Video Games as Art: Visualizing the Narrative

Imagine an image of a cocoon. Spring green plant life fills the background and the sun is rising, with light filtering in through the leaves. The photograph is stagnant and there are no words, just the image and all of its tiny details. Flip the page, onto the next picture.

This time, the cocoon is fracture down the center. The sun has risen and its light is bright enough to pierce the plant life for a brighter foreground, emphasizing the breaks in the soon-to-be butterfly’s swathe. The plant life looks largely the same, perhaps with a perched ladybug on one of the earthy twigs. Flip the page, onto the next picture.

The cocoon is ruptured at the seam. The inside of the encasing is hollow – a small, aphotic slot. An orange glow reflects off the shimmering leaves, which have droplets of rain rising from their skin. Behind the leaves, a luminous white butterfly floats away toward the sun.

Even from a young age, we’re able to infer a story from image A to image C. Even though the story itself might be primitive, there’s something beautiful about the simplicity of it: telling a story through visual image. This isn’t wholly unusual, as it’s something that’s been done across several mediums – from picture books to silent films – but it’s importance may not be fully realized in terms of video game creation and, ultimately, analysis.

 

Video Games as Art

Before getting into examples of video game design that tell stories through image, or as we’ll call it, “Visualizing the Narrative” (VTN), let’s deconstruct a common argument about games: that they can’t be art.

Roger Ebert, perhaps the most famous film critique ever (and my personal favorite), posed that video games cannot be art. His point, which we will refute endlessly at Epilogue Gaming, is that “No one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great poets, filmmakers, novelists and poets.” This is largely not true, and since Ebert’s untimely death several years ago, video games have begun to thrive as a storytelling medium. In an attempt to be fair to the argument as a whole, we’ll stick with games that were released before 2013 – the year Ebert died. Though, it should be mentioned that Ebert claimed that, “No video gamer now living will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form.”

Because it’s the definition that Ebert sites, and a fair one by my estimation, let’s use the following definition for art (via Wikipedia): “Art is the process of deliberately arranging elements in a way that appeals to the senses or emotions.” It’s hard to imagine that, even if we concede that there hasn’t been the video game equivalent of Moby Dick or Citizen Kane (and I’m not ready to concede this point, for what it’s worth), that game design doesn’t at least occasionally fit under that definition.

As we’ve discussed before, successful game development is about finding the appropriate balance and use of both gameplay and narrative mechanics. But let’s provide a baseline, first. If literature, an accumulation of words that are “deliberately arranged in a way that appeals to the senses or emotions,” can be considered art, Ebert must concede that games at least have the potential to become art (which he does, begrudgingly). Video games have the ability – as exemplified in “text adventure” titles like The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy (1984) – to be slightly modified versions of acclaimed source material. If the game literally just copied and pasted text from the novel, would it be considered art then?

Because there is no real argument that can be made in defense of Hitchhiker’s as any kind of real masterpiece, I’ll use The Walking Dead: Season 1 (2012), instead. Telltale is the developer behind many “choose your own adventure” titles, which we’ll call “interactive narratives” for now.

The Walking Dead, designed by Sean Vanaman and Jake Rodkin, uses a design structure similar to the television show of the same name. The first season contains five episodes, only one of which can really stand on its own (“Starved for Help”), each shrouded in themes of death and consequence. The game has been praised for its well-drawn tragedy and brief moments of catharsis in between by some of the most well-respected reviewers in the game industry.

And while narrative mediums have few objective qualities, Ebert can’t refute the importance of perception, reflection and ultimately the judgement of reviews – as it was what he did, and did well, for a career. Using aggregates such Metacritic, The Walking Dead stands at a mighty 92 average score. Meanwhile, Charlie Kaufman’s Synecdoche, New York – which is Ebert’s favorite film of the decade (2000-2010) – rests at a 67.

This doesn’t mean that Synecdoche, New York isn’t a masterpiece of a film (in fact, it’s actually one of my personal favorites and one that I’ve seen several times). What it does mean is that even by the standards Ebert’s own career have set, there are games that should be considered masterpieces – or at least under consideration for such.

But just in case, let us refer back to the earlier definition laid out by Wikipedia: does The Walking Dead deliberately arrange elements in a way that appeal to its player’s emotions? Unquestionably, the answer is yes. Warning: spoilers for the first season of The Walking Dead are ahead.

The game’s protagonist, Lee Everett, is a sympathetic man from Macon, Georgia. Formerly a state professor, Lee was convicted of murdering a senator believed to have been sleeping with his wife. Assuming Lee actually did kill the senator – which is only alluded to in the game – this isn’t an uncommon tactic used by directors in film. Acclaimed director Sergio Leone had several sympathetic killers, like Tuco from The Good, The Bad and The Ugly.

Through a series of good and bad luck, Lee finds himself a free man attempting to survive a zombie apocalypse. It isn’t long before he finds a young girl, Clementine, alone in a tree house, waiting for her parents to come home from a vacation.

Despite the game’s intentions, what takes place after all of this is a fairly linear narrative interrupted with small moments of influence. The game does everything the show attempts to do, including developing meaningful relationships between characters (as is evidenced by Lee and Clementine), drive home its motif of consequence (through its decision-making game mechanic) and tell a deeply affecting story driven by death and loneliness. While comparing it to one of the world’s most popular shows may seem disingenuous due to lukewarm critical reception, it does make the point that games have the ability to tell similar stories and tell them better.

Lee’s death at the end of the season is perhaps the most obvious example of this. Over the course of the game, Lee becomes a father figure to Clementine, who has since gathered proof of losing both her parents to the outbreak. For the same reason it might be difficult to explain Synecdoche, New York to someone who has not seen it, as Ebert struggles to do in his review – where he recommends seeing the film not once, but perhaps twice or three times to fully understand it – it might be difficult to adequately explain how stirring the centralized relationship of The Walking Dead is. From someone who comes from a background of film and television, it is a rare example of something that touched me in a way that required another playthrough to fully come to terms with. Then another.

Perhaps if Ebert and other detractors of the medium can’t admit to games as an art form for them, they can at least admit that it is to me. And plenty of others, too, who felt that The Walking Dead appealed to the emotions of its players.

Linear Versus Non-Linear Games

One of the chief concerns I have with video games as a storytelling medium is that the structure doesn’t set up particularly well for it. Because games vary by genre so much, this certainly isn’t an assertion that makes sense for all games – particularly ones like The Walking Dead that are almost entirely linear. So before diving into VTN, let’s briefly differentiate two different kinds of games (linear versus non-linear) and why the distinction is important for understanding games as a storytelling medium.

Linear video games have a much longer history, including the birth of franchises like Mario and Final Fantasy. The essence of these games is that both its narrative and set of objectives exist on a single plane and either a) don’t give the player the ability to leave that plane, or b) actively promote not leaving that plane. For modern day examples, games like Bioshock or Dead Space, both of which do allow the player to meander between levels, push the player forward with objective markers or an integrated GPS navigation tool – so as not to disrupt the immersion. If a piece of string were to represent games, a linear experience would be in a straight line.

Non-linear video games face a much more difficult task: telling a story that can be digested in any order and still having it all make sense. One of the games we’ll be dissecting in VTN is the Dark Souls franchise. Lordran, the game’s setting, is largely interconnected – allowing for the player to go in any direction they’d like right from the beginning. Because of this, creating a linear narrative becomes an arduous task. Imagine writing a book where the reader has the ability to shuffle the pages and read it in any order they want, and having to craft it in a way where it would still make sense. That is the plight game developers face, and one we want to break down at Epilogue.

Visualizing the Narrative

When considering the difficulty of piecing together a narrative that can be digested in so many different ways, developers have formulated an answer to the problem: visual imagery, interpretation, and immersion.

For just a moment, let’s consider the cocoon one more time. Only instead of a cocoon, let’s imagine Link from The Legend of Zelda. The first shot of the game is Link without a sword in his hand. Not long after, the player will find a sword in Link’s hand. Of course, it can be inferred that some kind of journey took place in between for Link to go from not having a sword to having one – and that inference would be right. Something has changed, and the game wants to show that to you. Imagery exists to tell us something has happened, and even if what happened isn’t on screen, we’re meant to interpret it.

The benefits of interpretation are two fold: For the developers, it allows them to craft a narrative without having to bog down the gameplay with exposition. They can tell a story without the player ever having to become passive in order to intake the story. Link doesn’t have a violent disposition and is weaponless at the beginning of the game. Once he’s given the sword, the tone shifts: Link is off on an adventure and he’ll have to fight his way through it.

One of the things that separates games from other storytelling mediums is their ability to immerse the consumer in the work. This isn’t a claim that film and literature can’t be immersive, but it is a claim that they don’t have the potential to do it as well. In games, players assume agency of the character(s). Tolkien tells a reader about the Misty Mountains, but Shigeru Miyamoto allows me to climb and inspect Death Mountain through Link. I don’t just read about inscriptions on the side of the mountain, I see them. Perhaps I even interact with them. This is where the narrative begins to visualize itself. This is where games become an art form.

Over the course of the next several months, Epilogue Gaming will be releasing a series of videos and essays on games that take advantage of this kind of immersive storytelling. Much like the cocoon exemplified earlier, games can tell a story through the use of visual interpretation and meaningful moments of interaction.

 

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