Exploring the Experience: A critical evaluation of Video Gaming
The visual Arts world and gaming industry is already saturated with speculation and arguments regarding whether or not video games are to be considered an Art form. So for the purpose of this critical review of some of the best and most moving moments in gaming over the last ten years, I am not going to waste my breath adding to the falsie that they are not. Working on the basis that they are Art, which is something I am adamant about, with a kind of stubborn, pig-headedness, allows me to just dive in and talk about some of the elements of a wide range of games that moved me. This is what I am passionate about.
One game worthy of a hefty mention is the brilliantly original The Path. You play as eight different characters that are one by one sent to their grandmother’s house in the country. Played from the tried and tested third person format (something I will be talking more about later) each girl is flawed in their own way and ultimately pays for this with their life. Tale of tales – the creator of this ‘walk in portrait’ leave most questions unanswered, in this breathtaking journey through beautiful scenery, metaphors and the loss of innocence. TOT describe it as a short horror story, but it is so much more than this. It is brutally moving and replayable experience, which not only tears up the rulebook, but hurtles it into the sun. The obvious and intentional parallels between the fairy tale Little Red Riding hood and the excellent The Path only add it its feelings of layered and deeply considered exploration. The game is far from simple, giving you no easy handle to grasp as you stagger through intensely beautiful woodland landscapes, dissected with – no surprises here – a path. The game relies on the players need to push video game boundaries to the limit, providing you with one simple rule, by all means, stay on the path. This is, conversely, the one rule you have to break in order to not only ‘complete’ this game, but to see all the intricacies it has to offer. The music is hauntingly beautiful, highlighting the visual feasts perfectly; invading all the senses with conflicting amounts of fear and illation.
The game as well as being brilliantly written and made, showcases a wonderful solution to the constant problems of finite limits to designed locations. It wasn’t long ago that games had to rely on clumsy pretences to cover up the fact that exploration is always limited to the amount that can be physically designed and created. A good example of this is the peerless, revenge based, slow-mo kill-athon, Max Payne. I remember one particular scene, set on a snowy open street, which poses a lot of awkward questions about how you make it clear in which direction you are meant to interoperate as the right one to head in, as you have many doors and alleys built into the surroundings it give it authenticity. The rather extreme solution to this dilemma was to make a large truck crash in the prologue cut scene, which conveniently blocks one of the two exits from the area. physically stopping you going that way, as well as psychologically inferring that this is not the right direction.
Methods like this may seem a little too hasty but at least it was attempted to blend them into the plot. I don’t want to appear cynical of Max Payne for using techniques like this, because I think it is actually a rather clever way to put a barrier up, but you cannot have trucks crashing everywhere all the time. More modern games seem to have resolved this dilemma rather eloquently, in two steps. The first is to build a map so large and intricate it almost beggars full exploration anyway, such as the groundbreaking game Fallout 3, which has a scale comparable to the actual size of New York, in which it is set. The sheer size of this environment has the added bonus of it being more than likely that the player will have forgotten that they are revisiting a previously explored area because it takes so long to start overlapping what you have explored and what you haven’t. The second is to make a location that is still large, but seamlessly loops, as if you were running on the face of the globe itself. This technique is used in The Path to an awesome degree, helped considerably due to its very repetitive forest location. Either style of exploration works a lot better than some more dated solutions to the problem. I remember in many games, such as futuristic Deus X having invisible walls, which just literally stopped you in your tracks if you were heading in the wrong direction.
You cannot blame the designers for issues such as these, but it is nice to imagine a gaming world with an infinite degree of possibilities. Nothing breaks the immersive atmosphere like a sudden jab of reality. You become instantly aware that you are in a game as soon as you encounter one of these boundaries. I often muse about the paradox of a character managing to escape one of these boundaries, if Max Payne managed to jump the flaming truck and head off into the un-designed realms…not possible. Anyway, ideally we want extensions of our own reality, believable limits that can be pushed. The best games are the ones that do their best to discredit their own limitations.
Another game to mention is Valves sublime, Half-life, which set a bar so high few games have managed to vault it to obtain the ultimate combination of excellent graphics (in its time) and a very well thought out plot. The game in its day was immense, and had a very pleasant circular feel to it when subsequent sequels were brought out in later years, such as Opposing Force and Blue Shift. One occurrence that I always found pleasing was a particularly nice wink to the audience between the first and second game.
In the first Half-life, Adrian Gordon (the main protagonist, and hero-scientist) is knocked out and dragged down a corridor, momentarily regaining consciousness and through blurry eyes manages to watch his own feet being dragged behind him, before passing out again. Years later, in Opposing Force, you play as disenfranchised SWAT team member, Adrian Shepard, a renegade one man Army who manages to infiltrate Black Mesa (the location of Alien based evil experiments, and Freeman’s workplace). While concealing himself in an Air vent, Shepard witness the aforementioned Gordon Freeman being dragged down a corridor by two guards. For me, this represents one of the best techniques in video gaming, a feeling of considered circularity. I like to know that the makers are treating me as an insider, they know that I know about this previous situation in the last game and it just feels like a very well thought out touch, perfect water cooler talk and it breaks the boundaries between one game and another, invading and adding to both. The fact that little touches like this also help cement your own suspicions that all three games are happening simultaneously is also awe-inspiring. As if you might run into a previous version of yourself running around somewhere inserted in from when you played as him years ago. Wormhole. Anyway, you are alone in all the Half-life games, which always add to the intensity of an experience.
Another game to utalize the power of the lone experience is one of the best flash games to come out of the heaving porn and poker orientated creation we call the Internet, namely The Crimson Room. I drone on about this game so often it is almost second nature, but it is such an excellent example of the platitude less is more. The premise of the game is simple, you wake up in a room unaware of why you are there, who you are and how to get out; you know none of the answers to the basic question, which is a bold and rare move in video games. All you know is you have to get out. The ominous undercurrents of the game are fascinating in themselves, but in particular I like the cohesion between the first game and the second The Viridian room. After escaping The Crimson Room you had to wait months for a sequel, and when it arrived I was delighted and slightly unnerved to find a rather delicious overlap. Once in The Viridian Room you can look through a keyhole to reveal the previously escaped Crimson Room. I cannot explain it, but I get Goosebumps and shivers down my spine when I encounter this kind of circularity. It just makes everything more transient; the games flow more believably, instead of each game in the world just being a single island never connecting. The ones that do touch each and interweave almost say ‘Ah, remember that game? You were there and we remembered you were there’ just leave me in awe.
In a totally different kettle of fish; is the fascinating Façade, ‘the most important game of the last twenty years’. Based on the classic text adventure genre, the game takes place in a diner party scenario. Starting off with you inputting your name into the game, you appear at the door of an apartment, which you can overhear an audible argument occurring on the other side of. You knock on the door and await it to be answered by a man named Trip, who heartily greets you by you name. From this point on you have the ability to interact by kissing, hugging, comforting and most importantly, saying anything you wish too. The characters have some of the most impressive A.I I have ever encountered. Once you overcome the urges to run over to Trip’s wife, Grace, and kiss her repeatedly and spout obscenities, the game play becomes nothing short of addictive. The couple proceed to break down emotionally into a marital battle before your eyes and you have to do your best to control the situation in the any way you see fit. The game seems to have no boundaries, but you can push them too far. On one occasion I demanded drink after drink until he yelled at me, and after a frustrated outburst he threw me out. I have yet to complete or even proceed beyond a certain point in this game, but the sheer amount of options is simply staggering. You never encounter exactly the same convocation twice, as each reply or interruption to their questions and insults results in a different tangent path. I found the subject of sex, although crude, helped bust through the first walls of sniping and snide comments, but timing is everything in this game, one answer to a question at one point in the game will have a positive reaction where it might result in further problems later on. The game is built on subtleties, choosing your moment to interrupt or intervene is integral. Staggeringly, this game is built with audio voices’, which just makes it more impressive, as the characters fluidly and convincingly, answer and react to almost anything you type. More exciting than Façade is the possibility of what is on the horizon for gaming. If it is possible to program this level of interaction, imagine what will be possible in ten, five or even a couple of years time.
Often, it is the format in which you play the game that holds the most weight. The timeless Half-life uses a first person style, which I believe to be the most effective way to make your protagonist believable and more importantly, interesting. You don’t just buy into the plot of the game; often you need to buy into the character you play as. The best way to do this is too play through the eyes of this person, and the less you know about them the better. There is something intoxicating about becoming this character shrouded in mystery. A game that utilized this perfectly is Bioshock, a game so effortlessly addictive and immersive it almost seems to mock reality for being unbelievable. An incredible premise, if ever I have seen one; Bioshock’s intro alone assures its place in gaming history. After surviving a plane crash you find yourself floating in a flame-riddled Atlantic, watching the huge tail of the plane sink before your eyes. This is when you find Rapture, an underwater city built to escape the post war world of the late nineteen forties. Inevitably, everyone becomes the victims of their own vanity and isolation, taking copious amounts of a steroid like enhancement drug. The eerie setting of this world, in a futuristically re-imagined period of the nineteen fifties means you get a bizarre combination of haunting gramophone records, period characters and weapon modifying technology. The character you play as, is someone whose past is carefully and slowly revealed as you play through this visually stunning first person game. You know so little about him, that after a while you take up this persona of a heartless, iron bastard, and frankly you have to be to play this game which often was so jumpy that I could only play in stints of fifteen minutes before having to have a lie down and a cup of tea.
The first person format is strengthened by the presence and absense of your virtual entourage. This is something that I noticed while playing the very successful game adaptation of the film King Kong. I am almost embarrassed to mention such a game, as by and large, I never really rate games based on movies, as they are often clumsy and pointless, but this breaks the mould so severely that it is worth an honourable mention. I found to my surprise that when I played this game as part of a team, travelling the dense jungle with the A.I characters, I had an odd sense of belonging and comradely. This sense of belonging only really become apparent when I was suddenly left on my own, such as in the situation when a bridge collapsed before I had crossed, leaving myself and the other figures separated. I’m not ashamed to admit I had a mild sense of panic. Illogical, but this does support ideas of people’s (or just my) engagement with games. I never really considered myself to be someone who gets too involved with games, with delusions of which reality is real; but although this reaction was only a small one, it can not be ignored. It is clear from video games, films, even dreams, that being alone is a reoccurring theme in which negativity, insanity, death or a shock usually follows. I admire the creators of King Kong for this development, which I can only assume is intentional as you end up on your own so often that it can’t be anything other than a tired and tested technique.
I don’t want to be a martyr, or worse still a dork, fighting for video games place in 'The Hall of Arts' – which is a place I just made up; because I understand a lot of what I speak about is very personal, a far reach from the world of 'Pro-Evo'. Video games, as with higher Art have always been subjective, and probably will always be. In resent years we have come to see more interactive, game influenced works come to the surface, and I believe we will continue to see more. This untapped and powerful medium will becomes more utilized, more powerful and more emotive. So are Video games Art? Who cares? I never set out to answer that question or even dignify it as worth exploration, as for me it is inconsequential. I get all the exploration I need from gaming. I strongly suggest seeking out The Path, which is a bargain at less than 8 pounds online (that works out at a pound per zillion hours of gameplay) and Façade, a game that bizarrely is available on free download. Just do it.
One game worthy of a hefty mention is the brilliantly original The Path. You play as eight different characters that are one by one sent to their grandmother’s house in the country. Played from the tried and tested third person format (something I will be talking more about later) each girl is flawed in their own way and ultimately pays for this with their life. Tale of tales – the creator of this ‘walk in portrait’ leave most questions unanswered, in this breathtaking journey through beautiful scenery, metaphors and the loss of innocence. TOT describe it as a short horror story, but it is so much more than this. It is brutally moving and replayable experience, which not only tears up the rulebook, but hurtles it into the sun. The obvious and intentional parallels between the fairy tale Little Red Riding hood and the excellent The Path only add it its feelings of layered and deeply considered exploration. The game is far from simple, giving you no easy handle to grasp as you stagger through intensely beautiful woodland landscapes, dissected with – no surprises here – a path. The game relies on the players need to push video game boundaries to the limit, providing you with one simple rule, by all means, stay on the path. This is, conversely, the one rule you have to break in order to not only ‘complete’ this game, but to see all the intricacies it has to offer. The music is hauntingly beautiful, highlighting the visual feasts perfectly; invading all the senses with conflicting amounts of fear and illation.
The game as well as being brilliantly written and made, showcases a wonderful solution to the constant problems of finite limits to designed locations. It wasn’t long ago that games had to rely on clumsy pretences to cover up the fact that exploration is always limited to the amount that can be physically designed and created. A good example of this is the peerless, revenge based, slow-mo kill-athon, Max Payne. I remember one particular scene, set on a snowy open street, which poses a lot of awkward questions about how you make it clear in which direction you are meant to interoperate as the right one to head in, as you have many doors and alleys built into the surroundings it give it authenticity. The rather extreme solution to this dilemma was to make a large truck crash in the prologue cut scene, which conveniently blocks one of the two exits from the area. physically stopping you going that way, as well as psychologically inferring that this is not the right direction.
Methods like this may seem a little too hasty but at least it was attempted to blend them into the plot. I don’t want to appear cynical of Max Payne for using techniques like this, because I think it is actually a rather clever way to put a barrier up, but you cannot have trucks crashing everywhere all the time. More modern games seem to have resolved this dilemma rather eloquently, in two steps. The first is to build a map so large and intricate it almost beggars full exploration anyway, such as the groundbreaking game Fallout 3, which has a scale comparable to the actual size of New York, in which it is set. The sheer size of this environment has the added bonus of it being more than likely that the player will have forgotten that they are revisiting a previously explored area because it takes so long to start overlapping what you have explored and what you haven’t. The second is to make a location that is still large, but seamlessly loops, as if you were running on the face of the globe itself. This technique is used in The Path to an awesome degree, helped considerably due to its very repetitive forest location. Either style of exploration works a lot better than some more dated solutions to the problem. I remember in many games, such as futuristic Deus X having invisible walls, which just literally stopped you in your tracks if you were heading in the wrong direction.
You cannot blame the designers for issues such as these, but it is nice to imagine a gaming world with an infinite degree of possibilities. Nothing breaks the immersive atmosphere like a sudden jab of reality. You become instantly aware that you are in a game as soon as you encounter one of these boundaries. I often muse about the paradox of a character managing to escape one of these boundaries, if Max Payne managed to jump the flaming truck and head off into the un-designed realms…not possible. Anyway, ideally we want extensions of our own reality, believable limits that can be pushed. The best games are the ones that do their best to discredit their own limitations.
Another game to mention is Valves sublime, Half-life, which set a bar so high few games have managed to vault it to obtain the ultimate combination of excellent graphics (in its time) and a very well thought out plot. The game in its day was immense, and had a very pleasant circular feel to it when subsequent sequels were brought out in later years, such as Opposing Force and Blue Shift. One occurrence that I always found pleasing was a particularly nice wink to the audience between the first and second game.
In the first Half-life, Adrian Gordon (the main protagonist, and hero-scientist) is knocked out and dragged down a corridor, momentarily regaining consciousness and through blurry eyes manages to watch his own feet being dragged behind him, before passing out again. Years later, in Opposing Force, you play as disenfranchised SWAT team member, Adrian Shepard, a renegade one man Army who manages to infiltrate Black Mesa (the location of Alien based evil experiments, and Freeman’s workplace). While concealing himself in an Air vent, Shepard witness the aforementioned Gordon Freeman being dragged down a corridor by two guards. For me, this represents one of the best techniques in video gaming, a feeling of considered circularity. I like to know that the makers are treating me as an insider, they know that I know about this previous situation in the last game and it just feels like a very well thought out touch, perfect water cooler talk and it breaks the boundaries between one game and another, invading and adding to both. The fact that little touches like this also help cement your own suspicions that all three games are happening simultaneously is also awe-inspiring. As if you might run into a previous version of yourself running around somewhere inserted in from when you played as him years ago. Wormhole. Anyway, you are alone in all the Half-life games, which always add to the intensity of an experience.
Another game to utalize the power of the lone experience is one of the best flash games to come out of the heaving porn and poker orientated creation we call the Internet, namely The Crimson Room. I drone on about this game so often it is almost second nature, but it is such an excellent example of the platitude less is more. The premise of the game is simple, you wake up in a room unaware of why you are there, who you are and how to get out; you know none of the answers to the basic question, which is a bold and rare move in video games. All you know is you have to get out. The ominous undercurrents of the game are fascinating in themselves, but in particular I like the cohesion between the first game and the second The Viridian room. After escaping The Crimson Room you had to wait months for a sequel, and when it arrived I was delighted and slightly unnerved to find a rather delicious overlap. Once in The Viridian Room you can look through a keyhole to reveal the previously escaped Crimson Room. I cannot explain it, but I get Goosebumps and shivers down my spine when I encounter this kind of circularity. It just makes everything more transient; the games flow more believably, instead of each game in the world just being a single island never connecting. The ones that do touch each and interweave almost say ‘Ah, remember that game? You were there and we remembered you were there’ just leave me in awe.
In a totally different kettle of fish; is the fascinating Façade, ‘the most important game of the last twenty years’. Based on the classic text adventure genre, the game takes place in a diner party scenario. Starting off with you inputting your name into the game, you appear at the door of an apartment, which you can overhear an audible argument occurring on the other side of. You knock on the door and await it to be answered by a man named Trip, who heartily greets you by you name. From this point on you have the ability to interact by kissing, hugging, comforting and most importantly, saying anything you wish too. The characters have some of the most impressive A.I I have ever encountered. Once you overcome the urges to run over to Trip’s wife, Grace, and kiss her repeatedly and spout obscenities, the game play becomes nothing short of addictive. The couple proceed to break down emotionally into a marital battle before your eyes and you have to do your best to control the situation in the any way you see fit. The game seems to have no boundaries, but you can push them too far. On one occasion I demanded drink after drink until he yelled at me, and after a frustrated outburst he threw me out. I have yet to complete or even proceed beyond a certain point in this game, but the sheer amount of options is simply staggering. You never encounter exactly the same convocation twice, as each reply or interruption to their questions and insults results in a different tangent path. I found the subject of sex, although crude, helped bust through the first walls of sniping and snide comments, but timing is everything in this game, one answer to a question at one point in the game will have a positive reaction where it might result in further problems later on. The game is built on subtleties, choosing your moment to interrupt or intervene is integral. Staggeringly, this game is built with audio voices’, which just makes it more impressive, as the characters fluidly and convincingly, answer and react to almost anything you type. More exciting than Façade is the possibility of what is on the horizon for gaming. If it is possible to program this level of interaction, imagine what will be possible in ten, five or even a couple of years time.
Often, it is the format in which you play the game that holds the most weight. The timeless Half-life uses a first person style, which I believe to be the most effective way to make your protagonist believable and more importantly, interesting. You don’t just buy into the plot of the game; often you need to buy into the character you play as. The best way to do this is too play through the eyes of this person, and the less you know about them the better. There is something intoxicating about becoming this character shrouded in mystery. A game that utilized this perfectly is Bioshock, a game so effortlessly addictive and immersive it almost seems to mock reality for being unbelievable. An incredible premise, if ever I have seen one; Bioshock’s intro alone assures its place in gaming history. After surviving a plane crash you find yourself floating in a flame-riddled Atlantic, watching the huge tail of the plane sink before your eyes. This is when you find Rapture, an underwater city built to escape the post war world of the late nineteen forties. Inevitably, everyone becomes the victims of their own vanity and isolation, taking copious amounts of a steroid like enhancement drug. The eerie setting of this world, in a futuristically re-imagined period of the nineteen fifties means you get a bizarre combination of haunting gramophone records, period characters and weapon modifying technology. The character you play as, is someone whose past is carefully and slowly revealed as you play through this visually stunning first person game. You know so little about him, that after a while you take up this persona of a heartless, iron bastard, and frankly you have to be to play this game which often was so jumpy that I could only play in stints of fifteen minutes before having to have a lie down and a cup of tea.
The first person format is strengthened by the presence and absense of your virtual entourage. This is something that I noticed while playing the very successful game adaptation of the film King Kong. I am almost embarrassed to mention such a game, as by and large, I never really rate games based on movies, as they are often clumsy and pointless, but this breaks the mould so severely that it is worth an honourable mention. I found to my surprise that when I played this game as part of a team, travelling the dense jungle with the A.I characters, I had an odd sense of belonging and comradely. This sense of belonging only really become apparent when I was suddenly left on my own, such as in the situation when a bridge collapsed before I had crossed, leaving myself and the other figures separated. I’m not ashamed to admit I had a mild sense of panic. Illogical, but this does support ideas of people’s (or just my) engagement with games. I never really considered myself to be someone who gets too involved with games, with delusions of which reality is real; but although this reaction was only a small one, it can not be ignored. It is clear from video games, films, even dreams, that being alone is a reoccurring theme in which negativity, insanity, death or a shock usually follows. I admire the creators of King Kong for this development, which I can only assume is intentional as you end up on your own so often that it can’t be anything other than a tired and tested technique.
I don’t want to be a martyr, or worse still a dork, fighting for video games place in 'The Hall of Arts' – which is a place I just made up; because I understand a lot of what I speak about is very personal, a far reach from the world of 'Pro-Evo'. Video games, as with higher Art have always been subjective, and probably will always be. In resent years we have come to see more interactive, game influenced works come to the surface, and I believe we will continue to see more. This untapped and powerful medium will becomes more utilized, more powerful and more emotive. So are Video games Art? Who cares? I never set out to answer that question or even dignify it as worth exploration, as for me it is inconsequential. I get all the exploration I need from gaming. I strongly suggest seeking out The Path, which is a bargain at less than 8 pounds online (that works out at a pound per zillion hours of gameplay) and Façade, a game that bizarrely is available on free download. Just do it.
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