying money to enjoy themselves, it's difficult to decide to do something else, to go and explore what else this medium can do.

The kind of fun that current videogames offer only appeals to a small subset of the population. Everybody else is left out in the cold. This is a commercial disgrace for sure, but it is also simply unfair. Videogames technology has a great potential for a wide variety of entertainment and art. We shouldn't just make games with it.

What would you like to see more of from the gaming community?

We would like to see more tolerance and openness to new ideas. And we would like to see more respect for people with different opinions, especially if those opinions entail that they don't like videogames. The gaming community can be a very hostile place and seems extremely conservative, even defensive about its hobby. Games are immensely successful and yet gamers act as if anybody who expresses even the slightest bit of criticism is the Evil Demon From Hell Who Will Destroy Them All. Gamers seem literally afraid of anything that is even remotely different from what they are used to. They often behave, in fact, like xenophobes.

It is only through facing criticism that the medium will mature. But sometimes we wonder if that's what the gaming community fears. Sometimes it seems that they are delighted by the license to be childish given to them by games. And they don't want to give that up.

So more maturity is something we'd also like to see more of in the gaming community.

Would like to share with our readers what Tale of Tales is working on next?

We're currently working on a prototype for a sort of casual multiplayer game with the Brussels organization of Foam (http://fo.am/). It's a game in which every player plays a plant. And players can be humans or plants.

And soon we'll start on a new small project in the vein of The Graveyard but with a totally different atmosphere and interface. This time it's about a young woman. And she dances. For her stepfather.

E3 this year seemed more focused on high-tech controls than on upcoming titles; did anything catch your eye? Are you looking forward to any releases in the next year?

Well yes, we're very much looking forward to The Last Guardian, Fumito Ueda's new game. Maybe this time he'll let us be friends with the colossi.

It was also mildly amusing to see how Microsoft takes an idea from Sony (Eyetoy) and promotes it like an idea from Nintendo (Wii). It's like they're finally doing this together. Such a show of friendship is truly heartwarming.

The Path Less Traveled

by C.T. Hutt

There can be little questioning that the artistic medium of video gaming is still in its infancy. Despite this, there is no denying the existence of established genres. We have the first person shooter, the side-scrolling platformer, the fighting game, the RPG, and so on. Even games which push the boundaries of these classifications such as Mass Effect or Portal often end up awkwardly piled in with others. I feel it is one of the great failings in human thinking that we are given a sense of comfort when we attempt to dissect creative work and file it neatly away. I understand why it’s done of course; it makes the sublime more accessible, the infinite and indefinable more commonplace, and it cools the blazing power of imagination down to the lukewarm temperature of logic. Just occasionally, however, something in the art world comes along that refuses to be classified or contained in the established ways. It is these bold endeavors that truly lead us to new and wonderful frontiers in the arts. I have seen the beginnings of such genius reflected in The Path by Tale of Tales.

If Edgar Allen Poe had programed a video game for his estranged daughter it would probably look a good deal like this. The Path is a dark, confusing, and truly absorbing adaptation of the classic children’s story Little Red Riding Hood. Players take control of one of six sisters who are charged with the simple task of delivering a basket of goodies to grandmother’s house and are warned not to stray from the path that leads there. Any diversion from this task leads your character into a dark forest filled with all manner of strange and interesting sights, sounds, and feelings. Exploring this enchanting place is not all light and games. The more one plays, the more they get the feeling that there is something sinister in the forest, always just out of sight.

Things only get stranger when a player makes it to Grandmother’s house. No tea and cookies await your arrival; instead the player is treated to a surreal digital funhouse, made more extensive and interesting by the amount of exploring accomplished before arriving there. Rules of physics and time twist into a fantastic display of just how far the gaming medium can challenge our perceptions. All through the experience is the chilling suspicion that there is something right behind you.

Perhaps the most unique effect of The Path is the emotional cord it pulls in the gamer. It is not the visual effects of the game itself so much as our own imaginations which provide the real thrills. There are very few actual boogiemen in The Path; whatever monsters may lurk in the shadowy forest never truly unmask themselves to us. Instead of showing us the face of fear, this game evokes a long-buried ability in all of us to make every shadow into a ghost and every gust of wind into a monster’s wail. No matter how many times I checked, I was quite certain that there was a wolf hiding somewhere in my apartment Wednesday night just waiting for me to nod off.

I have been, and probably always will be, a meat-and-potatoes narrative man. I know it is a weakness to have such a limited palate, but frankly, I like my story arcs to look like mathematically perfect parabola. The Path is much more like guiding an avatar through an abstract poem than a traditional story, as such it doesn’t quite satisfy my finicky appetite for a clear beginning, middle and end. Nevertheless, there is no doubt that Tale of Tales is showing the gaming world exactly what it needs to see: that there is more to this new medium then what we are familiar with, that video games can be emotionally evocative in their own right, and most importantly that we, as gamers, should expect more from developers then overused conventions.

I heartily encourage all gamers to turn out the lights and give this one a try. It can be downloaded through Steam and The Path website.

One of my favorite things about the indie gaming scene is that developers are more accessible and receptive to inquiry then their larger counterparts. Rather than post on some oft-ignored forum and wait four months for a one-line reply, I’ve had the pleasure of sharing some correspondence with Michael Samyn and Auriea Harvey, the directors and founders of Tale of Tales. They shared with me some reflections on gaming and the arts which I will post next week.

Playing with Art, Continued

I’d like to offer a sort of response today to a post Daniel wrote a little while ago. (“Response” may not be the right word. Continuation? Sequel? ...Pastiche? One of those.) In any case, here’s my take on the dramatic potential of the gaming medium, as well as my take on its shortcomings. I shall also mount a withering rebuttal against its critics; be warned, for I stand tall upon my soap box. I agree with Daniel on a key point here: video games offer a storytelling medium that in many ways differs from past disciplines, and should be understood entirely on its own terms. The genre’s detractors have unfairly maligned it by holding it up to the standards of other realms of art, asserting that it fails to claim the dramatic ambition of literature or the visual vibrancy of film. This line of reasoning is nonsensical; I could as easily point out that the Moonlight Sonata lacks Picasso’s visual aesthetic, or that Picasso himself populates his works with characters lacking the depth or complexity of those presented by a Rushdie or an Updike. In short, an apple is a thoroughly deficient orange. To ignore the proper category of a video game and lump it in with seemingly similar creations – to group it with the movie because of its presentation, or with the superhero comic because of its content – presents a misguided estimation of both its current worth and its potential for future achievement. When one judges, say, Braid against Casablanca, one’s initial assessment of the former cannot help but be overwhelmingly negative: there is not the same reach for visual metaphor, nor are the characters drawn with the same depth; Braid can be sometimes accused of naked ambition in its structure, while Casablanca earns its dramatic heft slowly and by measures. This judgment would, however, be remiss on two counts. First, where Braid has obvious shortcomings when held against a classic, it also has a manifest – if less heralded – merit: namely, the narrative moves at the pace of the player. Victory or defeat carry more weight as they are bought with effort and dedication, triumph grants greater satisfaction as it is the culmination of work. This immersion is the aspect of the video game that is irreproducible in any other medium, and it is on the strength of such an immersion that the best games expand the boundaries of the territory to encompass ground unmapped. The second point to remember is that video games remain in their relative infancy. This is crucial to any attempt to properly judge their current progress: a reasonable historian would designate the birth of the modern video game at or around 1972, when Pong was introduced to arcades. (An even more generous historian, when judging modern games, would move the start date to 1985 – when Nintendo released Super Mario Bros. and popularized the platformer.) This puts the age of the industry at roughly 37 years (or 24). The movie could be said to trace its origins from the 1878 filming of the horse “Sallie Gardner,” though a more agreed-upon beginning can be found in the 1888 film Roundhay Garden Scene. The first narrative films were Christian documentaries on the life of Jesus, produced first in France in 1897; the first stab at continuity was made by Robert W. Paul’s Come Along, Do! in 1898. This means that Braid, made in 2008, is the product of an industry and an art somewhere between 24 and 37 years old. Casablanca, made in 1942, is the effort of a medium at the ripe old age of at least 44 - or even 54, or 64, depending on which “origin” story you buy for film. Braid – along with other games that have been cited for their artistic reach – is still the work of an art that has not fully grown into its adulthood. I would argue that it is following the developmental arc common to every innovation: it is still seen as a diversion, as the indulgence of the ignorant. It should be remembered that sushi, in its modern form, was considered fast food in Edo Period Japan; the novel had its start in fancifully fictional “histories” popular in the 15th century; the tragedy was, initially, the drunken culmination of the Dionysian orgy. Humble beginnings, indeed. We are still in the drunken, fanciful, fictional, fast food era of gaming. To measure these early rumblings against the heights of established art is to improperly chart the course of the future; we end by saying “Here is the extent of its progress,” rather than “Here is the promise of its beginnings.” The Mexican director Guillermo del Toro – once confined largely to superhero and fantasy cinema, now called upon for arthouse fare – spoke on the potential for the video game in a recent interview in Wired magazine. In his words:

In the next 10 years, we're going to see all the forms of entertainment—film, television, video, games, and print—melding into a single-platform "story engine." The Model T of this new platform is the PS3. The moment you connect creative output with a public story engine, a narrative can continue over a period of months or years. It's going to rewrite the rules of fiction….Think about the way oral tradition became written word—how what we know about Achilles was written many, many years after it made its way around the world with different names and different types of heroes. That can happen when you allow content to keep propagating itself through different kinds of platforms and engines—when you permit it to be retold with a promiscuous form of mythology. You see it when people create their own avatars in games and transfigure their game worlds.

Heady stuff. I like the idea of promiscuous mythology, and I strongly endorse del Toro’s likening today’s games to the Model T. Hopefully it won’t be too long before we strap jet engines to the thing and see how far it can fly. In the reasonably near future, I want to discuss where I think games should be headed to better fulfill their potential, and what changes I’ll look for before I’ll be willing to call the medium mature. In the meantime, though, what are your thoughts? What do games lack now that serious art possesses, and how can they grow up?

Playing with Art

by Daniel Bullard-Bates

We at Press Pause to Reflect take as an assumption that video games, like any other form of media, can be artistic works. This has been debated on many blogs, and by notables like Clive Barker and Roger Ebert, but I don’t really think that video games’ potential for art remains debatable: they certainly can be. The question is how video games can best show their artistic value.

Often, when the argument for artistic merit in games is made, examples are given of the craftsmanship shown in some particular aspect of a game. The visual style of Okami, for example, evokes traditional Japanese art and calligraphy. Nobuo Uematsu, the composer for the much-lauded Final Fantasy soundtracks, can be cited as a musical talent creating artistic works for games. Or a particularly well-told story with compelling characters, such as those present in Beyond Good and Evil or Silent Hill 2, can make a compelling case for comparing games to works of art in film and literature.

Ultimately, that is where the argument breaks down: the most enduring works of art are only possible within their chosen mediums. When we compare a game’s story to that of a book or a movie, its visuals to a painting, or its music to a song or an overture, we are merely exploring the way in which games imitate other forms of art. Story, graphics and sound are important aspects of any game, but they are not the most important element, nor do they distinguish video games from other artistic mediums.

Instead, the question of what makes a profound artistic accomplishment in a game should revolve around the thing that makes the video game a unique art form: while one observes paintings, listens to music, reads a book and watches a movie, the unique quality of a video game is that you play it. Beyond bringing your own perspective to a game, you can shape the path of the story itself, control the pace and the situations, and choose what to assign importance and what to ignore to a degree that is impossible in other mediums.

For a video game to achieve artistic greatness, it is this interactivity that must be explored. Art in gaming should toy with the expectations of how to play a game, and create circumstances and scenarios that would be impossible without the input of the player. Just as Citizen Kane could not have been made into an equally excellent book, The Unbearable Lightness of Being failed to convey itself as a movie, and the Mona Lisa lacks any potential for greatness as a song, great artistic achievements will not come to the world of video games without wrestling with the idea of user input and interactivity. Gaming has yet to reach the lofty heights of any of the works I mentioned, largely because most game developers are attempting merely to imitate the qualities of other works of art, instead of innovating and exploring the possibilities unique to video games.

Let’s look at a few examples of games that explore those possibilities to artistic effect. From the world of role-playing games comes one of the first major innovations in story-telling to reach the world of video games: the ability to make choices that shape the outcome of the game itself. From the multiple endings in Chrono Trigger to the dramatic shifts in narrative possible in Star Wars: Knights of the Old Republic, video games offer the ultimate fulfillment of the idea first presented in “Choose Your Own Adventure” books. While the dialogue and options are still prepared for the player, games have been written to accommodate more and more choice, so that the player determines the outcome of the plot and the attitudes of the characters in the game. If your character becomes a paragon of virtue, it is because you guided them down that path. If your choices result in the genocide of a people, the sadness and horror of that moment is mixed with your own guilt. When the choice is yours, the emotional impact of a well-told story is that much more profound. This is expanded further by sandbox games like Fallout 3 or Grand Theft Auto 4, which have “main” storylines but so much else to do that one could begin the game, play thirty hours in and have created a compelling story for yourself without really dealing with the supposedly primary story arc.

Another way that a game can achieve artistic greatness is by playing with our expectations of the game itself. Braid, for example, takes one of the oldest archetypes of gaming controls, Mario, with his running, jumping and landing on enemies to kill them, and uses that as the jumping-off point to explore a number of mind-bending situations and variations on basic gameplay. Because the controls are so simple, the game instantly feels familiar, which allows for every change in the basic rules of the game to take the player by surprise. When the character dies for the first time, for example, instead of losing a life, they are prompted to press a button which rewinds time to before the death. In a later level, as the character walks right, time moves forward. As he stands still, it pauses. As he walks left, it moves backwards. The story, too, is a familiar one: we seek a princess, who is always in another castle. Our expectations fall into line naturally, only to be confused and swept aside as the game proceeds. Rez also does fascinating things with an established gameplay idea: you are moving forward and shooting at enemies, like in so many other games, but the levels, the visuals, and the music evolve as you progress, with every shot you fire contributing a drumbeat or a click to the electronic score.

Video games can achieve artistic greatness, but we must first learn to evaluate them by different standards. It is not in its similarities to works in other media but in its differences that an artistic movement ultimately achieves its greatest works. The difference here is an exciting one: with video games, you are encouraged to touch, you are compelled to be involved, and it is perfectly acceptable to play with your art.