More Musings on Games as Art

There are video games that exist purely as mechanics, as systems. They inherit many of their characteristics from board games, card games, puzzles, and sports. I have been known to enjoy many of these kinds of games, and to play them often and regularly. Tetris is one example. Rock Band is another. Sometimes, these kinds of games have stories associated with them, but they are only peripheral; you can easily remove the story, or replace it with another, and the overall feel of the game mechanics will always remain the same. The quality and artistic merit of the game therefore depends on the elegance and functionality of the mechanics. They are beautiful in the same sense that architecture and mathematical formulae are beautiful. And although this is a kind of beauty I admire and respect, it is not the kind of beauty that I primarily aspire to in my own work.

There are also video games that exist as interactive stories. They inherit many of their characteristics from literature, film, theatre, and informal roleplaying, and their mechanics exist to serve the telling of the story rather than to stand on their own. The mechanics are therefore not judged on their own, but as a part of a greater whole, along with several other elements: plot, setting, characterisation, dialogue, visual presentation, sound, music. The quality of these elements on their own, while important, are secondary to the manner in which they fit together to deliver a unified theme. It is these kinds of games that I often criticize as underdeveloped when it comes to being works of high art, though unlike the Roger Eberts of the world, I see great potential in them to be so. It is these kinds of games that I aspire to create myself.