I talk about video games as an art form ALL THE TIME. Practically every other post on this blog is about how video games need to be accepted as an art form, because they are art. But one thing I don't talk about nearly as often is how they can be used to create art.
Video Games can be great and powerful tools in the right hands. How so? Well, several ways. An example? Machinima.
What is Machinima you ask? Simple. Machinima is using the art assets in a video game, and manipulating them in a way to create a video. The most typical type of Machinima is music video parodies. These can vary to really really good. To... Less good. It just depends really. That said, while there are some out there that are straight up parodies of songs (which in many cases can be better than the original song.)...
*Caution crude content... But what do you expect, it's a Ke$ha parody. She has to freaking censor her own name, and that's not even a swear word.*
There are plenty that just take existing songs and create a music video for them. These are probably my favorite music video machinima.
I mean look at that. That's art right there. That was made using World of Warcraft animations, and essentially Photoshop. If you're familiar with the Warcraft Lore the story to the video even makes sense, as it shows a character rescuing Thrall (a major character) from an orcish internment camp.
Another great example is "Gilnean Like Me" a music video for the song "Wolf Like Me".
*Caution some mild language. But man this video is epic.*
This one is just gorgeous. Using the song, and the visuals from WoW, it tells the story of a man who becomes a Werewolf, as his homeland is attacked by an undead faction known as the Forsaken.
This is absolutely art. Absolutely.
But there are plenty of Machinima doing things other than music videos. Although music videos are probably the vast majority.
There are entire dramatic series done in Machinima form. For example, WoWcrendor's faux "How To" series.
Or the "Freeman's Mind" series, which while hysterically funny, is both too bloody and contains too much language for me to post here. Basically it's a guy narrating Half-Life, if the main character, instead of never speaking, wouldn't shut up about how much his job sucks. Also he kills guys. But don't worry it was "self defense with an automatic weapon".
There's plenty of dubs, too.
Basically anything you can imagine can be done via machinima. Including this. And I'm not even sure what this is.
Phew. After my hate-filled review of Assassin's Creed, a game that I really did enjoy, but thought could be a lot better, perhaps it's time I wrote a positive review? And what better game to talk about how much I love than Psychonauts.
Psychonauts is a very polarizing game. If you're the kind of games are art guy that I am, you will love it. If you're stupid, you won't. You might think I'm being extreme here, but this is one of my favorite games, and it's really a shame that hardly anyone bought it. When it released it was critically beloved and commercially bombed. It has a tragic story from that point of the price slowly dropping, until finally the great Tim Schafer has gotten to the point of saying they make more money off the sale of Psychonauts T-Shirts than they do the actual game.
Then again, it kind of makes sense that the game bombed, because on paper the premise is weird. Heck, off paper, the premise is weird. It's about a young boy named Raz who runs away from the circus to a summer camp for psychics. And yeah, it's strange. That's part of what makes it so amazing.
Each level takes place in the mind of a different person, and the setting reflects the personality, and psychology of that specific person. The opening level, basic braining (it's a pun) takes place in the mind of Coach Oleander, and it's a battlefield, since he is a grizzled war veteran. Party girl Milla's mind is... Well... A party!
But it goes deeper than that as you search for memory banks that show you brief glimpses of the past for each person who's mind you're in. These range from touching (Milla's Children) to just plain mind screw (The world shall taste my eggs!).
But what really makes this game is the humor. Let me put it this way. There is a level in which you are a Godzilla scale monster, and you rampage through a city populated entirely by talking fish.
It's amazing. And even better than that is my personal favorite level "The Milkman Conspiracy" which takes place inside the mind of an insane conspiracy theorist. I'd tell you more, but it would ruin the level.
Now, the graphical style is very cartoony and strange, it looks like something Tim Burton might created if he had a day that he took a particularly large amount of drugs, but in a good way.
The characters themselves look very strange, and some people think of the graphical style as a setback, personally though I love it. The characters are all greatly exaggerated, which gives them quite a bit of personality, and instantly help to define the characters, even before they say anything.
And the characters are awesome. Every character is given an interesting background that you can find out simply by searching for memory vaults and viewing a brief slide show. Each character is interesting, and unique.
The humor in the game is spot on, and almost every joke hits the mark, with only a very small percentage, if any, failing to get the laughs. In the video game industry today, where games humor tends to be... Bad. Just bad... It's great to see some really fresh and entertaining, and unique humor in games.
That said, the game is not perfect. The platforming can be a bit clunky at times, and all the content outside the main storyline are just scavenger quests, not to mention at one point it pulls the old "You cannot continue the storyline until you have bought this item from the store which costs an absurd amount of money, so get to it!" card. And the last level will have you wanting to slam your head against the wall, because it feels very poorly constructed, and... Just hard.
But these are all such minor complaints that it's hard to even, well, complain about them. Psychonauts is an incredible game, and you can get it for $10 on Steam, so if you haven't played it yet, go buy it now. NOW. I DEMAND IT. You will not be disappointed. Buy this game if: You like unique, fun, games that are exactly what the video games industry needs to make more of. Don't buy this game if: You're stupid.
"One obvious difference between art and games is that you can win a game. It has rules, points, objectives, and an outcome. Santiago might cite a immersive game without points or rules, but I would say then it ceases to be a game and becomes a representation of a story, a novel, a play, dance, a film. Those are things you cannot win; you can only experience them."
Now, normally, I wouldn't be bothered by that quote. I would dismiss it as an old guy's misunderstanding of how games work, or just not understanding how a work of art could have an objective. But it does bother me, because he's not the only person I've heard say that. In fact, a friend of mine said to me (I'm quoting from memory, because it was quite awhile ago) something very similar when I first suggested that games could be art.
"I find it hard to accept games as an art form, because the story is driven by the player, and in film, or literature, the story is driven by the author, or filmmakers."
I've heard that many times over. How can games be a valid medium of storytelling, when the player progresses the plot? It troubles me that people think that way, because in most cases that's simply not true.
The first problem, is that people don't understand the difference between problems and choices. I'll let Daniel Floyd cover that, since I would really just end up spouting his opinion again, paraphrased.
See, the thing is, most games stories aren't progressed by the player. The player just goes through a set of problems to see more bits of a story. Let me give you an example in the form of one of my personal favorite games to bring up, Psychonauts.
Psychonauts is a great game, easily one of my favorite games of all time. It's not without it's faults, but it has an excellent story. But the thing is, no matter what you do, the story is the same.
At the beginning of the game, you are introduced to your character, Raz, a young psychic who ran away from the circus to go to a secret government run summer camp for psychics. After an opening cutscene, you are told to go to the Coach to go through "basic braining". So what happens if you choose not to? What happens if you choose to run over to explore the camp? You can't. You're blocked. You cannot progress until you finish basic braining.
After that, you have to get power X in order to overcome obstacle Y, and power X is only found in level Z. Or, later on, you find yourself at an abandoned mental hospital, and you can't progress until you help all the left behind inmates, and get something from each of them.
This happens over and over again in pretty much every game. Even games that claim to give you high degrees of choice use this method to control the story. Here's an example: The game "Heavy Rain" for the PS3 kept talking about how much choice it gave you. Throughout the game, it would give you so much choice that you could in fact screw up, and one of the four main characters might die and disappear for the rest of the game. Of course, as soon as you start the game, this happens.
Right there, a choice is denied. The story says you take a shower and get dressed before you go downstairs, so you do. You have no choice in the matter. You can keep attempting to go downstairs all day, you won't manage to do it. You character will keep stopping himself.
Let me give you another example, this one a little more free. The game InFamous. While the plot is really awful in that particular game, being saved only by the sheer ridiculousness of it all (Trash robots. What.), it does give me a good example of another type of limit given in more free roaming, sandbox games.
In this game, you're given all your missions by people on the phone. At any time, you can stop doing missions and just go mess around for awhile. Blow up cars, terrorize civilians, whatever you like. It's darn good fun too. But of course, you won't get further in the story until you do the mission you were already given. The power won't return to more parts of the city until you get to the point in the story where it is. You can go to the sewer grates where you need to go to restore power, but you can't go in unless you're at that point in the story.
Of course this game gives me another good example of how storytelling is actually quite linear in these games. "Choice" in games. In InFamous you get choices that affect your powers, and to a point the plot. The thing is, these choices are pretty simple. An example comes early in the game, when supplies have just been dropped into the quarentined city the game takes place in. You have to the choice to A. Zap the pedestrians who are swarming the crates, and take all the food for yourself, or B. Let them eat the food, and get almost none for yourself. As you can see, these choices are pretty simple "Am I Hitler, or Mother Theresa" choices. You're either evil, or good. No middle ground.
Throughout the whole game you get these choices, but none of them really matter in the end. Let me give you an example, toward the end, Kessler, the villain of the game has your girlfriend, Trish, kidnapped. He has her suspended on top of a skyscraper, and she'll be released in a moment, killing her. On the tower next to that skyscraper are 7 doctors, on the same mechanism, with the same timer. You can only save one. So you have the choice of good (Save the doctors) or evil (save your girlfriend).
At first it might look like a real choice. You can either keep you girlfriend in the plot, or let her die, right? Well no. If you choose to save the doctors, she falls and dies, that's true. If choose to save her though, you find that the woman on the tower was another girl in a wig, and Trish was actually one of the 7 doctors, and she falls and dies. Either way you end the same way, Trish is dead, and Cole hates Kessler even more, leading up to the climactic battle with him at the end of the game.
*FINAL CINEMATIC. DO NOT WATCH THE VIDEO IF YOU PLAN ON PLAYING INFAMOUS.*
No, the ending doesn't make any more sense in context. But that's beside the point, the point is that either way you play ends the same way. You still find out who Kessler actually is. You still end up friendless and alone. Basically the only thing different is your attitude about the whole thing.
Of course, games that have choices that really matter within the story do exist. A prime example is Bioware's Star Wars epic, Knights of the Old Republic. Knights of the Old Republic gives you many choices in your search for what's called the Star Forge. You make choices to either be good or evil, and while for the most part they're still about as subtle as "Do I save this kitten from a tree or eat its soul?", they actually do make a difference toward the end of the game. At the very end many things will happen depending on dozens of choices, even ones past the simple "Good vs. Evil" choices you made. Did you convince the Jedi Bastila to give in to her passion and fall in love with you? Then you can convince her to leave the dark side and help you in your battle with Malak. Or maybe you just told her she can be your queen of the sith once Malak is dead? Either way, the ending does change quite drastically.
Either way, you're getting a story. It's just a different story than you might have gotten had you made other choices. I just don't understand why people don't think anything where you drive the story can't be art, when it most certainly can.
