Well, I read it, and I'm sure I'm not the only one. For those of you who don't know, Roger Ebert recently made a blog post entitled "Video games can never be art," wherein he elaborates on his less recent off-hand comment that video games can never be art. The somewhat long blog post sparked a lot of controversy, with a comment section that made the post look like a speck of dust. Personally, I think Ebert's blog post is rambling, defensive, and, in one or two spots, just plain rude. No surprise there; Roger Ebert isn't known for writing well-thought-out argumentative papers. He writes whatever he feels like saying, even if it is unfair or off-topic. And that's not such a bad thing, because that kind of honesty gives us nuggets like this:
One obvious difference between art and games is that you can win a game. It has rules, points, objectives, and an outcome. Santiago might cite a immersive game without points or rules, but I would say then it ceases to be a game and becomes a representation of a story, a novel, a play, dance, a film. Those are things you cannot win; you can only experience them.
That’s worth thinking about. The main thing that’s tying games down from being an art form may be that, in order to sell, a game has to be…well, a game. There has to be some kind of fun challenge. In commercial gaming, real interactive stories are few and far between. Even among those that claim to be “story-centered” games, the experience is dominated by gameplay that does not further the player’s emersion into the story. Those of us who want to use games as a medium for art should not feel a need to throw in a game when we’re telling an interactive story. Sure, this may provide a nice backup if the story can’t stand on its own in the world market, but this idea that has been ground into our culture, of interactive stories having some need to be games, is holding us back in many respects as artists.
That being said, we shouldn’t ignore the usefulness of gaming concepts in telling a story. Objectives, rules, outcomes, and yes, even points, to a certain extent, can have a place in interactive storytelling.
When you were in elementary school, middle school, or even in high school, did your teacher ever tell you what makes a story? There is a beginning, middle and end. There is a problem central to the story (these are not always bad), and there is a character, called the protagonist, who has to deal with this problem. Then there’s the antagonist. The antagonist does not necessarily have to be a character, but he/she/it generally creates obstacles to dealing with the problem. This definition is goal-centered by nature, and the goal is always to fix the problem. While some stories hang on to this definition only loosely and some not at all, this form has dominated much of modern storytelling. Tons of great works are built on objectives. Having objectives in an interactive story and giving those objectives to the player rather than to non-playable characters does not make the story cease to be great art.
Enter the antagonistic forces. In any non-computer game, rules work as obstacles that keep us from getting to the objective. If Go Fish had no rules, one could just grab cards from the deck and pair them together. The only obstacle would be the other player. In video games, of course, we can’t break the rules unless we have programming knowledge, get help from someone else who does, or do it with the “cheat codes” that the game-makers build in. The complex “rules” that make video games fun and challenging are comparable to the obstacles a protagonist faces when trying to reach his or her objective. They make the story interesting. Suppose a character wants to get over a huge wall. They can’t float over it, because of gravity. This example could be used in interactive stories as well as non-interactive stories. The only difference is that the goal is the player’s, not just the character's. So what is the difference between a game with rules and an interactive story with obstacles? In a story, we pretend the working parts are something else. I mean, if you saw people wearing pieces of fabric running around on your lawn yelling random stuff, would they be telling a story? No. But if they put on clothes that made them look like something else, and they moved and spoke in a way that represented actions, they would be telling a story. Now, if we saw that wall for what it is, a collection of variables that make the screen light up in certain ways, and didn’t pretend it was a wall, we would just be playing a game. However, we pretend we are a protagonist dealing with a wall, so we are involved in the art of storytelling.
Another parallel can be made between a game script and a film/play script. Those of us familiar with object-oriented programming can tell you that writing code for a game is much like writing a script with If Statements and Event Listeners (these are things that help a program respond to the user’s actions). Actually, one could create virtual actors and tell them what to do and say using code, but at the end of the day, it would be a waste not to use the tools available to let the viewer play a part, if it would enhance the story.
And then, what is a story without outcomes? It’s a cliffhanger. “Outcome” can mean many things, but if Roger Ebert meant “consequences to actions and/or events” then he’s wrong that art cannot have outcomes. Just about any story shows causes having effects or effects being caused by something at least once in the course of the story. It would be weird to say, “Let me tell you a story. A bucket fell over, a spaceship exploded, and then, after that, someone flipped a light switch,” not only because of the anticlimactic ending and the lack of setting, but also because there is no cause-and-effect line linking the events. Games, however, make a lot of sense without outcomes. You try to be the one with the most cards at the end of Go Fish, but nothing happens when you do.
If Ebert meant by outcome “a result in the player’s choices,” then this is just another matter of deciding whether a story with viewer interaction is worthy of the title “art.” Some, myself included, would argue that the point of letting a viewer control a character’s actions would be so they can explore the artist’s work, rather than view it in a narrow scope. If nothing the player did had some consequence, then the scope would remain narrow. There would be no tweaking by the player, and so no different perspectives could be given.
Because computer programs are actually a series of variables with changing values, points can play a crucial part in an interactive story. Not points that say how well you played the game, but points that measure the various levels and amounts that make up a world. These may not be needed in a traditional story, but in an interactive story, where storytellers must create a world that can survive and deal with a player’s actions without the artist’s constant input, such details are absolutely necessary.
Again, the difference between games and interactive stories is that we pretend one thing is something else, and that we focus on story. Our ability to represent stories on a computer screen and to allow viewers to interact allows for a unique kind of storytelling. There are, as there have been for years, opportunities to make an art of interactive storytelling. Those of us who take that opportunity need to remember as we enter this brave new world that, although we need to rid ourselves of the idea that interactive stories have to incorporate fun and/or challenging games, we should also keep in mind that many aspects of game theory can play roles in storytelling and can have a powerful effect on viewers or players, whatever we want to call them.
