Games, and video games in particular, have enjoyed a cultural ascendancy since the turn of the millennium. More people talk, think, and care about games than at any other time in history. While it’s true that sport has always been an important part of any society, what is happening now is an elevation of games as a genre of human activity. People no longer talk just about the subtleties and eccentricities of Chess, or Baseball, but about the psychological ramifications of play, and the responsibilities of game developers to their players and the world. It’s only natural that as games have risen in social capital, the dominant forms of art have made efforts to domesticate their wooly cousin. Games have at different times been compared to film, television, novels, poetry, and even abstract art. Yet none of these projects have served any great utility in understanding ‘the heart of gameness’¹.

THE BIRTH OF INTERACTIVE DRAMA

During the late 90’s there was a movement among a range academics in support of what came to be called ‘interactive drama’. Founded on the sometimes utopian visions of Virtual Reality, theorists such as Janet Murray, Marie-Laure Ryan, and Brenda Laurel, spoke about a hopefully not too distant future where designers would have the tools and the resources to create an entirely new form of story-telling. Most of their predictions relied on belief that computer scientists would be successful in creating a computer with a level of artificial intelligence that would be indistinguishable from human intelligence. In other words, these theorists pined for a virtual ‘game master’ to keep watch over the narrative and world that users would be exploring, and that would make adjustments in response to the user’s actions. While the passage of time has brought most of these grand schemes down to earth, the legacy of these promises has lived on and influenced the pursuit of a few modern designers.

In 2005 Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern released Façade, which they had built entirely from scratch while Mateas earned his PhD from Carnegie Mellon University. Façade drops the player into the role of a guest at the apartment of a couple, Grace and Trip, who are experiencing a rough patch in their marriage. The game’s look and controls are reminiscent of early adventure games, both text-based and graphical, as well as modern first-person shooters. Players navigate through the apartment and the evening by pointing and clicking on objects, and typing questions to the couple. Whatever its faults (Mateas and Stern admit that it was not a complete success²), Façade successfully proved that there was a practical approach to interactive drama.

The arguments of academics such as Murray, Ryan, and Laurel, and the experiments of designers like Mateas and Stern, show that there is a need to examine games through one final lens: the performing arts. A case can be made that games and the performing arts overlap in several important ways, notably in structure and aesthetics. However, before this point can be made it might be helpful to shed light on the intrinsic differences that have made comparisons between games and some of the more prevalent forms of art unsatisfying.

 
EVENTS AND THEIR RULES

The most important thing that separates games from static media such as books, movies, or recorded music, but that it shares with the performing arts, is that it is an ‘event’. Both the novel and cinema are forms of art that came into their own with the help of mass production, and the individual ‘works’ are, as such, objects produced for mass consumption. What mass production guarantees is that no matter how many objects are produced of, say, Stephen King’s latest book, every copy will be identical. While the circumstances of experience, reading while in a park or on a train, may vary (and certainly interpretation will), the ‘work’ itself never changes. The same could be said of the movie made out of that book, or the soundtrack to the movie recorded and sold on a CD.

The ‘Fine Arts’, which includes painting and sculpture, while not typically mass-produced, are still very concerned with the fixed nature of the work. Though this assumption has been challenged by the work of artists such as Marcel Duchamp, Andy Warhol, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, and others, the ‘art world’ is still predominately concerned with the terminal act of creation. It is this obsession with rarity and with defeating change that separates the static arts from both the performing arts and, especially, games.

A great deal can and has been said about the rules of games and their history, but in a very real way a game does not exist until people gather the materials, and each other, and begin to play. You can say as much as you want about a great game of Football, but you can’t build it, you can only be there when it happens. You can do your best to engineer one through more complex rules, but a ‘good game’ can never be guaranteed. Likewise, when a game is over, it ceases to exist, and cannot be reproduced. This is a natural consequence of games typically having ‘emergent’ qualities, of being more than the sum of their parts.

A performance is an ‘event’ as well and like a game does not exist until people are gathered, and disappears once they have dispersed. The old adage that ‘no two games of Go have ever been the same’ could easily be applied to any dramatic performance. No two Othellos have ever been played the same, neither have two Odettes (the female lead of Swan Lake). Even within the run of a show, a performer will always change their performance from night to night, if only to stave off boredom. A game then is no more its rules than a performance is its script or choreography.

In most of the modern world, actors and athletes are celebrated to a sometimes irrational degree. That a similar celebrity status is given to practitioners of these two professions shouldn’t come as a surprise, as the two jobs aren’t very different. Both athletes and actors work within a supposedly inviolable structure, the rulebook for sports and the script for theatre. Within these structures the actions of the players, athletic and theatrical, are of the utmost importance, but outside of the event, outside the ‘magic circle’³, the same actions can be considered meaningless at best, and at worst, highly irregular or dangerous. Certainly, people have been killed over sports matches and actors have been arrested for their performances, and vice versa, but it’s hard to take these examples as anything but exceptions to the rule.

 
SIMPLE MISUNDERSTANDINGS

There are two points of contention that people might take with the argument that games and the performing arts are structurally similar. The first is that games have a high level of improvisation, participation and non-linearity, a wider variety of viable strategies for success, than do the performing arts. This springs mostly from a misunderstanding of the history of dramatic performance. The polite and passive audience is a relatively new occurrence. Secular performance began with the oral poets of the ancient world, who would weave stories based on folklore through pure improvisation, and adapt them to different situations and audiences. Twenty-four hundred years later performers of the Commedia dell’arte used similar techniques, featuring common tropes and characters, to entertain Italian audiences from the sixteenth to the eighteenth centuries.

William Shakespeare, whose work has been thoroughly tamed in performance, had to deal with audiences that would not be out of place at a modern rock concert, or a political rally, or a stand-up comedy show (this last comparison is perhaps the most appropriate). The reason that Shakespeare’s plays, and those of his contemporaries, are full of asides and soliloquies is that the audience would frequently talk to and sometimes yell at the performers onstage, as well as at other audience members. The brilliance of Shakespeare’s poetry is its flexibility, which allows for an actor to change inflection and thus the meaning of a line on the fly, often in response to an audience member’s outburst.

The second objection might be that, unlike a performance, games have goals, a winner and a loser. This objection, unlike the first, arises primarily out of a misunderstanding about games. ‘Goal’ is a vague term, and those who use it frequently don’t define whether they mean it in the sense of an ‘objective’, such as “in order to win you must do this…”, or as a ‘motivation’, such as “I would like to win rather than lose…”. To the latter definition it must be asserted that a game’s rules, no matter how carefully they may be structured, cannot make a player care about any particular outcome of a session of play. At any point in the game, a player may decide that they cannot win, and begin to play for second place. Motivation is something that is personal and individual to each player and beyond the control of the game’s design.

Regarding the first meaning of ‘goal’, it might be more accurate to call it an ‘end condition’. In other words, when a certain state has been reached in the game, the session is ended with a player, or set of players, given the status of ‘winner’. In this sense, though, it is hardly different from any theatrical performance, which is almost always meant to begin and end under certain predetermined conditions. The lovers are buried, the bows are taken, the curtain falls, and the audience goes home. Just as in a game, if for some reason the event ends without the pre-set conditions being met, it is usually because something went wrong, something that should be avoided in the future.

 
LONG LOST RELATIVES

Anyone who doubts the significant overlap between gaming and performing has only to look at the most important game, along with Pong, of the last thirty years: Dungeons and Dragons. Published in 1974 by Gary Gygax and Dave Arneson, it was accused of blurring its players’ senses of reality and fantasy long before the current political hysteria over violent video games. It has since then influenced more games than any person could ever play. While from the outside it’s easy to get distracted by Dungeons and Dragons’ dense and highly arcane ruleset, it’s important not to overlook that the very same rulset is what gives ordinary players the framework to take remarkable, and completely improvised, flights of fantasy. Though a session can be a long and grueling affair, words that game designers usually try to avoid, Dungeons and Dragons remains compelling because it is able to give people without any formal training a space to create meaningful performances, to give them their own narrative and a world in which to make their own interpretations. The ruleset of Dungeons and Dragons cannot be mistaken for anything other than the ruleset of a game, and the performances that it engenders cannot be distinguished from that of any piece of improvised theatre.

Dungeons and Dragons is the most prominent example of the porous line between games and the performing arts but interesting cases can also be found in video games, which are more often and erroneously compared to movies. In his book, Game Design, Satoshi Tajiri, the creator of Pokemon, writes that good games are built around verbs, like ‘sneaking’, or ‘jumping’, or ‘catching’. This echoes Aristotle, who asserted that all good drama centered on a unified action, such as ‘the search for truth’, or ‘the quest for revenge’. Bertolt Brecht used what he called an ‘alienation effect’ to draw his audience’s attentions away from the reality portrayed onstage and to the overt political statements of that reality, and the theatrical experience itself. The Metal Gear Solid games, which are the life’s work of Hideo Kojima, similarly combine rich, immersive worlds and stories with constant reminders to the player that they are still playing a game. It should come as no surprise that Kojima’s games center around the vicissitudes of international politics. Finally Gonzalo Frasca, who is an important member of the recent ‘Serious Games’ movement, cites Augusto Boal, a playwright and theorist who wrote the seminal Theatre of the Oppressed, as an inspiration for his own game designs.

None of what has been argued here is to suggest that game development is not its own distinct discipline, with its own possibilities and limitations. What is being argued is that games and theatre are much closer cousins than has been considered before, and an open dialogue between the two might be richer and more productive than the current ‘cinema envy’ that grips the games industry. Though games are probably the oldest form of human culture⁴, those who care about the advancement of the field are stuck in a somewhat youthful paradox: while steadfastly defending the uniqueness of game development against the “colonialism” of other forms of art, we are still envious of the legitimacy and popularity those forms enjoy. Once games move past this particular cultural dissonance then an honest assessment of similarities and differences can be made, and unexpected and informative connections will surely emerge.

Author’s Note: The greater part of this essay was written over a year ago for Frank Lantz’s Game Design class at NYU’s Interactive Telecommunications Department. While my position has become a little more nuanced since then, I still agree with the primary argument: that games and the performing arts are so similar that they can sometimes be indistinguishable.

Cited Works:

¹Jesper Juul – The Game, The Player, The World: Looking for a Heart of Gameness

²Michael Mateas and Andrew Stern – Build It to Understand It: Ludology Meets Narratology in Game Design Space

^3&4Johan Huizinga – Homo Ludens