Pixellated pixies have joined Gerard Depardieu as one of France’s cultural exports. In November 2006, the French government announced plans to have video games recognised as a cultural industry alongside French cinema, with the same tax breaks and hopefully, eventually, the same global status. French blockbusters include Top Spin, Dead to Rights, Act of War, and Cold Fear. Unlike many Hollywood hits – you could probably list three Steven Spielberg pictures without having seen any of them – you’re unlikely to have heard of these unless you own some kind of gaming console or live with someone who does. Yet in 2005 the gaming industry made 7 billion US dollars.
At the heart of this expansion are MMORPGs – the ungainly acronym stands for “massively multi-player online role play games”. Western revenue from MMORPGs alone in 2006 stood at 1 billion US dollars. Perhaps the most famous of the genre is World of Warcraft, a fantasy-based adventure quest, populated by gnomes, dwarves and druids, in which you can interact in real time with other players to form alliances and complete tasks. The atmosphere is a mix of science fiction and medieval romance. It offers moral certainty, glory, power – a bunch of things that are in short supply in the average person’s offline life. Unsurprisingly, this controllable, internally logical world can be addictive – some studies have shown that users spend up to a third of their “total time commitment”, i.e., um, their time, either in-game or working on tasks related to the game. A browse around the World of Warcraft forums reveals debates taking place on the spiritual beliefs of gnomes and “transmutation etiquette”. Most of the board is incomprehensible to someone without experience of the game. One player asks, “Does anyone know if icefin bluefish are going to be seasonal, like winter squid?”
Other MMORPGs, like Second Life, (although some argue that Second Life is not a game at all) have taken a different approach, encouraging users to generate virtual communities and invent their own tasks and targets. “Residents” of Second Life’s online world can own land, throw parties, spend money, fight monsters and do housework, along with anything else they can come up with. Second Life has been popular with corporations, as well as individuals. Reuters, for example, has a Second Life bureau, mixing news about the online and outside worlds. Reuters, like many other users, see Second Life as a potential “3D successor to the internet”. And for more creative users, it mimics one of the central attractions of a really good novel or film: the ability to slip into an invented life, at least for a while.
Many outsiders view MMORPGs with suspicion – it’s a lot of time to spend on something that isn’t, well, real – but for regular users, games like World of Warcraft are a lifestyle choice, a venue in which they can act out fantasies, achieve targets and make decisions, while talking with like-minded people via a headset or onscreen messages. Depending on who you talk to, MMORPGs are either our newest and fastest-growing art form, or an online sport that represents at best a meagre pastime and at worst a headlong flight from reality.
Santiago Siri runs a blog called Games Are Art 2.0, as well as a wiki project called Playdreamer designed to generate new ideas for ‘art games’. On www.playdreamer.com, Santiago writes, “Games are usually perceived as a digital sport rather than as an interactive art. Top productions focus their development skills in creating amazing realistic worlds where gameplay ends up reduced to the ludic metaphors of killing, eating and running. As a consequence, gamers end up focusing their experience in the abstract pursuit of increasing their individual score bypassing powerful communicational elements that are present in games capable of permitting more profound and complex experiences.” Santiago and developers like him are engaging in new ways to express the “profound and complex” through games.
You do wonder if he’s being a bit hard on the gaming industry. Someone could just as easily paraphrase him: “Chick lit novels are usually perceived as entertainment rather than literature. Top novelists tend to focus their writing skills in creating unrealistic characters and relationships, reduced to the basic functions of sex, marriage and childrearing.” And so many popular films are based around “killing, eating and running”, without anyone suggesting that they are not up to the benchmark of art. Whether or not they’re great art is definitely up for debate, but it seems unfair to deny MMORPGs a place in the artistic canon simply because their subject matter isn’t highbrow enough.
But a recent focus on ‘art games’ has produced some interesting – if slightly weird – experiences, including an abstract game about relationships, The Marriage, developed by Rod Humble. Humble wrote an article for Escapist magazine outlining his idea that the artistry of games lies in their rules: “the creation of a set of rules within which the successful player must be creative is a form of expression exclusive to the domain of game design. No other art form does this.” The Marriage as an MMORPG? Why not?
In the end, the philosophical contortions required to say that games are not an art form are just too complicated. It seems easiest to say that of course MMORPGs are just as much an art form as films, or paintings, or novels. The games contain narratives, images, music, rules. Creative people work on them: designers, programmers, musicians. Yet of course they are unlike any other current art form. Instead of simply admiring or analysing a game, the player uses it, takes part in it. Games collapse the distinction between audience and participant. They’re a bit like a reality TV show in which the world can wander on and off set at will. Snobbery about games will in all likelihood disappear as they continue to become more popular, more sophisticated, more beloved. Start creating your World of Warcraft avatar now.
