Over at Destructoid, Jim Sterling’s created a bit of a stir with his two articles regarding the “artsy” nature of games – one in which he decries the pretentiousness of indie “art” games for eschewing gameplay, and one in which he has to clarify what he was trying to say. The camp of opposition to Jim’s little article seems to fall within two main bodies of people – one which thinks Jim is bashing artistic value in games and the other which thinks Jim hates different things than the norm, a sort of gaming racism, if you will.
Sometimes I feel for Jim, because unlike someone as optimistic and annoyingly sunny as me, Jim receives plenty of negative impressions in his reviews and his notions. When they come out, they come out in a way that is inevitably insulting to some portion of the gaming populace. It leads to a lot of need to clarify and repeat. Definitely not fun all the time. In my own way, I think I’d like to help by providing my own impressions of what he thought.
Really, I think the main point that’s being put across is not that art games suck, or that indie games suck, but that a game being “artsy” and only “artsy” as a selling point of success sucks. We all know that games themselves are an amalgamation of parts, and the presentation, of which art is a part, is only one portion of making a successful game. I love games that make me think, present me a theme, show me something that is controversial and out there. In fact they’re a welcome alternative to the mainstream stuff I sometimes play when I don’t need a brain to play. But as much as we need “art” in games sometimes, we also need the accompanying gameplay and sensible logic to go with it. This is pretty much, I think, the crux of Jim’s argument.
If people thought that gameplay was the only thing that could make a successful game, we wouldn’t see half of the interesting twists and turns that some games are adventurous enough to take. If people thought that art was the only thing that could make a successful game, then we’d have plenty more games that were out there and well-known that tried to send more of a thematic message than play well. The fact is, we need both art and gameplay to make a good game, and one without the other is like having a peanut butter and jelly sandwich without the bread.
The mere fact that games have a smaller, indie market to create titles that are a bit “out there” (like The Path) is a good thing. The expansion of the games market and the target audience to include people who take a more artistic tack on media is really only a good thing overall, and not a bad thing. Really, I think the point is that the fundamentals should not be forgotten when making a game, no matter what message or thought you want to send with it. More significantly, one part of creating a game should not make the game an automatic success, whether that is the more “artsy” ideas of what message/theme you’re trying to send, or the fact that you can turn on a dime with the analog sticks and shoot backwards or upside down. Judging games as a whole should be based on all the factors, not just one which gives it a free pass to evaluating everything else it does. I personally look forward to seeing what art can be done in games – as long as I’m able to make sense of it at the same time, too.