Artsy Video Games: Is it sacrificing game play?

Videogame developers and players have long struggled for their passion to be validated as an acceptable art form. Roger Ebert is credited for saying that he didn't believe games to be on par with movies, simply because there has never been a game that was on par with the greats in music, theater, poetry etc. In my opinion, Roger forgets that the definition of art is personal to the viewer; nothing is imbued with the inherent status of art. We, as a society, have standardized the definition of art to mean many different things, and it seems that video games just barely miss the quota according to general opinion. Games, however, have taken strides to reverse this and be respected as a true art form. There is a new trend of artsy games being created with wonderful creative direction and bold experimentation. In this article by CNET, the rise of the indie developer is displayed with such hit titles such as Monument Valley and Journey.

"The game has to work as a puzzle, but it also has to work as piece of graphic design." This was dilemma for Monument Valley: How was it possible for the art itself to be as big of a gameplay mechanic as the puzzles in the game. Looking at the still from the article, its clear that they intended for level to be art. Taking influences from Escher, the world inside the puzzle is splashed with a pallet of color, and the puzzles are designed around the world itself. In essence, the art becomes the puzzle, and a good example of using of art being used. The article, however, delves deeper into the problems of being an indie developer: the lack of funding and attention. In order to survive in the rapidly changing market, indie developers need to find their niche and get their name out there. It just so happens that their method of getting noticed is by emphasizing on their artistic styles. As the article claims, "Getting noticed is the most important step to long-term survival in the gaming industry."

At what point, however, does focusing on the art of the game impede on developing the gameplay? Does focusing on the artistic side of the game too much distort the overall goal a game is trying to achieve (that is, an interactive experience for the user)? At what cost are we willing to sacrifice in order to achieve the allusive classification of art? Recent controversy came out of the game Gone Home, when gaming journalists and gamers had two very polarizing opinions of Gone Home's ''classification." In Gone Home, the plot revolves around a girl who has, fittingly, come home and explores her house. Along the way, the player can unfold the story through various clues around the house. Critics praised it for its artistic take on telling a story in the first person. Players, however, believed that there was little to no substance to the game, and it did not warrant a 20$ price tag. Sure, it told a great story against a great soundtrack, but there was barely any player input. If anything, the "game" was closer to a movie where you could control the pace. Can Gone Home really be classified as a game then? In an effort to produce a video game that could be considered art, Gone Home created something entirely different, almost akin to a new medium of interactive storytelling. It is not a game by any conventional definition; this is why that there is a threshold between complimenting a game with art and complimenting art with an interactive medium. Creating the latter only hinders games from ever being classified as art, because it sets a standard that an actual game can't achieve, and it doesn't showcase the mechanics of that a game should have. 

Source: Statt, N. (2014, November 23). Video games aren't all guns and gore; artistic titles are on the rise. Retrieved December 5, 2014.