Contextualizing Game Design as Art in a Postmodern World
- Kaleb Brooks
- Mar 31
- 14 min read
Kaleb Brooks
Faculty of Animation Art and Design, Sheridan Institute of Technology and Advanced Learning
GAME 43557: Professional Profile Development
Professor Chris Crowell
3/12/2024
PREFACE:
This deep dive essay was written for the professional profile development course at Sheridan College's 4th year HBA in Game Design program. This essay explores what makes great art in a postmodern context, after the rise of the internet and the explosion of popular media.
Introduction:
Defining art, as in art with a capital ‘A’, or what some would refer to as “fine art” is likely one of the most divisive subjects of all time. This definition has been the object of intense criticism throughout history, especially as new forms of art enter the scene. For example, in her 1926 essay The Cinema, Virginia Woolf famously said “These philosophers have presumably forgotten the movies. They have never seen the savages of the twentieth century watching the pictures.” (Woolf, 1926) like many others at the time, criticized cinema for their emphasis on Kitsch ideas, as well as the danger of mass-media (despite novels and pressed works being some of the first forms of mass-media). Ray Bradbury expressed similar thoughts, this is evident upon reading most of his works. For example, Fahrenheit 451 is predicated on this fear of mass-media losing important context. In 2007, Bradbury stated “[Television is] useless … they stuff you with so much useless information, you feel full” (as cited in Johnston, 2007). Obviously, most scholars today would reject these ideas, with some critics of cinema even retracting their initial statements and embracing it. George Bernard Shaw was fiercely skeptical of cinema, but eventually published many of his plays like Pygmalia on the silver screen. This idea of “gatekeeping” forms of art persists everywhere in time and like anything else written in the annals of history, these ideas ironically are carried forward into the future. Roger Ebert, a man who built his career on the idea that cinema and tv are valuable forms of art, wrote the essay Video Games Can Never Be Art. Three years later, he retracted his statement. Rather than attempt to define art, this deep dive will explore the intrinsic relationship between art and design in the context of video games. This essay will argue that in fact, design is not only inseparable but required to form a work of art, and in turn prove that some games are in fact worthy of the title of fine art.
Shadow of The Colossus and the Classical Art of Design:
Let’s start with the following scenario: A painter sits at his easel, he ponders his muse, and then what does he do next? The painter would consider his composition and the following brushstrokes. What precisely does he consider though? Most classically trained artists would likely give you an answer along the lines of “The Elements and Principles of Design”. Broken down into elements; line, space, form, shape, texture, value, and colour. These are the building blocks which make up any work of visual art (and sometimes other forms via transferred context). The principles of design include; emphasis, balance, contrast, repetition, proportion, movement, pattern, hierarchy, rhythm, unity, variety, and space. These are how we, as artists, manipulate those elements to create something new and interesting. There are many variations of these methodologies and breakdowns, and many other variations for other forms of art like the Elements of Style in writing. These are what we call artistic or design frameworks and are a source of major overlap between all forms of art. In game design, we use the same elements/principles of design for just about everything. Narrative Designers frequently make use of the Elements of Style to get their ideas across, but there are more interesting frameworks we can explore game mechanics in as well.
Imagine, if you will, Phalanx, the winged serpent, rises to the sky with a majestic yet terrifying grace. It’s armored body undulates through the air like a leviathan swimming through the depths of the ocean. Colossal fins unfurl along its sides, catching the wind as it soars gracefully above the dunes. The creature’s eyes glow with an ancient wisdom, completely indifferent to the small intruder below. Heart pounding, Wander kicks Agro into a gallop. It’s hooves pound the sand, each stride bringing them closer to the soaring monster. Dust trails in their wake while they race beneath the colossus’ shadow which blots the desert like an eclipse. Bow in hand, Wander takes aim at the glowing air sacs beneath Phalanx’s body -- it's only vulnerability left. Arrows whistle through the air, piercing the sacs. A guttural roar echoes through the wasteland as Phalanx begins to descend, it’s flight faltering. Seizing the moment, Wander urges Agro closer. Standing in the stirrups he leaps from his mount, fingers grasping desperately at the rough stone on the colossus’ fins. Now clinging to the massive creature, it regains altitude. Wander feels the wind tear at his clothes and whip through his hair. The ground becomes a distant memory as they ascend higher into the sky. Each movement is a desperate battle against gravity and Phalanx’s shifting mass. Determined with resolve, Wander climbs upwards toward the sigils etched into Phalanx’s armour, his sword gleaming as it catches the sunlight. The confrontation between man and giant unfolds amidst the boundless skies.
This is how it feels to play Shadow of the Colossus, something more akin to a Hayao Miyazaki film than Uncharted or God of War 2018. This isn’t something you witness in a cutscene, and there’s hardly any dialogue, but through the art and design of this game, we can enter this world, and feel the weight of our (Wander’s) actions, a powerful motif portrayed through every aspect of the game. We, as Wander, feel the pain of the beasts that we slay, questioning if it’s worth it to continue this journey. The reason Shadow of The Colossus can pull this off is because of very deliberate design.
Shadow of the Colossus is a 2005 Action/Adventure game developed by Team Ico and directed by Fumito Ueda. It follows Wander, a young man, his horse Agro, and who we presume to be Wanders sleeping beauty who is afflicted by a dangerous curse. You are tasked to find and kill sixteen ancient gargantuan creatures called Colosi to cure her. Throughout your journey, you begin to question your actions. The Colosi are largely peaceful and don’t attack until deliberately provoked. The man who tasked you (a disembodied voice called Dormin), is hiding something. And as you kill Colosi, your skin starts to slowly become pale.
In Valdemar Ribbing’s thesis (2021): A Game as a Painting: Using Impressionism to Explore Game Mechanics, he presents an artistic framework for games inspired by impressionist paint brush techniques. The major techniques he uses for this framework are:
Size: How much overall space does my mechanic occupy
Placement: What are the adjacent mechanics in time, space, and narrative
Angle: What argument are you trying to make, what perspective do you approach the mechanic from, a designer, player, educator, etc.?
Visibility: How visible is the mechanic to the player, does the player have full understanding of how it works?
Shape: What shape is the mechanic, what kind of story is it trying to tell?
Overlap: How does this mechanic overlap with other mechanics.?
These impressionist techniques have existed for hundreds of years and they still find useful context in new forms of art. If what’s been presented so far doesn’t illustrate the importance of design thinking in any form of art, let’s take a look at Shadow of the Colossus through the impressionist framework, trying to understand what kind of artistic intent they had behind their ideas. While fighting Colossi, the mechanic that always stood out most to me was stabbing. It’s an incredibly deliberate action and one you have to do over and over again, feeling the intense weight of the sword and your action. Let's break it down into parts.
Size: This mechanic is pretty frequently used, but not so much that it dominates the gamespace. Stabbing is only used at specific points when climbing a Colossus and because of this it becomes a twisted extrinsic reward for the player, forcing you to question your actions and feel the desperation of Wander. You are never stabbing outside of these specific circumstances.
Placement: Stabbing is only done on specific marked points of the Colossus. You run out of stamina after stabbing too much so you can only get a few good ones in at a time. At the same time it damages the Colossus, causing black blood to spurt from the wounds. It turns the act of killing a Colossus into a very deliberate and desperate process.
Angle: While this decision is for the sake of art, it is almost certainly intentionally designed to make the player feel this way. Good design is both useful and compelling. This mechanic compels you to question your actions with every blow you strike.
Visibility: At first the mechanic feels fully visible to the player, they’re taught in extremely fine detail how to stab. However, the weight of the mechanic does not dawn on the player until it is revealed that the black blood released from the Colossi is fueling Dormin’s soul, which could bring forth a major catastrophe.
Shape: As mentioned, the deliberateness and steadiness of the action makes you feel the weight of your attacks. After repeatedly attacking the Colossi, you really do begin to feel the weight of your actions, questioning what on earth you’re doing here.
Overlap: Stabbing consumes some stamina, meaning you can only do it so much before falling. At the same time it damages the Colossus, it howls and roars when this happens. The black blood that spurts from the Colossi also ties into the greater progression system of the game, affecting the artistic narrative (Wander’s appearance and your own feelings about this solemn journey), as well as giving the player more endurance.
Through this case study we can analyse and therefore create mechanics that allow us to visualize the game as a whole piece of art. This framework could be incorporated into other design tools like Noun-Verb Diagrams to nail down a game’s design and artistic vision beyond just establishing design pillars, this is an extreme example of how essential art is to game design, but it’s important to remember how often we use other design tools that directly affect a game’s artistic vision.
The Artistic Power of Thematic Mechanics in Outer Wilds:
Rick Rubin, author of The Creative Act and eight time Grammy Winning producer once said “Art without meaning is just decoration. The art is in the idea.” This can be interpreted in a number of ways, but the core of the idea here is that themes are a powerful and arguably essential tool to all artists. To anyone familiar with art or the artistic process, this is a given. The themes, or the messages that a piece of art conveys are a massive contributor to how well any given piece of art is received. The themes of an art piece are what keeps thousands of people lining up to see Guernica by Pablo Picasso or The Sunflower Quilting Bee at Arles for example. While their artistic prowess is certainly admirable, it’s the theme and message that the piece conveys that keeps people idly staring, trying to understand its meaning.
Outer Wilds is a space adventure game Directed by Alex Beachum, set in a micro solar system where you are free to explore whatever you want, whenever you want. Your established goal, however, is to uncover the mystery of the Nomai people, a race that was mysteriously made extinct years before your species was even sentient. The catch of course, is that every 22 minutes the sun explodes and you are caught in a time-loop. Each 22 minute (or less) session allows you to explore new areas and discover new, hidden, mechanics that allow you to progress further and uncover the history and goal of the Nomai, as well as find a reason why the sun keeps exploding. One of the game’s most prevalent themes is that death is inevitable but always gives way to new life. (Geller, 2019). This theme is so prevalent in fact that just about every mechanic revolves around it in some way. The time loop, of course, is evident in and of itself. It’s a constant reminder that the death of you and your civilization is but minutes away. Beyond this however, the solar system is ever changing and decaying. Not only can you watch the sun explode, but Brittle Hollow, one of the system’s planets cracks and fractures, pieces of the planet’s crust fall ever into the abyss of the black hole at its core.
Another two planets, The Hourglass Twins, shift sand through a gravity well between one twin and the other over the course of one time-loop, Ember Twin, slowly fills with ashy sand and slowly cuts off its internal cave systems. This parallels the loss of time and the fleeting nature of opportunities, the fact that it fills so slowly also reinforces the idea that death is not typically a sudden event, but rather a slow and gradual march. This not only delivers a powerful motif, but also adds new avenues for exploration, allowing you to go to new areas and find new landmarks to visit in your next life. This idea of progress through repetition also directly reflects the narrative themes of learning from our predecessors. Much like how we learn the secrets of the solar system from the long-dead Nomai, we as the player learn just as much from the previous version of ourselves. Remember, again, that these are not artistic decisions. They are by design. Each and every planet is carefully laid out to present new information to the player at different times, but always in an accessible way. This allows the game to give its players the illusion of thinking they’ve discovered a major theme or motif all on their own, when in reality, it was carefully planned and playtested hundreds of times.
The Emotional Weight of Game Mechanics in Papers, Please
Another main contributor to how well a piece of art is received is its emotional resonance. “Do I feel moved?” is often the first thing that subconsciously rises in one's thoughts when viewing a piece of art. Be it poetry, a screenplay, a novel or even a video game, art that is not emotionally relatable or at the very least emotionally interesting will stifle, bore, and leave its viewers with nothing memorable about it. In chapter five of What is Art, Tolstoy asserts “It is upon this capacity of man to receive another man’s expression of feeling and experience those feelings himself, that the activity of art is based.” (1996).
Papers, Please is a 2013 game by Lucas Pope. You serve as a immigration inspector in a fictional country called Arstotzka during the 1980s. With only your mouse, you inspect travel documents to make sure the people in line are allowed to enter the country. The game is largely linear, with specific events happening on each day, but the game’s timeline can split at specific points depending on your actions. It’s quite obvious at first glance why this game has the potential to be emotionally compelling, but there is more going on beyond a chilling narrative and desaturated sprite art. A major focus of Paper’s, Please, is on how the individual mechanics and systems question your morality and evoke powerful emotional responses. Another common framework we use in Game Design is called MDA. Coined by Robin Hunicke, Marc LeBlanc, and Robert Zubeck, the MDA Framework allows us to analyse and create games by breaking down game components into Mechanics, Dynamics, and Aesthetics.
Mechanics: Typically defined in layman terms as a rule for a game, a sort of “if this, then that” that creates the engaging elements of games that allow the player to interact with it.
Dynamics: are created by the overlap of multiple mechanics and they both affect and are affected by aesthetics.
Aesthetics: Aesthetics are the visual, auditory, and overall sensation caused by the player receiving the game’s dynamics.
The important thing to understand about the MDA Framework is that designers experience their games in order of mechanics, dynamics, and aesthetics, but the players will always experience it in reverse. MDA is a great tool to analyse game mechanics, but if used too rigidly, you’ll lose the holistic mindset required to make artistically interesting games. Much like the aforementioned “Thematic Mechanics”, some mechanics are designed not only so they adapt the way that you play the game in unique and interesting ways, but also are aimed to trigger specific emotions that the player receives when appreciating the aesthetics of a given game. These mechanics, which from hereon will be called “Emotional Mechanics” are game mechanics that are specifically aimed in part or in whole to trigger an emotional response in the player.
In Papers, Please your most central emotional mechanic is the ability to accept or deny a person’s entry to Arstotzka. Your accept and deny stamps are entirely up to you on how to use them, and while you will receive citations and pay-cuts for incorrectly admitting an illegal immigrant, you can choose to let them in anyway based on your own personal reasoning. Many people in the queue that you really want to admit may have their papers out of order, and some detestables will have a clean record. This puts a special emphasis on player agency, asking you the question: “Is it worth letting this person through at risk of my job security?”, the game continues down this path with each mechanic it introduces. At the end of your day, Papers, Please asks you the toughest question yet. After essentials, you will be left with only a little bit of money that you need to choose how to allocate. You can pay for heat, food, rent and medicine, but almost never all at once. This decision can be life and death for certain family members, and unless you are fully complicit, your whole family may not survive to the end of the game.
Once again, this puts players in the special position of constant oppression. Every single thing the game does to you results in an emotionally hard decision to make, reinforcing the players agency with every step, and slapping them in the face for non-complicicity. The emotional response evoked from this game is incredibly intense, foreboding, and memorable. This is the reason Papers, Please sticks out in the minds of so many. This is the reason why a small indie game developed by a single person was able to become one of the most critically acclaimed games of 2013.
Conclusion:
The question of whether video games can be considered art becomes less contentious when viewed through the lens of design as an inseparable aspect of artistic expression. As shown through the case study of Shadow of the Colossus, Outer Wilds, and Papers, Please, video games evoke profound emotional responses, communicate compelling themes, and rely on intentional design principles to craft experiences that can rival traditional forms of art. The mechanical and aesthetic choices made by game designers can resonate with audiences in ways that parallel the impact of literature, film, and other fine art.
Design, far from being the antithesis to art, is its foundation. The deliberate structure of mechanics in Shadow of the Colossus and Outer Wilds not only serves essential gameplay purposes, but also immerses the players in thematic and emotionally charged journeys. Papers, Please, forces its audience to confront moral dilemmas and feel the weight of their choices, showing that video games can provoke introspection and empathy through player agency and their other systems. They illustrate that art is not confined to static mediums of the past, but can actually thrive in interactive experiences that engage players on intellectual and emotional levels.
Ultimately, the artistry of video games lies in their ability to blend important design principles with thematic depth and emotional resonance, creating a medium that is unique in the way that it is equipped to capture and communicate complexities of the human experience. The question no longer is “Can video games be art?”, but rather “How can we better understand and celebrate the artistry inherent in their design?” By embracing this perspective, we get closer to recognizing that video games are one of the most innovative and compelling art forms of our time.
References
Beachum, A. (Director). (2019). Outer Wilds. Mobius Digital.
Brown, E. B. (1945). Design is Inseparable from Creative Art. Design, 47(1), 12–13. https://doi.org/10.1080/00119253.1945.10742389
Ebert, R. (2012, December 15). Video Games Can Never Be Art. RogerEbert.com.
Geller, J. (2019a, May 19). Who’s Afraid of Modern Art: Vandalism, Video Games, and Fascism. YouTube.
Geller, J. (2019b, December 30). Outer Wilds: Death, Inevitability, and Ray Bradbury. YouTube.
Hunicke, R., Leblanc, M., & Zubek, R. (2004). MDA: A Formal Approach to Game Design and Game Research (pp. 1–5).
Johnston, A. E. B. (2007, May 30). Ray Bradbury: Fahrenheit 451 Misinterpreted. LA Weekly.
Pope, L. (Director). (2013, August 8). Papers, Please.
Ribbing, V. (2021). A Game as a Painting : Using Impressionism to Explore Game Mechanics. DIVA.
Rubin, R. (2014). American Recordings. American Recordings.
Tolstoy, L. (1996). What is art? (R. Pevear & L. Volokhonsky, Trans.; Paperback). Penguin Books.
Ueda, F. (Director). (2005). Shadow of the Colossus. [ Sony PS3 Edition]. Sony Entertainment.
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