BriceMorrison.com Life is a Game

…gaming is a superset of all these other forms of entertainment.  If people look inside of a game, you’ve got writing, you’ve got music, you’ve got animation, you’ve got actors, stories, almost anything you’ll find in any other form of media, it’s contained somewhere in games.

Will Wright, creator of Spore and The Sims

Are games just a hodgepodge of art and music?  A scrapbook of narrative and animation?  Au contraire!  Games do much more than simply bring other media together, they also bind them, mold them, and turn their influences back on one another.  Last but not least, games enhance other media by adding the exciting element of interactivity.  In this post, I’ll explore the aspects of different types of popular media not usually discussed by developers, and the effects that games have when combined with them.

Sountrack of your life

Music is a highly abstract and highly emotional medium.  When you listen to a sad song, then you begin to feel sad, because the music makes no assumptions about what sadness truly is to you.  Instead, it presents the unabashed emotion and leaves it to the listener to fill in the reason behind it.  Everyone has music that immediately makes their heart swell.  When I hear a joyful song, then I immediately think of a joyful moment in my life, such as the struggle of a friend or the death of a relative.  Ironically, the abstract becomes a doorway to the personal.

Of course everyone knows that games include music in them, but games also enhance music further than would be possible on its own.  By having the ability to react to the player, games provide music the ability to even further insert itself in a player’s own life.  One example of this is dynamic music generation, where the music in the game responds to a player’s actions.  Shadow of the Colossus, an action/adventure game for the Playstation 2, does this especially well.  The game is centered around the main character attempting to bring down an enormously large monster about the size of King Kong.  When the colossus appears, the music becomes very deep and ominous, warning of coming danger.  As the player latches on to the fur of the colossus, the music shifts to one of high excitement, adding to the emotion of the moment.

The most basic form of dynamic music, switching between different tracks, is being further developed by other methods, such as adding or removing instruments to alter the tone.  Some other games are built entirely around the interplay between the player’s actions and the musical sounds it generates, and vice versa.

Your own epic story

Many people, at some point in their childhood, wanted to be a writer when they grew up.  There is something about the written word that makes it appear to be the ultimate form of expression, and for good reason.  As a species whose greatest sources of intellect come from the ability to write and the ability to understand symbols and abstract meaning, novels take advantage of both.  The ability to describe the concept of regret, devotion, or peace is a very powerful tool.  Written novels also have the extraordinary ability to delve into characters’ minds, explaining line by line the very thoughts occuring in a scene.  This is something that other media do not currently engage in at a frequent level.

In terms of written fiction, games bring the option of involving the reader.  You may remember the Choose Your Own Adventure books, short stories where, upon reaching certain pages, the reader would be asked to make a choice.  Would you like to go up to the mountains?  Or would you like to continue into the cabin and talk to Geno?  This was an early adaptation of the choice of games brought to narrative.

Though not popular in mainstream culture, tabletop roleplaying games such as Dungeons and Dragons are wonderful examples of how games can add incredible value to narratives.  Players move through a quest, conveyed with words and images and conducted by a real-life narrator.  While the narrator has at his hands a general plot and story outline, the players may decide what to do at any given point.  Will the players attack the monster, or flee?  Will they trust the damsel, or stay suspicious?  By having a human act as the “computer”, these games are able to be incredibly versatile, giving an immersive experience that walks the fine line between complete freedom and a directed, epic narrative.

The future of such narrative and game meshes may lie in massively-multiplayer games.  These games, with their origins in entirely text-based systems, are able to outsource much of the plot aspects to other players, since computers themselves have a difficult time performing tasks such as conversation, allied strategy, and story progression.  By harnessing the power of thousands or millions of players, these games have the potential to unlock entirely alternate worlds where the player can both follow her own story as well as choose her own path.

The elegance of dance

Dance and movement are also important elements of any tour of art.  A friend of mine in college was a dancer, and she invited me to several of her ballet performances where I was struck by how dance, in a way, isolates itself from other media.  You can take snapshots or a video of a routine, but then you are turning it into something else.  Dance is all about the beauty of the actual movement itself, the moment to moment changes in the positioning of the human body.  In a way, dance is a meditation on the elegance of our own species.

Due to technological and cost barriers, dance is one form of art that is still lagging behind in its integration to games.  While movement based titles such as Dance Dance Revolution, which requires the player to step on lighted pads to a beat, and Wario Ware, which requires players to move their arms using the Wii remote, involve some sort of movement, there aren’t any games that I know of that focus on the slow beauty of human dance itself (please comment if you know of one!).

As physical movement sensing technology becomes more mainstream, it’s likely that we’ll see more dance-based games that incorporate more than pressing buttons to the right beat.  Sony’s Eyetoy, which allows the player to interact with a game overlaid on top of their own picture, would be a promising candidate for such a title.  Different goals such as holding a certain position, moving in a predefined arc, or recording movements for others to repeat would be a wonderful synthesis of movement and gameplay.

The power of choice

Now I’m not one to get into an argument over whether games are better than books, or books are better than film, or what have you.  Each medium has its own unique characteristics which can be used and manipulated to its advantage. On the other hand, if the goal of the artist is to recreate an experience of life wholesale, then I believe games come the closest.  They provide a subset of the very system we live in; the only differences are the mechanisms and the differences of input.  If one day we are able to create some sort of holographic experience, such as the ability to actually sit down and have a conversation with virtual people, then it will most certainly be called a game before it is called anything else.

See you next time,

Brice