Expressive Gaming

Reasonable people have all accepted that video games are a form of art. If someone truly disagrees with the premise that video games have substantial artistic value, then I think it is self-evident to any gamer that the person simply has not experienced games properly.

The act of designing and developing a game is clearly an act of artistic expression. Unlike movies and novels, however, games are interactive. Many games often act more like a dialogue between the designer and the player than a simple transfer of content from designer to player. My question, then, is this: can the process of playing a game be considered an act of artistic expression?

I think that the idea of playing a game as an expressive activity is somewhat unappreciated in important ways. Gamers always leap to the defense of designers as masterful artists, and many games are focused on things like telling a story, or having beautiful explorable worlds. These are all ways in which designers create art which is perceived by the player. Some games, however, are much closer to an empty canvas. The best example in recent years is the runaway hit game Minecraft.

For the two people out there who have never played Minecraft, it is a deceptively simple game. You control a guy, and walk around in a world of blocks. There are mountains made of hundreds of blocks, trees made of dozens, oceans, everything is made of big blocks. These blocks can be broken apart using the appropriate tools, and yield resources. These resources allow the player to lay out their own blocks, reshaping the world in dramatic ways.

There is no explicit point to Minecraft. There are no points to score, no stars to collect, and there's no boss to defeat. There are enemies, but they spawn randomly and are simply an obstacle and nuisance. Minecraft is a game in which the players have to set their own goals. Some players might want to forge the best weapons in the game, then go travel across the empty wilderness. Other people might build great cities, populated with the simple block people the game spawns in certain areas. Other people create elaborate dungeons through which other brave players may travel, simply for the pleasure of the challenge and the accomplishment of completing a task.

The game itself has artistic merit. Its blocky aesthetic is oddly pleasing, and the design of its mechanics is elegant and beautiful in its own right. More important, however, is the massive amount of expression that goes into playing the game. Simply choosing a goal in Minecraft is already an act of expression. When someone decides to spend a hundred hours building a perfect replica of the Capitol Building, they are saying, “This is what I want to do. This is important to me.” That act is an act of personal expression, and can genuinely be seen as artistic. The things they make also have serious artistic merit. The blocks of the game may be cruder than paint or stone, but the final impact of the finished work is greater when the viewer knows that the player who made this did it within the rules of the game, and the work is made greater for its limitations.

Minecraft is a very obvious case where the act of playing is expressive. Other games, however, have more subtle forms of artistic expression embedded in their gameplay. Many games now offer players a variety of moral choices. Mass Effect is a series of games in which players play as an intrepid space captain tasked with saving the galaxy. They are offered many moments where they have to make choices. Which crew member do they save, and which do they let die? Is it acceptable to commit genocide to rid the galaxy of a terrible threat? Can machines achieve true consciousness? The game poses these questions, and asks the player to unravel them in whatever way they choose. The designers were careful to create a rich, detailed world, so the decisions have a great deal of context to them, especially if the player is one prone to notice and remember details. The questions go beyond mere thought experiments because they often tie into specific characters you have come to know and fight alongside. I think it is reasonable to say that the decisions made by the player in Mass Effect amount to acts of artistic expression on the part of the player. The player is making judgments about what things they find important and which things they don't, and they are choosing which characters matter to them the most. The presentation of the decisions is an artistic act by the designer, but making the decisions is art from the hands of the player.

There are still other games where players deliberately ignore the stated objectives of the game and simply do their own thing. This can be an almost rebellious act, turning the game into something far different than the designers intended. For instance, my brother and I used to play a game we referred to as “Jigglypuff Football,” which was our own amusing take on the popular game Super Smash Bros. In Super Smash Bros., the normal objective is to damage the opposing player and eventually hit him so hard he would fly off the map, thus killing him and depleting his stock of lives. The game is over when only one player is left alive. However, we invented our own game within the game. We put in a computer AI opponent (always playing the character “Jigglypuff”), and each claimed one side of the map. Our objective was to knock Jigglypuff off the other player's side of the map. Each knockoff was a goal, and we would compete to score the most goals in a given time period. The game was built to not care which side someone fell off, and had no way of tracking our game. Yet we played anyway, and had great fun. Our decision to ignore the game's stated objective and play our own way was in a sense an artistic decision. We became designers of our own game, making use of the tools the designers had given us.

There is a takeaway from all this for game designers. Any game with clear rules and a certain amount of leeway can become a fantastic platform for everyday expressiveness. Right now, the gaming community is really into games that are basically expressions of the designer. Popular and critically acclaimed titles like Call of Duty, The Last of Us, and Journey are games in which the designer had a clear artistic vision, and communicated it powerfully through an interactive medium. I think that in the future, however, people will really grasp the artistic and cultural importance of games designed to let the player be expressive. Games focused on player expression, like Minecraft, The Sims, and Grand Theft Auto are doing very well right now, and will likely continue to do well in the future. This sort of expression is something completely unique to games, and I think should define why video games deserve their own unique spot in the canon of artistic media.