Edge columnist N’Gai Croal delves into the games as art debate.

The peril of writing about the art of videogames (or the lack thereof) in a one-off print essay aimed at a general-interest audience that’s presumably uneducated about the subject matter is that there isn’t enough space for sufficient examples or fine distinctions.

Therefore one or two games must stand in for many, and broad strokes take the place of nuanced assessment. A further challenge is that when drawing analogies between videogames and other media – a time-honored tactic for pulling in the uninitiated – some parallels that seem obviously accurate at first glance later break down under close scrutiny. That’s why it’s incumbent on us as writers to use the right analogy at the right time.

A good example of the challenges we scribes face is demonstrated by an op-ed that ran in the New York Times entitled The Play’s the Thing. Written by Ronald Radosh in the wake of the Halo 3 launch, the essay uses Bungie’s magnum opus as a jumping-off point to weigh in on the ‘are games art?’ debate. The piece is more thoughtful and considered than most of its ilk. You’ll find no intemperate Roger Ebert broadsides here. Yet it ultimately founders on its insistence on a seemingly inarguable point: that videogames are a storytelling medium whose potential is only being held back by their slavish imitation of film.

As Radosh writes: ‘Many games now aspire to be ‘cinematic’ above all else. In Halo 3, as in most games, the plot is conveyed largely through short expositional movies that are interspersed throughout the action. These cutscenes undermine the sense of involvement – of play – that is games’ authentic metier. Games have become a backward-looking medium. Because game designers rely on the language of cinema, they have not sufficiently developed a new form of storytelling based on the language of videogames’.

It’s understandable that Radosh would go after cutscenes. After all, developers and gamers alike are profoundly ambivalent about their role. If, as the film director Howard Hawk once said, a good movie consists of three great scenes and no bad ones, while most games have multiple mediocre-to-terrible scenes and few if any great ones, is it any wonder that story-based games struggle to be seen as art? That’s partially why I’m sympathetic to Radosh’s subsequent statement: ‘The games that come closest to achieving artistry tend to be non-narrative: manipulable abstractions of light and sound, whimsical virtual toys or puzzle adventures that subvert the gamer’s sense of space, time and physics’, because I’ve often felt that way about certain games with a minimalist narrative like Rez, Ico and the recently released Portal.

moscalloutWe don’t fault paintings for not telling stories as well as comic books, or photography for not telling a story as well as television./moscalloutStill, Radosh makes a fundamental error in assuming that the art in story-based videogames lies in their narratives. The function of a game is not to tell a story, but rather to simulate an experience in which narrative elements are merely a single element. Halo 3 is more akin to the combat sequences in Saving Private Ryan, except rather than watch Tom Hanks or Tom Sizemore make the moment-to-moment decisions, we get to experience an abstraction of combat wherein we can make those moment-to-moment decisions ourselves. That’s where Halo 3’s art resides.

As Will Wright said yet again during his BAFTA Video Games Lecture in October, the focus of linear stories is empathy, while the focus of interactive media is agency. We don’t fault paintings for not telling stories as well as comic books, or dance for not telling stories as well as theatre, or photography for not telling a story as well as television. Instead, we judge each medium on its own merits. Yet because games have come to look like movies, and because developers have borrowed some cinematic techniques, some would weigh the two side by side and find games wanting. This is a mistake.

To define Halo 3 as ‘not art’ on the basis of a story not well told would be like faulting the movie Silence Of The Lambs for not capturing the interior lives of its characters as well as the novel did. Movies simply don’t handle subjectivity as well as novels do, despite the fact that there’s an entire cinematic language built up around this: voiceover narration, point-of-view shots, slow motion, freeze frames, etc. (Perhaps the use of cutscenes in a videogame is similar to the way that voiceover narration is often used in film: an efficient way of communicating exposition and character before returning to the drama at hand.) It’s also mistaken to assert that game designers have relied on the language of cinema rather than invent one of their own. After all, what are health bars, pickups, powerups, ammo counters, damage indicators and inventory screens if not an iconographic language? But, unlike the visual language of cinema, it’s there to support our agency rather than tell us a story.

And it is in that agency where we shall find the art of this medium.

N’Gai Croal writes about technology for Newsweek. His blog can be found here.