Game is a loaded word. It conjures up associations with sport, with competition, with fun – all things which are argued as have nothing to do with art or creativity.
But these are superficial aspects of games. Digging deeper exposes the bones and gristle of conflict: rules, goals, mediated interactions, the ways groups or individuals respond to each other, and structures for risk and overcoming adversity. These are the pieces for the creation of unique art and experience.
The arts have always functioned to provide us with synecdoches: figures of speech where a part of something is used in place of the whole. We find examples in writing, film, painting, theatre and now we can add game to that list alongside their technologically-enabled siblings, videogames.
In 2009, the Agency of Coney, a UK based company who describe themselves as an agency of adventure and play, presented A Small Town Anywhere at the Battersea Arts Centre, a game of political intrigue, gossip, community and agency. They describe the work as “theatre for around 30 playing audience who take hats and badges to become citizens of a small town for the most momentous week of its history”. In a small town on the edge of war, factions of mostly strangers spread gossip, vie for information and power, and share secrets, with participants becoming not only party to, but integral, to the evolving story through the stories they tell themselves and each other and the way they interact within the rules of the fictional town. This is theatre, it is art but it is also a game.
Another example of a creative game draws from a cinematic base.
Blast Theory’s A Machine To See With places the audience inside a heist film. You supply your mobile number and receive an automated call with the location of a street corner. You arrive, the phone rings, and you are off following a series of instructions that lead you through the city on your own personal story.
Blast Theory describes the work as being “about the financial crisis… It contrasts the agency of a film star, of a protagonist in a heist movie with the reality of the financial crisis since 2008. It places the adrenaline rush of revenge against the steady impotence of citizens confronted by global capitalism”. The mix of contemporary reality, as well as the physical staging in a real world location, and the use of familiar technology, gives the piece enormous storytelling power.
Both of these artworks are still games. They have rules that mediate how you interact with them, they have goals for players, they evolve based on the player’s actions, and they have systems that create conflict between players or the world or the systems themselves.
But they are also more than that. They are theatre and cinema; they are technology and play. They are games in the synecdochical sense, not the classical sense, and they are part of emerging work that is evolving our sense of what a game might be – as the word itself expands to also contain that sense.
This expansion also applies to games mediated by technology and by screens, with videogames expanding the idea of what games are, what they might become, and how we can create unique experiences with their component parts. They can create games in the classical sense – competitive, fun, social – but they can also be used to create worlds where our own rules don’t apply, or to create abstract metaphorical representations of real world systems, or to simply bind layers of music, visuals, text, and art together in a seamless whole in a way which is as far from a game as it can be – but which is still clearly identifiable as a videogame.
Exploring these new opportunities, the past few years have seen the emergence of a new type of videogame creator – individuals or teams more interested in exploring the expressive edges of the form than in creating competitive systems or in duplicating the high-score driven experiences of their youth. Enabled by improved technology, digital distribution, and their own innate curiosity, they are creating works which – as with A Small Town Anywhere or A Machine To See With – use games as synecdoche, but are so much more.
Dear Esther from The Chinese Room is one such videogame. There is no high score. There are no enemies. There are no weapons. You cannot die. There is no competition. But there is conflict. There is fear and hope and there is the sense of a world on the deserted island you wander along while an unseen and unknowable narrator relates to you stories about their thoughts and the history of the island.
It is a strange experience, but it is still clearly a videogame. It is mediated through technology. It uses familiar first-person tropes such as keys for movement and the mouse to look around. It has a flashlight to illuminate darkened areas. But it chooses also to leave some aspects out, embedding rules about the experience deep in its code. You cannot run, which forces a very specific pace. You cannot jump which enforces the paths and barriers. And at certain points, the game lies to you about what is happening, creating a distance between player and narrator, the space itself and the experience of moving through it.
Dear Esther stands amongst a wealth of experimental and expressive titles, which all lean more or less on their game-like bases. Journey from thatgamecompany creates puzzles and connections by restricting the ways players can interact with other networked players, creating a sense of agency and solitude. Papo and Yo from Minority tells the story of an abusive alcoholic father and the need for escapism through videogame-like puzzles which fantastically reshape the world, but which do little to reduce the potency of the central themes. Dys4ia by Anna Anthropy is an autobiographical game about when the author began hormone replacement therapy, capturing some sense of the experience through single screen interactions and clear goals.
Theatre, film, writing, painting, comics, games: we inevitably end up talking about the core when were talking about the expansive whole. A game is an engine of conflict. Systems and rules are ways we create goals and mediate interactions. Technology allows us new ways of doing all of that, while simulating worlds and creating new metaphors which give us new ways of thinking about our lives and reality – and new ways for people to create art.
Freeplay 2012 Independent Games Festival is on in Melbourne from September 19 – 23.
