Split-Screen :: The Game-Geek’s Daily Read

by Nike Okami

Most of us think of the drop-dead gorgeous art direction of an Ico or Shadow of the Colossus and we immediately remember a masterpiece of visual proportions being played out on the screen. Original soundtracks for games have also surpassed the usual 16-bit arrangements of yore, as anyone who listens to the beats of The World Ends With You and the gentle melancholies of Silent Hill can testify.

However, when we think of it in terms of gaming, what actually constitutes ‘art’?

By the most logical definition, art is considered as a selective re-creation of the elements of reality that are most aesthetically pleasing to the human senses. Usually this goes against the established norm that art is something beyond this world — that “Beauty is disinterested i.e. an end in itself, hence it is endless” (the words of my insane art teacher; gotta love the contradictions) — and that man never creates anything on his own, rather he borrows patches from reality, or denies reality completely in his goal of creating a piece of abstract proportions. To say that an artist does nothing but steal from reality is to also say a writer is little more than a plagiarist on a universal scale. As Ayn Rand stated in The Romantic Manifesto, “Art is a concretisation of metaphysics… It brings man’s concepts to the perceptual level of his consciousness and allows him to grasp them directly, as if they were percepts.”

This is the key difference between an imaginary hero in a video game who rises above the pettiness of self-deceit and cowardliness to save what is most important to him, and the depraved, self-berating, cynical murderer who rips pimps and rapists apart with slow, calculated barbaric intention.

Art in gaming would constitute the rationally correct selection of those elements that would hold meaning, and that reflect the values and ethics of the artiste as much as invoking it from the soul (here, it refers to “consciousness”) of a gamer. Every choice in the the visual and audio perceptions in a game, more than anything else, is made from the standpoint: Right or wrong? Correct or incorrect? Beautiful or ugly? Does this choice in the design bring out the highest, most exacting and most natural qualities of a piece? Does it represent a something that is of this earth, not of some imaginary abyss, elevated to the status of what it could and should be, given the proper tapping of potential? Is it a conceited, ugly mess, ashamed of the existence it denies in the name of some mass-produced ideal?

What could possibly constitute the “art” of music? Simply put, music consists of coordinated vibrations and waves that are pleasing to one’s ear. However, music itself is arguably more effective form of art that literature and painting. While other forms of art go from one’s perception to his conceptual understanding to appraisal (either negative or positive) and ending in emotion, music goes directly towards the emotional level of man’s soul before facing his rational understanding.

Music has the power to invoke emotions within a man only through the factor of whether it is pleasing to hear or not. Once it enters his phase of appraisal, you have a soundtrack that you could listen to years from now, due to the emotions and values it represents. Naturally, it’s for this same reason that you could outright reject a soundtrack consistent of wailing guitars and hoarse singing (the unpleasant sounds of “noise” - and no matter what everyone thinks, you can not condition a man to enjoy what he perceives as noise).

Unfortunately, gaming today is selective when it comes to its art. It is, of course, intentional. God of War, despite showcasing the gods and goddesses of Greek mythology, concentrates most on their upheaval by means of a brutal upstart. Here, violence and brute measures are seen as wholesome solutions to what is displayed to be petty feuds. “But then,” some argue, “The man has been wronged and there are no fair means to fight Gods when they can do anything. Kratos had no choice but to go from a war-mongering bastard to a demonic blood-bather, willing to walk over the corpses of millions, in order to preserve his sanity. Don’t you see he couldn’t help it?”

Of course, the goal of God of War’s aesthetics is not to win the above argument. It’s to make you believe an argument like even has any relevance to rationality at all. And by following this path, we come to the debasement of those very figures envisioned to be the highest forms of man possible, rather than omnipotent quibblers who wound up on the wrong side of Sin City in their childhoods.

No, this issue is not mutually exclusive to Sony games. Halo, for instance, features a distinct lack of any artistic vision in anything save it’s music. Unlike selective recreation of appealing elements, Halo actually goes the straight-forward route, including cliched devices of storytelling and actually stripping away many essentials of artistic design in favour of mayhem. It can be credited for its refined multi-player experiences, but it’s a shame to tear the game into two halves for the sake of finding something feasibly aesthetic to comment on.

Art in gaming takes on so many different forms, from design to graphics to sound to level progression to story representation. Some may debate the importance of art as a vital instrument of gaming. But it’s art and its nuances of conceptual to perceptual grand-scale designing that distinguish games from each other. So a year from now, when you look from Psychonauts to Banjo-Kazooie and wonder which game gave you that profound feeling of aesthetic pleasure, you’ll discover just how deep the rabbit hole can go when it comes to art in games.