Ayn Rand on Video Game Art

A couple of weeks ago I came across this quote from Ayn Rand:

Art is a selective re-creation of reality according to an artist's metaphysical value-judgments.

I don't claim to be an expert on Ayn Rand's ideas, but I've liked a lot of the things I've heard from her, and this quote especially. As I am wont to do, I immediately started thinking about how this idea would apply to video games, and whether video games could qualify as art under such a definition.

At it's core, a video game is an abstraction, a simplified system that often emulates a real world system. The game designer selects aspects of reality to model within the game, and comes up with game mechanics to represent them. Then covers the whole system with narrative window dressing to show us how the various mechanics reflect real life elements.

On the whole, this works really well, and people seem to forget that the game is just an abstraction, a selective re-creation of reality, rather than reality itself. Running through an FPS gunning down monsters by clicking on them is pretty different from real life warfare. But the mechanical metaphors that we use are good enough that even our noble politicians have trouble remembering that games are in no way reality.

The point is, that games simulate portions of reality, and they do it in the way that the game designer chooses. There are many reasons for the choices they make, ranging from gameplay concerns, to interface device limitations, to hardware limitations, to development costs, to just plain old aesthetics. And it's that last one that is really interesting, some choices are made because that's how a game designer feels that reality works, or that's how he wants people to perceive that it works, or even a little of both.

Consider a game like Sim City, through game play abstractions it allows the player to run a virtual city. We accept that it’s a stylized representation of reality, but even so we expect it to mirror our experience in the real world. This is where the game designer has an opportunity to say something about reality, and how it works. Suppose that the game designer feels that cutting taxes to businesses and allowing the wealth to trickle down to the populace is the best way to build a strong economy. It is a simple matter for him to make his game world function this way. By tweaking the systems that underlie the game, he can force the player to adopt a fiscal policy in game that is similar to the designers idea of an optimal fiscal policy.

As the player plays the game, he will learn, whether consciously or not, that providing tax breaks and incentives to businesses is the best thing to stimulate an economy. This is a very powerful way of expressing an opinion. Not only is the designer presenting his own ideas in a positive light, but he is forcing the player to accept and act as though, at least in the game’s limited reproduction of reality, the designer’s ideas are correct.

The potential for these kinds of statements is present anywhere a game simulates an aspect of reality. The actions available to players, the problems they must solve, and the means by which they may solve the problems all give interesting insight into the world view of the game designer. This isn't to say that every element of a game's mechanics should be subjected to scrutiny, and taken as an implicit statement by the games author on the nature of reality, but that the potential is there, and messages are being communicated even if they aren't intended.

The really neat thing about this, is that this is just one of the many types of expression available to a video game designer. In addition to choices on how the nature of reality will be represented in a game, the designer can make statements through art direction, music selection, narrative and many other avenues. Video games are truly one of the most expressive mediums yet.

So after just a little bit of thought, it becomes pretty clear that any assertions that games are not art because they lack the ability to express anything, are pure garbage. Unfortunately there haven't been a lot of games yet that have started to use game mechanics to say anything meaningful, there are a few, but not many. It's a difficult thing, as I've been working on my game I've discovered that it's hard just to make something that's interesting to play with, let alone making it interesting, and meaningful. But it is something that I plan to explore in future projects, and hopefully this is something that we will continue to see more of.

Game Length and Narrative Power

Let me describe to you what I believe the best format for a narrative game would be. First, a first time player would be able to be played through the game in around four to eight hours, with the length depending largely on the scope of the story being told. Second, the game would be broken into chapters, or acts, with each act taking around one and a half, to two hours to complete. So far what I’ve described sounds like a short novel, or a long movie trilogy. Playing through a game of this kind sounds like it would be about the same as watching the Lord of the Rings trilogy, or the Star Wars series. But here’s the difference: to make the most of the interactive medium, these games would need to tell stories interactive enough that the player could play through them three or four times and have radically different experiences each time. I’m not talking about different meaning the first time I shot everyone on sight, and the second time I snuck past everyone. Or the first time I chose the evil dialog tree option, and the second time I chose the good dialog tree option. I’m talking about differences where the entire meaning of the story is changed from one play through to the next, by seamlessly integrating each of the player’s actions into the story, and reacting to those actions in an intelligent way.

That is where we will see the true power of interactive storytelling, each play of the game will render a different experience, but each shedding additional light on the story’s primary theme. As the player chooses different approaches to the game, the narrative would change and reflect the game creator’s views on the subject. Each play-through would show a different aspect of the story, with it a different view of the designer’s vision. Additionally different characters could be used for subsequent play-throughs, allowing the player to see the same events from a different perspective, and gaining even more understanding into the importance of what happened in the game. In this way the interactive nature allows the author to speak more clearly, not just showing or telling the player how they feel about the world, but actually making the player experience it.

There are a couple of reasons why a game of this type would have to be kept short. First, replayability. A game that takes forty or so hours to get through is going to be a difficult to play through multiple times. Further, at forty hours there is just too much story for the player to remember and be able to contrast across different play sessions. Second, development costs; highly interactive stories are very difficult to make, which is why a lot of games are very linear. In order to create a game story that is able to support player influence, it needs to be shorter than the average game. Fortunately, the cost of creating a deeply interactive story will be offset by savings in art assets. The player would still experience forty or so hours of play, by playing through to experience the different facets of the story, but each one would be done with the same art, meaning that the game would require around a quarter of the art a typical game requires.

In the end a game narrative that really allows the player to author the story with their choices would be much more compelling and satisfying than a linear story that lasted even four or five times longer. But more importantly, such a game would be able to be truly artistic in conveying important themes and ideas to the player. Such a game would be more than just an interactive movie, or mindless diversion, it would be a culturally relevant piece of artistic expression—that also happened to be a video game.