I went to Playful 09, a day of cross disciplinary frolicking last week. A first set of thoughts sparked off from the discussions there…

Levelling Up

I think it was Duncan Gough that talked quite a lot about the continuum between games and films and television shows. There was a real sense through the conference, though, that games were regarded as a separate entity. That film and television were established and mainstream and that games were on the edge of “art”. Certainly this is arguable, but it was particularly fascinating to me because having edged around film-making circles there’s definitely a sense that fims are “proper art” and that television is an edgy pretender, a series of loud, flashing distractions wrapped in ads rather than a legitimate artistic medium. If you hang around theatrical bastions you’ll begin to wonder whether modern cinema is capable of creating anything meaningful. My point here is: every medium goes through an extended stage of unsurety before it becomes legitimated by society, before it is reborn in the mainstream*.

At the moment, it’s games. What I would argue with is the idea that games are always going to be on the edge of art or that this is in any way special or different from the parth that cinema or television had to tread when they were relatively new. Before we can accept the medium itself, its tools have to become second nature to us– in about fifteen years time, when all the Independent arts critics have grown up playing Guitar Hero and Super Mario Galaxy, the tone of the conversation itself will be very different. We don’t regard the television, the cinema screen, the laptop or desktop computer as pieces of “specialised equipment”, and in fact their uses grow less “specialised” the more legitimate and entrenched the medium gets.

Already our gaming rigs are becoming part of the home-cinema landscape, and they’re also starting to be used for an ever wider variety of purposes: now you can not just download but stream in HD to the XBox and the PS3. Films, television shows, games, even live events like sports or premieres could end up being watched through the XBox rather than “conventionally”. So, not just cross-media, but cross-purpose as well.

Authors, Auteurs and Attributing Crowds

Maybe one of the big issues in terms of “artistic legitimacy” is the idea of authorship…which plays heavily into the idea of ownership. Traditionally speaking, something must be owned to have value. Monetary value and creative value have an antagonistic but relative relationship. We are used to art that has a creator, a progenitor, a driving force. Paintings have artists, books have authors, films have directors and auteurs, even television shows have showrunners; as we find it difficult to give credit to a group of people, we pick one to laud, to see as the creative engine behind a project. But games, especially big-ticket console games, tend to be produced by a company and worked on by large groups of people. Games require collaboration between writers and artists and coders and level-designers and marketers and producers. They’re too corporate, too collaborative to quite fit into the singular idea of authorship that helps us to label a creation as “art”. And when we do, it’s often because we’ve created an auteur– a Peter Molyneux, or Cliff Bleszinski or Will Wright. We need to be able to see the imprint of a personality on the product. (That’s not to say it will always be a positive imprint, there are as many Molyneux-haters as there are fanboys-and-girls, but we still see his games as part of an ‘artistic vision’ rather than just a factory output.)

One of the speakers at Playful– artistic lead Kareem Ettouney from Media Molecule, company which produced LittleBigPlanet– touched on ideas of “art” and collaboration in the video game world. What was interesting about his talk was that he didn’t shy away from using art, and artistic terminology to describe his and others’ work on the game. His fine art background did not cause him to dismiss this sort of larger, collaborative, compromise-filled and commercially-driven sort of entertainment creation as anything other than artistically motivated.

Not to put too fine a point on it, television and film are both team-sports in the extreme as well. The production process is not dissimilar. While it’s necessary to have an overarching artistic vision and view of the bigger picture, the real work is done by tens and hundreds of people collaborating and creating within this larger framework. While it’s easier to credit a director or producer it’s rarely entirely accurate. Our auteur-figures are often just convenient props, just so that we can see the creator’s fingerprints in the margins.

Perhaps we were used to experiencing art individually, and so it was important to see an individual on the other end? But now, art is both created and consumed collaboratively. Our labelling system just has to catch up.

*A lovely, thorough academic exploration of this idea is Andre Gaudreault’s ‘A Medium Is Always Born Twice’

Unreal City Update!

The first chapter of Unreal City– our surreal multimedia adventure– will be up for beta testing by the end of the week. If you’ve signed up to the newsletter or read the blog then you’ll definitely be hearing about it. Once it’s up, it would be fantastic to have as many opinions about it as possible. We’re interested in what you think! Comments can be left here, or sent in to themechanic@thisunrealcity.com.