Different Ways to Game

[inasilentway]

I remember reading an interesting article on video game theory about a year ago. The thesis was basically that there were two ways of playing video games. The first and most obvious is what the writer called "competitive gaming." It basically involves gaming for sport, trying to complete objectives, get a high score, etc. The second he referred to as "environment immersion." This kind of gaming involves exploring a different world. I think it could be likened to aesthetic experience. Environment immersion oriented gaming is about seeing, hearing, and experiencing things that the natural world can't provide you with.

Of course, it is not a strict dichotomy, most games involve a combination of both components. So rather than thinking of it as two camps into which all gamers fall, you can look at gamers as existing on a spectrum. Tetris competitors sit at one end and Second Life devotees are at the other.

What do you get out of video games? Do approach video games in the same way you might approach a rubik's cube? Or an art gallery? Do you lean towards one end of the spectrum or do you fall squarely in the middle? Are video games a legitimate art form?

[Covenant]

This seems an odd question to bring up, since it really devolves into an infinity of hair-splitting. No matter how finely you divide the catagories, it's still going to fail to properly define what people want to get out of it, so you're always enforcing a level of abstraction with these artificial catagories. At best you'll just confirm the theory that everyone wants something diferent. At worst you'll get flames.

Regardless, nothing is set in stone. I approach some games competitively and some for pure mucking around. None of them are engaged the way you engage an art gallery, and it is foolish to assume it would, since games are interactive and gallery pieces are not. And before anyone dares weigh in against me on what is and is not art, and if art is interactive, just let it be known that this is a debate that will only end in tears. Until we can define art, we can't figure out if games are art or not, and this is not the right subforum for that fight.

I reject the spectrum as irrelevent and entirely arbitrary.

[inasilentway]

Maybe I didn't make myself clear. Obviously an individual can play different games for different reasons, we all do. What I am really trying to point out is that today, we can get things out of video games that weren't even conceivable in the pacman era. Game developers increasingly incorporate elements from other art forms (music, literature, film) into games. Trying to draw a final demarcation between art and non-art is clearly a stupid project, but that being said, I think we all can agree that aesthetic experience enters into the Elder Scrolls more often than it enters into Donkey Kong. I don't think we are always aware of exactly what we're doing when we play a videogame and I don't think that questions of that nature are totally bankrupt.

[Covenant]

Yes, but it's a question that requires a definition of art before it becomes meaningful, only difference being that you're just assuming that it's only natural that "aesthetic experience" is an understood quantifying aspect of art. It's only through certain definitions that we even consider film to be art, so it's a matter of trying to determine what makes something art, and something else not art. Before we can decide if games are art, or even what parts of games are art, we still need an agreed-upon definition for it.

The concept, I'd almost say theory of aesthetic experience in psychoanalytic and artistic behavior theory is so tied to a specific form of art philosophy as to invite criticism of that philosophy before using it. The distinction between a work of art and art as a concept is wide, and defining what a work of art is can be maddening and fruitless, but it's not impossible to define what art is. If we entertain aesthetic experience we must also invite in a prominent definition of art from a prominent philosopher on the topic of aesthetics, Monroe Beardsley:

"Either an arrangement of conditions intended to be capable of affording an experience with marked aesthetic character or (incidentally) an arrangement belonging to a class or type of arrangements that is typically intended to have this capacity".

With such a wide definition, I don't see how any sane person could say games are not art, but most people do say games are not art, because most people are uninformed to give criticism on it. And this is problematic. The page after the above quote he explains why you would use such a definition:

"...in selecting key terms for aesthetic theory we ought to stay as close as convenient to ordinary use... a use that has been prominent for some centuries and still persists quite widely today, outside the speech and writing of or about the avant-garde"

So you still have many questions about the nature of art. Is a work of art still art to the artist? Can your aesthetic experience be from the creation of the work? At what point does the player experience the game--do they experience it as it is presented, or are they creating the presentation themselves? How do we judge the ideal experience or the quality of the artifact? Few other media require the audience to be skilled in the activity they're experiencing in order to experience it at all--does a game cease to be art once it defeats the player, makes him lose his lives, start over, replay the same thing several times? Is that an aesthetic of the presentation, or of the artifact? What about bugs that alter or distort the gameplay? Do we treat those as elements of the presentation (a specific bug in a specific place at a specific time) or of the artifiact (a poor product that has bugs in it) or of something else?

Speaking for myself, I'm not in total opposition of such a definition of above, but it gets incredibly complicated. Elements of art are not inherent to gameplay any more than they are to film or music or painting, all of which can be done to such a minimal degree of artfulness that it would be indistinguishable within the culture of it's use from non-art.

The reason I feel this question is fairly useless is because trying to define this in any meaningful way is going to devolve into defining what a work of art is, and that's the sort of thing everyone hates to do and can almost never do to any degree of success, and you've already brought it up with comparing Donkey Kong and Oblivion, which sounds like comparing the Lascaux cave drawings to the roof of the Sistine Chapel. Where is the art in Oblivion? Is it in the poor writing, or is it in the way the landscape is hand-crafted and sometimes quite beautiful? Is it the stuff we think of as art, or the stuff we don't? Isn't it quite possible that Donkey Kong, because it's been drawn by someone to create an experience, is as much art as anything else? If so, doesn't this become almost a masturbatory exercise? Nothing will come of it, it doesn't help explain experience further, it won't change people's experience to it. People like Ebert will say games are not art until they can make him feel depressed, and he'll gloss over the fact that if they painted these worlds or framed the concept art instead of creating them in three interactable dimensions it would obviously be art.

In some sense, aesthetic experience requires people to experience it aesthetically. If they merely experience it as if it was natural and normal and it doesn't provoke an aesthetic response, it doesn't count. What many games try to do by giving a seamless, realistic world is the opposite of what art tries to do by hammering home a level of abstraction. Many of the most artful elements in games are meant to be ignored. It's a philosophical nightmare. I think it would give Kant fits, and such discussions are really beyond the average purview of this subforum, since it's about aesthetics and not really much about electronics. I may not think the discussion has legs, but it'd be best to give it a fair shake in one of our better forums where you could maybe attract attention by one of the more philosophical forum-goers.

[Bradbury]

I remember reading an interesting article on video game theory about a year ago. The thesis was basically that there were two ways of playing video games. The first and most obvious is what the writer called "competitive gaming." It basically involves gaming for sport, trying to complete objectives, get a high score, etc. The second he referred to as "environment immersion." This kind of gaming involves exploring a different world. I think it could be likened to aesthetic experience. Environment immersion oriented gaming is about seeing, hearing, and experiencing things that the natural world can't provide you with.

Of course, it is not a strict dichotomy, most games involve a combination of both components. So rather than thinking of it as two camps into which all gamers fall, you can look at gamers as existing on a spectrum. Tetris competitors sit at one end and Second Life devotees are at the other.

There's actually several better known definitions of types of gamers. There's the four categories of Achievers, Explorers, Socializers, and Killers, and expanded ones that try to create parallels with different theories of personality in psychology. All of them fail for the same reason Covenant outlined, though.

I think looking at "aesthetic experience" as a qualifier for games being art is barking up the wrong tree.

Just because it has art in it doesn't make a game art. It simply says the stuff contained in it is art. If I put a Van Gogh painting in my room, that does not make my room art. What you should be looking at is what makes a game unique - its interactivity - and why that makes it art or, if that's not what you are looking at then why that makes it an "aesthetic experience". Otherwise you are just saying that because a game includes pieces of art, it is art.

Elder Scrolls is still the wrong place to look at for this since it doesn't stand out very much as a piece of art in itself rather than just being a very pretty game. There are far better games to pick from that can give clues on what games as art would look like, such as anything made by Jason Rohrer, especially Passage (an allegory of the passage through life) and Betweeness (uses multiplayer coop to emphasize just how far apart we are from each other). Those succeed because they create a specific experience for the player that can only exist through the medium of games.

[DPDarkPrimus]

Rez is interactive art, no two ways about it.

[inasilentway]

There's actually several better known definitions of types of gamers. There's the four categories of Achievers, Explorers, Socializers, and Killers, and expanded ones that try to create parallels with different theories of personality in psychology. All of them fail for the same reason Covenant outlined, though.

I like those four, that seems like a good way of looking at it. Could you elaborate on the last one though? Is a killer more than just an achiever in an FPS? Would a killer be like, someone going on a killing spree in gta to no reward?

I think looking at "aesthetic experience" as a qualifier for games being art is barking up the wrong tree.

Just because it has art in it doesn't make a game art. It simply says the stuff contained in it is art. If I put a Van Gogh painting in my room, that does not make my room art. What you should be looking at is what makes a game unique - its interactivity - and why that makes it art or, if that's not what you are looking at then why that makes it an "aesthetic experience". Otherwise you are just saying that because a game includes pieces of art, it is art.

Elder Scrolls is still the wrong place to look at for this since it doesn't stand out very much as a piece of art in itself rather than just being a very pretty game. There are far better games to pick from that can give clues on what games as art would look like, such as anything made by Jason Rohrer, especially Passage (an allegory of the passage through life) and Betweeness (uses multiplayer coop to emphasize just how far apart we are from each other). Those succeed because they create a specific experience for the player that can only exist through the medium of games.

I agree that video games offer modes of art experience totally unavailable in any other medium, and this is really interesting. I'll check out those titles.

That being said, I don't think that games necessarily have to emphasize these features in order for us to approach them as art. I don't think that your Van Gogh print analogy is very good so I'll try to put forward a better one. You can extricate a painting from a room, but you cannot extricate game art from a game any more than you can extricate cinematography from a film. When a director works with a highly regarded cinematographer in order to make his/her film as visual impressive as possible, we don't say "Oh, your film isn't art. It is just a pop culture trash movie which happens to contain art." We approach the film as art, and the visual component is simply a part of that (along with sound, story, etc). I think videogames are a mixed medium and they are all the more exciting when different types of sensory experience are emphasized. No one is forcing us to look at the Elder Scrolls as a work of art but I think it makes gaming more fun.

[inasilentway]

Rez is interactive art, no two ways about it.

I'll check it out!

[Stark]

Be warned, it's an amazingly pretentious on-rails shooter. You lose 50% of the experience without sitting on the vibrator it shipped with.

[Bradbury]

I've played a little bit of Rez HD. It vaguely reminded me of Space Giraffe, except a much much better game.

That being said, I don't think that games necessarily have to emphasize these features in order for us to approach them as art. I don't think that your Van Gogh print analogy is very good so I'll try to put forward a better one. You can extricate a painting from a room, but you cannot extricate game art from a game any more than you can extricate cinematography from a film. When a director works with a highly regarded cinematographer in order to make his/her film as visual impressive as possible, we don't say "Oh, your film isn't art. It is just a pop culture trash movie which happens to contain art." We approach the film as art, and the visual component is simply a part of that (along with sound, story, etc). I think videogames are a mixed medium and they are all the more exciting when different types of sensory experience are emphasized. No one is forcing us to look at the Elder Scrolls as a work of art but I think it makes gaming more fun.

You can easily extricate art from a game and throw out the game. You can listen to a game soundtrack and call it art because it's music. You can see a piece of 2D art or a 3D model and call it art because it falls within the usual parameters of production art. You can see a video of a play through of a game and call it art because it then becomes a subset of film.

To compare to film, you can take a still from a film and suddenly its a picture - either photography or 2D rendered art. You can take the soundtrack and listen to it as music. The thing that makes film unique as its own medium in art is that which differentiates it from other media: the movement of a camera. I'd argue the same thing for games - it includes other art forms just like film does, but its only when you look at it from standpoint of being interactive can you separate it from the other media like film and digital art and it can stand alone as a piece of art.

To make my point, imagine I played music in the background while I had people stare at a painting and then called this a new medium of art called "photomusic", and then critics said it wasn't an art form itself but rather it just contained pieces of other art. It'd be up to me to explain how "photomusic" is unique from other art forms and how that specific aspect justified it as art.

[inasilentway]

I've played a little bit of Rez HD. It vaguely reminded me of Space Giraffe, except a much much better game.

That being said, I don't think that games necessarily have to emphasize these features in order for us to approach them as art. I don't think that your Van Gogh print analogy is very good so I'll try to put forward a better one. You can extricate a painting from a room, but you cannot extricate game art from a game any more than you can extricate cinematography from a film. When a director works with a highly regarded cinematographer in order to make his/her film as visual impressive as possible, we don't say "Oh, your film isn't art. It is just a pop culture trash movie which happens to contain art." We approach the film as art, and the visual component is simply a part of that (along with sound, story, etc). I think videogames are a mixed medium and they are all the more exciting when different types of sensory experience are emphasized. No one is forcing us to look at the Elder Scrolls as a work of art but I think it makes gaming more fun.

You can easily extricate art from a game and throw out the game. You can listen to a game soundtrack and call it art because it's music. You can see a piece of 2D art or a 3D model and call it art because it falls within the usual parameters of production art. You can see a video of a play through of a game and call it art because it then becomes a subset of film.

To compare to film, you can take a still from a film and suddenly its a picture - either photography or 2D rendered art. You can take the soundtrack and listen to it as music. The thing that makes film unique as its own medium in art is that which differentiates it from other media: the movement of a camera. I'd argue the same thing for games - it includes other art forms just like film does, but its only when you look at it from standpoint of being interactive can you separate it from the other media like film and digital art and it can stand alone as a piece of art.

To make my point, imagine I played music in the background while I had people stare at a painting and then called this a new medium of art called "photomusic", and then critics said it wasn't an art form itself but rather it just contained pieces of other art. It'd be up to me to explain how "photomusic" is unique from other art forms and how that specific aspect justified it as art.

Video games are not a simple mixed medium like "photomusic." In virtue of their interactivity they are quite clearly distinct from other forms. However, they do contain these other elements, and enhancing these other elements contributes to the overall experience.

There are of course other ways of tweaking a game so that it is more engaging and more aesthetic. (As I think you're saying, perhaps in stronger terms.) Putting a game in an online social setting or emphasizing moral decision making within the game are equally valid ways of creating a game that is an exciting aesthetic experience. These things are perhaps more important than graphics and sound.

Also, can you elaborate on the four types of gamers you talked about earlier? Those looked like a promising way of looking at video games. Are you particularly inclined towards one of the four camps?

[inasilentway]

Yes, but it's a question that requires a definition of art before it becomes meaningful, only difference being that you're just assuming that it's only natural that "aesthetic experience" is an understood quantifying aspect of art. It's only through certain definitions that we even consider film to be art, so it's a matter of trying to determine what makes something art, and something else not art. Before we can decide if games are art, or even what parts of games are art, we still need an agreed-upon definition for it.

Yeah I guess I am taking some things for granted (and I suppose my own views here are pretty unpopular in certain circles, I don't see much point in drawing a distinction between looking at a beautiful painting and looking at a beautiful sight in nature) but I think that at some point you have to take these things for granted. If it takes you a long time to establish that films are art then you'll probably have to wait a long while before you encounter interesting questions. I don't think that the best way to answer the question "what is art" is to construct a definition and then sort objects accordingly, but I suppose if one does, then yes, this discussion is going to take a lifetime.

[inasilentway]

What many games try to do by giving a seamless, realistic world is the opposite of what art tries to do by hammering home a level of abstraction.

Perhaps we play different games. Most games in my collection are rather unrealistic.

But even if I agreed that far I would certainly disagree that this somehow excluded games from being art. Is representational art then not really art? How about (the majority of) novels? Tolstoy novels are a hell of a lot more realistic than say, Super Mario.

[Qwerty 42]

Generally when I think of a "realistic world" I think of having internal consistency, characters with motives that can be understood (both protagonists and antagonists,) and some intelligent AI to create at some level the illusion that the world of the game is real. Some games (The Legend of Zelda: Majora's Mask) do this, while others are out with a different purpose in mind (Super Mario Bros.) While having a game that strictly follows the conventions of the real world is realistic, it doesn't mean that fantasy games cannot have realistic worlds.

In short, a man's dangerous whether he's carrying a gun or a Mana Cannon.

[Covenant]

What many games try to do by giving a seamless, realistic world is the opposite of what art tries to do by hammering home a level of abstraction.

Perhaps we play different games. Most games in my collection are rather unrealistic.

But even if I agreed that far I would certainly disagree that this somehow excluded games from being art. Is representational art then not really art? How about (the majority of) novels? Tolstoy novels are a hell of a lot more realistic than say, Super Mario.

You didn't get my point. It wasn't that these games are inartful at all. The most traditionally understood definitions of art would exclude games because people take those seamless worlds for granted, not because a seamless world is not art. If I took this concept art for Fallout 3, put a frame around it, and called it "Ruminations on a Spoiled Orange in Blue" then your average person would agree it is art. Put it in a gallery and they might even think it's deep and meaningful. Put it within the frame of a computer screen or television and they'll forget it's art, since you're spending your time blasting your way through it with a machinegun.

And most people would agree that they don't spend most of their time stopping to look at the artful vistas, or finding just the right angle as the sun comes up to capture a certain look. Those things are certainly in these games, and since they're put there deliberately by an artist, they're certainly art--a digital sculpture virtual installation piece of sorts. Like you said, most people may not realize what they're doing when they're playing. But forgetting to experience the art makes the art lack an aesthetic experience, so by your kind of definition it could cease to be art if experienced in certain ways. If people don't know to stop and think "Wow, that's gorgeous," and think of it as art, then it isn't. Which is why I said this discussion is pretty poorly aimed, and misses the larger point, and is in some ways a bad discussion since it perpetuates that brand of thought. It's looking at things like Rez, which is just a damn front-end for a musical vibrator, and forgetting all the other stuff that nobody notices like I just said. There's a certain subset of people who want to make games into art, or prove that they can be, and they do it by trying to make it more and more obviously some kind of digital art thing and much less of a game. That's antagonistic both to art and to games, and is a terrible brainbug that needs to be burnt out with purging fire.

So whenever the topic comes up, "Can games be art?" you do need to ask what art is. Not to say that games can't be art, but to make it clear that a game doesn't need to be artsy to be art. Just like how most artsy movies are just bad fucking movies, an artsy game is generally a cover for a game with low production values and high amounts of pretention. It's the pound of flesh requested by a hypocritical elite to demand that experience be divided up into catagories, or games feature bullshit artsy elements, or that they provoke a specific response, or wherever else they move the goalposts to. Aesthetic experience is relevent to someone understanding it as art, but the intention of an aesthetic experience is present even if people don't experience it, merely because they may not think they should. This shouldn't be an unusual concept to you, it's part of what the whole "Found Art" thing exposed. Put something in a gallery, no matter what it is, and it magically becomes art to people. Not to say it isn't, but the threshold crossed for such things is laughably low.

I certainly can't guess your motivations, but I think you're looking for answers that are convenient and wrong. You need to first really decide if the aesthetic experience of a game is anything even remotely similar to a painting or a movie or music. It could be well argued that social settings and moral decision making are irrelevent and distracting to the core defining aesthetic of gameplay, and those are the things that should be removed, rather than emphasized. Why are graphics and sound less important? Aren't these fundamental core elements of the presentation and experience of the game as intended to be experienced than the randomness of a social setting or moral answers? It could be argued that they are, and again, without some sort of definition to work with you're basically just grasping at straws with any kind of theory of how to make a game more aesthetic--that or imposing your unformed theory, which is just as bad as all the people who say that games cannot be art.

Regardless of what you believe you need to justify it and examine what that stance means. You need an objective basis to work from, or theres no way to ever hope for a discussion on a topic to advance towards any degree of truth, and it's painfully shortsighted not to realize this from the get-go. If you want some "interesting questions" then you need to stop being evasive and start dealing with the questions already put forth. I've already got nuclear torpedoes to sink the sliding scale model as put forth in the first post, if it isn't sunk already. The next volley is aimed at that four-person catagorization you're interested in. It's called the Bartle Gamer Test, and it's a steaming sack of shit. Here's the original article. It's nitpicking a bit to find outliers and inflate them to the point of rule-breakers, but when you're bottling players into convenient archetypes just for the sake of making the organization convenient, you're making a bunch of broken useless archetypes. Here's another way to do it, this time into three catagories instead of two or four. Bartle also made one with eight catagories, and I'd bet your ass he could make one with 16 or 24. How far do we reduce these catagories until they cease to be useful? How do you define the character who wants to achieve 100 percent completion just to unlock the +1000 Sword of Awesome and teabag all the newbs he'll gank with it? Or sell it on ebay? Killer because his motivation is to eventually gank people, Achiever because his gameplay method is one of completion, Explorer because other gamers find him a font of useful knowledge from all the quests he's completed so far, or Socializer because he is required to gain the materials for his quest through socialization with a massive and well coordinated guild?

These are handy for theory and useless for individuals, and when applied to a wider context, they remain useless in the face of total subjectivity about what experiences people seek. All of the above require that people be allowed to be part of one, part of another, so all you're creating are arbitrary weighted targets. You can just as easily subdivide any element and find vast distinctions in that. Bartle's MUD analysis could divide killers into four deeper catagories: gankers (enjoyment from other's frustration), crusaders (enjoyment from hindering enemies and defending others), conquerors (enjoyment from claiming territory by force) and gladiators (enjoyment from becoming most deadly player). We could then divide gankers into four even deeper catagories: teabaggers (frustrating via humilation and lulz), campers (frustrating via repetition of gank), raiders (frustrating via unexpected interruption) and harmers, (frustrating via some real tangible loss). And so on and so forth. Eventually you're just splitting hairs, but some people enjoy one and not the other, and these things have very real implication both on experience and game design. The only way to make a spread that has any meaning at all is to figure out what you're testing for. There's several of them, and for easy reference, check out here:

A List of Lots.

Finding one that works in all instances is impossible, so I find it absurd to try to make a single catagorization method for gamertypes as a whole. For what it's worth, I find the Magic:theGathering list of archetypes the most true to form, as the way they were implimented was very narrow and the subjectivity of them very broad. This doesn't make them useful for wide application, but I feel that within a narrow focus you can focus more easily on the way players want to win than on all the various motivations they may have for wanting to play at all. The former is easier to define than the latter. Smash Brothers is a game I play because it's played at gatherings and I want to be social, but I am not a social gamer by nature--I want to win. But I want to win with an absurd character, or one I find appealing aesthetically, but isn't too strong, but can still be competitive. Fit me in a Bartle box at your own peril, but the M:tG archetypes describe me easily, since it focuses on the desired experience in pursuiant to the goal rather than an extraneous gaming motivation.