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The idea that motion pictures can be works of art has been around since the 1920s, and it hasn't really been disputed since. It's easy to see why—cinema shares characteristics with theater in terms of acting, direction, music, set design, narrative, and so on. Now we have whole academic departments dedicated to film appreciation, to understanding the emotional and intellectual responses—deep feelings of awe and reverence, among others—that movies can elicit.
But video games aren't assumed to be as artistic as cinema or theater, if it all. In 2010, for instance, the late film critic Roger Ebert wrote an essay titled, "Video Games Can Never Be Art." But with the increasing sophistication, and variety, of video games today, it's becoming more and more clear that they are forms of art; or, at least, they evoke many of the same intellectual and emotional responses that artworks do. What's more, creating large-scale titles is like creating big-budget films or operas, since they require huge teams of people. An enormous amount of the cost of a big-budget video game is paid to people the industry classifies as "artists." (When their jobs have such titles as set and lighting design, music composition and performance, acting, animating, and painting, what else should we call them?)
There have been many arguments against views like Ebert's, and I won't rehash them here. But perhaps it's not enough to say, as the philosopher Aaron Smuts does, that video games are on equal artistic footing with any other so-called art. It might be that video games can actually do more as art than other forms.
One of the primary differences between video games and other art forms is that, in games, the player helps decide what happens. Controlling a character in the game's narrative can create emotional responses impossible—or, at least, extremely rare—in other art forms. In a 2006 study, for example, researchers interviewed what they termed "heavy users of first-person shooters," and found that players could readily recall feeling guilt, or at least moral concern. One player noted that, sometimes, his enemies would writhe on the ground for a while, rather than die immediately: "That reaches a limit," he said.
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It's true, you can feel guilty for watching a trashy movie; but that's the same kind of guilt you might get for drinking too much—a feeling that you should have been doing something else. You might have felt this after playing video games too long, perhaps at the cost of other things in your life. But this isn't the kind of guilt I'm talking about. It's not an artistic response.
Closer is Norman Rockwell's painting The Problem We All Live With, which can make people feel guilty for their own complacency or association with the racism of the American people. But video games can make one feel a raw guilt for something only happening in the artwork itself. Because you are sometimes making moral choices in many of them, and the game shows you the consequences of those choices, game designers can make players reflect on the moral outcome of their decisions in a way that's difficult or impossible with other art forms.
(Score: 2) by Hyperturtle on Wednesday February 08 2017, @04:30PM
I can't say I have had a moral quandry when playing a game. There are times I get bored and see if I can lay waste to entire communitites. Then I reload, since I do not want such actions affecting my progress.
It's a game. There is no AI asking me if I want to play chess instead, but if there was, it likely isn't going to be a WOPR of a game and instead will be like Dr. Sbaitso speaking to me in some dystopian command line future.
I take the view of: What do I think I enjoy the most, and second, what career path (Sith or Jedi) provides me most in terms of player character reward. Do I get more powerful in the long term being good? Good it is. Do I get challenged with having to wrestle with the moral quandries of having to do a little evil to do a greater good? Cool! Do I get punished for being overtly good and not taking into account the actual predictable repercussions in the game based on how good is presented to the player at first?
Games like Deus Ex made it so that you could not easily, at first, determine who was wearing the white and black cowboy hats. Changes can alter your progression and you can end up with a variety of well thought out script and story progression based on a series of values one can relate to as judgement calls -- either for morality, for credits, for guns, or because you're role playing a dick in a role playing game.
Games like Bioshock made it pretty clear who was wearing which hat, with a linear progression based on initial first choices. You can be a dick really early on and it doesn't let you undickify your actions later and allow you to regain the graces of being good. I am speaking of the plauer -- you know when you are a dick and the game provides feedback in relation to this--short term or long term gains based on actions. Any plot twists later just show you how many saints and sinners exist in that reality.
This entire "feel guilty for following the parameters of a game you can do role playing in to act out various scenarios differently as you may do in real life" is not something I can easily understand. Are some of the same people afraid of choose your own adventure games, too?
Do people feel guilty playing the original counterstrike, since they are always the terrorists in the eyes of the opposing team? It doesn't seem that there was an uprising about this. But then again, you are dressed as the good guys on your own team... the bad guys always look like the culturally stereotypical bad guy terrorists. The other team doesn't look like it is filled with Timothy McVeigh types, even though he's valid description of a terrorist with a bomb.
Perhaps the guilt is really in how the media narrative has encouraged some people to feel? Then again, the media responsible do not seem too guilty about that, so I suggest that those playing these games also do not feel guilty trying to get a high score or doing things they'd never do in real life. It's a game. But in real life.. try not to be a dick.
(Score: 2) by rleigh on Wednesday February 08 2017, @08:49PM
I do like moral decision making in games, particularly when the "correct" decision has an element of uncertainty, as in real life. It adds something.
Some games (KOTOR, BioShock) are pretty black and white, and there's not much effort required other than deciding if you want to be good or evil. But others (Deus Ex, more recently Dreamfall Chapters which was not great but did this aspect pretty well) do a good job of presenting you with a mixture of obvious, irrelevant or maybe irrelevant options. Agonising over a trivial decision because you can't anticipate its potential effect (if any), or just sodding it and picking one on a whim!
I can't say I ever feel in a quandry--it's not real life, but I do generally end up being "good". And often I'll choose what I feed would be in character for the game character rather than myself, even if it's "bad" or not truly "good". Deus Ex pulled this off so well with the unknown allegiance of the characters it really drew you in and got you involved. Best game I've ever played, shame none of the later sequels stood up as well as the original.