Cinematic Action Games: A Brief Critical Assessment

Many of the games I named in my previous post about the cinematic action genre have been criticized for their lack of value. Because these games are short and linear, and rarely have life-extending multiplayer modes, the validity of charging full price for them has been questioned. Simplistic gameplay and action-movie inspired plots have led some critics to call these games shallow. Yet, several games that belong in this genre — Ico, Shadow of the Colossus, and Sands of Time — are regularly trotted out as examples of the best that the medium can achieve. To categorize cinematic action games as intrinsically shallow or lacking in value would be the worst sort of genre-as-pejorative thinking. Their approach to game storytelling has produced many strengths, but one central characteristic of the genre is also a critical weakness. The great artistic limitations of cinematic action games come from their disinterest in the player as a creative force.

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It's just a _____!

I didn't intend to write a separate post on this topic. I'm no authority on philosophy and can't claim that I adhere to some superior standard of rationality in daily life. I wanted to leave the "just a game" thing alone, and let my comments on the relevant post at Dan Bruno's site be my final word. But then someone left a comment at my Tin Man post, attempting to blunt the criticism with the idea that it was just entertainment. Now, despite the fact that I happen to think that some things really do fit into this category, the use of this phrase as an argument annoys me, because it is no argument at all. So here's my position. It's probably not art, but you might be entertained.

"It's just a game," or "It's just an action flick," and other statements of their ilk almost always betray a mental sloth, an unwillingness to actually engage the arguments presented. When someone responds to an argument in this way he displays a fundamental disinterest in the discussion, but also a foolish pride in that disinterest. Because he does not view the subject as worthy of discussion, he concludes that this viewpoint must be valid for everyone else, and proclaims it as a fact. However, even if it is true that some games are "just games", then that must be proven, not simply asserted. The statement incurs a burden of proof, and anyone unwilling to try meeting that burden probably shouldn't be saying anything at all.

Leaving aside for the moment the question of just how that statement can be proven, everyone ought to know that proving it doesn't put a close to the discussion. That a particular game is "just a game" doesn't preclude meaningful and interesting discussion about the way the game is made or the values that went into it. An example of this came up in the comments to Dan's article. Few people would dispute that a golf simulator is "just a game", and I am not one of them. Nonetheless, Michael Abbott says some very interesting things in comparing the presentation of the Tiger Woods games to Hot Shots Golf, and about simulations generally. Of course, we can also address the quality of the entertainment experience, i.e. its artisanship, which I tried to do in the Tin Man piece: I thought it didn't actually do a very good job of entertaining me because of its inconsistency. Even if everyone in the universe agrees that Ballistic: Ecks vs. Sever is so far from being art that it might not even deserve italics, we can still discuss whether the boom mike drops into the scene and what that does to the entertainment value of the film.

This brings me to another point: the failure of a piece of media to achieve anything artistically is a valid criticism of its entertainment value. We all accept that different people are entertained by different things. Gamers, whose tastes are often fragmented along genre (or even subgenre) lines should be especially aware of this. The other night I came across this fundamentally fair review of Baroque, which sent commenter Gen Eric Gui over the edge. His problem was that the author did not judge it strictly on its merits as a Roguelike, and he really likes Roguelikes, and thus loved Baroque. Everyone who has ever discussed games with any regularity has had a conversation just like that. Well, here's what I really, really like: games that do something interesting artistically. That plays a significant role in deciding whether a game (or book or movie, for that matter) entertains me. There's not some mystical wall dividing art on one side from entertainment on the other. Art does entertain, or at least it can; otherwise we probably wouldn't have it. So when considering whether a piece of media succeeds as entertainment, it's reasonable to ask whether it has some artistic merit that can help entertain people who get turned on by that sort of thing. Tin Man didn't have it, or at least not enough. Neither, in my opinion, did Baroque.

So does it matter that something is "just a game"? I think it does; achieving some kind of consensus on that point gives us a good idea of where to direct our mental energies. If it is true that a particular game (movie, etc.) is entirely without artistic merit then we ought to focus our discussions of it on the artisanal aspects of its construction. Halo probably isn't art, but it contains art, as well as artful design, from which much can be learned. Shadow of the Colossus is art, and we could do worse than discussing its artistic qualities, in addition to or instead of studying its artisanship. Directing the discussion into a particular area, however, shouldn't exclude efforts to see whether there is some merit.

Here we get to the question of how we can prove, or at least support, the statement that something is "just a game". I have to admit, I use a pragmatic rather than an analytical standard here. My experience is that it's virtually impossible to prove that a particular piece of media (let alone an entire medium) is art. My standard therefore is not analytical proof, but simply whether the premise "X is a work of art" leads us anywhere interesting. In plenty of cases, including Halo (Roger Travis' view notwithstanding) and sports simulations, I think it doesn't. We can say very interesting things about these games, but those things don't need the premise that the game is a work of art. In contrast, I think you would need to accept that No More Heroes or The Two Thrones are art in order to fully appreciate them. That doesn't mean that we have to uncritically accept every attempt at artistic discussion, but we are obligated to reply, with more than just "nuh-uh, it's just a game".

Sometimes a game is just a game, and I honestly don't have any problem with that. Plenty of games (and other media) are very entertaining without having much artistic merit at all. But the statement that a work is just entertainment is not a rebuttal of reasoned argument to the contrary, nor is it a valid way to deflect criticism. And really, because artistic content is (or at least can be) part of the entertainment value, it's not any kind of response at all. "It's just a game" isn't a response that's automatically invalid, but saying those words doesn't make them true. It's a statement that must be substantiated and shown to be relevant, just like any other argument. If you're not willing to go through with that, then perhaps you don't really have anything to say at all.

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"Time is an ocean in a storm..."

The modern Prince of Persia trilogy begins almost inexplicably—a man stands on a balcony that looks out into a thick jungle. All he can do is enter a palatial building through swaying drapes. Then come the images—a drop of water, the desert, a beautiful woman—and the story begins:

Most people think Time is like a river that flows swift and sure in one direction. But I have seen the face of Time, and I can tell you, they are wrong. Time is an ocean in a storm. You may wonder who I am, or why I say this. Come, sit down, and I will tell you a tale like none you have ever heard...

Impressively, this is true; more impressively, the tale is actually good.

Megaspoilers below the fold.

The man telling the story is the Prince himself, and the game in which he tells it, Sands of Time, is deliberately constructed to evoke the feel of the 1001 Nights. As the game progresses, the Prince's narration occasionally explains where you are or what he's feeling. When the player dies, the Prince steps in to correct him: "No, no, no, that's not what happened."

The characters are also evocative of the 1001 Nights. The Prince himself is the main character, accompanied by the Maharajah's daughter Farah. His opponent, the treacherous Vizier, first betrayed the Maharajah to the Persians, and then betrayed his new master by tricking the Prince into opening the Sands of Time. This mystical substance has destroyed the palace of Azad and infected its inhabitants. In order to "undo what he has done", the Prince must traverse the crumbling ruins to confront the Vizier and re-seal the Sands in their Hourglass. Along the way, he must mature from a sarcastic young charmer fixated on honor and glory into a responsible adult who properly understands his duty as a person.

To do this, he must use an array of acrobatic skills. The Prince can run up or across walls, jump great distances, balance on beams, swing on poles, and cling to precarious ledges. The challenge of the Prince of Persia games is to figure out which route to use through a landscape, and which skills must be used. Then, precise timing is often required to make it through. Mistakes are inevitable, but the Prince can survive them using the Dagger of Time which he finds early in the game. With this, he can rewind time back to a moment before his failure, or slow down time to make evading a trap easier, or even freeze his opponents in time.

The Prince's first confrontation with the Vizier ends in failure. Despite the bond that has grown between him and Farah on their journey through the ruins, he distrusts her at the critical moment and the Vizier casts them down into a tomb. They escape, but the price of his failure is that Farah steals the Dagger. But because she is not a warrior, she dies en route to the Hourglass. Filled with remorse and aware of the futility of fighting for honor and glory, the Prince at last heeds her words and plunges the Dagger into the Hourglass. The effect is to rewind time all the way back to before the Vizier betrayed the Maharajah. As the story ends, it becomes clear that the whole game that was played was the story the Prince was telling to Farah to warn her of the Vizier's treachery.

The final combat with the Vizier is a rather mundane sequence; properly viewed as an epilogue rather than the final boss. The true final boss of the game, as others have noted, is the Tower of Dawn, which the Prince must climb using all his skill but without the Dagger. This is a critically important key to understanding what the Prince of Persia games are really about. The platforming, motion, and timing are the essence of the game. Farah's criticism of fighting as futile is also important to this point.

Yet the developers themselves did not understand it. In the sequel, Warrior Within, the focus is on combat. Because Sands of Time was criticized for its repetitive and excessive fighting, the developers attempted to address this by creating more unique fighting moves. This was an attempt to solve the wrong problem. The fundamental flaw with the combat was not that it was dull or there was too much of it, though both these things were true. The problem was that the combat had nothing to do with the rest of the game.

The platforming and combat aspects of gameplay in Sands of Time did not interface well, to the point where it felt like you were playing two different games. One of them was a magnificent platformer, and the other was a mediocre hack-and-slash game. The careful timing, exhilarating acrobatics, and understanding of the environment that were the core of the platforming were abandoned when the swords came out. Thus, the player had to shift gears every time a battle started. Jerry Holkins likened the feeling to ordering a pizza and getting a free walrus. Any step to "fix" the combat that did not recognize this divide was doomed to failure.

In Warrior Within The Prince, pursued by the demonic Dahaka for the crime of opening the Sands, flees to the Isle of Time to prevent their creation. He fundamentally does not change his behavior—when he accidentally creates the Sands of Time by killing the Empress Kaileena, his answer is to go back in time to fix his error. He succeeds in doing this, and also kills the Dahaka. The Prince's failure to change as a human being is accompanied by an intellectual regression in the game itself. Farah's rejection of violence is cast aside, and in a way she is ridiculed from afar by the game's glorification of violence and puerile, chauvinistic sexuality (best evinced in Shahdee's outfit). Granted, a chauvinistic viewpoint (the Prince's) was also present in Sands of Time, but there it was used to ridicule the Prince and demonstrate his childishness. In Warrior Within the chauvinist's view is celebrated. Moreover, every aspect of the 1001 Nights influence vanishes, replaced by generic architectural and musical elements; the narration is excised completely. As a cumulative effect of these decisions the game is an artistic failure.

Warrior Within alienated many fans of Sands of Time, but all the errors were fixed in the finale, The Two Thrones (or Rival Swords in its Wii incarnation). The Prince returns to Babylon with Kaileena, who narrates the tale, recovering this part of the atmosphere. The classic characters also return, for the Prince finds the city ravaged by the Vizier, who has overthrown the Maharajah, imprisoned Farah, and invaded the Prince's kingdom, with the intention of seizing Kaileena. He succeeds in doing this, and the Prince, still acting as he did in Warrior Within, attacks recklessly and fails to save her. She dies, releasing the destruction of the Sands of Time within the city, and also into the Prince. He comes away from his failure with nothing other than the Dagger.

The Sands give rise to an alter ego—the Dark Prince, who in form resembles a sand monster, and whose personality is the purest articulation of the man the Prince was in Warrior Within. As the Prince works his way back to the Vizier for a final confrontation, the Dark Prince constantly urges him into combat and seduces him with promises of bloody vengeance. Farah once more argues against this path, ultimately convincing the Prince himself. For the Prince, hearing his dark half's eulogy of the bloodthirsty warrior, replies, "...what you describe is not a man, but a beast..." Implicit here is a criticism of the very kind of game Warrior Within was, and of what it celebrated.

This is more than just a passing note from the writers, for the game itself constantly de-emphasizes the sword-based combat that dominated the earlier entries. While the Prince can fight in this way, the best approach to combat is always to use the stealth-based "speed kill" system. In this sense, "stealth" means moving through the environment to a point above or behind the target, waiting for the right moment, and then engaging in a timing-critical attack sequence. Bloody, violent combat becomes less a part of play, while platforming begins to inform every aspect of the game. The boss fights, once purely combat experiences, become fusions of combat with platforming or timing. The "two games" problem is thus put to rest.

This evolution is best articulated in the fight against the Vizier, which has three phases. The first is a straight-up fight that might have come directly out of Sands of Time. In the second, the Prince must engage three speed kills, and the combat of Warrior Within vanishes. In the last segment, the Prince must navigate a floating maze to reach the Vizier—with this, the death of fighting is nearly complete. Combat has been supplanted by platforming.

Yet the final articulation of the Prince's agreement with Farah comes in the game's epilogue. Here the Prince confronts the Dark Prince in the realm of the mind. To defeat the Dark Prince, platforming is necessary, but the amount of combat needed declines throughout the sequence. In the end, to triumph over the Dark Prince, the player must choose not to fight him, and instead to follow Farah's voice, casting the "warrior within" aside forever. Thus the player's gameplay transition matches the Prince's maturation process.

This is true in another connection as well. Throughout the trilogy, the Prince and the player fix mistakes by manipulating time. This is fundamentally childish, akin to putting a broken lamp back together using Elmer's glue in an attempt to make it seem as if an accident never happened. Yet each repair the Prince performs causes a new problem. Undoing his error at Azad provokes the Dahaka. Going back in time to kill the Empress creates the Sands. Traversing time again to rescue Kaileena from himself and destroy the Dahaka only brings the Empress into the grasp of the Vizier. Near the end of The Two Thrones, when the Vizier has captured Farah and cast the Prince down into the Palace catacombs, he comes across the greatest sign of this failure: the body of his dead father. As the voice of the Dark Prince mocks him, the Prince casts aside the idea of "undoing" his mistakes. He will not rewind time; rather, he will confront his mistakes and their consequences.

The player, who knows all too well (from three games) the attraction of rewinding time to reverse one's errors, is implicitly invited to this kind of maturity. And, by giving up the dagger after the confrontation with the Vizier, but before the game ends, the player is made a part of the Prince's decision. This could have been accentuated more powerfully, as in Sands of Time, by giving up the Dagger when the Prince finds his father, but for story reasons the Dagger must be with him at the top of the tower after the Vizier's defeat. Nonetheless, by playing the final stage (within the mind) without the dagger, the player and Prince are united in confronting the outcome of their mistakes (in this case, the Dark Prince) without trying to "undo" them.

The Prince of Persia trilogy is very uneven; Warrior Within was a significant artistic failure, devoid of the atmosphere and meaning that informed Sands of Time and The Two Thrones. Sands of Time itself was seriously flawed, because of its divided gameplay. Its story and atmosphere, however, more than compensated for that imperfection. These were preserved in The Two Thrones, and moreover that game achieved a gestalt in which the two primary gameplay aspects were unified with each other, and then brought into alignment with the thematic rejection of violence and of "undoing" mistakes. When the Prince repeats his introduction from Sands of Time at the end of The Two Thrones, the story comes full circle, but his enormous growth as a person is undeniable, for the player has participated in it.

Prince of Persia: Sands of Time (highly recommended) and Prince of Persia: Warrior Within (not so highly recommended) can both be played at GameTap. Prince of Persia: The Two Thrones and its Wii counterpart Prince of Persia: Rival Swords are still available for purchase at video game retailers (as of 3/2008). I would regard any video game library as incomplete without The Two Thrones.

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The Arty Party of Games

So, now that we've had a little fun with serious science, let's have a little serious discussion about fun. Gamasutra has two excellent features up about the relationship between games and art, and I think both of them have merit. EA producer Jim Preston's feature, "The Arty Party" prompted an impassioned response from E. Daniel Arey about "The Art of Games". Jim Preston has a really good comment on Arey's piece, and of course Arey's is a really good response to some of the limitations of Preston's article. Both pieces have merit, and I highly recommend reading both of them if you have the time.

Preston's article is primarily an indictment of arguments over whether games are art or not. He points out that often what defines art for people is context: the best violinist in the world playing the best violin music ever written may not be taken for an artist if he is pursuing this activity in a subway station. In this regard, the real criterion by which one can judge whether some object is art is whether people believe it is art. Consequently, Preston doesn't believe that engaging people like Ebert in a debate over whether games are art is worthwhile. This speaks to my own prejudices; as I have mentioned before, I think the best way for enthusiasts to regard this question is to treat the debate as won and start talking about and judging games as works of art. The earnest and articulate belief in games as art will do more than toppling a dozen Eberts in what Preston terms "essentialist debates".

Arey's piece is a response to what he perceives as a sort of self-satisfaction in Preston's article. He feels that Preston's attitude reflects a willingness to let games stand still, as it were, with respect to their artistic form. Arey, on the other hand, thinks that developers and publishers should be actively pushing the artistic boundaries of the medium. I'm in agreement on this point as well. While Arey believes there should be some push on the supply side, I've already argued that there should be pull on the demand side as well. Arey believes that, regardless of context, the idea of art still matters, and that people in the bright centers of publishing should do all they can to encourage innovation and growth in the artform.

As Preston notes in his comment, these views aren't really at odds with each other. Gamers ought to treat the debate as won, but both developers and gamers should want to win more, and win better. Talking past the essentialist debate is all well and good, but we shouldn't be content with that. Even if we've won or avoided the fight over whether games are art, we should still strive to bring to market something that can show up an Ebert and expose the argument that games "can never be art" for the vacuous nonsense that it is.

In keeping with my own prescriptions (and Preston's) I am going to try to finish some in-depth studies of games I've been meaning to post (similar to my post on Silent Hill 2). I hope I'll be able to have the first of these up by Sunday evening. Others will have to wait for refresher play and by the same token, for loaned-out games to return to me.

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The Game as Art — Silent Hill 2

James Sunderland arrives at the deserted town of Silent Hill. He has received a letter from his wife, Mary, though she has been dead for three years, stating that she will meet him there. As he searches for her, he finds others like himself—others who have been called to the town, even though there should not be, can not be, anything there for them. He is tempted by a woman named Maria who looks and sounds like his wife, but in personality is everything she is not. He is pursued by a monstrous, invincible symbol of sexual violence, which repeatedly kills and tortures the temptress. The companions he has found choose death over life, and he realizes the lie he has been living.

Spoilers below the fold.

Silent Hill 2 is a game for mature players, not because it is frightening or because it is violent. Rather, it is because the game deals with so many subjects that are only meant for the mature. Her dialogue and the visual themes surrounding her leave no doubt that Angela was sexually abused by her family. At one junction you find her in an underground room with walls that look like flesh and a row of running pistons around the top; the player must defend her from a strange creature that resembles two people sewn into a bedframe. This monster only recurs later on at a hotel that had romantic meaning for James and Mary. As I mentioned, Pyramid Head himself is an image of sexual violence, and his actions are also violent in a sexualized way. His weapons, a knife and a spear, are phallic, and a woman is his frequent victim.

James himself has been called to Silent Hill because he killed his terminally ill wife. This has unhinged him and he believes her to have died of her illness years before, shortly after they first visited Silent Hill (at that time it was a resort town). Many of the monsters James encounters are symbols of the hospitals where she stayed and the sexual frustration he felt during that time—"patients" trapped in straitjackets of their own flesh, over-sexualized hideous nurses, and bizarre mannequin-like creatures that have only a torso and four legs. Pyramid Head is derived from the historical executioners of a local prison.

The exact circumstances and reasons surrounding Mary's death depend to a certain extent on the player. However, the nature of this crime and the idea that Mary might forgive him for it are not something most children or teenagers are really ready for.

Would Silent Hill 2 be better off as a movie, or a miniseries? Perhaps so, though the first try at it failed miserably. The gameplay itself is competent but not fantastic, and though the fetch quests are designed so as to maximize the player's experience of the environment, most of the puzzles do not add to the atmosphere. The great artistic strength of Silent Hill 2, aside from the visuals, is the story, and this could perhaps be conveyed equally well by a movie. Indeed, the brevity of film would probably force the excision of Eddie Dombrowski, who does not significantly serve the story.

However, two things probably could not be done in a movie that are strengths of the game. The first is a construction of atmosphere. Silent Hill is very foggy, and quite full of monsters, who are preceded in their appearance by a buzzing of static from an apparently broken radio. The difficulty of seeing and the radio gimmick would probably just be annoying in a film, but in the game they inspire a fascinating paranoia and dread. Silent Hill 2 doesn't really rely on the visual flashes and cheap thrills that provoke a burst of fear, though there are a few such moments. Instead, the 'horror' of Silent Hill 2 is built up from a pervasive feeling of dread. You do not know what you will encounter next, but you know it will not be good, and yet the story provides an impulse to continue. There are some subtler tricks as well—James continues to carry Mary's letter, and the further into the game you are, the less of it there is, until it becomes only blank paper.

The other aspect of the game that could not be replicated in film is the collaborative aspect of its storytelling—the conclusion of the story depends on actions in the game. The most interesting part about this is the complexity of the calculus: unlike other games, there is no clear moment of choice that determines how the story ends. Instead, the game looks at how you have played. The story adjusts itself in response not to explicit decisions the player makes, but rather to what appears to interest the player in the context of the story. If you are intrigued by Maria, and keep protecting her and checking up on her, James leaves with her. If you are drawn by Angela's self-destructive nature, James himself commits suicide. If the player makes choices that re-emphasize both his love of Mary and the choice of life, James leaves town with the young girl Mary had planned to adopt.

In the end, despite its flaws, I believe Silent Hill 2 is a good work of art. The story that it tells is moving, and the visual symbolism used to convey the story is fascinating. The dialogue has very few awkward spots, and the voice actors all do a good job. The soundtrack is very high quality. But the thing that makes it art as a video game is its clever use of participation in two ways. Because the player must move his character through the fog and past the monsters, the work's ability to inspire dread increases. Because it is the player who decides how the story ends, the work is tuned for the greatest emotional impact. Carefully done, Silent Hill could be a good film, but without the participatory aspects it would not be as good a film as it is a game.

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Ming Lei, artist of the molecular age

It's sometimes said that constructing the right figure for your paper is an art, and on occasion that statement really proves to be accurate. Thus it is that I present to you postdoctoral fellow Ming Lei's masterwork "Improperly Parameterized Adenylate Kinase Dynamics Overlay" - electrons on magnetic media, 2007.

For those who are interested, this was meant to be an overlay of many snapshots of Adk from a molecular dynamics simulation, on its way from an open state to a closed state. Doro wanted some motion blur on it, but before he got to that point Ming accidentally created this view, which I feel has its own artistic merits. Biophysics departments in need of a computational researcher, or art departments in search of a fresh voice, should be aware that Dr. Lei is a skilled visionary with several high-profile publications on the way, and would be a fabulous addition to any faculty.

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