Games Are Not Art
Scribblenauts as the triumph of game over aesthetics
9/30/2009 11:36 AM | 70 Comments | Page 1 of 2
Roger Ebert doesn't think games are art.
John Carmack doesn't think games are art.
John, meet Roger. Roger, meet John. John and Roger, meet
Scribblenauts, a game that proves your point and shows why games are not art, or at the very least, don't need to be art. And at the very, very least, games would be better off if they stopped worrying about the whole art thing all together.
Call me a troll and tell my why I'll never have a girlfriend for daring to actually think about the subject of videogame aesthetics. But before you go after me the way you went after Roger, follow the line of thought:
- Scribblenauts is not really about goals or meaning.
- Our aesthetics-focused game criticism looks for beauty in a game, and that usually means some glorious visuals, thundering narrative sense, elegant game mechanics and certainly a pleasing conclusion, like the crashing conclusion of a symphony.
- But games are about play, and play can just ramble along, surprising us and keeping us thinking.
And that's why I'd call
Scribblenauts "game of year" even though
some critics are iffy on the game, and I know I have to play another 100 games before now and 2010. But it's OK,
Scribblenauts is that good.
Art or adventure!
Before we go any further, I want to point something out about
Scribblenauts that is sort of obvious, though no one has seemed to have bothered to spell it out.
I am not sure how many objects there are in the
'nauts database, but 10,000 keeps coming up. I have heard 20,000, and I am assuming that is because there are a lot of words that conjure the same object. For example, Moby Dick and Herman Melville both produce a little dude that looks like Indiana Jones, but might be a famous 19th-century author, or perhaps is a sailor named Ishmael.
So let's assume there are 10,000 objects in the game. Since you typically need combinations of objects to solve each level, you have this crazy combinatorial possibility of play. Assuming that it takes about three objects on average to solve a puzzle, that means there are
1 trillion possible ways to solve a single level! If you are like me, and play slow, sloppy and lazy, and generally conjure up five objects per level, then to figure out how to get that car started and drive it up the hill you have
100 quintrillion possible options.
These mind-numbing, impossibly large numbers go lightspeed if you just toss in one more object. Take six objects to solve your little
Scribblenauts dilemma and you have a
septillion possible options -- that's a million billion billion. That's 1,000 times more
Scribblenauts options than there are grains of sand on the earth. That's a universe of possibility shoved into a cheap chit of plastic you can pick up at Target for $30.
That, my friends, is fun with math.
And while I will admit that not every combination is helpful (Can you stop a rampaging bear with coconut, coconut, coconut, coconut, coconut? Maybe not), the simple fact that you have access to a practically infinite number of possible solutions tells you what you need to know about the game. This title isn't about winning; it's about trying stuff out.
Is this art? No, it's fun!
Or maybe we should put it this way:
This is a game you play. And play. And play. And as a result, this is one of the purest forms of gameplay love that we've seen in a long time. In doing what it does,
Scribblenauts breaks free of the growing tyranny of classical aesthetics that has slowly been choking the fun out of games.
Let me explain.
The whole idea that games are aesthetic objects, or art in any meaningful sense, is to simultaneously misunderstand art, aesthetics and games. The three get thrown together because our basic notion of art holds that a) you experience something, b) it makes you go "wow," and then c) someone puts it in an art museum. Since people experiencing games often go "wow," and every once in a while someone tries to put them in a museum, we assume that games are either art, or gosh darn it, they ought to be! As a special bonus, since artists can submerge crucifixes in human whiz and get the full protection of the First Amendment, then we really ought to consider games as art just to keep them out of the censors' glare.
The trouble is, art is about beauty and some sort of unspeakable experience of the Other. Games just need to be fun. And while you have some art that is kind of fun -- like Duchamp putting toilets in galleries, doodling moustaches on famous portraits, and painting nudes walking down steps with all the panache he could muster in a picture that looks like so many pretzel sticks tossed in a pile -- art has no real business in the fun business. Likewise, as sublime as moments in
Flower might be, or as achingly evocative as
Braid is for some people, take away the fun and you get art games -- beautiful pieces of work like
Passage which are plenty artistic, just not that much fun.
This earnest pursuit of beauty in games has turned into a reverence for the art in the game -- the graphics, the music, the story, the elegance of the game system or the architectural wonder of the level design. And games have responded by becoming more and more a directed experience, a goal to reach, and less about just having fun. And by fun, I mean that silly state of delirium that comes from playing around with all the seriousness you can muster while pretending things are not what they really are. After all, it's only fun to survive a nuclear holocaust to find your dad MIA, or be left in a city overrun by zombies with a bunch of other knuckleheads, to the degree that that it's just
sort of apocalyptic and horrific. Art's gotta be about something tangible or important; games have to constantly pretend they are not.
