Tag Archives: narrative

Exhibition Review: The Art of Videogames

Today, I took a trip to the American Art Museum to check out The Art of Videogames, and here is what I found:

I was expecting a somewhat larger exhibit than what I ended up finding, but overall it was still interesting. The first of the three rooms gives an overview of the history of videogames. In the second, one finds 4 iconic titles to play as well as a fifth game called Flower, which is more art than game. Finally, the last room has every major console from Atari to Playstation 3, each with clips from four games.

My recommendation for the first room is to go slowly and watch the videos. There’s not a whole lot of text, so that’s where you learn the most about the exhibit. Here, they break the history of videogames into 5 major eras: Start, 8-bit, Bitwars, Transition, and Next Generation. This is also perhaps the most interesting feature of the exhibit. There are five screens side-by-side which show specific game-play elements have changed across the eras. It is striking to see how jumping, for example, has changed in 40 years, and a clip from each era plays simultaneously to highlight that progression. There are also interviews with luminaries in field about how they see videogames maturing as a medium for artistic and narrative expression.

The second room is the interactive one, with a game from each era that visitors can play. Four are classics: Pac-Man, Super Mario Bros, Myst, and The Secret of Monkey Island. However, the fifth was one I had never seen: Flower. It came out in 2009 and is more of a pleasant, relaxation activity than a game. In it, the player is a gust of wind that goes around picking up flowers in a pleasant 3D world with soothing music that responds to the player’s activity. For me, this is the epitome of an art game.

The largest portion of the exhibit was the final room. Here, twenty game consoles are presented in chronological order and each has its most popular game in the genres of Target, Action, Adventure, and Tactics (full list here). For those who have been gaming for a while, the room provides a walk down memory lane with classics such as Sonic, Zelda, Tomb Raider, SimCity, Mario, and others. Take as long as you want in this room, there is a lot to take in. Then, just before the exit is a video discussing more of how videogames are coming to be a more important cultural force.

Overall, I enjoyed the exhibit, and the most interesting takeaway was seeing the progression of videogames all at once (specifically the 5-era display at the beginning). In fact, I wish I had spent more time in that first room watching the videos there. I especially recommend the exhibit for those in our class as an opportunity to see many of the games and consoles we discussed earlier in the semester when we went through an early history of vidoegames.

Finally, here are some pictures I took of the exhibit.

Videogames are Growing Up

Seamus Sullivan is a playwright by trade, and this background has given him some great insight into the analysis of narrative in videogames. One key idea is that making a story for a videogame is much like making a story in other media, with a few special items to take into consideration. The previous posts from today already summarize his key points (smile11), and mention that much of what he says applies as much to videogames as to other storytelling media (edang).

Building on that last idea, something struck me towards the end of the presentation: that videogames have become a serious medium for narrative. Much of what we have read this semester (and thus, the class discussions on those readings) has shied away from discussing videogames as stories in search of the more unique characteristics that set them apart from other media. Sullivan’s presentation was my first exposure to a thorough discussion of character development and narrative crafting in videogames. My biggest takeaway was that videogames are maturing as a medium and are beginning to offer the rich, layered stories that great movies and literature have provided for decades and centuries respectively. Sullivan used many of Valve’s hits to illustrate this. For example, Half-Life 2 tells the player about the game’s world not through a dry debriefing but by showing characters in the game interact in a way that quickly highlights their personality and relation to the main character.

Considering videogames as narratives provides a way of unearthing the depth of some games while seeing how poorly-done others are, and the ideas Sullivan discussed in his presentation provide a solid framework to begin a critique or creation.

Back to Narratives: From the Beginning

Contrary to the perspectives of Aarseth and Eskelinen, Kline shows (whether purposefully or no) that video games have always carried narratives in some form. The Spacewar game/simulation was drawn from ideas surrounding the space race and the then new fear of nuclear war with Soviet Russia. The later game Space Invaders was drawn from a similar idea of fighting in space–though this time focused on an extra-terrestrial invasion of our civilization. Game designer Chris Crawford commented on the need to develop the theory of computer games with ideas like “rewards”, “proving oneself”, and “sculpting the ‘play value'” into games. But these ideas do not fundamentally alter why you make and play video games, they simply help you make video games better. The real reason we play games has to do with something far deeper and far more subtle — namely the narrative associated with them.

Video games, through their narratives, are an expression of our lives and experiences and we experience aspects of life through them. They express our fears and vision for the future as in Spacewar, but also our fantasies as in the many games that grant super-human abilities to the player. In a similar manner to cockfights being symbolic for larger issues in the culture, video games are a picture of our lives in the world. As Crawford saw, the need to design games with player interactions reflective of reality are “the central art of the game designer”. It is interesting to note that given the user-oriented feedback loops in game development  and increases in computer technology, the overall direction of successful video games has been towards a story-telling style, and not a simply high-tech tetris or pac-man (though, of course, those games are not necessarily devoid of narrative). This trend illustrates the reason we as a society are really interested in video games: their ability to express our lives in ways we couldn’t before.

User Input in Comics and Videogames

http://www.mspaintadventures.com/?viewpage=new

 

MS Paint Adventures is a unique comic in that the plot is determined by the audience rather than a single author. Andrew, the creator of the blog, makes some starting frames for a comic and then the rest story is continued based on comments by other bloggers. I thought this was interesting for two reasons. First, the comics are all related to some genre of gaming, such as RPGs and fighting games. The second reason this comic is interesting is the view it presents on the debate of narrative use in videogames. When reading this comic it is obvious that once user input determines a story, the story can take many unpredictable turns. According to Aarseth, videogames should also have unpredictable storylines in which user input is rewarded. In the end, I believe that videogames with good storylines are better, but more user input will make the game more engaging for me and also allow me to play the game more than once with a different experiences every time.

Cut Scenes and the Operator-Machine Relationship

http://www.thenextgreatgeneration.com/2011/12/storytelling-in-video-games-how-cutscenes-get-it-done/

I found it interesting during our class discussion that some people felt videogame cut scenes were often too long, and that like bugs or lag, they can detract from the operator’s diegetic experience.  This article defends cut scenes as an important mechanism for advancing narrative, but also describes them as essential to the “single-player experience.”  The author, Justin DiCozo, notes the frustrations of players who feel cut scenes usurp their control over the videogame, as well as how many modern game developers have played with the cut scene mechanism to make it more interactive.  I found this relevant because it relates to the tension in the “operator-machine relationship” that Galloway describes in his book.  In Galloway’s view, cut scenes are the machine’s chance to control the game, almost completely ignoring the operator.  As DiCozo notes, some games rely more heavily on cut scenes than others.  How important, then, is the aspect of “control” to the operator’s gaming experience, and at what point do cut scenes blur the lines between games and movies?