This post is part of a series: “unfinished posts I wrote a year ago that are collecting dust on my hard drive.” Most of them are about videogames and/or storytelling from an artistic perspective. I’ve been waiting for certain points where I’d be inspired enough to dig them up, and a recent article by Ian Bogost about Heavy Rain and how it relates to cinema inspired me to dig this one up. You should check out his article. Also, I realized something new while writing this, so I’m happy to have made some progress.

In my dusty post, I was writing about storytelling, and I tried to think of artistic mediums. I realized that in the context of making art or telling a story, it would be very helpful to define them by what made them distinct. I’m probably not doing any of this incomplete list the justice it deserves, but hopefully this will make the point.

• Oral tradition – dynamic, three-dimensional, using language spoken orally
• Music – dynamic, three-dimensional, using the sound generated from the structured series of contacts of objects
• Live-action role-playing – dynamic, three-dimensional, using live actors playing roles in a defined space
• Token-based role-playing – dynamic, three-dimensional, using tokens playing roles in a defined space
• Light painting – static, two-dimensional, using a single image represented by the placement of light on a surface
  
• Painting – static, two-dimensional, using a single image represented by the placement of colored pigments on a surface
• Literature – static, two-dimensional, using written or printed language arranged on sheets of a semi-permanent surface
• Photography – static, two-dimensional, using a single image of a real-life scene captured by a camera obscura and transferred to light-sensitive paper
• Film – dynamic, two-dimensional, using a sequence of images and audio of a real-life scene captured by a camera obscura, cut into a linear series of arranged segments, and presented on a screen
• Animation – dynamic, two-dimensional, using a sequence of images represented by the placement of colored pigments on surfaces, cut into a linear series of arranged segments, and presented on a screen
• Software art?? – dynamic, two-dimensional, using a sequence of images and audio stored on a computer, programmed into an interactive system, presented on a screen

As you can see, artistic mediums are technological in nature in the sense that the technology being used (or not used) makes one medium distinct from another. For each of these, you will want to artistically use one of those properties in order to create an artistic experience through that medium. With literature, you’ll want to use language, arrange the language, or use the surface in some artistic way. With film, you’ll want the scene, the capturing of the scene, the arrangement of the segments, or the presenting of the images on a screen to be artistic.

None of these mediums have any mention of storytelling or games because both of these things are completely abstract structures for meaning. They don’t rely on technology at all; they’re basically systems created by thought. Therefore, in order to be expressed in a way that can be artistic, a story or a game must be presented through a medium. Storytelling presented through live-action role-playing gives you theatre. Storytelling presented through light painting gives you shadow puppeteering. Games presented through token-based role-playing gives you board games. Storytelling presented through painting gives you graphic novels.

That means videogames are games that are presented through the last medium. And what makes them distinct is that medium. It’s based on an interactive system that is virtual (computer-based) and fictional (artistic, not functional). EA probably put it most concisely in the manifesto promoting their indie game collective, calling it “software art.”

To bring it back around to Ian’s article, he was suggesting that in the same way film has editing at its core, videogames might have extension or prolonging at its core, which is basically the opposite of film. And after looking at what makes videogames unique, I can see how that could be true in part. Because videogames have at their core a computer, and computers are good at simulating, so they could be more about continuity than the breaking up of continuity.

However, I think a better way to put it might be that the use of editing is at the core of film, as opposed to the use of fast editing. In the same way, the use of simulations would be at the core of videogames, as opposed to the use of continuous simulations.

That means good artists in film would use editing (among other things) to provide meaning, whether it was fast or slow.  In videogames, good artists would use simulation (among other things) to provide meaning.  In the case of Heavy Rain, that simulation was used for everyday actions, which gave the experience a distinct feel.

What is Interactive Visual Worship?

Interactive visual worship is a form of worship where people can use videogame technology to worship visually along with a band that’s playing music. It can be hard to understand at first if you’re not very familiar with forms of both Christian worship media and videogame media. I don’t blame you, so I’ll try to elaborate on both!

Christian Worship Media

During a modern Christian church worship service, on the surface level you will see a band playing music on a stage in front of the congregation, and the congregation sings along to the music. These days people know what to sing by looking at white words on black projected onto screens above or to the side of the band. Some churches have also begun using abstract animated backgrounds behind the words (or on different screens altogether), referred to as “motion backs.” Other churches even try to include less abstract animations, such as video clips of nature or people interacting in a meaningful way. In terms of the media that’s going on, it’s similar to live visuals at a rock concert.

So the goal is to express some faith-based message through film/animation during the musical part of worship – this is visual worship, or rather a specific form of visual worship. Since it is about expression, artists are needed to express that message. They choose the clips and fade between them live to the music in order to create meaning, similar to how a DJ works with turntables. Therefore, these people are referred to as worship VJs. So you could say that these worship VJs are worshipping visually by creating meaning from video clips in sync with a worship band playing music. Again, like VJs would at a rock concert/club. And there’s almost always only one worship VJ doing visuals, just like you usually have one DJ playing in a band or at a club.

Videogame Media

Interactive visual worship takes that idea, combines it with videogame technology and media, and allows a group of people to worship visually at the same time. Now when I use the word videogames, you might think of Tetris or Doom or Halo or Peggle, but that’s not quite what I’m talking about. I think of videogames as a mixture of two unique mediums – a specific medium that doesn’t really have a name yet, and games. At the heart of this unnamed medium is a virtual, fictional, interactive system running on a computer.

This system takes input, computes it, and displays an output that changes based on the input given. It’s fictional in the sense that the system represents something artistic; it’s not tax software, but a virtual world created by an artist that you can explore and learn from. It’s a world that speaks to you on a very human level, but because it’s interactive, some videogame designers describe it as a world that you can have a conversation with.

Interactive visual worship uses this unnamed medium. Keep in mind that it’s a unique medium that’s distinct from games, so it does not include winning & losing, game-like challenges, or points. But it still uses interactive systems or environments. These could be made up of a series of scribbles that move around, geometric shapes that appear to be alive, or an earthly world that looks like a painting or photograph.

What is it Like in Practice?

In the real world, where culture exists, this takes the form of using wireless devices like a Wii remote to interact with videogame-like environments during a church service. And the visuals appear on a screen for the congregation to see, just like existing visual worship media.

I can hear it now…”What?!  Playing videogames during church?!” Well, kind of. Though it’s not that different than mixing beats during church or painting during church. It’s a medium, just like other things that are experienced on Sunday morning. For interactive visual worship, it’s designed to be a communal activity for at least 6 people, like adding a visual band to the music one.

I’m working on a demo video that I’ll post soon; hopefully it will be provide some clearer idea of what this is all about. Basically at this point I have a few environments that I can switch between. It’s a polished prototype. More info to come.

For the past year, I’ve been working on my own interactive projects that don’t involve game mechanics, so it was very relieving to find out there are others out there wanting to do things that are like games, but not quite games. And when ToT invited developers to join them, I saw an opportunity to be part of a like-minded community.

If the essence of what I loved about The Dig wasn’t the puzzles, why have them? Why not have only the essence of what I loved?

I’m not 100% convinced that videogames proper are holding back the full potential for expression, but I have the same gut feeling as Tale of Tales that in many cases they are.

I suppose this comes from evidence that some of my favorite “games” lately have been things that actually have very minimal game elements to them. It took some dissection of Small Worlds, Today I Die, The Majesty of Colors, and others on the notgames forum in order to come to an official conclusion on that. But if I follow the trend forward, it could be possible that by having no elements at all, the experience would be even more expressive as a creator and enjoyable as a player.

An even larger amount of evidence comes when I stop to consider the unique elements of art forms (or media if you prefer), and how videogames don’t really offer anything truly unique.  This point is part of a very long-winded essay I have yet to publish, but the short story is that the “games” part of videogames isn’t unique to videogames, and the “video” part of videogames isn’t unique to videogames.

The “video” part I’m referring to – what I like to call a virtual, fictional interactive system – is what I love most about videogames. Basically it would be fictional media that fully utilizes the computer, including its input, computation, and output. Games would be a fine addition, but from my experience playing and creating them, they often create various forms of dissonance, especially when it comes to the more artistic/story-driven ones. A game system integrated with an artistic interactive experience usually feels duct-taped on top to me.

For example, the fact that I never finished The Dig because the puzzles were hard and I got tired of them really frustrates me. The puzzles are not why I loved The Dig, although they were interesting in their own right for a little while.  To me, it begs this question: If the essence of what I loved about The Dig wasn’t the puzzles, why have them? Why not have only the essence of what I loved?

Thus, my conclusion is that it’s well worth my time to answer this fundamental question of my experience with games by doing. I will create The Dig minus its puzzles, or more specific to the game I have in mind: “Myst minus the puzzles.”

EDIT: This sounds a little misleading. I sort of got “microwaved” with a vision – a specific story idea – almost a year ago at a game jam. Since then, I’ve come up with a game idea for it, and after explaining the idea to Ted Martens, he told me what I was describing was basically Myst but without the puzzles. I realized the connection to my frustrations with The Dig after the fact.

As a final note, one of my goals as a developer is to make games (and notgames) for a variety of people, including those that are intimidated by or apathetic about games. I found this information graphic to be great motivation toward my goal, pulled from the notgames manifesto:

Make love, notgames.

Greg just wrote about Why do we do what we do? and eloquently summed up the hard-to-define reason for why we at Intuition create art:

These are all things that fester inside me and I desperately want to expel them.  Not that they’re demons of any shape, but it’s this compulsion to create that drives me.

I really like how he put this because it can be difficult to put into words.  He makes it look easy.  The only other thing I can compare this to is something from Judeo-Christian culture – the psalm.  This compulsion is why I created MEHC.  It’s not the kind of game I like to play, but I just needed to make it somehow.

Alec Holowka was kind enough to respond to Greg’s post and suggested we check out his recent post Why Art?.  I was inspired enough by both of them that my comment to both of their posts turned into this.  Check them out if you haven’t yet.

In Response To “Why Art?”

I’m very comforted and honored to be amongst such final gentlemen who can present a rational argument.  Alec makes a good point that anger about discussing art often comes from fear or misunderstanding.  I especially like the video he posted – that says as much about his point as the words that follow it.  We’re just a part of the continuum, communicating something about humanity to each other through time.  And because we are unique, the message will be different for each person.  I like that attitude.

What I got from his argument about why games are art specifically seems to be that art gives him something about life to relate to, and because games also give him something to relate to, that makes them art.  I would go even further and say that art is created (it doesn’t just happen), communicates something human (a story/idea/emotion), and is otherwise “non-functional.”  By that, I mean that the thing in question has no function other than the act of communication itself (thus separating the word from design).  And because video games have these properties, they are art, too.

I was a little confused by the statement about art being subjective, though.  Did he mean that the experience of art is subjective?  Or the work of art itself is subjective?  There is a distinction to make here, and it partially forms the basis to my answer of “Why art?”.

I believe that art can be perceived in a subjective way.  But isn’t the work of art itself – the video game in this case – an object?  It is a collection of code and binary data running on a computer of some sort with input and output.  That makes it material, existing in reality, which is objective by definition.

Furthermore, because art “speaks to us,” that seems to make it objective, too.  Something is doing the speaking, and I think the thing that speaks doesn’t really change.  It is we who change and hear different things.

Therefore, I’d say that a more specific argument would state that the perception of art is subjective, based on each of our life experiences and unique brains, while the work itself is objective.  That can explain why we can look at a film several years later and see or learn something different.  The film itself remains unchanged, but our perception of it changes.  It communicates something about humanity in a different way than before, because we understand humanity in a different way than before.

I think this distinction is important because it suggests that a work of art is unchanging, yet communicates on a level higher than normal understanding.  The fact that we can return to an object and subjectively learn something new suggests that we can’t fully comprehend the work all at once.

To me, that gives art a magical quality (in the emotional sense).  That is one of the reasons why I think it’s important to call games art.

Saving the World

In the comments of Greg’s post, Alex and Greg were discussing saving the world with art.  The notion may seem impossible to some, but I’d argue that we are living proof that it can work.  Inspiring people through creation seems to be one of the simplest (though still very hard!) ways to change the world with art.  Saving it is just a few steps away.

By making something of incredible quality that communicates to people and inspires them in a lasting way, you can inspire them to either change or to create themselves.  And them creating will often lead to change later.  Here’s a quote from Eva Zeisel to illustrate my point:

It’s very difficult to know exactly whether to live for an ideology or even to live for doing good.  But there cannot be anything wrong in making a pot, I’ll tell you.  When making a pot you can’t bring any evil into the world.

Just think about the games we’ve played that have inspired us to make games ourselves.  Those games have done good things because they have inspired us to create, and those acts of creation have changed us.  Those games have changed the world.  Saving it is just a few steps away.

This site unfortunately doesn’t have a plant-growing Conway’s Game of Life simulation like the Flash version was going to, but it does have more accessibility and a faster way to get to the content.  I’m scratching the plant-growing itch by making a musical gardening game anyway.  More info on that in the future.

It’s a bit nostalgic/embarassing looking through the wayback machine at my site circa 2002.  I had a “news archive” since there wasn’t really the word blogging in use yet.  Heh.  And I wanted to make it like makeoutclub…oh man.  I’m much more happy with the direction I was going in June 2003. It was going to be a Flash site with little sci-fi/sleek modules that you slid out and stick in the content section to load the content. I was soooo inspired by the Zion “white room” scene in the second Matrix movie with all the switchboard people.

But hey, this site is actually finished and will actually allow people to view my work quickly.  So go check it out if you are so inclined.

Coworking is an awesome concept and I love working here.  A cool benefit of coworking is the ability to collaborate on projects, and that’s what is happening with Neil and I.  A couple weeks later after I saw his simple Flash game, he showed me a prototype of it working on the iPhone, and before I knew it, it was completely ported and more fleshed out.  The game is nearly complete in functionality and design, but he wanted better art for it and help smoothing out a couple kinks.  So I decided to help him out with the art and a little design.

This as-of-yet unnamed iPhone game is an economic strategy game where you must make the most money you can in 30 days fishing for crawfish (slang for spiny lobsters) in the Bahamas.  The game has a couple other modes, including one where you try to make $1 billion as soon as you can and a “daily game” mode where you get the same seeded random events as other players and you see how well your strategy compares with others.  In the game, you place traps in either shallow or deep water, buy more traps, move traps around, and a couple other more minor things.  It’s a pretty fun and simple game.  The part I like the best about it is that random things happen to you while you’re crawfishing, and that combined with the play-through-the-menu style of gameplay really reminds me of playing Oregon Trail.

I’ve heard that Oregon Trail is coming out for the iPhone, but after checking it out online, I was a little disappointed.  The art seems great, but the mini-games seem to take a little too much away from the original feel of Oregon Trail, which was more about using your imagination given suggestive text with simple, low-res illustrations and also about the hunting game of course.  I can’t think of any other way to say it right now other than the fact that the design seemed pure.  There was a purity to it.  The new Oregon Trail seems to have the more recent flavor of casual game-style rewards.  Another way to put that is that it has a lot of extrinsic rewards systems, and fewer intrinsic reward systems.  I might be wrong, and I’m sure the game will still be good, but it’s just plain different from what I remember about Oregon Trail.

And that’s what excites me about Neil’s game – it will focus more on the suggestive text and simple illustrations to create a world that lies within the player’s head.  I don’t know enough about psychology to know what that kind of experience that is called, but I think this game tries to achieve that.  And I’m not saying that games shouldn’t explicitly provide a rich world because it takes away from the one in the imagination, but I’m saying it’s nice to have a simple experience like the one you get from the original Oregon Trail every now and then.  And besides, it’s just plain nostalgic.

So for the past couple weeks, I’ve been creating art for it in a pixel art style.  I’ve had a little taste of making pixel art before, but this project has allowed me to get a lot more familiar with the style, and I’m having a lot of fun.  When will the game be released?  I’m not sure; I suppose part of that will depend on how soon Intuition gets approved as an iPhone developer.  Yep, this collab of God at play and Neil Roberts will likely be Intuition’s first iPhone game.  Woot!