Part 2: Aesthetics - Fantasizing About What Is

Unlike other technological forms of visual representations developed in the last two centuries, specifically film and photography, the digital game began its life alienated from realism and technically accurate reproductions of the objective world. Unlike film and photography, which began with simple, but accurate representations of reality, digital games, limited by existing technology, struck out across the fields of imagination, producing works that bore little more than a symbolic relationship with the real world. In many ways, the symbolic nature of many early digital games shared more in common with two dimensional cave drawings and ancient artwork preexisting the revolution of perspective and dimensionality than they shared with contemporary aesthetic creations.

Unable to accurately recreate reality, game designers were thrown back upon themselves and their imaginations in search of symbols and concepts that could be expressed in the rudimentary graphics of the limited available technology. In many ways these initial constraints lead to some very exciting and creative aesthetic experiments in visual communication that have been rarely matched by contemporary game design.

The point of this is not to romanticize this era of design or pretend that it was more sophisticated or groundbreaking than it actually was. It is tempting to overlook the many flaws of the fledgling game design community because of its explosive imagination and daring, but it is just as instructive to take stock of its flaws as it is its virtues. Despite the limited ability to recreate reality and the many fantastic worlds that spawned from these limitations, many games did attempt to recreate reality. The first games ever created were either created by engineers and scientists working in the military-industrial complex in their spare time , or were contracted military simulations created for the government. These games, which either explicitly bore the stamp of military command and control or merely reflected the subconscious of its engineers and scientists, could not help but be chained to the reality of the cold war they were created in. Most of the other games, even in this anarchic and untamed period of development, still operated under a logic of command and control, violent coercion, and domination, despite outlandish visuals and fantastic settings. As I alluded to in Part 1: Commodified Clichés, this initial commercial and ideological influence, namely towards military simulation and domination, has established a forward momentum that has yet to be overcome by the industry. Game mechanics are still primarily focused on an adversarial approach to the game-world and aesthetically the trend is highly biased towards ever increasing realism.

This unquestioned trend towards realism has taken a serious toll on the potential development of the medium as a form of art and the industry’s ability to develop and expand creatively. The emphasis on ceaselessly improving the technical presentation of the digital game, be it through improved visuals, better simulation of physics or the passage of sound, or any other technical gimmick, has enabled the industry to essentially create the same archetypical games over and over again. Every genre can be reduced to a basic, tired formula that appears to be reinvigorated through the use of more sophisticated technical innovations. While some technical innovations have lead to more sophisticated and involved gaming experiences, more often than not this innovation allows for little substantial change to the core experience while appearing to progress by essentially redressing the same product in a flashier façade. I want to make clear that I am not claiming that an emphasis on technical progression is a problem in of itself; I do not believe this for a second. The problem is that major titles now cannot be produced without conforming to this technical advancement, costing them valuable time and resources that could be diverted to truly re-imagining the gaming experience as we know it. Titles cannot be properly promoted and advertised without following the trend of newer, better visuals and more sophisticated technical presentation. The reasons for this are fairly obvious— it is much easier to present a three minute long tech demo showing off all of the latest technical advancement of an upcoming game than it is to explain the intricacies of a new way of experiencing digital games. Graphics and other technical achievements offer an easy, accessible point of reference for the audience to judge its possible merits. Furthermore, we, as a consumer base, expect bigger and better, and our concepts of innovation generally revolve around technical progression. Because of this our expectations are relatively low when it comes to general innovation concerning the medium itself. We are currently content with the way games are designed to conform to the same set of tried and true genres, with those that don’t conform being truncated or redesigned to do so.

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It is telling to look at the development of Bioshock both because of how accurately it conforms to these expectations and how unanimously it was praised from all circles. In the beginning of the game’s marketing campaign many people who had previewed the game were stumped as to what genre to place it in. Many reviewers said that it was somewhat of an adventure and action hybrid, placing the character in a vibrant world to explore while employing a verbose and satisfying combat system. Rather than embrace these positive comments, the developers took it as a negative reaction to their game. They knew that, financially, “adventure game” was a label to be shunned, and actively worked to reign in these comments and control the perception of their game. They engaged in an active campaign to place the game firmly in the action/shooter genre, downplaying any “adventure” elements and emphasizing its “balls to the wall” action roots. While many of the most important and forward thinking works of art of all aesthetic media have enjoyed this label defying quality, in the highly commodified world of digital game development it was instantly shunned and aggressively undermined. This speaks volumes about the problems facing any meaningful development within the industry and, subsequently, within the medium itself. (This tendency towards simplification and one-dimensional representation, both in the industry and the medium itself, will be discussed in further detail in a subsequent article.)

Furthermore, by focusing so much effort on realism game designers are missing some of the major strengths of the medium. Digital games begin from nothing, built out of code and any number of methods of visual rendering, and as such bear no direct link with the real world. Unlike film or photography, it takes no effort, or at least no additional effort, for them to render something unreal or fantastic. Thus, it makes no sense to place so much emphasis and to devote so many resources to the goal of fully realistic rendering of reality before the medium has even begun to develop its inherent trend towards un-reality, and anti-realism. The trend towards realism, an artificial trend created by politics and the market, runs against the grain of the medium itself, runs against the grain of what is fundamental to the medium. It takes far more effort to attempt to recreate the experience of the real world than it does to simply create one’s own world. This trend makes no sense; it would be like all the great painters skipping over every epoch of artistic creation, the nuance of every style that has come so far, in an attempt to create photorealistic paintings. The goal of photorealistic paintings is achievable, and has been achieved by many artists in the 20th century, but in the end this is only a small innovation that does not warrant much attention, because after all of the laboring it only amounts to a replica of a photograph. Surely the significance and meaning of a photorealistic painting holds a special place in the artists who create these amazing works, and in the art community in general, but to place this style of art on a pedestal and endlessly strive to achieve it would be absurd. And so it is for digital games.

A final, troubling aspect of the fixation on realism is the inherent claim to objectivity that comes with it. In the vast majority of games, and especially those that attempt realism, the perspective of the player, whether it be first or third person, isometric, or a god’s-eye type view, has always represented itself as objective. In other words, it can be taken for granted that whatever the player is seeing, it is what is actually happening in the game-world. We assume that what we are seeing is not being passed through the perspective of the character we are playing, warping or biasing it in anyway. This is a fatal error for a medium that has the unique potential of placing the player into the subjective world of another. By seeking out realism, the industry has missed the potential to explore the plethora of ways that each of our personal, subjective perspectives alter and mediate the “objective” world that we share. It seems to me that the digital game could rival even the novel in the presentation of totally foreign and otherwise hard to comprehend subjective experiences. (This will be the topic of a post that is currently in the works.)

Much of the initial thought process that lead me to these thoughts and theories came from reading “Video Game Aesthetics: The Future!” and I highly recommend it to anyone that has enjoyed this article. It has a much more in-depth look at specific sets of aesthetics and how they have either been incorporated into the digital game or stand as new frontiers begging to be explored.

Thanks for reading and keep a look out for the first entries from the other main contributor here at the blog, Casey.

Part 1: Commodified Clichés

The digital game industry, which is often misunderstood to be more profitable than the film industry[1], has enjoyed explosive success and growth in recent years. But this success has come at a cost: internal industry consolidation and the escalating financial risk of game development threatens to arrest and suffocate creative exploration of the medium. As production values increase dramatically with each generation of game technology, with the average “next-generation” title for Playstation 3 costing $15 million and generally taking a minimum of two years to create, the pressure to financially perform has never been greater. This leads to the production of derivative, formulaic titles which exploit existing financially successful content, rather than exploring new ground. Furthermore, with the consolidation of power within the industry, independent production has become increasingly limited, especially due to licensing fees required to develop on any major platform other than PC.[2] This is especially problematic for an industry that has always thrived on the development of “small development enterprises.”[3] As the industry struggles under bloated production values and vastly shrinking ownership, it threatens to crush many of its original sources of innovation.

These factors have led to a market that cannot afford to take the risks necessary to innovate and expand. As a result, “dynamism and creativity” have been replaced by “tried and true genres, based on replicating the success of hit games”[4], even as concentrated control of market and distribution leads to “a relatively restricted repertoire of games promoted by well-connected publishing houses, and towards marginalizing or asphyxiating the projects of developers outside this circle.”[5]

What we are left with is a relatively small number of games able to reach a mainstream audience, nearly all of which are fiercely derivative and often iterative.[6] What has sold in the past defines, in large part, what will be made in the future, and what has generally sold in the past is violence. In many ways, the past success of violence can be explained by the origins of the modern digital game as a product of the military-industrial/entertainment complex (this will be explained in further detail in a subsequent post). Patterns forged during times of more open exploration of the medium, with less pressure to financially perform, have become solidified and ingrained within the industry as the individual production of games have become higher risk. Intensification of continually nuanced and varied forms of violence serves as a form of product differentiation and provides a way to “precision-target strategically important market segments.”[7] While the Entertainment Software Association (ESA)[8] boasts that 85% of all games sold in 2006 were rated E – T, violence continues to be a pervasive, marketable part of the gaming experience. If one examines the game sales by genre, as opposed to simply rating, they will clearly see a strong trend towards violent content. A minimum of 58% of video games and 63% of computer games sold in 2006 fell into traditionally violent genres and many games rated T still contain explicit levels of violence.[9] As political and cultural pressure builds to restrict violent video games, developers have decided to slightly sanitize the violence in their games so that they may earn a T rating, as opposed to an M rating, allowing their game to more easily reach a wider market segment while still featuring commercially viable violent scenarios. Popular games featuring mutilated bodies, dismemberment, murder, violent military scenarios, and the sociopathic destruction of life have all been rated T in the last two years. (Oblivion (until it was re-rated because someone created a nude patch that modded the texture files of the female characters) and Destroy All Humans quickly comes to mind)

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This obsession with violence and domination, problematic in its own right, is leading the industry astray and seriously limiting developers’ ability to realize the creative potential lying dormant in the digital game as an aesthetic medium. When significant increases in technical sophistication (specifically in the realm of graphics) are a prerequisite for any blockbuster game, innovations of the past quickly become burdens for the future. If developer A spent years developing a complicated way of rendering violence and dismemberment for their first person shooter, this initial innovation quickly becomes a forward momentum for future projects. Their fans want more of this system, but better. Their producers want them to exploit the market share they have managed to carve out through their system of rendering violence. Now, instead of freely picking any project they like, they are pressured to continue and improve their past innovations. The aforementioned risk of developing a big title in the game industry, coupled with their past success and its conformity to the general trends of game design thus far (namely, violence sells) gives them every reason (and often little choice but) to continue with their past work. This cycle leads to iterative game design, as opposed to true innovation, and the system of “tried and true genres” which essentially recreate a few basic scenarios with minimal circumstantial changes and more sophisticated technology and techniques.

On a small scale this might be acceptable or worth encouraging, but when we take this scenario into account on an industry wide scale, it is easy to see how development has become so stagnant and how it will continue to stagnate. Essentially the industry is driven by a desire to render “objective” reality in increasingly fine detail, while creating ever more complex scenarios of violence. Subsequent articles will discuss where this momentum may have originally came from (hint: think as far back as the first game ever created) and why this drive towards realism is so problematic aesthetically and creatively.

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[1] The number $7.4 billion is often thrown around to backup this claim. The claim itself is actually misleading because the $7 billion figure includes the sale of game consoles but the comparable film industry statistics don’t include the sale of DVD and VHS players. Without the inclusion of game console revenues the game industry could not be considered more profitable than the film industry.

[2] This unfortunately may be changing for the worse. Microsoft has made recent moves to solidify and market games sold for PCs under the title of “Games for Windows.” This is likely part of a play by Microsoft to get a piece of all the revenues coming from development on their Windows operating system. This move would be catastrophic for creative experimentation within the game industry, as independent game producers, not to mention amateurs, already operate on severely limited budgets and the additional licensing fees would often be insurmountable.

[3] Digital Play, 177.

[4] Ibid. 250

[5] Ibid. 179

[6] For instance, the most profitable game to date is Halo 3.

[7] Ibid. 249

[8] The leading lobby for the game industry.

[9] http://www.theesa.com/facts/salesandgenre.asp (I couldn’t find the original source of this information, but this is a good place to start looking, if you are interested.)

State of the Industry

We would like to begin this blog with a discussion of the state of the digital game as an aesthetic medium and as an industry. While the industry and the medium are inextricably tied, for better or worse, we intend to make a clear distinction between the two in this discussion and all others we may have on this blog.

This discussion will take place over several posts, so expect the subsequent parts to be posted regularly after this first installation.