A Case for Game Systems Being Art

Fiction, music and visual compositions are art mediums, naturally the combination of them would also be art. But the actual question is if Games (Game systems) can be art on their own. Is Tetris art? Independent of the catchy music and the visuals? I would like to present some arguments as for why game systems are definitely an art medium, viewed through a certain lens.

What is Art?

I am not personally interested in finding THE one way to define art. I am content with having various mental models through which I view and create art and switch between them at appropriate times. Here is one mental model shared between many designers and some of the greatest minds in our industry.

We make art. By we, I don’t just mean you and me. Cultures that have never heard of eachother, develop a love for art creation and consumption completely independent of each other. You could maybe make the case that animals create and consume art. At the very least they seem to appreciate certain things based on their various formal qualities. This phenomenon has also been observed in babies and children that have yet to be indoctrinated in our cultures.

You could view it from the point of view of evolutionary biology and psychology. The argument goes that there must be some survival advantage for this activity to pop up in cultures that have never interacted.

So what is the evolutionary advantage of art and creating art? I personally found this question to be relevant to my own motivation as to why I create, in an age where AI can provide an endless number of paintings indistinguishable from human work.

“I think all of the manifestations of art have something in common. My belief is that they are part of the survival mechanism of our species. I believe that art is a form of meditation for both maker and witness and that, like meditation, art makes us attentive. If you say that the aim of art and meditation is to produce attentiveness and quiet the mind so that it can discard pre-existing ideas in order to see what is real, then we can say all of the arts share this. They help us to survive by encouraging attentiveness.” said Milton Glaser in his book Drawing is Thinking. The view is also elegantly expressed in the last interview he gave. This view is commonly shared by other prolific designers of 21st century like Saul Bass and Paul Rand, and influential teachers like Gyorgy Kepes.

How does creating and consuming art makes us attentive. As Ed Catmull the co-founder of Pixar put it in Creativity Inc: “Something about the act of commiting that object to paper was completely engrossing — the way it necessitated seeing only what was there and shutting out the distraction of my ideas about chairs or vases and what they were supposed to look like”.

Our brain is a master at optimization. When looking at the world around us, it skips work wherever it can. The brain uses our pre-existing memories of how things should be, to either fill in missing information or to skip processing information already in memory, the cache. So it presents our assumptions about the world as facts back to us. While this is a feature, not a bug, it presents a big problem. It makes it so that looking at a thing and really seeing it are not the same thing.

Have you ever walked down a road you walk everyday under a different condition? For example, taking a stroll through your daily commute at night and realizing there have been entire new shops since months, which you somehow missed? You might have walked that road everyday, but you stopped really seeing what is actually there ages ago. Your brain was just showing your memories of what you think should be there.

By the time we lay at our death bed, most of us have long ceased to live. But not quite, because here is where art comes in. Art breaks through the assumptions, preconceptions and optimizations of our brain.

The most ordinary objects can be the subject matter of amazing art. By simply framing that object in a context that forces our brain to really reexamine it again. An artist might frame a tree for you, and you will look at it, and that might be the first time you are seeing a tree in years. That framing, the new context, the weird new connections are at the center of art and you paying attention again is the core reason why it needs to exist.

This all can be about concrete things, such as how leaves are usually actually blue, since they reflect the skylight or abstract such as how we relate to the concept of a tree.

Enough on art, lets talk about toys, play and games.

Toys and Play

To me toys seem to be objects (or concepts) that offer us various different possibilities of interaction. As we play, we try out these different potential modes of interaction and have fun doing it.

In his book The Art of Game Design, Jesse Schell defines a good toy as an object that is fun to play with! Now we need to define what play means.

Jesse defines play as “manipulation that indulges curiosity”. I mostly agree with this statement, though I would frame it differently. I think play is an exploration motivated by our curiosity. After all, I love to play in my head. In those cases I am running a mental simulation and exploring all that is possible about a concept.

All this talk of exploring a subject matter aligns well with Raph Kosters’s Theory of Fun. That games are about learning in a risk free environment and fun is the reward our brain provides us as an incentive. Raph also talks about the topology of the game systems, which is all the choices and actions the players can take within the possibilities provided by the game. Games need to provide interaction possibilities expansive enough for us to be excited about exploring them, but not so expansive that it becomes overwhelming.

To us everything is a toy at the beginning. Even the movement capabilities of our own bodies. I saw a child running in the rain today. The child was moving in all weird ways and having a blast. I remember that feeling, the joy of exploring all these different ways my body can move and how it felt. But the older we get, the more our brain starts building these assumptions and does these optimizations. We start having a predefined relationship to most objects and concepts in our daily life.

When was the last time you played with a chair? You could try building a house with a chair. Use it as a target for throwing stuff. You could jump over it. You could run around it. You could …. But you don’t do that. You SIT on it. That is the affordance a chair makes. But you don’t sit on a table. You put things on it. Why not? Childern do all that and a million other things we can’t even think of.

When these affordances start fully defining our interaction with the world around us, we cease to play with these objects as toys. This can be either because we have fully exhausted exploring all the ways the objects can be interacted with (how many things can you really do with a pen?) or because our brain has decided on one main mode of interaction with a thing and optimized even the possibility of anything else from our mind!

Does this sound like what I was saying before? It does to me. Just like how art came to the rescue in the previous segment, here come games! Because as a matter of fact, there is ALOT you can do with a pen. But before that, let’s talk about what a game is.

Games

Games are not toys. We play them just like we play with toys, but games have more in them. In the book Rules of Play, a lot is said about games being formal structures. It has players that willingly enter a magic circle (famous contribution of Huizinga in Humo Ludens), with some defined rules, where certain things take on a special meaning that only matter in the circle and rules of interaction is laid out that could define things like winning and losing conditions. Quite a long sentence. I will try a shorter one.

I think games provide a structure within which we interact with one or more toys. You could say the game system and its rules are a framing which encourages certain type of interaction with these toys and sparks our curiosity. Interaction and curiosity of course lead back to play. Games don’t do this framing just through rules, they usually do it by providing you with a challenge. They provide you with a problem to solve. The challenge and the rules induce a specific type of play which shapes an experience in your mind. It is beautiful.

I mentioned we have a very specific affordance associated with a pen. You write with it. Some chew on it. You might think that is all you can do with it.

So it ceases to be a toy and you don’t play with it. But have you ever seen people pen spin? That is one wild way to use a pen with vast possibility space. All it takes is a game system. Try to move the pen with your fingers in tricky ways. Depending on how hard it is to replicate the manuever you get points, the one with the most points wins. Now throw in a bunch of people in a room with these rules, they will be spinning in no time!

The possibility to spin, to play, to see the toy has always been there. Yet it is the game that brings it out through the framing. And this is not all you can do with a pen. Sharpen a pencil, lay it down on a flat surface. Hit the tip of the pencil with the edge of your hand. The pencil will jump in the air and do spins. The one with the highest number of spins wins, everyone else just walks away with a throbbing hand.

So I am saying that the framing in games can make you reexamine objects (and concepts) in the world around you and what you can do with them. Still not convinced? Think about stairs.

Stairs are a strange thing. Why do we decide to go up them. Is it the shape? Is it the inclination? There are things that are shaped that way or inclined that way that we decide are not to climb. Why don’t we climb a wall? Is it because we can’t? Maybe that mode of interaction with that ‘toy’ is simply not accessible to us?

I have been rock climbing for a while, and since the moment I started, I have never, ever, ever looked at a wall the same way again. The game redefines what can be done with a wall. Suddenly, any surface I see is something I could climb. I am constantly playing the climbing game in my head wherever I go. “I bet I can climb there”, followed by a mental simulation of how that would go.

Another example, one of my favourite current pass time, Mini Golf in VR. The rules of mini golf are about holes and points, the toy is the club, but there is something in between there. Mini golf is actually a game about surfaces and their relationship with each other. You can think of the ball like a beam of light, if it hits that wall, where would it get reflected too? Where would it go after that? and if you want the light to end up there, where do you have to point to now?

Whenever I come out the game after playing too long, I get a Tetris effect. I start playing mini golf with everything, with the 2D pattern on my carpet, with topology of my kitchen or the objects on my table.

Amazing, no? If games can make me examine my mode of interaction with something as straightforwad as my 2D persian carpet, then within what I defined as art, games are without a doubt, art. Not because of the music, not because of the visuals, but because the game systems themselves make us re-examine our relationship with the world around us, to pay attention. To be attentive!

Thanks for reading. You can follow me on various socials, all list on my website: https://ircss.github.io/