Who Says Video Games Have to Be Fun?
Brian Doherty | June 26, 2007, 7:17pm
From Wired, the makers of the grim videogames Fatworld, Airport Security, and Bacteria Salad (among others) make a bid for artistic growth for the video game by claiming for it the same right as other art forms: to challenge and annoy us in a decidedly unfun manner:
"The question of fun hangs like a cloud over this medium," [Ian] Bogost [leader of Persuasive Games] says, pointing out that "fun" would hardly be accepted as the highest possible praise for a song, novel, or movie. In his new book, Persuasive Games: The Expressive Power of Videogames, Bogost describes how games can engage us through irony, luring us into a pattern of actions that we recognize as reprehensible, or at least dismaying, while at the same time exciting our competitive drive and allowing us to inhabit an unfamiliar point of view....Bogost brings to gaming something that fiction writers have always known: Moral discomfort is the root of comedy, and pain can be a source of pleasure, too.
Kevin Parker in our April 2004 on the higher meaning and potential of video gaming.
Jon H | June 27, 2007, 12:14am | #
"interactive fiction/adventure games are basically a kind of novel you play through. many have very limited choices for the player beyond "do a, then b, then c," etc."
The most limited ones, yes. The best can be quite a bit better than that. You may have to do things in a certain order to solve a given puzzle, but you don't *have* to do things in that order.
Even in hoary old Zork, most players no doubt agonized over different ways of opening the faberge egg, only to always discover the scroll inside had been shredded by the mechanical works. They may even have continued exploring without trying to open it.
SPOILER
The solution, as it happens, is to let the Thief steal it, then later kill the Thief and find it among his posessions, safely opened.
Of course, you can't do that if you killed the Thief before you got the egg.
Now, granted, you do have to do a certain number of things in a certain order in order to obtain the scroll intact and thus succeed.
But many things in real life are like that, too.
The main limitation on the freedom of the user is in how many objects and responses the programmers implement. That's partially space-bound, which limited early games, partially time-bound, because you could spend forever adding unique responses, and partially gameplay-bound, in that you don't want too many red herrings and other 'noise' in the environment.
When any object can be part of the solution to a puzzle, I should think the addition of each additional object increases the size of the problem space significantly: is this object useless? Have I not encountered the situation for its use? Do I not have an additional object which would make it clear?
As a result, the richness of the environment and the realism of the 'simulation' may suffer for the sake of solvable games.
As an aside, I'm waiting to see what someone can come up with using Inform 7, which lets you set up relationships such as NPC's feelings - 'Hate is an emotion. Love is an emotion. Bob hates Anna. Anna loves Bob. Mike loves Anna.' then you can set up NPC behaviors under conditions based on these relationships (What does Anna do when someone she loves is in the room).
This should allow a certain small degree of emergent behavior and un- (or partially-) scripted actions.
KP | June 27, 2007, 4:41am | #
dhex wrote: "even the grand theft auto series (IV) is taking a step towards greater consequence and not realism so much as coherent world-building that's not entirely fantastic."
I agree about world-building, but wouldn't bet against greater realism: "Pedestrians are much more intelligent, realistic and diverse, using mobile phones, cash machines, eating snacks, drinking soda, reading newspapers, scratching their nose, coughing and interacting with each other through laughter and threatening remarks. Pedestrians and traffic flow will also be different depending on the time of day."
"...variations in the terrain cause the way the character walks to change. The way the player moves is controlled by a physics engine instead of purely pre-written animations, therefore enabling character movements to be more realistic."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Grand_Theft_Auto_IV
Karen wrote: "I have to register my objection to videogames as an art form..."
Videogames certainly contain art since they contain music, graphic art, fictional dialog, architecture, voice acting, among other forms. But are they art? Throw in gameplay, AI, physics, and the way these and other elements are combined and I'd say videogames are not *merely* art.
But just as one should be careful not to confuse "a painting" with painting generally, it's important to distinguish existing videogames from the possibilities of videogames. I think that's part of what's meant by Bogost and others.
