Titel-Serie

Barry Atkins

Looking for a Space and Time for Videogame Play

As is apparent in the very existence of issues of journals such as Kunstforum that address videogames in the context of art, culture and society, we currently occupy an interesting moment in the history of the reception of videogames. There has certainly been a rapid and considerable increase in the attention paid to videogames in recent years by academics, artists, and by gallery and exhibition curators. There are even occasions when videogames have received a more measured appraisal than they have been used to in the mainstream press, although they remain, in the United Kingdom at least, a favourite target for demonisation by elements of the tabloid press. While videogames may not yet have overcome many of the general assumptions made by their more negative critics - that they can be dismissed as culturally and aesthetically irrelevant after the most cursory glance at their often violent content, or after superficial recognition of their resemblance to the toys and games of childhood - there are some signs that what had been a gulf of understanding of videogames (that was often generational in nature and located most consistently between those who have played videogames and those who have not) is beginning to be bridged.

On a recent BBC radio arts programme featuring the heads of some of the UK's most prestigious arts institutions, the Director of the Royal Shakespeare Company, Michael Boyd, was invited to condemn the assumed lack of attention span of the 'videogame generation'. Rather than agree with the programme's host that the established arts of theatre, dance and opera were under threat from an audience somehow spoiled in their possible appreciation of other forms of live performance by this new media form, however, Boyd was quite generous in his description of videogames:

I think the attention span required to get a sense of satisfaction from a Final Fantasy computer game or [Grand Theft Auto:] San Andreas, the dedication, the concentration required by that […] equips kids really well to cope with the complications of narrative and makes them an awful lot less naive than maybe our generation was when we were that age. [It makes them] much more sceptical, much more used to intervening and making choices.

In a statement that sees some resonance in the work on game literacy by the academic James Gee he might still position games as essentially immature, in the sense of their consumption by 'kids' who might find games a useful stepping stone to more mature arts, but he had isolated several things about the practice of videogame play that are worth highlighting - specifically that familiarity with games makes their players used to intervention and the exercise of choice. This may not sound particularly radical, and as an interactive medium it could be argued that videogames are inevitably about intervention and choice, but his comments also display an understanding of the processes of games as played objects that is often lacking in public conversations where they are judged not for what occurs in the mind and imagination of the player, but for what can be seen on the screen.

There are commercial and non-commercial games that have depended on sound, or the stimulation of other senses, to communicate and provide feedback to their players, but the commonplace understanding of videogames, as is apparent in the term itself, is inevitably tied up in the primacy of the visual image. If we are to begin to approach games in a quest to understand the specifics of their aesthetic qualities then we might well have to be prepared to at least question whether their aesthetic is in any meaningful sense a visual aesthetic, or whether it might actually be counterproductive to evaluate videogames as a primarily visual art. It is undoubtedly necessary, although sometimes difficult, to ignore the brash visuals with which games attempt to assert themselves in the marketplace, and consider whether it is possible that we have been hoodwinked by the video in the videogame into missing what it is that makes them so appealing to so many players and so fascinating to the growing band of academics and artists who have explored their limitations and possibilities.

Anyone who seeks to understand videogames would certainly be advised to be aware, as Boyd evidently is, that any examination of games needs to go beyond simply looking at their surface images to consider how those images contribute to the experience of play. Although this is an essay, like many others that concern themselves with the discussion or analysis of videogames, that focuses firmly on games in terms of the images that are produced on a screen the intention here is not to simply interrogate specific images or combinations of images, but to attempt to interpret the nature of the role of the image in mainstream videogame play. It is possible, even, that in this form of popular media text where common sense tells us that the emphasis should always be on the visual representation before us, that we are actually confronted by something that is invisible to the human eye, that will not show itself however intently we stare at the screen, and cannot be coaxed, however hard we try, into revealing itself.

Looking at play

In order to try and understand videogames it still makes sense to attempt to conjure up an initial image that we all might share. Unless we turn to a specific example, however, it is clear that the videogame is already an elusive object of consideration because of its multiplicity of possible manifestations. Imagine for a moment that we are standing behind and slightly to one side of a player of a contemporary videogame, for example. Such an act of imagination already begs a series of questions. Is the player standing at an arcade machine, sitting before a personal computer, relaxed on a sofa in front of a television set, holding a mobile phone or other device for handheld gaming? Are they alone or in company? Are they online and engaged with other human players, or locked in solitary communication with the artificial intelligence of the machine? Is the interface a keyboard and mouse, a touch sensitive screen, an alphanumeric keypad, a USB camera feeding the image of the player back to her or him as the controller, a joystick, a mat placed on the floor that translates foot movements into instructions, one of a range of proprietary gamepad controls for the various consoles, or even one of the more exotic controllers now available, from lightguns to maracas and bongo drums? It is as well to remember, whenever anyone claims to be speaking about videogames in universal terms, that they are often attempting to force into a single category a huge range of phenomena that differ one from another in the most obvious and radical of ways. It might even be comforting that the variety of possible forms of videogame play are both obvious and visible, while we ask ourselves what it is that is unseen that binds these forms of play together.

For the moment, however, let us focus on the screen before the player. That at least, despite variations in size and the specific technology deployed, would appear to remain a constant presence in what is usually referred to when we claim to be considering videogames. On such a screen we might see the simple shapes and bright colours of what resembles an animated cartoon, the abstraction of Tetris's tumbling blocks, a screen that looks like little more than the spreadsheets we are used to seeing on our office machines, or something far more like the images we expect to see on our television or cinema screens, in the form of car chases, complex sports contests, or bloody and violent clashes between individuals in combat uniforms, space suits or war machines. Such images may be realised to a greater or lesser degree of photorealistic achievement depending on the platform or the skill and ingenuity of the game's developer, the genre of game, and the choices made by the art team. It is even possible to see games that look so much like military flight simulators that the layman would find it hard to tell the difference. There is nothing if not a potentially vast variety of different sights that might greet us, even among commercial games that do not make any claim to radically reinvent the medium or push the boundaries of its possibilities of representation. Everything from film noir, Japanese anime, and the universe of Barbie has been realised within games. As technological limits on games are lifted by the increase in brute processing power there is less and less expectation that one game need necessarily resemble another. The days of the limited colour palette and small pixel range of sprites of the 8 and 16 bit computing era are long gone. And yet there is something about the transmission of information about the game being played through the medium of the screen that ties all such games together in the popular imagination. Again, the cursory glance of the potential spectator sees only difference, and little beyond the shared framing boundary of the screen that unifies what it is that we refer to as the videogame. For all this dependence on the presence of the screen, simply looking at videogames, self-evidently, is not enough.

If we draw back a little further and shift our attention to the player of games we are likely to see something far less varied, but something that nevertheless reinforces an assumption that we should address questions of vision and of seeing when we attempt to understand videogames. In all but a handful of games and genres of games, the eyes will be fixed on the screen with a potentially disturbing level of concentration. Boyd's point was well made: it would be absurd to see a relationship between an inability to remain fixed and attentive on visual event and behaviour learned through exposure to videogame play. Games played out in real-time demand a constant renewal of attention on their screens. The question we should ask ourselves, however, is what it is that fixes the player of games so firmly to her or his screen? What the spectator sees from the outside even risks missing the whole function of the observation of the screen within the temporality of videogame play. In a very real sense, the observer is out of synchronisation with the player of the game. The screen does not represent the present, let alone the future, on which the player is focused. Rather, the screen represents the past of play. The player is not fixed on the image that has been revealed as anything more than a confirmation of the success or failure of past action, or as an indicator of possible futures that may yet be revealed. To the outsider the screen may appear more or less visually interesting, more or less aesthetically pleasing: to the player it is full of rich possibilities of future action, pointing always off to the moment at which it will be replaced by another image and then another. Its purpose, if it fulfils its function, is to insist on its own erasure as it prompts the player to move on and look elsewhere. If it is not able to demand its own extinction, and the screen no longer spurs him or her to action, then the game has failed or the player has failed in their co-operative construction of an experience that is never static, and can never be captured effectively on a screen as anything but the fossil record of play. Instead the image seen within play is always one which invites intervention and choice, and produces a fleeting stream of swiftly changing images.

It is in the lack of any clear understanding of this very space where image meets action, and image is essential to the generation of action, that confusion can be generated and videogames as visual experience can be most profoundly misunderstood by those who do not play. Videogames are not something that we primarily watch and observe like film or television, but are something that we engage with through the action of play. Games are also temporal events that exist only in their dialogic relationship with a player, and a videogame without a player is just so much dead code. An image may remain on screen without the input of a player, but it means nothing in terms of game experience unless it prompts a player to erase it and return the screen to a fluid and mobile state of play. Some videogames might still go into 'attract mode' as arcade machines always have, where the screen shows a simulation of play or a recording of actual play, but the source of that attraction is not so much on what is seen, the achieved image presented before us, but the invitation that the image presents that we may see something different and something other if only we were to insert a coin and take up the controls or pick up the gamepad. And that possible future of a vast array of potential images is accessible only to the player, and not to the spectator.

Videogames seen in the gallery

Inevitably, this specificity in the function of the image in videogames has meant that some attempts at the accommodation of videogames within gallery spaces more used to conventional forms of visual art have been notable for the absence of the game element of the videogame. When the artists Jodi showed a new work for the first time at the FACT gallery in Liverpool in 2004 they seemed to seek to challenge an understanding of all videogame play as necessitating the conformist rehearsal of pre-scripted (and prescriptive) action that would be familiar to those critics of games who would see the practice of playing videogames as demanding little in the way of the imaginative intervention of the player. Their installation 'Max Payne Cheats-Only Gallery' was largely made up of a series of video recordings of events manufactured inside the game-space of the commercial game Max Payne by the artists manipulating both the conventional controls of the game and the command console through which more radical manipulations (the cheats of the piece's title) might be accomplished. These interventions were then played back on monitors from which the viewer was deliberately distanced and excluded. Peering through small circular holes in a whitewashed corridor the visitor was able to see moments at which the encounter between the artists and the game had led to a collapse of the integrity of Max Payne as a three dimensional virtual space open for navigation and exploration that Henry Jenkins would describe as its 'narrative architecture'. Flaws in the illusion of this as a consistent space were exposed as bodies were caught in impossible poses and positions. The flat planes of triangles that make up the scenery were revealed in a way that the game's producers could not have foreseen as possible, or certainly desirable, in the normal process of play. Animations faltered and sound effects were caught in stuttering loops within the restrictive corridors to create audio confusion.

Rather than representing a negative critique of the technical achievement of Max Payne as a piece of computer code all-too open to the interventions of the artists, however, that did little more than show the game in an essentially broken state and expose its inner workings, the artwork produced by Jodi sought to present itself as a work of resistance or subversion. In a very real way Jodi were not obeying the rules or playing the game. In doing so they showed what players who are fully cognisant of the rules system they are confronted with in such a game might do to counter the tyranny of rehearsed action. The game might demand that the player conform to its expectations if they are to be rewarded with progression through its twin structures of narrative plot revelation and movement from level to level, but Jodi chose to play with the game, rather than to simply play the game. What the visitor to the gallery had access to in turn was a record of this play with the game as object.

What the visitor did not have access to, however, was the experience of play itself. There was no keyboard and mouse or gamepad controller attached to these monitors that would allow the visitor to engage with the game. In fact, the game itself was absent, with no computer or console present on which the code was actually running, all that was within the gallery was the record of event in which the audience was able to trace the play of the artists. In using the game as the source material for their own display of playfulness Jodi had erased Max Payne as a game. Something was absent, and that something was directly related to what makes videogames so appealing to their players - the imminent possibility, always, that the player may intervene to manufacture their own aesthetic experience.

This is related, in turn, to the problems that academic critics of games face when they attempt to articulate what might be meant when videogame players or developers discuss 'gameplay'. Most essentially concerned with the question of the experience of playing, and the feelings of satisfaction generated (or not) by the actual practice of being in control of the game, gameplay remains a difficult term when attempts are made at precise definition, but it might be usefully thought to refer to this invisible crucial element in any videogame's aesthetic. Whether successful or not, gameplay rests somewhere between the imagination of the possibility of plural future outcomes inherent in any game space, whether they are the cluttered film noir spaces of Max Payne or the austere asteroid belt of Asteroids, and the physical action of the manipulation of the interface of control. As the core experience of play, the moment of gameplay is born and dies again and again in that impossible Augustinian moment of the indefinable present as the player exists within a constantly renewed loop of action that alters the observable game state.

In this space between the way games have begun to enter the gallery as (visual) art, and the ways in which the practice of play demands a different aesthetic understanding, we can locate a potential misapprehension of games as something other than played experiences where the aesthetic is generated in a maelstrom of anticipation, speculation and action. Videogames prioritise the participation of the player as he or she plays, and that player always apprehends the game as a matrix of future possibility. The focus, always, is not on what is before us or the 'what happens next' of traditionally unfolding narrative, but on the 'what happens next if I' that places the player at the centre of experience as its principle creator, necessarily engaged in an imaginative act, and places the videogame firmly within the realm of the performance arts.

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'Front Row', BBC Radio 4, broadcast 3 January 2005.
James Paul Gee, What Videogames Have to Teach Us About Learning and Literacy. Palgrave. 2003.
The images that accompany this article are screenshots taken from various iterations of the VMule/Astroversity project produced in partnership between the author's home institution at the International Centre for Digital Content at Liverpool John Moores University and NESTA FutureLab. This is an educational game project that seeks to use the visual techniques, technologies and visual vocabulary of commercial games to engage videogame literate school students in the classroom. More information about this project can be found at www.icdc.org.uk/Vmule/.
Max Payne Cheats-Only Gallery was anewly commissioned work that was part of the exhibition Computing 101B held at the Fact Gallery Liverpool 16 July-1 August 2004.
Henry Jenkins, "Games Design as Narrative Architecture". http://www.electronicbookreview.com/v3/servlet/ebr?command=view_essay&essay_id=jenkins.