Falling home values, crashing stock markets, nationalisation of corporate foundations… If you didn’t open an Atlas Shrugged and know better (not necessarily in the same order), you’d swear the current world scenario is beginning to mirror her predictions. Revenues are short. All notable currencies are losing value. The costs of war have finally ribbed the US with all the subtlety of a rugby tackle. Capitalism, as we know it, is in depression.

The circumstances and results resemble the famed premier novel incredibly. However, an exact mirror of them can found no where else but in 2K Games‘ Bioshock. A spiritual successor to System Shock 2, the game best illustrates freedom of choice in a virtual ecosystem independent of the gamer’s actions. More lucid than anything, however, the game illustrates the kind of fate a Randian Atlantis like Rapture befell.

A society breaking all records for production; one where only the scholarly, aesthetic and industrial were allowed; one were only the strong survived. The results were staggering, like most famous and famously misunderstood market bubbles. However, somewhere along, in this “lassez-faire capitalist” economy, the original goal of ethical agreement and rational disposition was lost. One man propagated a new “discovery” (be it the bio-compound Adam or the later unsustainable value of house prices), preached its benefits and meanwhile, its increased consumption began to out-strip its production. Greed gave way to parasitism. Soon, all men began to consume more than they could produce. Sooner, rather than later, everything imploded as the economy literally caved under extreme pressure.

Sound familiar? If you would kindly look around you, it’s where we are today.

Be it Rapture or Wall Street – everything was reduced to ruins to serve as little more than salvage for the broken soul. Our world is collapsing from the effects of an economy whose costs outstrip its returns; Rapture collapsed from a desire who’s hunger outstripped its fine taste. In the latter, the metaphysical impression of drowning is only more real as the city is located underwater. Grimly, our world isn’t exactly underneath a huge tsunami, but if US college students walking around with buckets and signs saying, “We really need the money” at traffic junctions prove, we’re definitely seeing the result.

The trailer for Bioshock 2: Sea of Dreams suggests something as a lone Little Sister stands on the Atlantic Coast and witnesses the city of Rapture rising in the sand. A resurrection? A new beginning? Hope? Or simply a repeat of events in a different place and time? If the correlation between our economy and Rapture’s is anything to go by, something tells me the answer is: ‘All of the above’.

It’s still a great time to be a gamer, though. Right?

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.

In our first part, we talked about the meaning of guilt in gaming; how gamers want to gain an objective feeling from a non-objective reality (or, real feelings, such as guilt and sadness from a fictional world). This time, we’ll talk about an interesting topic. Rather, we’re going to confront a topic and properly define its existence in the realm of gaming.

Ever read about the reaction for Doom when it first came out? The gushings of an audience enthusiastically mowing down all manner of demonly spawn and inhuman entities is echoed even today. That era of gaming, where first person shooters centered mainly on “kill all enemies, reach the end boss, escort him to his maker, watch credits sequence”, is famous for not only Doom and Wolfenstein, but Quake, Heretic, Unreal, Kiss: Psycho Circus and Duke Nukem, each with it’s own shtick to differentiate it from the crowd. It was only with Mark Laidlaw’s heavily-scripted and compellingly weaved story of Half-Life did we experience anything beyond simple gagging and fragging. Half-Life provided us with a main character with which we could feel compassion for. Gordon Freeman’s predicament was presented in such a realistic fashion in that he had little to no idea what was happening and spent a majority of the game simply killing those who pulled guns/knifes/grenades/green-electricity-shooting tentacles on him first.

We’ve heard it before, I know. The evolution of gaming from straight-forward performance of an action to obtain a goal on a linear, immutable path to a multi-pronged approach to tackling complex problems on a branching path. However, take a look at the analogy again, and study the state of games today. Then think for yourself: When is the last time a game played exactly as you wanted it to, where the experience was tailored by you in every conceivable way, from the dialogue to the gameplay to the story, to reflect the sum of your values within your consciousness? When was the last time you played a game that didn’t so much have multiple endings but resolutions to a still on-going imitation of objective reality?

Simply put, when is the last you played a game that didn’t stop existing? This is different from infinite replayability, for that term implies a game that can be played over and over again, with the gamer playing the same objectives, the same missions, the same gameplay variety (ironic, isn’t it, for variety to repeat within a game?) again and again.

Deep down within us, we know games are fake: they are a recreation of the sum total of a developer’s abstract values and designs into digital entertainment. We encounter games where the universe seems to exist outside of our playing it. For example, as Cliffy B, the lead developer for Gears of War, cited during that game’s development: By naming fictional places and cities that don’t actually appear in the first game, the developer makes the gamer think the world is bigger than it really is. Gamers are already involved in an enormous conflict in a once-great metropolis, but they recognise the global impact of such a conflict being relatively small when taking the sum total of other conflicts into consideration.

If reality as we actually know it were a distorted, cycling series of events imitating the truth, the result would be monotonous for some and insanity-inducing for others.

For gamers, however, that problem never arises because products become obsolete. We close the book on worlds and stories, characters and conflicts, and shift to the next game for our entertainment.

Only when we play a game ceaselessly over a large period of time do we realise how messed up we can be if we replay a game and find it entertaining, each second mapped out before us at a time (this scenario is much less likely in MMORPGs and online FPSes, as they add the element of malleable, human actions to the mix). And once that happens, we pick up a new game or start a different activity. In the worst case scenario, some leave gaming altogether.

A game as a work of art (more on that in the next part) can live longer than a game claiming to contain a large amount of content. A Mass Effect or Okami, despite the inevitable linearities of their gameplay towards thunderous conclusions, can live longer than the supposedly sand-box variants of the same Grand Theft Auto 3 skeleton design and receive more appreciation besides. What dictates a game that can live forever as a sentient being, though this being be nothing more than a collection of predefined values and sum totals of experiences set against an unreal reality? What defines a game as a life, and not simply an existence?

The answer lies in five points: The study and acceptance of existence as such (metaphysics) — a game being more than just a collection of predefined events and programming. The theory of knowledge that studies man’s means of cognition (epistemology) – when a game is sure that what it is representing is the most accurate and truthful representation of reality. The choices and actions that define the course of its life (ethics) — when a game makes the most rational decisions it can to ensure its identity as a life on its own and not as a brain-dead existence.

The principles of a proper social system (politics) — where a game is allowed the freedom of rational thought without bias or baseless objections. Finally, the refueling of man’s consciousness (art) — here, your standard game fulfills its needs for the first three points; your game is moving beyond the realm of static thought into a world of numerous possibilities on its own volition. To prevent games from falling into the inevitable rut of repetition, even if the vision of a truly independent, self-sufficient game is long off, these five points are a must. These five points can be encapsulated into one single branch.

That branch is philosophy. And if gaming is to be the entertainment, the art form, the independent existence that it should be, a major branch of philosophy needs to be evolved.

Will Wright (co-founder of Maxis, which is now a part of Electronic Arts) has been feeling the pain lately, but it’s not over the recent Chinese earthquake or the World Food Crisis. The sultan of Sim has lived through the ultimate Grand Theft Auto experience — that of butchering an innocent in cold blood? And finds himself, like so many gamers before him, bewildered. What is this new developing sensation of guilt and remorse?

Killing people here was no different from killing them in multi-player maps of Halo, so why does it feel so shameful here? Are the graphics, the audio, the small nuances so tightly knit, so intricately woven as to produce this gut-wrenching feeling of humbling remorse?

My GTA experience started with Liberty Stories on the PS2, and on switching over to the meaner, bling-o-rific San Andreas, it only got more…vague. Why, I asked myself, did bystanders in Liberty City stories die when I ran them over once, but in San Andreas, it usually took two or three direct collisions to bring down even the leanest of substance-abusing shrimps? Perhaps gameplay balance motivated one to peruse their murderous extravagance with precaution? That you had to actually think when killing. That you had to make conscious, rational efforts to end the life of your opposition.

Rationality and ethics in real life can play havoc with one’s mind? “An idle mind is a devil’s playground” becomes “An active mind is the reverence of one’s life” Those who do what they want, achieve their goals according to their moral standards, who never compromise their moral stature for the sake of those littler and more belittling than them rely on rationality, whether subconsciously or consciously.

It’s often been cited in several murder cases. The murderer can’t begin to understand what provoked him to end another man’s life. All the rage has been sobered down and he’s been reduced to the level of a socially innocent child with his hand in the cookie jar, his cognizance failing to register that his unconscious actions define his life, and that murder was an unconscious action, hence it ceases to hold any mortgage on his life.

Did the boys from Columbine blank-out when they were planning their murders? No. That was a fully-planned, meticulously constructed scenario meant to destroy and desecrate, if nothing else. However, social conditioning theories sought to take that away, seeking video games as the gore guiders of today’s youth.

What did all the Jack Thompsons of the world use to justify their case? The absence of the mind and the “monkey-see, monkey-do” theory of learning. But for every action, there is a thinking mind balancing the rationality and the moral significance that any reward would provide for one’s actions; when one can only destroy things around him in an unconscious state using the only means humanly possible to him… the means of unconsciousness.

Will Wright, however, isn’t your ordinary man. He’s one of the established game designers, a revolutionary visionary, one who pursues each and every aspect of game planning with an objective sense of reality. Every one of his games was created with the one constructional choice of a designer — right or wrong? For whom, you ask? The gamer. Which gamer? The gamers of this world, the ones who play games because it’s what they want. The real gamers? The ones who want to have fun. Some have more of this within them and some less, predominately the fanboys.

However, find a game of either Will Wright or Sid Meier being denounced by a fanboy, and you’ll find that whether people believe it or not, whether some mystic feeling is telling them these kinds of games are beyond petty squabbles and dime-a-word hackneyed critiques, little to no arguments exist on the amount of fun derived from them.

Fun within one’s hands. Fun obtained through one’s own thinking. Fun created and rewarded through history being changed for the better. Fun achieved through productivity and application. Fun, by the only way possible to man: In using his brain and being good at it.

Which brings us back to the violence of Grand Theft Auto. Ever endeared yourself to a mafia movie that you knew was so wrong in its preaching, and which, typically, ended with the main characters incarcerated or killed?

On this single count, I applaud Rockstar North for encapsulating a feeling that lasts for two hours at best in a cinema hall into a 100+ hour game. You’re not killing people through cut-scenes but with your own two hands, which applies to every single other illegal action in every other Grand Theft Auto game.

Grand Theft Auto IV, more than any other such game however, caters to the gamer who wishes to use his rational mind but to achieve actions of shame. A gamer who wants to see a young woman fall limp and the blood pooling into a small crimson puddle at his feet.

He wants to commit the actions with his own rational convictions, not by blank-out or adrenaline rushes, but with spontaneous material thinking, in search of a reward fitting to the moral standards practiced in the game. This is why, even though Grand Theft Auto IV promotes using your head, that fanboys are complaining whether the game’s worth or not, whether it was really ‘fun’ or not. It’s not despite the graphics or audio or story or lifelike qualities of the game world that we come to regret any amoral actions committed.

Destruction is the polar opposite of productivity. There is no morally grand reward awaiting gamers who finish GTA IV. This a game world built on destroying one’s ethics using the source of his ethics — his mind. Rather than setting the body against the mind as in a real murder, video games have that unique talent of setting one tool of the mind against the other.

That is why Will Wright felt remorse, even if for a split-second. That is why GTA IV is a feat. This being an action game, it’s your thoughts translated into actions that have the most impact. It doesn’t try to take you away from an objective reality.

It puts you knee-deep into the museum of it, watching and waiting for you to decide whether to observe and appreciate it or desecrate and destroy it, then swooping down in the form of a bloodied corpse of an innocent civilian to remind you that your actions were real, even if the reality and the results are fictitious.