Austin360 blogs > Digital Savant > Archives > 2006 > March > 14 > Entry
Game designers vs. centuries-old dead guy
Dave & Busters on a Friday night is not the place you expect to get all deep about art, but there it was: a panel discussion put on by the Austin Game Developers, a collection of programmers, artists and media types in the business of digital entertainment.
Artists is a key word because the discussion, held in the party room of the adult arcade, was “Are Videogames Art?” The panel included Mike McShaffry of BreakAway Games as moderator, Scott Jennings (Lum the Mad to gamers) of NCSoft, Damion Schubert from Wolfpack Studios and Allen Varney, writer for gaming online magazine The Escapist. (A good blow-by-blow of the event is available.)
After gamers milled and gathered in clumps, then hit the buffet (palm-sized mini burgers, chicken strips, nachos — hey, this is a gamers’ meeting!), the discussion started with an infamous quote from Roger Ebert that in recent months has made him a whipping boy in the videogame world.
Interestingly, the panelists didn’t outright disagree with Ebert’s assessment that games cannot, by the very nature of their interactivity, aspire to be works of art on the level of major films, music or works of literature.
Gamers who’ve played games like “Deus Ex,” “Half-Life” or “Final Fantasy VII” know that games can certainly carry a narrative, and for some, the test of whether a game can make you cry has actually already happened. (A major character death in “FFVI” was a watershed for many role-playing gamers.) But, as one of the panelists pointed out, it wasn’t the gameplay that made you cry, it was the full-motion video sequences in between the interactive parts that elicited such a strong emotional response.
Comparisons were made to Shakespeare (who, depending on which panelist was talking, is either a 400- or 500-years-dead old guy) in guessing whether games created today will be played in 500 years. I’m not even sure games of today will be played in 50 years. The retro gaming movement is cool, but it seems to be most popular with people who grew up with the games now considered “Classic,” not a new generation of gamers.
The panelists and folks in the room (a heavily male audience as expected, ordering up mostly Dr Peppers in favor of beer) have a vested interest in making games art because they want to feel that their careers and passions are more than just ones and zeros packaged in a shiny box and sold to 14-year-old boys. Game developers continue to put out shooters and RPGs (big boobs, bigger guns), but the market demands that. For every “Katamari Damacy” that breaks the mold, there are dozens of “Grand Theft Auto” and “Everquest” clones.
But game developers are just like everyone else — they want to inspire, they want their labor to matter and they want to create works that will be remembered beyond the next holiday buying season. They have heroes: Will Wright of “The Sims” and “SimCity,” Warren Spector of “Deus Ex” and “System Shock” and Richard Garriott of the revolutionary “Ultima IV: Quest of the Avatar.” The challenge is that many games tell a great story, but are no fun to play. Many fun games have no story whatsoever. Is narrative necessary to create a compelling gameplay experience? Is it beside the point? Is it a better parallel to compare the act of playing games to sports than to film and literature? Can a football game be called a work of art?
Game design continues to evolve and change and the role of interactivity in games is still a huge question mark going into the future. As the wall is hit on photorealism in games, where will developers take us? Will we move toward persistent worlds like “World of Warcraft” or will casual videogaming continue to grow, becoming the dominant form of home entertainment? Maybe some combination of the two will happen.
The good news is that game developers are self-aware about the sorry state of most rehashed and released games and that they want to do more. As Jennings pointed out, the gaming world has not yet produced a work on the level of “Schindler’s List,” but then who’d want to set a game in a concentration camp anyway?
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