What difference does it make?

A lot of this debate goes back even before Roger Ebert declared video games to be artistically inferior by definition to literature and film, but that perhaps qualifies less as a debate and more as an intellectual exercise. If that’s all we’re doing, then so be it. Exercise all you like, I say. But the tone has grown into a flame war-style argument and so far no one has seemed to step back and ask the simple question of what the point could possibly be.

Let’s say we could all agree on a standard definition of ‘art’ and had a viable test that we could apply to any concept, object or creation and come back with a binary value: Art or Not Art. If we applied this test to either video games as a whole or a specific title, what would it mean to get back either result?

Art

Let’s assume for a moment that video games are inherently artistic. What bearing might that classification have on gamers? What about developers? Non-gamers or laypeople? I submit that even if we all suddenly decide that games are art, we’ll still have developers making games—some good, some bad, many in-between—gamers will still play them and laypeople will still have at best a passing interest or familiarity only with the most successful titles, producers and characters. Apply that same conceit to anything the art purists currently decree as art and you’ll find an overwhelming number of similarities: There are bad films that mock artistic merit, film-lovers consume movies obsessively, filmmakers still do what they do and for the most part people are only aware of the most popular, most effectively marketed movies which often eschew artistic aspirations in favor of broad commercial appeal.

Roger Ebert narrows his dismissal of video games to an arbitrary sub-categorization of “low art” which contrasts with his preferred medium’s potential for “high art.” N’Gai Croal takes great exception to this but neither bothers to explain what the significance of high art has over low art or, for that matter, non-art. Is bad high art inherently superior to good low art? Is mediocre low art preferable to non-art? Can anyone bother to explain why this is even an issue?

Not Art

Perhaps the concept of art escapes me. So let’s posit for a second that games are incapable of possessing any significant artistic merit. Once again, I wonder: What would that mean, exactly?

The closest anyone gets to explaining the importance of the debate is Roger Ebert when he says:

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.

The not-quite-spelled-out message here is that games, being without artistic merit or at best “low art,” represent an active waste of time that could be better spent exploring “high art” which improves culture, empathy and civility. At least, that’s how that reads to me. The problem is that the subtext suggests that anything which does not improve culture or civility or empathy is a waste of time. Yet if this is the case, we have to hold all potential art to that standard and discard anything that does not aspire to those goals as inherently worthless, as well as that which does have those lofty aspirations but falls somehow short. Were that the case, N’Gai Croal and Roger Ebert would be equally guilty in their support of rubbish: Mr. Croal obviously advocates a whole subset of pointless entertainment while Ebert has wasted gargantuan swaths of his life sifting through garbage and occasionally even encouraging the consumption of such culture-less, uncivilized, empathy-deprived anti-art at the expense of our precious time. Let’s face it, not every movie he gives the Thumbs Up to is worthy to be deemed high art.

Laid to Rest

The point I hope is clear is that aside from an academic exercise, there is no reason to worry about whether games qualify as art. It is possible that they do not but only a fool would use that as a reason to dismiss them as having no merit. And perhaps people like Roger Ebert are fools, but that, too, is of no particular consequence.

The real issue is what value a medium has for the consumer: Those who value art as defined in a traditional sense (which in turn has a varied definition depending on whose tradition you’re referring to) can easily ignore video games as being a waste of time while they stare for hours at a lump of marble shaped like a human. Meanwhile video gamers can classify their games as art or the evolution of narrative storytelling or just leave them at “games” and ignore their esoteric or cultural significance.

Classification is significant only to those making the distinction: If the pursuit of great games is worthy of your time then that should be all the motivation necessary. In that way art is like pornography, where its definition is tied into little more than an individual reaction rather than a set of criteria. If my interpretation of art leaves room for pink plastic flamingos, to me lawn ornaments are worthy of scrutiny and evaluation. That they may be tacky scourges on a landscape to you does little to diminish (or at least should do little to diminish) their intrinsic value in my eyes.

Therefore, when asked the question, “Are games art?” The only correct answer is: “What do you think?”

Commentary on the interview below.

Ratings, Value and Crying in Your Beer

So, in essence Gitelman is crying about how his game got lousy review scores and how unjust it is. Since the OXM reviewer is in on the podcast, he defends his 7.0 score by saying the game’s $60 pricepoint, nine maps and three game modes aren’t compensated for by the innovation in the FPS genre that Shadowrun supposedly represents. Gitelman focuses at first on driving home the point that the game is fun and many reviews acknowledge that, but don’t represent it as such in their overall scores. He seems to think that review text is being overlooked in favor of the score, especially when the score is average.

Initially, I wanted to agree with Gitelman. Obviously I think the weight put on nonsensical numeric scales as applied to the relative merit of a game is foolishness which is why reviews on Tunnels of Doom are nearly binary. Essentially, either a game is good enough to play or it isn’t and the only distinction is whether it is also good enough to own. That’s how I look at it. Trying to drill down and assign decimal-level integer values to something like “fun factor” is an exercise that is at best a little silly.

But then he gets into this weird place where he’s saying that people don’t even read reviews when the final score is in the six to eight range, only finding lure in the text when the game is highly rated (to see why the game is deserving of such praise?) or panned (for the humorous slander?). Since Shadowrun got a lot of reviews that went something like “fun to play but we’re docking it points because it’s expensive and doesn’t feel like they have enough content in the box for the money,” Gitelman gripes that people are missing what he feels is the key phrase there—”fun to play.” He rails against the cost argument by saying that a single-player campaign mode would be perhaps 10 hours worth of play based on other comparable shooters and they preferred to polish the longer-lasting multiplayer element which could give many more times that amount of entertainment thus justifying the full price even more due to its multiplayer-only style. He calls all this just the way the world is, suggesting reviewers (and gamers, I suppose) are operating under some sort of delusion.

Meanwhile the OXM guys complain that the problem really is that 7.0 range scores are misunderstood as being a “bad” score when the definition they include in their magazine reads something like “good game with some kind of glaring flaw that may limit the game’s overall appeal.” Now, I concede that if ever a game fit that description, Shadowrun is it based on the review texts I’ve read. But they do have to recognize that—while we’re talking about the way the world works—7.0 scores generally mean “mediocre” whether a reviewer intends them to be so or not. Put another way, if they used the exact same scale but applied scholastic grade values, Shadowrun would have been given a C- and no one would suggest that’s exactly a ringing endorsement.

All of which amounts to a sort of meta debate about reviews in general (and their ultimate utility) that kind of gets nowhere with Shadowrun.

It’s difficult to go into much detail because I still haven’t played the retail game so my opinions are based almost entirely on the stunted demo version. But let’s talk a bit about Gitelman’s gripes especially since he seems to hammer on the idea that Shadowrun is so innovative that it breathes new life into the team-based shooter style of game.

Basically, Shadowrun offers races with different attributes, tech and magic upgrades that allow players to do relatively unusual things like have limited flight, healing, teleportation and so on and does so in a format that gives each player a single chance to fight per round and must purchase their equipment prior to the match using money earned via performance in game. The races are essentially classes which we’ve seen in plenty of games like Battlefield 1942 and Day of Defeat. The funky powers are kind of intriguing but teleportation has been around since Unreal Tournament and flight is not really any different than low-gravity mods available since early versions of Quake at least. The game’s structure is so much like Counter-Strike that it’s practically impossible to read a review that doesn’t make the comparison, so that’s nothing new.

Hang on, where’s the innovation again?

The one claim to fame Shadowrun does have is the PC/XBox interoperability thing. Which is fine and kind of neat but, I have to ask, was any gamer really asking for this? I know almost everyone who heard about it said right away, “Aren’t the PC folks with their mouselooks going to pwn the XBoxies with their analog sticks?” Even if Shadowrun gets it right (which several people have suggested may be true), that still doesn’t change the fact that playing PC vs. XBox wasn’t really something everyone was clamoring for.

Just like the Shadowrun pen-and-paper game, there is nothing particularly original about the ideas behind Shadowrun the video game. Magic and technology, SF and Fantasy: Not a stretch. The PnP game is/was great because it blended the two so well, but Gitelman doesn’t seem to be saying he did everything exactly right, he’s trying to say this is something you can’t get anywhere else and that may be true for all the pieces combined, but collages aren’t innovative. Interesting, possibly, but not original per se.

Meanwhile he completely sidesteps the main issues: CS and Team Fortress 2 are similar but vastly cheaper alternatives which are both similar in execution and multiplayer-only format. How does that reconcile in a customer’s mind if they (like me) are on the fence? To the point: How is this game worth $60? If you want to talk about the way the world is, let’s talk about the way the game is selling versus how it could be selling if it were priced appropriately. In the real world, perception of value is value, so while some people may find a game with nine maps, three modes and no single-player campaign worth $60, I and many like me don’t even find games with twice that multiplayer content and a full single-player/co-op campaign worth $60 most of the time. Ask me sometime how many of the fifty-some-odd 360 games I’ve played cost me $60. Here’s a hint: Zero. I don’t want to pay that much for a game, sorry. Even Oblivion and Dead Rising, which I’ve gotten countless hours of enjoyment out of and are two of my favorite 360 titles, weren’t worth full retail price to me. I got them both used. Maybe I’m one of the cheaper gamers, but I play a lot of games and if I’m even going to consider dropping $60 the least you can do is give me something to do that’s more entertaining while I’m learning the game’s controls than stupid tutorial missions.

I’m sorry Shadowrun isn’t burning down the house with rave reviews, but I’m sorry to say it was nearly destined to be so because at the end of the day, this isn’t even what people wanted from the license at all. Who here thought at any point, “What the 360 needs is another shooter”? To take a role-playing license and shoehorn it poorly onto a semi-interesting shooter and then cry because no one is taking your game seriously enough strikes me as being unforgivably myopic.

Speaking of…

The Real Slap in the Face

Near the end of the interview, around the 54:00 mark, the OXM guys ask Gitelman about a Shadowrun RPG. Gitelman responds:

People are like, ‘Oh my God, I’ve waited twelve years for a Shadowrun game and you haven’t made an RPG out of it!’ It’s like, hey, you know what? Everybody waited twelve years. And think about it, we’ve owned the rights to Shadowrun for a long time: Microsoft has had it for eight years as a publisher. Nobody has ever approached us saying, ‘Hey do you want to put out an RPG with this?’ It was us going to other people. So all these people [saying], ‘It should have been an RPG,’ if it had to be an RPG that much, someone would have made it by now. I love Shadowrun to death, and I personally want to make an RPG out of it… I never made an RPG before, and I worked in the RPG industry. But I’ve never made one and that’s what made me shy away from it this time. The talent we had in the studio was first person multiplayer action, so that’s what we did.

Okay so score one for the idea that someone over there sees value in making a real Shadowrun game. But that bit at the end makes the hair on the back of my neck stand up. Granted, I don’t have any insights as to how games get greenlit but it sounds to me like Gitelman is blaming the format of the first Shadowrun video game in eleven years on a nebulous “they” and the fact that he didn’t have the talent on hand to make the game the way it should have been made. For one thing, if no one was approaching them asking for a Shadowrun game, when they approached other people, why not say, “This is a role-playing license so we want to make a role-playing game. Who’s with us?” For another, if you don’t have the staff on hand to make the game correctly then doesn’t that mean you need to get the right staff in there? That would be like Bungie buying the license for Super Mario Bros. and saying, “Well, all we really know are first person SF space shooters, so we decided to make Super Space Mario because our team is more comfortable doing that than a family-friendly platformer.”

At this point, I’m almost afraid that this guy will make a Shadowrun RPG.

It has already been said—often!—how woeful it is that this game is a First Person Shooter and not some type of role-playing adventure. Whether you share that knee-jerk assessment or not isn’t what needs to be discussed here, because reasonably you have to grant that it is at least possible that Shadowrun could be translated into a phenomenal shooter. What does need to be questioned is the design decision to make Shadowrun an online/multiplayer-only team-based shooter more along the lines of Counter-Strike than Deus Ex.

I don’t mean to suggest that the Shadowrun world’s precise blend of SF technology and fantasy elements doesn’t have a place in a game like this. As a matter of fact the idea intrigues me. But where I get lost is when trying to figure out why in this particular case they needed to work from Shadowrun at all. Blending magic and cybertech is certainly not unique to Shadowrun, and if the developers merely wanted a reason to have various races of characters and the ability to apply technological as well as mystical upgrades, they could have fairly easily done so without a licensed property.

And here’s where things start to go badly because the wonder of Shadowrun is not its originality, but the boundlessly exact manner in which it sets the stage for these disparate elements to interact and create a fertile soil to plant narrative seeds. Let me put it another way: I assume the developers for the new Shadowrun game simply thought that having tech and magic upgrades in a squad-based shooter would be cool. I’m with them so far. But in this particular environment, with this specific type of game, they don’t require the kind of perfect execution of exposition that sets the stage for story the way Shadowrun does it. They could have set the game on some remote planet, “Gamma 6″ for example, and said, “On Gamma 6 there is a struggle between high technology brought by the Earthlings and mystical energies wielded by the native Ancients.” Done. Magic and cybertech are duly blended sufficiently for a narrative-less shooter.

By using the Shadowrun backdrop to accomplish something that it isn’t needed for, the developers really only succeed in doing one of two things: If you already are familiar with Shadowrun as an RPG product, you enter the game disappointed. There is no narrative here; there is no reason for this game to be called “Shadowrun.” You hoped for at least a campaign mode that could explore the Shadowrun setting in a novel fashion (or, let’s be honest, you hoped for a console role-playing game set in this world) but you didn’t get what you wanted. Alternately, you have no familiarity with Shadowrun and you leave the game wondering what all the fuss is about because there is very little here that could adequately introduce Shadowrun to the uninitiated.

So Shadowrun serves neither the fans of the licensed property nor does it work to create new fans of that property, at least not actively. Let’s assume for a moment that the reason Shadowrun’s property was licensed to this product was due to some assumption that the fanservice product (a modern role-playing game set in that universe) would not be successful. The problem is that betting against the fans ahead of time is the only sure way to “prove yourself” right as the IP owners. Say this new Shadowrun game is successful and sells well: The obvious conclusion would be, “See, we were right. People want a shooter with a setting they like.” But if the game fails the conclusion most easily reached is, “Shadowrun doesn’t sell well enough to be a viable license.”

Those aren’t the only conclusions one could cull from the success or failure of the game, but those are the most likely to come from a company or group of companies who shied away from giving gamers what they wanted in the first place. And the end result either way is that a Shadowrun game we really want is unlikely to ever be made. The only scenario I can imagine paving the way for a legitimate Shadowrun title would be for this game to sell so incredibly well that the publishers think they’ve stumbled on a licensing gold mine along the lines of Pokémon. But with the game releasing right in the middle of the Halo 3 beta and to critical indifference/disappointment, that seems highly unlikely.

Okay, granted all of this is coming from someone who hasn’t had any hands-on time with the game. But I need to express why this game was such a bad idea and how it was so poorly executed that it has, as I see it, essentially ruined any chance of a decent game in one of my favorite RPG settings. I will grab the demo and give it a fair shake on its own terms; I haven’t even ruled it out as a purchase if it’s legitimately good. But for what it represents to a fan of the franchise by its very existence, I can’t help but undertake the exploration with an already somber mood.