In the original Age of Empires, the typical mission briefing reads like this:

The elimination of the Izumo leader brought a temporary peace to that part of your border, but the Izumo are getting aggressive again. Izumo raiders from islands in the Inland Sea have attacked a number of your coastal villages. They have carried off important treasures from several shrines. You are ordered to attack the Izumo islands and recover the six treasures they have stolen.

For all of its ground-breaking advancement of the RTS genre, the original Age of Empires always struck me as a game that never fully exploited the story-telling potential of the medium. There’s a lot lacking in a mission briefing like this one. Why are the Izumo getting aggressive? The more real the writer makes their motives, the more compelled I will feel to counterattack because the more real their threat will seem to me. What are the treasures that were stolen? Why are they important to my people? And more significantly, are they important to me personally?

And who exactly am I playing? The Yamato, obviously, but who is my character, the man assigned to undertake this mission? The more real you make him, the more emotionally invested I become in the game.

Three modders really jumped on this and used a new approach to character creation in their custom AoE levels. I was one of them in my Persian Wars series, along with Chris Theriault and a mysterious modder named Imhotep who did some of the best AoE custom work we had ever seen, then disappeared one day after some melodrama on the site. Both of these guys did a lot of tremendous groundbreaking work here.

In fact, Chris, aka Eggman, created a wonderful scenario about Julius Caesar’s invasion of Britain in which the character of Caesar figures prominently as a real protagonist. Well guess what? When the ES put out the Rise of Rome expansion pack, they had a four-scenario mini-campaign in which we follow one character, Julius Caesar, through key events in his life. When I was working for Stainless Steel Studios, we called this a “focused campaign” as opposed to an “epic campaign.” But it was a direct route from here to WarCraft 3!

First off, let me thank you all for joining in my discussion about art and games. I deeply appreciate the time each of you has taken to make well-thought-out, substantive and articulate responses. It’s also pretty thrilling for me to discover that other people are having these thoughts and feel strongly enough about them to set pen to paper… er, finger to keyboard… mouse to icon… whatever…

It’s always interesting to me that for many gamers the moment we recognize we’re involved in something more than a mere diversion boils down to a specific moment in a specific game when suddenly we realize we’ve been changed somehow — whether it’s Bioshock, Privateer or a text adventure. I hope to get more of these moments in the mix as SOLO unfolds and develops.

The whole question of whether games do, or even can, measure up to the great masterpieces of classical art frankly never even occurred to me to consider before now. Although, I can’t say as I share EdyPegasus’ apparent disappointment with modern art (if I understood you correctly, EP). Recently I had the unforgettable pleasure to experience the Parthenon frieze at the British Museum for the first time. It was one of the great transformative moments of my life. But I have to say I feel equally transported when I sit in front of Jackson Pollack’s Autumn Rhythm at the Metropolitan Museum here in New York, in the same way that I find the poetry of ee cummings as unforgettable as Sappho.

In any event, art doesn’t have to be great in order to be art. And I’m not saying all games are art. Some games are, well… games. Whether puzzle games will ever be art is something for some one else to tackle, though I suspect the answer is no. Crossword puzzles may look like Mondrian’s “Broadway Boogie Woogie,” but no one is going to suggest they’re art.

In the same way, I wouldn’t say all movies are art, either. Most of them in fact are just diversions. The term “movie” was, in fact, coined to suggest a side-show novelty, “pictures that move!” — like a magic show, suitable only for carnival entertainment. It turned out to be a bit of misnomer, in the way that “game” turns out to be too small a name to describe the experiences many people have had “playing” them. And of course the term “play” and “player” are still used to describe drama presented on the stage, whether it’s “Oh, Calcutta!” or “Hamlet.”

However not all art requires us to be passive onlookers, Oliver, not even classical art. The Parthenon is intended to be entered, to be walked through — in fact, after walking through the Propylae and across the open plaza of the Acropolis. And if I hadn’t walked the length of the Parthenon frieze at the British museum, I would have missed the whole point.

For example, many of you may have heard of the game Line Rider-you draw lines (digitally) with your mouse, and the stick person on the sled rides on them. This game stands among few others, in it’s own genre, gart. The simple-yet-raw power of this editor can truly bring about the artist in anyone. Even if you can’t read, the interface is so incredibly simple that anyone can do it. Which brings me back to why I consider it gart.

We may compare gart to other monuments, as said in the aforementioned article, and I agree to this. Why, if a person draws a picture of the colloseum or the Parthenon, isn’t this too art? We could probably call it imitation art-it takes less time to make, and yet it resembles the momuments wholly.

I suppose that one of the things I wish to say about this is, is time neccesarily relevant to the art itself? You could spend years painting a picture of your grandmother, but it may come out terrible or sloppy. But what if you took only one day to paint the same picture, and it came out perfectly, exactly the way you wanted it to?

What I mean to say is, I do not believe that time is a factor, or at least not a main one, in creating good art. The true way to create good art is through a person’s skill, not through time or effort. I realize that this amy sound hypocritical, but I believe that it is true. In short, a game could be art, but only if it is designed that way (You could even venture that the designing itself is also art). As a small sidenote, I would like to post a link to a certain Youtube video, which will conclude what I am saying.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cW44BpXpjYw

Peace be with you all.

-Shraze

Tetris has often been compared to chess in the sense that it is ‘gaming’ in its most distilled form. Is chess art? It is definitely mathematical in its nature, and some people can look upon equations and fractal sets and say: ‘this is art’.

My point is, I don’t think that a narrative element is enough to define games as art. Metal Gear Solid was considered art by some when it came, mainly because it took the narrative qualities of gaming one step further. But with every step games take along this path, they lose a piece of their origin, their core. They become something else. They become film.

I don’t think video games are compatible with the ‘classic’ way of judging artistic value. Art require us to be passive onlookers, but games require us to be active participants. Playing a game is like being an actor on stage.

Maybe your strong experience in Privateer had nothing to do with the actual quality of the prescripted event imagined by the game’s creator, but rather with the fact that you actively made a choice in the game that led you to a turning point. In your mind, you were creating your own experience.

A game where the outcome is already set is utterly boring. What matters is the feeling we get when we actively make choices in the game, knowing they will lead to consequences.

When the consequences we face touch us so deeply they have a profound impact on our souls, as you write, that’s when games can be considered art, not in the disguise of movies, paintings or music, but only as games.

@EdyPegasus
What you are talking about is sculpture, not architecture. Sure, it’s sculpture on a grander scale, but still sculpture. The designs we see today by architects Zaha Hadid, Santiago Calatrava and Frank Gehry are not so much architecture as they are solitary objects of mass and space. Architecture requires people to interact with it to be architecture. In a sense, architecture is therefore comparable with games.

This is also why I consider architecture and games the highest forms of art. They are infinitely more complex than painting and music, just because they need to communicate with our entire being, not just with our eyes or ears.

I started off playing games and now in my more mature years, I find myself wanting to make games. I am scoffed at by my wife, but I have come to think of computer games as an art - as a living story that if done well, can reach through our daily facades to the human being beneath that fears, cries, hates, loves, befriends, etc. I appreciate your legitimizing (single player) computer games as a valid art form and I look forward to your next essay.

And, in no small part, the reason is because of the story - the experiences that I shared with so many other gamers. From the first sighting of a Big Daddy to the penultimate meeting in Andrew Ryan’s office, the game is, in my mind, one of the best works of art in gaming. The end outcome is set in stone, but it’s the way we’re guided there that overpowers us.

Great read, Gordon, and I look forward to your next one.