Skulls in the Stars

The other night, I stayed up way past my bedtime playing the finale of the video game DragonAge: Origins, the recently released fantasy role-playing game (RPG) by BioWare.  Though the game had a lot of technical limitations that drove me nuts, and the fantasy setting was definitely stereotypical (Zero Punctuation had a great review of the game), in the end the characters and the development of the story won me over.  The game is designed to force you to make very hard decisions, most of which possess no right answer.  Though I made the choices that I felt were right in the game, I was genuinely saddened at the end of the game because of the consequences of those choices.  It may seem odd, but it is a game that will probably stick with me for some time.

This reminded me of a topic I’ve thinking of blogging about for some time: are video games artistic?  Of course, modern video games have armies of artists producing the graphics and the music, and there are other sites that consider video games as art in a more abstract sense, but I’m really thinking more about the stories that are told and the way they are told.

Roger Ebert has, in years past, caught a lot of flak for expressing his opinion that video games cannot be art comparable to great literature and movies:

…I did indeed consider video games inherently inferior to film and literature. There is a structural reason for that: Video games by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control.

I am prepared to believe that video games can be elegant, subtle, sophisticated, challenging and visually wonderful. But I believe the nature of the medium prevents it from moving beyond craftsmanship to the stature of art. To my knowledge, no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers. That a game can aspire to artistic importance as a visual experience, I accept. But for most gamers, video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic.

Roger Ebert has given this a lot of thought (and gotten into arguments with Clive Barker over it), and he makes a very reasoned case.  If I understand it correctly, he argues that good movies and literature require the author to tell a story the way he or she wants to tell it — the more one gives the player control over the outcome of the story, the more one is sacrificing their story and artistic vision.

I used to think more or less the same thing as Ebert, but these days I respectfully disagree with him.  Firstly, interactivity doesn’t necessarily ruin the story the author wants to tell — it can place the gamer into the story in a way that gets them more involved than a passive reading can do.   Furthermore, it is possible to use the very act of interactivity to tell a sort of ‘meta-story’ — showing the gamer how their actions have consequences and showing how those consequences can ripple further along the line in the tale.

Of course, most games don’t do this at all, and I can’t blame Ebert for not being familiar with some of the gems of the genre.  Heck, most movies that are produced fall very, very short of being ‘high art’, and someone who casually follows the summer blockbusters would certainly get the impression that movies are shallow and vapid.

With this in mind, I thought I’d share my list of video games that aspire to something more than shallow entertainment.  Whether or not they reach the level of ‘art’ I leave it to the reader to decide.  Certainly this isn’t intended to be the final word or even a convincing argument in favor; the internet is filled with commentary on the subject.
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