There’s a trend in game scholarship I can “interactive essentialism”. It’s the idea that because games can be interactive that interactivity defines the essence of what games are. You’re only playing when you’re interacting, and when you’re not interacting you’re “sitting back”. Those moments of stillness are treated as lying outside the play space.

But I think this stance is a profound misreading of how games operate. Those moments of stillness are part of the game too. And if you can design a game where you use moments of stillness to think about your next move, you can design a game when you use moments of stillness to think about the SIGNIFICANCE of your next move. And, in fact, such games exist.

Interaction is a tool that games offer the artist. It’s like the cut in cinema. The juxtaposition that occurs across a cut can be a profound tool for creating meaning in the mind of the viewer. But nobody would make the mistake of thinking that cuts are the entire essence of cinema. They wouldn’t say that a movie only exists “in the cut” and the time between cuts is just “sitting back”.

For example, there’s a sequence at the end of the game “Brothers” where you have to “play” through burying your brother who just sacrificed himself for you. There’s no challenge to it, no time pressure, no way to fail. It’s simply a thing the game asks you to do. But the emotional weight of the interactivity is tremendous. There’s a profound and powerful stillness as you’re dragging him slowly toward the hole you’ve dug, and the fact that you’re making the burial happen and not just watching it happen adds greatly to the poignancy of the moment.

The notion of something ‘deserving to be called art’ is an interesting one and perhaps epitomizes the disagreements in this discussion, which I think are disagreements over definitions rather than over the experience of gaming or experiencing art. I think part of the misunderstanding lies in the idea that ‘art’ is somehow higher than ‘games’. I’m going to try to explore this idea to keep us moving forward.

Our team had a chat about this with Mr. McKee yesterday. I’ll do my best to paraphrase.

Mr. McKee pointed out that with great art, your inner life is reorganized in a significant way, forever, by the depth and clarity of an experience that you’ve absorbed. ‘Passivity’ then (as you point out, Brian) in front of a movie or book is when your mind is constantly reconfiguring reality according to what the movie has to say. ‘Passive’ is perhaps the wrong word. You’re just not interactive. Your mind is profoundly focused and deeply absorbed and active. That’s the experience of great art.

Games, on the other hand, have their own advantages. They’re incredibly immersive. Great games are better than a lot of art (Mr. McKee points out March Madness, for instance), and certainly lots video games are ‘better’ than a lot of ‘art’ as well. I’m using ‘better’ as a general term about enjoyment or what one feels one gets out of it.

Now, this is me, Jonathan – an employee – attempting to put this all together rather than Mr. McKee’s own opinion: I think that what you talk about, Brian, wherein a gamer sits back in between gaming experiences and reconfigures the reality of the game in their brain, which teaches them something deep about life, would be ‘art’ as Mr. McKee defines it. It would have the potential to reorganize your thinking. But that experience of sitting back and letting your brain reorganize is not the moment when you are reacting to the attacking enemy or the time-intensive puzzle. Personally, I love the idea that you seem to be promoting – that a game can be both an immersive experience in the gaming sense, and an ‘art’ experience in the ‘reorganizing reality’ sense. I haven’t done much gaming lately, but I do believe it’s possible and can think of a few examples. I suppose the remaining question is whether one can have both (game and art) at the same time rather than needing to switch back and forth (in other words does the brain have enough RAM to both move through a quest and reorganize reality?). My two cents would be that if the game and story are integrated, the lines will get blurry pretty quickly, as one will remember what one experienced while gaming as part of the story and what one learned in the story while gaming. Finally, as for the notion of games deserving to be called art, my personal opinion is that if you can find a way to combine the principles of how great stories create insight into games that are also immersive and fun, then have the two work together, it could be something new and beyond.

I agree that part of the problem is that most games are too busy. I’m a big proponent of what I call “the play of stillness”. It’s what you’re doing when you ponder your next move in a chess game, or pause in the hallway of a first person shooter to consider your options. There’s a tremendous amount of play to be had in moments where you’re hardly interacting with the game at all. Furthermore, the construction of such moments is essential if you expect the player to engage in deeper introspection. It’s hard to think about what an experience means if you have to devote all your attention to keeping your character alive. The games that do the best job of packing an emotional and intellectual wallop — Journey, Flower, Ico, Dear Esther — know when to step back and let the player take stock of what they’re doing.

However, I disagree that this is because games are inherently active and movies and books are inherently passive. If you’re watching a great movie or reading a great book you’re busy! There’s so much to think about, so much to consider. You’re in an active flow state just as surely as a striker on a soccer team driving toward the goal. It’s this active engagement with the story that takes up mental space. The notion that watching/reading a story is passive is actually one of the things getting in the way of games maturing as an art form. If we think of filling up an audience with story the way you fill a bucket up with water, then how could it hurt to ask them to play a game at the same time? They’re not busy, after all! But once you realize that interpretive play requires just as much active attention as gameplay, the problem becomes clear. We can’t play two games simultaneously and if I need to keep pressing buttons to stay alive, interpretive play will fall by the wayside.

In fact, the idea that reading is an active process is not a new or radical one. Sartre wrote about it. The reader-response theorists of the last century — Iser, Jauss, Rosenblatt — analyzed it in detail. Understanding the active, ludic nature of all aesthetic reception is an important element of understanding why stories work the way they do. And (I believe) it’s the key in the long run to producing game experiences that deserve to be called art.

Very insightful, Joe. Thanks so much for taking the time to write this up. I find your depiction of someone going back and forth between the active and passive experience of a game compelling. If I wanted to try to be simple about it and agree with both you and Mr. McKee, I would suggest that the passive parts are ‘art’ and the active parts are ‘games’, and experiencing both together in the same activity makes for something incredibly immersive and new. But I also wonder about the edges of experience on either end, when you’re ‘getting’ the story while playing, kind of like an expert jazz musician who is grooving with the song while adding in a few notes or a solo in just the right place. Is she not passively enjoying the art and actively contributing when she sees fit? What about a conversation? Are the experiences so different? A psychologist named Csikszentmihalyi has written a lot about fully immersive experiences that take up our whole brain, calling the state ‘Flow’ in a book of the same name (subtitle: The Psychology of Optimal Experience). He says that skiing, listening to music, and playing with a jazz band when the challenge is high and the person’s skills are high can have in common that one is not aware of oneself because one is so caught up in the experience. Personally, I don’t know where the lines blur between active and passive. Even this process – taking in very clever opinions then writing back – seems to me to be somewhere in between the passive and active. Perhaps we need a new vocabulary here, or at least more distinct definitions, as is the case in so many debates of this sort.

I’ll first start with the video game industry is terrible for making money. Games require so many skills from professionals, they cost aLOT of money to make, and to market. Some of the biggest games require hundreds of millions to make, like battlefield, and starcraft 2, (over $200 million budget). the margin for making money on video games is slim, especially with digital pirating, thats why many video game companies tank. Many game employees sacrifice their livelihoods to make it. For example Electronic Arts programmers are paid 33% less than industry standard, but often work 25% more hours or more, and are in constant threat of being laid off. Also the skill set required is extremely high: game programming is the hardest kind of programming, and video game art also extremely technically challenging. These people are working extremely hard for little pay for something they’re passionate about.

i did enjoy the refinement on the definition of art, as being a passive experience on the audience, so that they can open up their emotional channels to achieve the highest emotional experience. Using this description of art, i will explain why game is art.

games are increasingly pushing this definition, and in some ways, convolute this definition between participation and passive reception, mixing them to giving heightened experience. Throughout art history, especially before modern age, art was descriptive. It told a story, or depicted an event, or scene. A large amount of technical skill was also involved, in vividly rendering something that would evoke imagination. We had the Renaissance masters depicting spiritual and religious works, we’ve had realists depicting the grittiness and humanity of mundane life, impressionists with their theories on color and the emotional response to such color schemes, the list goes on and on.

Now the video talked primarily about writing, but all forms of art are still art, whether visual, musical, performance, etc. Games allow the audience to go further than just to take a look, in the case of the visual arts. Have you ever seen a painting and wondered… what is it like to be in that painting? have you seen a landscape and wanted to trek its hills? seen a battlefield painting and witness the glory and horror of the event? seen a portrait and want to meet that person? That is what games allow you to do.

I like the definition in the video of art, because passivity and interaction should be well balanced in a game, if it is to succeed as art. If it is well balanced, i would even go on to say, the artistry and emotional response would be even HIGHER than that of passivity alone, because with interaction comes familiarity, and with familiarity a greater awareness can be achieved while being passive. This is similar to hearing a song for the first time, and you’re not sure whether you like it, or how much you like it. Then hearing it a few more times, you know you love it, and start blasting it on your sound system. Or meeting a new person, at first you think you may like him/ her, after a few dates, you’re starting to fall in love. Now just listening to music wasn’t interactive, but let’s say you started to dance to it, and eventually you figured out dance moves for every measure of the song, then you’d really love it !

The same interaction is true for games. A great game designer will give a great story, and let you control and interact just enough to get familiar, but still leave enough out of your control, let you sit down, relax, put down the controller or mouse/keyboard, and just watch. If written and acted correctly, you will be very close to the characters, you’ll have grown with them, experienced their experiences, and finally watch their epilogue, like some child you raised and sending them off. There is a LOT of passive reception in games, especially nowadays with big budgets and improvements in graphical and memory technology. Some games have more cutscene footage than hollywood movies. Some games are pure story, like Ellen Page’s “Two Souls” or “Dark Rain,” and every game has music, and lots of visuals. Riding through a fantasy forest with Jeremy Soule’s orchestration playing in the background, was a tear-evoking experience when Oblivion first came out. Watching Aeris die in Final Fantasy 7 was heartwrenching, with Nobou Uematsu’s famous track. Or Arthas ascending the Frozen Throne in Warcraft 3, awe inspiring with Tracy W. Bush’s signature score. Let’s not forget the monolithic first Halo, the last Spartan battling to the tune of Marty O Dell’s epic “Truth and Reconciliation.” If you have never experienced any of these poignant moments, you are missing out on some of the industry’s finest storytelling, gameplay, and musical compositions ever conceived.