Aesthetics: September 2007 Archive Page

Daniel Radosh brings to the mainstream press (New York Times) an argument that games researchers have been making for years.

If games are to become more than mere entertainment, they will need to use the fundamentals of gameplay -- giving players challenges to work through and choices to make -- in entirely new ways. The formula followed by virtually all games is a steady progression toward victory: you accomplish tasks until you win. Halo 3, for all its flawless polish, does not aspire to anything more. It does not succeed as a work of art because it does not even try.

Like cinema, games will need to embrace the dynamics of failure, tragedy, comedy and romance. They will need to stop pandering to the player's desire for mastery in favor of enhancing the player's emotional and intellectual life.

There is no reason that gorgeous graphics can't play a role in this task, but the games with the deepest narratives were the text adventures that were developed for personal computers in the 1980s. Using only words, these "interactive fictions" gave players the experience of genuinely living inside a story. The steps required to advance the plot, though often devilishly perplexing, felt like natural behavior rather than arbitrary puzzle-solving. Today's game designers should study this history as a starting point for an artistic revolution of the future.

I welcome his sentiments, though he is romanticizing the success of "interactive fictions," which never "gave players the experience of genuinely living inside a story," because the art form developed to suit a medium that could not promise such an overwhelming experience. Having said that, the marketing of text games did play up that first-person perspective, and if you are willing to suspend disbelief for the sake of enjoying the game, it generally worked out.

Today's video games do aspire to cinematic levels of reality, but in the end you're still shooting at wooden ducks on the carnival midway.  Way back when, the bleating speakers and photon-squirting CRTs meant that the graphics games at the time were hideously crappy, and they still look crappy. But the commercial interactive fiction still holds up as good interactive fiction. (We're talking on the scale of boutique art, with authors who know the tastes of their small audience very well.)


Update: Radosh reflects on the online response to his editorial.

A scene from Ridley Scott's youth, via Wired:

The air smelled like toast. Toast is quite nice, but when you realize it's steel, and it's probably particles, it's not very good. Crossing the footbridge at night, you'd be walking above the steel mill, crossing through the smoke, dirt, and crap, looking down into the fire.

Great Zork map.

Kaj Sand-Jensen:

Although scientists typically insist that their research is very exciting and adventurous when they talk to laymen and prospective students, the allure of this enthusiasm is too often lost in the predictable, stilted structure and language of their scientific publications. I present here, a top-10 list of recommendations for how to write consistently boring scientific publications. I then discuss why we should and how we could make these contributions more accessible and exciting.

Va Tech's guidelines for evaluating disturbing student writing, as a Word file and as filtered through an analysis by Inside Higher Ed:

The document also reflects the tightrope its drafters were walking, leaving ample room for intuition and judgment in identifying disturbing writing and offering a series of questions instructors might find helpful in distinguishing creative and literary explorations of themes like violence, drugs and suicide, from a threat or cry for help. Among the questions, geared for fiction, poetry or playwrighting courses:

• "Is the creative work excessively violent? Do characters respond to everyday events with a level or kind of violence one does not expect, or may even find frightening? If so, does the violence seem more expressive of rage and anger than it does of a literary aesthetic or a thematic purpose?"
• "Are the characters' thoughts as well as actions violent or threatening? Do characters think about or question their violent actions?..In other words, does the text reveal the presence of a literary sensibility mediating and making judgments about the characters' thoughts and actions, or does it suggest unmediated venting of rage and anger? If the literary sensibility is missing, is the student receptive to adding that layer and to learning how to do so?"
• "Is this the student's first piece of violent writing?..Is violence at the center of everything the student has written, or does other writing suggest that violence is something the student is experimenting with for literary effect?"
• "Are the violent actions in the work so disturbing or so extreme as to suggest they go beyond any possible sense of purpose in relation to the larger narrative?"
• "Is the writing full of expressions of hostility toward other racial or ethnic groups? Is the writing threateningly misogynistic, homophobic, racist, or in any way expressive of a mindset that may pose a threat to other students?"

"The danger," Falco says of the Virginia Tech document (which has received approvals from the university's counseling center, legal counsel and provost's office) "is that written guidelines can be misused....that a situation would come about where you hamper creative freedom because students are afraid to write something because they're afraid it will get them thrown into a system."

Most academic slide shows are dreary affairs. Our students might as well be writing "I will not think outside the box" on the blackboard 100 times.

Imagine a conference in which every presenter spoke for exactly 6 minutes and 40 seconds. Is it heaven, or is it a pecha-kucha night? That would leave a lot of room for conference attendees to, you know, confer. (Wired offers a good intro to pecha-kucha, and an example.)

The inventors of the concept have trademarked it, which I confess is a bit of a downer for me; nevertheless, the slideshow genre needs this kind of creativity. The inventors are architects, so it makes sense that their style emphasizes quality images that are worth looking at for 20 seconds. Larry Lessig, a lawyer, has a very different presentation style, which can involve a hundred slides or more, but each slide might only contain a few words; he cycles through them rapidly as he's talking.

Then, of course, there's comedian Don McMillan's spoof of over-designed slideshows.