On Authorship in Games

Not that long ago, famed film critic Roger Ebert stated that games are not, and indeed, cannot be, art.

Recently, following up on a response made by author/game convergence guy Clive Barker at the Hollywood And Games Summit, Ebert clarified his claims.

Ebert's basic argument is that art requires authorship, and that games abdicate authorship to the player, and therefore cannot be art. This is certainly a compelling and useful argument, as it strikes at the nature of our medium, not at the content we so frequently produce. Ebert is clever not to bother arguing whether or not another boring old rehash of the game where you use 24 different weapons to kill 6 different types of aliens in 18 unique levels and save mankind from annihilation is art or is not. He is going for the kill, and good for him.

As a student of the ‘school’ of design that often loudly and passionately advocates abdication of as much authorship as possible to the player, I guess I need to step up and help Ebert understand what he’s trying to say and what it means.

Ebert claims that because games – or indeed, any interactive medium, abdicate authorship to some degree to the player, that this at least diminishes, and potentially destroys the capacity of an interactive work (or at least a game) to be art. He also tugs gently at the idea that it is potentially in the interaction with the work that the artistry lies, and thus any artfulness in a game or other interactive work is not innate but rather, if it exists at all, is imbued by the audience.

Ebert is wrong for two important reasons.

First, there is authorship in games, no matter how much we abdicate. The form of the authorship is different, and hard to understand, but no matter how much we try to abdicate it, it will always remain. It is undeniably there, and it is inextricable from the act of creating a game.

Second, interacting with a work does not shape the work, it ‘only’ reveals it. Therefore, while there can be an art of expression in the way someone reveals the art, this does not necessarily diminish the art in the design of the work itself.

As both Ebert and Barker acknowledge, we could debate endlessly what is and is not art, or what is and is not a valid definition of art. For the sake of argument, I will accept Ebert’s roughly stated thesis that art requires authorship. In fact, I actually agree with him. I think he just does not understand where authorship lies in games.

Here is how it works:

• I am able to express my ideas, thoughts and feelings through the design of interactive systems
• Because a game is a complete formal system, the entire possible range of outputs from those systems is determined by me
• People interact with those designed systems and receive the outputs I have determined
• People literate in the medium can reconstruct my ideas, thoughts and feelings by experiencing these outputs
• Therefore, by definition, there is an unbreakable chain between my ideas, thoughts and feelings and the player's experience – I author mechanics that yield deterministic outputs in the game dynamics that lead the player to experience the aesthetic I want them to experience (within a given tolerance)

Now – by way of clarifying this explanation as well as pre-empting some of the counter arguments, I’ll try to lay out the best and most valid ones.

The Epistemological Argument
First there is the epistemological argument – which counters by saying ‘how do you know you are able to express your thoughts and feelings in the design of interactive systems’. Believe it or not, this is the best argument, because the best rebuttal is simply to say ‘I just know it.’ You could ask ‘how do you know the sentence you are speaking is not nonsense?’. I know because I understand it. What I am expressing makes sense to me both intellectually and emotionally. If others do not understand it, it is not really a question of whether I am expressing myself, but rather one of whether I am expressing myself clearly.

Beyond the subjective epistemological edge of this argument there is a requirement that the audience be literate. Hieroglyphics can’t express anything to me, but clearly the people who wrote in them had the capacity to express themselves, and they knew it. In the end, while this is a compelling argument, it degenerates quickly to a purely epistemological one, and arguing on that front is not going to enhance anybody’s understanding of the issue of authorship in games. I’d like to think even Ebert is not interested in pursuing this argument any further.

The Argument to the Incompleteness of Authorship
The next argument is whether or not it is, in fact, true that the entire possible range of outputs from a games’ systems are really determined by me. Well, honestly, no – they are not. Games are extraordinarily complex, and there are many outputs which are not literally determined precisely by me.

If we were to conduct a sort of inverse Turing Test and put me in a room and have me attempt to return the exact same outputs (ignoring ridiculous factors such as speed and precision of calculation) to a player playing Splinter Cell: Chaos Theory as he or she would receive from an Xbox… well, I would fail to pass myself off as an Xbox running SC:CT. I did not write every line of code in the game, nor do I have a complete comprehension of that code. Therefore, the argument could be made that my authorship of the game is only approximate, or incomplete.

The rebuttal to this argument lies in a comparison to film or to music or to any other collaborative artistic creation. Is every single note of a symphony perfectly determined by the composer? Is every single photon of light that enters the retina of every single viewer of a film determined by a director. No. There is noise in these systems too – some of it comes from the collaboration of others, and some of it comes from random noise. We do not deny Ode to Joy its status as art because it is playfully manipulated by a conductor, nor because the 3rd clarinet breaks a reed. It is the same with games. The outputs are broadly determined by me and heavily formalized by a large crew of people working with me to deliver on a promised aesthetic. Sometimes we make mistakes, and there are bugs. Even mediocre art can tolerate this approximate or incomplete authorship, so I am forced to assert that games can too.

The Arguments from Noise and Nonsense
The next argument would be that audiences cannot reconstruct the meaning I intend them to by way of interacting with systems. At very least there is a legitimate challenge here in saying "maybe they could reconstruct it, but they can also construct so many random meanings or contrary meanings, or generally just bring so much noise into the experience as to dilute the meaning to the point where it is not legible."

This is an interesting point, but again, this is not unlike other works of art. People can watch Citizen Kane and fast-forward the ‘boring parts’. They can watch it in ten sittings or fall asleep during parts of it and forget what it’s about. This does not strip the film of its status. So, yes, I would concede that because (some) games offer the player so many ways to play, players might well ‘miss’ the meaning, but I don’t think the likeliness of missing the meaning should determine the artfulness of the work. There are some paintings hanging in far away back rooms of the Louvre that would likely take four hours of walking full speed non-stop to get to – this does not diminish their artfulness. If the audience does not participate with the work they may never perceive the art, but that does not mean it is not there.

And what about those nonsensical interactions? The argument here is similar to the one above, and suggests that people can interact with games in all kinds of silly ways that don’t support or develop the meaning the creator intends them to experience. That’s true. I can play GTA 3 purely as a racing game, without ever doing any of the non-racing missions. How does that support the game’s central meaning (which I take to be about freedom and consequence)? Well, the answer is, it doesn’t. But hold on… I can also use War and Peace to prop up the broken leg of my couch, or view Warhol’s Campbell’s Soup Cans in a pitch black room and then say I don’t get the message. The point is that the audience must always interact with a work on some level (in games, this is very literalized), but their ability to interact with a work in nonsensical ways does not diminish or destroy the art.

You could say that in the Tolstoy example, the book is not being read, and in the Warhol example, the painting is not being viewed – but in my GTA example, the game is being played… and that’s the difference. I would actually simply say that is inaccurate. When you’re only playing one tiny part of GTA, you’re not really playing it at all, any more than you are reading Bram Stoker’s Dracula if you are only reading the sexy bits.

The Argument from Legitimacy
Another argument against the existence of real authorship in games is the argument about the legitimacy of the kind of authorship I am talking about. In his responses to Barker, Ebert says:

“If you can go through "every emotional journey available," doesn't that devalue each and every one of them? Art seeks to lead you to an inevitable conclusion, not a smorgasbord of choices.”

In other words, he is questioning the nature of an authorship focused on providing a single perspective, versus an authorship that affords the player a range of perspectives.

I agree with Ebert that there is a difference in these two kinds of authorship. Romeo and Juliet is one love story. The play gives us a specific and authored understanding of what Shakespeare wants us to think about love in this specific case, between these two specific characters, in this specific set of circumstances. But Ebert is wrong to suggest that games – in affording a different kind of authorship somehow do not lead to inevitable conclusions, or that they offer a simple ‘smorgasbord’ wherein ‘every emotional journey’ is somehow possible.

In a sense, the kind of authorship in a movie or a play requires an inductive approach to understanding the meaning. If I start with the specific love of two star-cross’d teenagers in Renaissance Verona whose families despise one another, and then try to generalize what love means, I am likely to end up with a lot of useless conclusions. It’s an inductive and error-prone process to move from the specific to the general. With all of the inductive errors possible, what can I truly understand about love in general from Romeo and Juliet alone? I could reasonably induce that real love can only exist in the convoluted set of circumstances of the play where one lover drinks a sleeping potion, and the other - distraught at seeing their love 'dead' - suicides with poison, so that the first can then prove their love equal and true by also drinking poison on awakening.

Certainly that would be an absurd notion of love, and that problem with induction is fundamentally why we continue to write love stories at a breathtaking rate… because when you are providing singular examples of love, and trying to facilitate the audience feeling love, you will always have room for more examples. You can write unique and powerful love stories forever and never exhaust the infinite scope of the material ‘love’. Examples piled on examples forever will never pile up to infinity. Regardless – and for good reasons – this ‘inductive’ form of artistic expression is the kind of authorship that we see in most media (and it is wonderous).

In games, it is different. The artist does not only create the specific case of the convicted criminal suddenly set free when his prison transfer bus is ambushed… it does not only tell the story of one criminal learning about the importance of liberty and the consequences of unchecked freedom. The artist is also capable of creating an entire expressive system space that explores a potential infinity of different notions of freedom and liberty. Where most other media require the audience to induce their meaning, games afford the audience at least the possibility of deducing their meaning.

In other media, ‘supporting material’ that is coherent with the central themes of the work is pushed to the side in a B-plot… in games, this supporting material affords the artist ways to illuminate the meaning from many, many possible directions, allowing the player to explore the meaning the artist is trying to provide. Potentially, because the game designer is able to express himself in systems rather than in examples, infinities can be examined.

Now, I guess this is kind of hard to wrap your head around, but surely this is a concept Ebert can understand. Many filmmakers, from Taratino to Inarritu to Haggis and dozens more have been increasingly attempting to explore stories from multiple angles in an attempt to mimic – in a medium severely limited for this purpose – what games can do innately. If Haggis’ Best Picture winning Crash was 100 hours long, and contained 100 different interconnected plots all echoing the same themes of racial tension from different perspectives, would it suddenly lose its status as art? It probably wouldn’t be a very good movie, because 100 hours of movie is painful. In any case, no matter how long you make Crash, you will never fully explore the domain of the themes of racial tension in modern America. 100 hours is just 50x what the movie already offers, and is no closer to the infinite depth of the theme than is the existing 2 hour film.

GTA: San Andreas on the other hand – which I played for a good 100 hours or so, gave me such a world transforming view of racial tension and inequity in early 1990’s California, that I have been shaken to the core, and have been forced to re-examine a huge part of my world view.

In a response to a reader letter dated November 27, 2005 Ebert said:

"To my knowledge, no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers."

Well, here you go. Let me state it clearly and for the record:

Taken as wholes, GTA: San Andreas is a more compelling, meaningful and important work of art than Crash.

Admittedly, not everyone will agree, and admittedly, I have a high level of literacy in reading systems. The point here is not to enter a subjective debate about what is a superior work of art, rather the point is to say that – yes – if a game is offering a smorgasbord of unrelated mechanics that are neither supporting each other nor driving toward a coherent theme, if they are not providing the player with a broad range of perspectives on a specific meaning that the creator is trying to express, then Ebert is right.

But if a game creator does have something specific he is trying to communicate, and he designs his game well, and the mechanics and dynamics are coherently supporting that aesthetic, and providing the player – more or less whatever he does (assuming it is not wilfully nonsensical) – with insight into that meaning, then yeah… it’s art.

The Argument to Migrated Authorship
The final argument that I see remaining is the one that asks ‘who is the artist here anyway?’ Ebert says:

“I believe art is created by an artist. If you change it, you become the artist.”

This is a much easier point to tackle simply because there is a fallacy in Ebert’s argument. He is implying that interacting with a work is the same as changing it. But this is not true. My ‘paint’ is not ‘what the player does’. My paint is ‘the rules that govern what the player can do’. The way the player expresses himself is a form of artistic expression (or a least it can be), but it is impossible for him to change the rules or even to express himself outside the domain of the rules that I have created. And it is not simply a case of saying ‘people who make paint are necessarily artists, while painters can be artists’. I do more than ‘make paint’. If all I did was 'make paint', I would concede the point in Ebert's response to his reader where he states games cannot move "beyond craftsmanship to the stature of art."

If I created ‘magic paints’ that could only be used to paint flowers that appeared highly vaginal, would I be less an artist than Georgia O’Keefe? While some painters using my paints could make crappy paintings of vaginal flowers that were not artful, and others could create beautiful masterpieces – I think it would remain clear that I was an artist for having created ‘paints that constrained the set of possible paintings achievable to those that dealt with a set of themes I had chosen’. There is a statement there - a statement about flowers and vaginas (and paint) and it is as important as any statement in any of O'Keefe's works. It may even be as important as all of the statements made in all of O'Keefe's works combined... but we don't need to get ahead of ourselves here.

The best analogy here, again, is that of a symphony. There is an art in the composing of the symphony itself – the creation of the song and the recording of the instructions for reproducing that song using a symphony orchestra. Yet, because of the comparative fuzziness of the transcription, there is often a high degree of malleability in interpretation of those instructions, and the ability to interpret those instructions well and to facilitate an orchestra to actually play the symphony is an artistic task. There are ways to do it non-artistically. Technically, a metronome and sheet music could do the job of conducting an orchestra, but we make a lot of room for conductors because in their art, they can add a tremendous amount of beauty to what is already a beautiful work.

Ebert’s fallacy extends to suggest that Ode to Joy is not a work of art once a composer conducts it, and that the conductor's art is not art for long anyway, because as soon as a musician plays it, he or she becomes the artist. The reality is, they can all be artists, and when an artfully composed work is conducted by an artful conductor, and played by artful musicians, the full perspective of the work is truly appreciable.

It is the same with a game and a player. Technically, a game could be played by a computer – many games are played by computers. While the beauty of the particular play experience might be diminished or even destroyed by doing it that way, it does not diminish or destroy the artfulness inherent to the game itself.

Such is the relationship between the designer and the player as I see it. The designer is the composer, the player is the conductor. The orchestra is the hardware and the sheet music is the software.

Conclusion
I think that about sums up my rebuttal to Mr. Ebert. When he made his first statements months ago, I was mostly just upset and insulted, but with his latest clarification of those original statements, he has not only looked more carefully at the real and relevant question, but he has opened the door to have the real nature of authorship in games described. I hope – should he happen past here and read this – he’ll finally understand the scope of the issue and admit that he’s wrong.

Comments

[Jonathan Blow]

Good analogies. I have one where I use architecture as the analogy, but that's probably not as good for general use, because not so many people think of a building as art (and most buildings are craft), whereas a symphony is stereotypically art.

The part of this that was most interesting to me was the bit about the game presenting the same thing as the sum of a bunch of individual stories. However, of course, this points out one of the weaknesses of games, which someone is sure to call you on: that the points in that story-space that we find the most meaningful or "artful" are at various extremes, and the game system is (probably) going to mostly produce things toward the middle, and if it reaches an extreme, that's an accident.

I don't think that property reduces the artfulness of what a game is, but for someone who doesn't understand games, it might be a good enough excuse to maintain denial.

[Sean Barrett]

I also use the symphony analogy when this comes up. It's not a perfect mapping to games, but then again that's also the point.

(And the questions/challenges that analogy doesn't address--I don't find those interesting anyway.)

[Jonathan Blow]

The thing that I do like about the architecture analogy, though, is that there is a clear separation between the art object and the usage, the way there is in games. (i.e. the building is the work, it is designed to influence the way people live in it, but not to control that, and the living-in-it is not supposed to be the art, though it is all the time affected by the art.)

[JP]

Mr. Coins,

You are being fairly cynical and glib. Your argument is seemingly invalidated if even one person with artistic intent produces a game and gives it away to be played freely. And indeed there are many such games today.

Very nice post Clint.

[Jare]

Maybe I'm just overly sympathetic to Ebert, but I think his declarations are half an expression of his position, and half a set of questions he'd like answered. He clearly wants this to be discussed and argumented intelligently and, given the large audience he brings along, I thank him for that. I hope your extremely insightful answer will reach many more people than those normally reading your blog (we are mostly sold to your side already).

That said, a few comments:

- The artistic value of a craft is not so much tied to its ability to communicate intellectual messages and information, as it is to convey emotions, stimulate sensibilities, and allow sophistication of execution. A documentary may teach me more about the nature of racial tensions than Crash, but I won't necessarily consider it more artistic because of that.

- GTA may be more meaningful and compelling than Crash, but to whom? My mother "gets" Crash, but she doesn't "get" GTA. Heck, _I_ get the art in Crash, and I can barely get the art in GTA. Not everyone will be able to experience and appreciate the value of all artforms and works of art. A craft becomes accepted as an artform by the majority, when the majority (or a sufficiently influential subset) has a reasonable amount of works that they appreciate as having artistic value. We discuss with Ebert, show him all the things that make GTA or Shadow of the Colossus works of art, and at some point he says "Ok, I see what you mean; games *can* be art. I just personally won't appreciate the art in games because games (the activity, the themes, the dynamics, the literacy) are as alien to me as painting is to a blind person." Now what? Nobody cares except those who already did.

Our most important challenge is not to convince others that games can be art, but to learn ourselves how to make games that are more valuable, memorable and meaningful rather than simple, forgettable, opportunistic (even if very entertaining and fun) pastimes.

[Diego]

Dude, you've been ranting about this since 11:40 last night. That's like 17 hours non-stop. I happen to agree with Clint, but regardless, though you are of course entitled to your opinion (as are Clint and Mr. Ebert), this is verging on obsessive. RELAX and get some freaking sleep man. Don't take out your frustrations on Clint, he's just voicing his opinion, as is his right.

[James O]

I should think that the breadth of installation artwork would be a sufficient rebuttal of Mr. Ebert's position. Videogames are not unique in abdicating a certain degree of control to the audience; many installation works are interactive and essentially meaningless/inert without some participant. Among art scholars, I don't think it would be controversial to label the work of Rafael Lozano-Hemmer as 'art,' and his works are quite dependent on an audience to interact with the works (particularly "Vectorial Elevation.")Ken Goldberg's "Telegarden" is another good interactive new-media-art example.

I also like the architectural analogy, because it works on both a metaphorical and literal level - videogame level design is essentially architecture in practice (crafting literal spaces for players to traverse and to induce a particular mood,) and the crafting of game systems and mechanics is a metaphorical type of architecture (crafting systemic spaces for players to explore, etc.)

Of course, with all that said, while I think videogames are necessarily art(I like Dr. John Valentine's definition - any artifact intentionally made or remade to be a candidate for aesthetic notice) most of it is bad art (though that doesn't disqualify it from art-ness.) As long as public literacy of interactive spaces remains low (preventing ordinary folks from discerning high art from low art in games,) it will be a while before videogames are popularly recognized as 'art.'

[James O]

Whether games are legally art or not is immaterial. The philosophy of aesthetics is certainly not bounded by the law. The status of games can be compartmentalized in that sense.

In that same sense I consider the creation of toys to be art as well - they certainly require artistic judgments in their design and production. It might not be considered a "high art," but under the definition of art I use it certainly qualifies just as much as any Duchamp or Renoir. That doesn't have any bearing on the legal status of toys, of course.

[James O]

That's something of a fallacy - is a painting not art if the artist keeps the work private? Of course not - the Mona Lisa was art the moment it was created; not the moment it was submitted to the Louvre. The art status of an artifact is not tied to its location, physical or temporal.

Of course, one's personal definition of what art is depends on one's philosophy of aesthetics. As I stated above, I subscribe to a very broad definition of art, and I don't see a clear line between "art" and "craft." Certainly everyone is entitled to their own viewpoint on a personal matter like that, although it seems your view that games are not art is rooted mainly in some sort of anti-capitalist ideology.

[James O]

Philosophers do - and that's the nature of this question Mr. Hocking is examining. The point I make is that the art-ness of an object is intrinsic to the artifact - it's not bestowed on it by virtue of where or when it can be found. Therefore, just because videogames are not found in museums does not disqualify them from being considered as art objects.

Similarly, the monetary question (which you raised) earlier I feel is also immaterial. You posited above that videogames cannot be art because they are commissioned for money, and that 'no artist is an employee.' You're certainly free to take that view; but bear in mind that you will have inadvertently disqualified pretty much the entire Renaissance from art-ness. Most works of that period were commissioned for money, either by the Church or by wealthy nobles. Further, many of these works were completed in part by apprentices under the direction of the master.

Thus, I think it is fair to say that the art-ness of an object is also not dependent on whether there was a financial incentive, or whether the artifact was crafted by a team of artists. While I can understand some of the distaste held for crassly commercial art (e.g. the works of Thomas Kinkade,) that does not disqualify them from being art objects.

[Brett Douville]

Wow, who let the Insert Coins comment-bot loose on this thread? Someone ought to nice that process. ;) BTW, IC, I think Clint's employer is clear from the games listed in his sidebar, but hey, that's just me.

A clearly considered and well thought out post. Jon, I agree with your thoughts -- if you think of it as a set of possible stories, you do have to bear in mind that the bulk of stories possible to generate are not interesting. Indeed, I think that in a way, games with a narrative arc are merely grafting on a more interesting story on top of the story that the player tells himself, and scripted "wow" events that occur in highly linear games serve that purpose as well. I'm particularly interested to see what Braid brings to the table in this respect -- from what I've read (and continuing the analogy), you're presenting not just a set of stories, but a set of sets of stories, since the governing rules (and themes) change from level to level.

In a sense, games as systems tend to these stories in the middle much as complex systems in nature tend towards stable states. For example, when you think about things on a quantum level, there's a chance that a large bunch of molecules could arrange themselves in a geometrically repeating pattern (such as required for superconductivity). In practice, that never happens -- the odds are vanishingly small -- but it can be made to happen by putting some energy into the system. In the case of a set of stories, the writer supplies the energy to the system to push that set of characters into an interesting extreme, as you describe. In the case of a game, we hedge (providing narrative elements and big bang events), assuming that most players will not do that, though some will; Clint gave a GDC talk a year or two ago about a video he found on the Internet where a player made use of Splinter Cell's systems to tell an interesting and humorous story. This was a player who went the extra mile to fully explore the systems of the game, to become expert with them, and to use them to show one possible interesting extreme of the system, in this case a humorous one. And, of course, mods involve some part of the player community collaborating on derivative works which might themselves be works of art, and here the energy is put in to push to some other extreme of the play space (Counterstrike being a swell example of this).

Highly non-linear games (such as the traditional adventure game) simply involved lots more energy on the part of the designer to push to an interesting state; play was introduced via puzzles, typically with a single solution. In a way, old-school text adventures left the player to find the complete solution by putting lots of energy into the system, typically through lots of replaying the game (I'm thinking of Deadline, for example, which really required multiple playthroughs, but even games like Zork where you had to decide what to carry made for a lot of replay to get a complete trophy chest).

Another example of the designer putting the energy in is levels of difficulty. It gives the player the choice to determine what sort of story he wants to be told -- one in which he'll probably die fairly rarely vs one in which the game will probably be a constant challenge (but which may itself tend to yield some interesting stories, such as being low on hit points or what have you but triumphing nonetheless).

[James O]

I believe he means that Clint is not trying to hide the fact he is employed by Ubisoft, or trying to insinuate otherwise.

The videogame industry is (unfortunately) not unique in receiving corporate welfare. There isn't anything special or unusual about it, and the videogame industry is not any more sinister or greedy for taking it than any other industry/interest group. If you oppose your government funding videogame development...this is probably not the right journal or audience to complain about it.

[Ryan Stefanelli]

I don't buy the idea that sold for profit = not art. This seems like yet another arbitrary rule, limitation and definition of art that has no real place in the discussion. This gets back to the fundamental discussion of art and it's definition, which eventually leads to a complete devolution of this debate... but the fact that the game is taken from the artists by a corporation and then sold for profit does not, in any way, change the fact it was -- first and foremost -- and artistic production.

Political involvement in the cash-in of these products also has no real bearing on this discussion. If I produce an artistic piece, give it to someone, and he makes $1 profit by re-selling it, the piece is not taken from the world of art into the world of product.

And let's face it, art is intent. When we make games, even the simplest, we are trying to tug some emotion from the player. That "intent" alone makes the game a form of art. Ebert tries mightily to distinguish between "high" and "low" art, which is his own personal way of separating games from what people would thusly consider to be "real" art (low art is not art, apparently). which gets back to the first point of this little post: we cannot, and should not, put arbitrary rules, limitations and additions to an already elusive definition of art.

If the people who make the games intend for the games to be art, then they ARE art.

[Zack Hiwiller]

I can understand why Clint doesn't post in this comments thread. This guy is a nutjob.

To me, this is an argument with no pragmatic consequences. If games are art, I will continue to make games as I do. If games are not art, I will continue to make games as I do.

I personally believe games are art simply because they take an aesthetic eye to create well.

But this whole argument is one big ego trip for gamers and non-gamers alike. Gamers want their hobby to be intellectual verified and non-gamers don't like to think of that-thing-that-kids-and-nerds-do as valuable to society in any form.

[mn]

I'm more upset that my tax dollars are NOT being used to give 'insert coins' the proper mental care that (s)he clearly deserves rather than having my tax dollars going to fund one of those cultural industries that HAS put Canada on the map. In this age of brain drain and declining relevance, Canada should be proud that such people and such developers are not just successful, but successful AND Canadian.

[Grassroots Gamemaster]

Well, though I don't agree that you need to own a company to create art - if you did, then almost three-quarters of all the world's great films would suddenly not be art - I do like the fact that there are still fresh, angry voices like insert coins around. The rest of the game industry is so incestuously steeped in groupthink and drivel - so thoroughly indoctrinated to be corporate lackies and not stand up for their own rights and take their own power - I'm not surprised they accuse IC of insanity. Truth is, his voice is one of the most sane I've heard in a long time.

[Clint]

First, I'll apologize for having modified the comment history on this post. About 25-30 comments from a single commentor have been removed at his own request as off-topic. I apologize also to the other commentors above whose responses have in some cases lost some of their context with the removal of said comments. I hope something liek that does not happen again.

Now that it has calmed down here a bit, I'll reply quickly to a few of the insightful replies this post generated.

Jare - I am also very sympathetic to Ebert. Early drafts of this post were more of an attack, but after I calmed down a bit I realized that in fact Ebert represents the vast majority of people on the planet in his failure to understand this new medium. It's not his fault. He's not trying to beat us down or anything. He just doesn't get it. Helping someone who is clearly as intelligent as Ebert try to understand is a small step in the right direction. And you're right - even if we win him over... what now? Well, nothing now. It's not going to change anything materially. It's an argument in principle. Even if he were to accept it in principle, it will not materially affect his literacy in the medium and enable him to experience the art. No matter how much your mom wants to see the art in GTA:SA, she likely never will. The literacy required takes years to build, I think. I'll be posting my thoughts on this form of literacy sooner or later....

Brett - I really like the analogy of designer energy into a dynamic story system being able to generate potential wells that take middling game mechanical movements and pressure them toward the extremes to create functional climaxes. In this way the necessarily ordered states of high intensity dramatic climaxes are generative - not formally authored. You're right to point out that it's not fundamentally different than level-of-difficulty management. It's significantly more involved and complicated, but ultimately it's the same core concept.

Zack - I agree with the point you are making - that the argument is more or less moot - but I would caution against thinking there are NO pragmatic consequences. The most important pragmatic consequences I see are those of protection of speech (in the US, at least). Given recent pushes by legislators throughout the US to curtail our freedom of expression, there may indeed be very pragmatic consequences to the offical recognition of games as a form of artistic expression. When someone with a prominant public platform aserts that games are not art, sadly (and as dull and repetitive as it starts to feel) we are kind of obligated to rebutt, I think.

[Grassroots Gamemaster]

In a world of insane people, the truly sane sound like they are mad. His comments about control of the product were bang on. Of course, he raved about it, but that is just a delivery element - the substance cut right to the heart of it. Game designers are corporate whores. They don't control their own intellectual property. They don't get their name on the box. They waive their moral rights far too soon. If you're gonna talk authorship, then talk it. Don't dance around splitting intellectual hairs - get to the meat of it: control and authority.

[Clint]

GG:

I won't go too far down this path with you, but I think your stance is ideologically anti-corporate as opposed to well-reasoned. As James O mentions above, the vast majority of artists in history have created their works in much the same climate that corporate employed game designers do today. Do you discount Michelangelo's work because it was commissioned by the Church? Believe what you like about the individuals - I don't give fuck if you think I'm a whore - the authorship still fundamentally and inseparably connects back to me or to Michelangelo or whomever, regardless of who is productizing the work. To state otherwise is to deny 90% of the works achieved by humankind. It's absurd. Laughable even. Idealised anarcho-communism is not the only social/political/economic structure that can have 'art' as an output.

You reject the idea that the 'fruit of my labor' should belong to the corporation, and then you turn around and suggest that as an author I should somehow get credit - with my name on the box - for the fruits of the labor of 100+ people working on my game. It's a team that make my game. We do it collectively. In reality, I just don't give a shit about my name being on the box, or about owning the intellectual property created with the money of my company and the labor of my team. Why should I own it? I DON'T WANT TO OWN IT. I WANT TO MAKE GAMES THAT MOVE PEOPLE. I am not interested in the rest.

[Brett Douville]

Well, Clint, if you manage to massage that into a game at some point, I wouldn't mind a credit ;)

I've been thinking about that stuff for a while. I think that we already do this to a certain extent, in games with multiple endings. Of course, I've been recently playing BioShock, and that's what's going on here, albeit in a very crude fashion. (The amount of energy applied to the system is essentially an equation -- if rescued(x sisters) then Ending1 else if harvested(...) etc.) But it seems like we can design systems that force or nudge towards, as you say, functional climaxes either in story or in-game events.

Just as a for example, or gedankenexperiment, consider an Oblivion-style game where rather than leveling up the creatures with us to maintain level of difficulty, we apply some sort of systemic dungeon ecology. Small monsters are eaten by bigger monsters, even bigger monsters come in for the hoards of treasure, what have you -- with nudges towards what look like reasonably steady states based on player time or level or what have you. You start off the game with giant rats to the east, and kobolds to the south, with a spider's nest off to the west. If you address the spiders first, the kobolds move in and start training the rats as mounts; if you address the kobolds first, perhaps orcs from further east move in and start eating the rats. Perhaps the spiders accumulate webbed up kobold bodies around their southeastern border -- rescue a few of those and maybe generate an uneasy truce between town and kobolds. Granted, there's a lot of issues swept under the rug here (and as a game programmer and tech lead, I fear that the rug begins to look like the Himalayas), but it's not too tough to imagine the sorts of systems that would be required (perhaps we divide monsters into classes and apply rules: humanoids expand their territory at particular rates, and when encountering "rideable" critters, begin training them, all of this taking time or being based on player variables such as level). With a little bit of designer nudging (i.e. doing whatever we do with the player variables to nudge towards these extremes), we begin to have a system which generates a handful of interesting stories.