January 21, 2008May 15, 2012 by Edward Champion

The Video Game as Art

Early Cinema, Edward Champion, Film, Fraction Fever, Jason Roher, Roger Ebert, Video Games
Early Cinema, Film, Fraction Fever, Jason Roher, passage, Roger Ebert, Video Games
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In 2005, film critic Roger Ebert ruffled a few feathers when he suggested that because video games require player choices, games are therefore an inferior medium:

To my knowledge, no one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great dramatists, poets, filmmakers, novelists and composers. That a game can aspire to artistic importance as a visual experience, I accept. But for most gamers, video games represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic.

I can certainly agree with Ebert that video games are, for the most part, showcases for the latest gaming engines, primarily designed so that the individual will drop hundreds of dollars for a next-generation console system or a needlessly expensive video card that will be outdated in a few years (only to be replaced by yet another). We are now in the nickelodeon days, although, as the Wii demonstrates, the game controllers are getting more interesting. But this multi-billion dollar industry is less concerned with the human experience than it should be. It has come close with the Civilization games and the Sims offerings, and may come even closer with Will Wright’s much delayed Spore, an ambitious god game that permits the player to develop a cell and then control the natural development of this cell into a species, and then further manage the species as it plunges into space exploration. I’ve lost many hours feeling an ignoble cathartic thrill when fragging a junior-high schooler who, like me, should probably be reading a book. But I can justify my shameful vicarious pleasure by knowing that this is a medium that has yet to produce a Battleship Potemkin or a Birth of a Nation.

To suggest, however, that the video game will never find the same gravitas as cinema is to fall prey to same prejudicial thinking with which intellectuals once castigated cinema in the early 20th century. Let’s not forget that it took the motion picture around thirty years of technological developments before it was considered more than a gaudy amusement. And we have only just passed the 30th anniversary of the Atari 2600.

This New York Times article from September 7, 1913 suggests that the then primitive motion picture was, like the contemporary video game, very much about delivering spectacle to a mass audience. George Kleine, one of the key people who established the film industry in the United states and who had just made a cinematic adaptation of Quo Vadis? with a cast of 3,000 people (then an unprecedented number), is quoted in an eerily comparable manner about the future of the medium”

“I have plans for the future which make everything I have done so far seem to be mere child’s play. The educational end has not begun. Motion pictures will not supplant books in the public schools, according to my opinion, but they will revolutionize our educational system. Instead of being bored, the child will enjoy learning by object lessons conveyed by the use of moving pictures.”

Replace “motion pictures” with “video games” and you essentially have what’s reflected in this 2002 BBC News article, in which a study reveals that games are not a substitute for books, but a way to help children learn. And if, like me, you grew up playing Fraction Fever (the ROM is here, if you’re an emulator geek) or any of the other Spinnaker titles, perhaps there is some credence to these theories.

There is also this commentary from the 1913 article:

There are many pictures being thrown upon the screen every day which, although not really harmful, possess no merit. Some are positively ridiculous, and portray scenes both unnatural and unreal. It is not to be expected, however, that with the demand for films exceeding the supply every production should be perfect.

It seems to me that Ebert’s Grumpy Old Man routine was published in newspapers a century before. The medium is the only thing that’s different.

Jason Rohrer’s surprisingly touching game, Passage, freely available for download and released a few months ago, quite easily destroys Ebert’s thesis that the video game is incapable of poetry. Rohrer achieves a unique poetry both in limiting the player’s perspective to a 100×16 window and through the deceptively simple manner that he has designed this game for the player. Play the game once and you will follow a strapping young man from left to right. He finds a woman along the way. A pixelated heart soon follows. As the man advances further along this horizontal tableau, he (and his sweetheart) begins to age. He goes bald. As he continues to age, his position on the axis shifts further to the right. Near the end of his life, he is hobbling. Then a tombstone crops up. The End.

Or is it?

The game isn’t limited to left-to-right movement. Play the game again, press the down arrow. and you will find yourself exploring a maze below the top, collecting many stars and stumbling for a way out. But with this simple design, Rohrer has done something very interesting. If you choose to fall in love with your sweetheart, the two of you can only explore certain areas. Because with your partner in tow, you collectively take up a wider space and can only fit into specific territory. If you choose to go through this life solo, then you’ll be able to collect many of the stars denied you and your sweetheart, but you may get lost in the maze and be unable to find your way back to where your sweetheart waits.

If Passage is not quite the video game’s answer to The Waste Land, Rohrer’s poetic game demonstrates that independent developers can in fact use the form in favor of human experience. Rohrer’s lo-fi approach is a welcome response to high-end graphical tentpole operations. I found myself thinking of all the choices I had made over the course of my life and wondered how I would have turned up if I had made slightly different decisions. Contra Ebert, I did indeed find the experience to make me more curious and empathetic about the human condition. (And this would appear to have been Mr. Rohrer’s objective.) This was something that no amount of fragging had inspired.

If all this sounds fishy, well, the game simply has to be played. Like any work of art, it is something better experienced than talked about. And it requires that superannuated naysayers keep open minds.

January 13, 2008 by Edward Champion

Weekend Sightings: “People in Order”

The question of whether life represents a parabolic arc is taken up by Lenka Clayton and James Price‘s short film “People in Order” — in which 100 people are edited together and proceed to beat on the same drum over the course of three minutes. It’s an inventive spin on the Michael Apted formula. The people here have been arranged by age, starting from the age of 1 and ending at 100. What’s particularly striking is the varying levels of enthusiasm, both in the people expressing their age and in their need to bang the drum. Some of the figures are happy at any age. Some are sad. Some seem to wonder what all the fuss is about.

December 15, 2007December 15, 2007 by Edward Champion

O Lucky Man! Revisited — Part One

This is the first in a series of posts on Lindsay Anderson’s masterpiece, O Lucky Man!

The other night, I revisited O Lucky Man!, courtesy of the recent DVD release, seeing it for the first time in its proper aspect ratio. While it isn’t so readily apparent in pan-and-scan versions of the film, Anderson’s subtle and very specific framings — which are often composed of medium and long shots — are as integral to the film as its many outrageous moments among its side characters. The coffee salesman and former if… revolutionary Mick Travis (played wonderfully by Malcolm McDowell) is often framed in the center of a tableau, and this positioning foreshadows Travis’s later victimization by political forces, both left and right.

Travis’s first appearance comes at the end of a slow pan, where we see Travis in the middle of an orientation meeting at a coffee company. He’s paying very close attention to a supervisor who is training many salesmen for possible lucre on the road. He has a clipboard under his left arm. Travis’s right arm grasps a pillar, his bicep (and thus his strength) interestingly occluded by the beam, connected to an unspecified part of the corporate machinery that keeps the factory in motion. In addition to this conformist image standing in sharp contrast to if…‘s violent revolutionary, it’s suggested by this establishing shot that this Everyman figure is drawn moth-like to the machinery. Indeed, only minutes later, we see Travis calculating on a piece of paper just what kind of money he can make on the road. From the protagonist’s introduction, the imperialism observed in the film’s black-and-white prologue is indeed reflected by modern forces. And this is just the first of Anderson and screenwriter David Sherwin’s onslaughts upon contemporary culture.

But what of the film’s opening title sequence just before Travis’s introduction? The film features numerous interstitial interruptions from Alan Price and his band, playing songs that often reflect and respond to Travis’s adventures. The effect is certainly reminiscent of a Greek chorus responding to the events on a stage. But since this is the film medium, there’s something fundamentally more surreal going on. The band also appears inside the movie’s narrative midway through the movie, as Travis flees from Professor Millar’s hospital. So the film’s technical enablers have just as sizable a role on Travis’s predicament as the forces of the world.

In the above image, we see Lindsay Anderson, clad throughout the film in a black leather jacket and a red shirt (perhaps just as important a sartorial choice as Travis’s protective gold suit?), going over the script with Price during a guitar solo. (The film’s hefty script is also used by Anderson in the film’s closing moments to strike Travis.)

You can find this shot at the 3:25 mark. It’s a roughly 220 degree dolly shot around Price and his keyboard that suggests that Anderson not only has no problems crossing the axis, but that the director (and the script) does indeed have a hand in the forthcoming events. But it’s also worth observing that whereas the camera remains stationary on its tripod in relation to Travis, this is not quite the case within the free-floating kinetic safety of the recording studio where Alan Price and company play their music. (However, there still remain tangible connections between the studio and Travis’s narrative, which I will go into very soon.)

In a future post, I’ll go into greater length about how the film willfully (and often defiantly) flaunts these fascinating cinematic techniques. (The film’s frequent cutaways to static blackness, for example, suggest imagined moments to be filled in by the film’s audience.)