Product, Service, or Art: What is a Game?

Part Two: Art meets capitalism, and the usual thing happens.

Palette-swaps for your League of Legends jelly-man. This is paid customization, not interactivity.
Source: Leagueoflegends.com

Well, we’ve come to…well, basically no conclusion at all about what interactivity in games actually means, but we have at least determined that its presence or absence isn’t an indicator of quality. So now the question becomes: why do we talk about it all the time as if it is?

The problem arises when we confuse interactivity with customization, when we blur the lines between games as artistic medium and games as consumer product. We do this, and then we are financially incentivized to do this, because our arguments about “how gamey a game is” are great advertising for games we love, and even better advertising for games we hate. Y’know…I think I’m gonna start using ‘gamey,’ as in, ‘having the strong taste and smell of wild meat’ to refer to this reductive, capitalist view of games — it has the same transformative power as a bullet on a deer, the same ability to convert complex, interdependent life into a sad heap of wet, smelly product.

The thing is, the way we think about shopping for products is very different from the way we think about art. When you buy a product, you’re looking for specific functionality, and anything it provides beyond that is customization — non-fundamental changes to the product that make it more individually satisfying to you but do not alter its purpose. Additional features in a product are considered a universal good — if you can add more bullet points on the package, you should, regardless of how relevant they are! Sure, slap ‘gluten-free’ on that package of ground beef, people like gluten-free things, right?

Raw, succulent, gluten-free video game

But that’s not how art works. No matter what medium you work in, you’ll be told by every artist you meet that the art should contain nothing it doesn’t absolutely need. If this isn’t the most interesting, important part of this character’s life, why are you showing me this? If the painting isn’t about that random dude over there, why did you go to so much trouble painting him? The hardest thing to learn as an artist is editing, but it’s the only way you’ll ever get published on anything but a blog. It’s painful at first, to be locked in a room with two of your favorite sentences and a bullet for one of them, but it’ll teach you real quick to be a lot more discerning about the essential bones and meat of your story, what it can’t survive without, than any triple-A game dev.

Players of collectible card games know this instinctively — that’s what it takes, to build a deck that can win. Extra cards are just more draws between you and what you want, which means every single card that is not critical to your success is actively detrimental. Deckbuilding is incredibly hard for this reason, and I’m not any better at it than I am at editing. You’re probably more than ten minutes into my rambles at this point; do you think I’ve got a good eye for what really matters? But even I’m doing better than many modern game devs, who design games exactly as they would design a microwave — with all the latest popular features and a custom faceplate in your favorite color!

Why does the original Half-Life have those awful jumping puzzles? Because gamers expected them to be there — jumping puzzles were a feature in other major shooters at the time, like Doom and Quake, and so there they are in Half-Life, like a butcher’s thumb in the middle of your sandwich, clogging up your craw with something the recipe didn’t call for.

Why does Spec Ops: the Line have multiplayer? Does it add anything to the game? Or does it completely obliterate the tone control, tight focus and mechanical consistency of the game in order to provide a mediocre knockoff of the gaming experience it was savagely criticizing in the campaign? Well, it’s got multiplayer because it’s a military shooter, and multiplayer is one of those lines on the back of the box that will be empty if they don’t half-ass something and jam it in sideways at the last minute! It’s a feature! Gamers complain when there aren’t enough features!

Games manufactured like products create gamers who scream bloody murder when a tired genre trope is discarded, who get into fights over the potential framerates of games that haven’t launched yet, who start petitions to have the endings of published games altered so that they “get the game they deserved” — the one that they imagined before it launched, presumably, that ethereal game that contains all features and encompasses all gameplay…except whatever kinds you don’t like, of course.

Dear Esther, a very non-gamey game.

When a game is interactive in a way that isn’t meaningful to us personally, we say it’s not interactive, and then we claim that our favorite brand of interactivity is a definitional feature of games, calling games that lack this feature incomplete, badly made — inferior art on the basis of their lack of customization as consumer products.

You did this.

Yes, you. You who scoffed when people said, “Don’t pre-order games, it’s creating an industry that doesn’t care about quality or finishing things,” you who argued about whether Dear Esther should have been allowed to charge money for THAT, as if the only things worth money in this world are things you already had in new packaging. You who blithered about “ethics in games journalism” as a smokescreen for your bigotry and nihilism, you to whom ‘ethical games journalism’ apparently consists of press releases that confidently assure you you’ll be able to murder as many brown people as you want without having to think about what any of it might mean for a second.

Okay, let’s calm down. That guy’s not reading my work, I know that. I’m an “SJW,” a gender weirdo who’s never touched a Call of Duty game, who thought they were right to fix Tracer’s booty-pose, and the kind of gamer I’m mad at didn’t make it as far as the headline, let alone all the way down here. So maybe those of us who did perceive the problem as it was developing, who get more nervous than excited when we hear the term “pre-order bonus,” can push back against it a bit. Perhaps we can do better at clarifying when we’re talking about a game as art or as a product. Perhaps we can remember which is which when we’re criticizing a game for lacking features we wanted that it doesn’t actually need.

Demand features from triple-A devs, sure — that’s the bargain they’ve struck with you, a bargain where they churn out new versions of the same bullshit each year and you compare the bullet points to last year’s, like Dudley Dursley counting his Christmas presents. They want you to treat their games like rented appliances, sending a guy round every two years or so to convince you to upgrade, and shutting off your service entirely if you don’t keep up the payments. So that’s probably how you should treat them — like the people who send you junk mail. They happily lie to your face, treat you like an idiot and a child, and do absolutely anything to get your money… anything except actually making something you’d want to buy. You should close the door in their faces until they get less laissez-faire about their capitalism. All I’m asking for is a corporate overlord who actually read Ayn Rand, y’know? Value for value and all that. At least they could commit to the ideals they’re cramming down our throats.

How to actually criticize art

But get out of my face with this nonsense about whether Death Stranding can “count” as a game without constant combat, whether Fallout 76 is objectively worse as a game because it’s different from previous Fallouts, whether it’s permissible to make changes to a game on artistic grounds without gamers screeching that they removed a feature! Interactivity may be the defining characteristic of the gaming medium, but it’s not an either-or proposition, a sliding scale from book to game, where game is synonymous with “unlimited interactivity” and we pull out more No-true-Scotsman arguments as the number goes down.

If that were the case, something like Little Big Planet or Dreams, something that allows you to build the game to your preferences from the ground up, would be the apex of “game” — the interactivity is off the charts! But because it has fewer fixed systems on which we can make an impact, we see that utter interactivity as more akin to the use of a medium — Dreams isn’t the game, you make games with Dreams. But…if you wanted to buy Dreams, you’d find it in the games section at the store. 

As a product, it’s a game. As a game, it’s terrible. But as an artistic medium, it’s fantastic. See how we’ve tangled things up?

We’re pretty good at the part where we yell at companies for not making products we like. It doesn’t help, but we know how to do it. Art criticism is the thing most of us aren’t trained to do, and that’s what I want you to work on, before you carry on shooting off at the mouth about what is and is not a game.

Goethe’s three questions are probably the most basic rubric for interpreting art:

1. What was the artist attempting to do?
2. Did the artist achieve their aim?
3. Was that a thing worth attempting?

It’s vital that we answer these three questions before we attempt to argue about what a piece of art should or should not contain. It’s also critical to answer them in order — the issue with much of our gaming coverage is that it jumps straight to question #3 without considering one and two at all. Criticism itself is content that can be monetized, so we’re financially incentivized to offer criticism that is inflammatory and uninformed, that cares nothing for artistic intention, makes no attempt at anything beyond surface analysis, and is useless to the artist because it fundamentally misunderstands and rejects the work it’s critiquing on purpose. That’s what gets clicks. That’s what makes money — people being wrong and loud.

And the thing is…

We sound super stupid doing it. We do, though. And we’re ruining our hobby by acting like we’re ordering from McDonald’s when we criticize games.

The Outer Worlds. Source: RPGamer

Is it food, or is it a meal?

Look at it this way:

You go to the store to buy Doritos, and you see someone buying lettuce. Do you stop that person and say, “Hey, why are you buying that? It doesn’t taste good, you can’t just eat it out of the bag, you gotta do all kinds of other stuff before it’s even tasty, and you can’t microwave it or fry it or keep it for very long…why would you EVER buy that when you could buy chips instead?”

Well, you see, because food is a product, something I buy for its utility, but it’s also a medium, something I can put more effort and creativity into and get correspondingly more out of. If I want a more complex and nuanced experience, I might need to add some things I already have to the mix, I might need to put in some work and time to make it just right.

An example: Obsidian is a game studio responsible for some games that are considered the most narratively nuanced and deep in the genre, games that explored choice and consequence in interactive media with such intelligence and passion that Bioshock looked pedestrian in that area before it even launched. Their most recent offering, The Outer Worlds, is…less like that. It’s clever, it’s funny, it’s better written than most games, but…

Well, check out this quote from one of the devs:

“We used to do dialogue where you had to pick the right choices all along this path to open up the [skill-based] dialogue choices, and then you have to pick the right dialogue ones, and it’s just like ‘I put all my points into dialogue and if I blow this, I’m screwed, because I’m going to have to end up fighting this guy.’ So we wanted to make it still feel challenging. It still felt like you were making choices, but a much more directed form of that. So you don’t have to get every decision right to get into the right place to be able to pick the right dialogue skill, if that makes sense.”
- Leonard Boyarsky to PCGamer in 2018

Here’s the thing about those games that required you to “pick the right choices all along this path” — to people who value narrative choice and self-expression, that’s called replay value. If I want a different ending in Disco Elysium, I might have to restrain myself from shining like exactly the kind of crazy alcoholic diamond I want to for a bit…but that isn’t a lack of interactivity or a reduction of my options, because the other option is still there for me to go back and experience later.

The boys at Obsidian used to be titans in terms of dense, branching storylines that allowed forms of player self-expression that did not directly translate into loot. Why is The Outer Worlds, pitched as a savvy corporate black comedy with the pedigree of the original Fallout games, a generic Bethesda-style craft-and-collect-a-thon in all its actual gameplay? Does that kind of gameplay actually express and emphasize the (sometimes) nuanced choices you can make about politics and economics? Or… is “process the natural world into components to use or sell via our established pipeline and pay us a nominal fee, none of which is meaningfully altered by your dialogue choices” actually a form of gameplay in direct opposition to everything the game claimed to be trying to accomplish?

So why is The Outer Worlds like this?

Well, because Fallout 4 and Skyrim sold much, much better than Fallout and Planescape: Torment. Because this kind of vaguely directed, inventory-cramming and crafting mechanic is jammed sideways into every game, whether it belongs there or not. Because if it’s not there, someone will say, “I can’t shoot space dinosaurs and craft bullets in this game? Well shit, what can I even do? Does that even count as a game?”

You see, an end user who wants a mechanically satisfying experience that matches their expectations and doesn’t demand anything of them— the purchaser of the chips, if you will — isn’t the best person to ask what makes a good salad. They didn’t want to put in the work to make one, that’s why they bought the chips. 

And that’s okay! People don’t have to like the same games for the same reasons. Buy your chips! The existence of lettuce does not obliterate the existence of chips. The lettuce is not worse food because it lacks all the features the chips have. It’s not as good for a specific person who wanted chips, but… that’s not actually a metric to judge lettuce on. It’s just a personal preference. What matters is what you went into the store looking for — did you want food, or did you want a meal?

Gameplay sold separately

Death Stranding, you can put down your fists. Stop insecurely defending your choice to not emphasize combat. You were never going to please those people — they didn’t want your game, and that’s fine. No one’s going to go around confiscating copies of Death Stranding when Call of Duty comes out; they’re not in competition with each other because competition is something that happens between things that can be measured on an objective scale. 

Art is subjective — its value is specific to each person who experiences it, and changes based on how much we choose to invest ourselves in the experience. Animal Crossing is not a threat to the existence of Counter-Strike, even though Animal Crossing could take up the rest of your life and all of your time, because they are very different experiences. No one ever bought Animal Crossing and then said, “Well good, now I have my military shooter needs all sewn up, I never need another military shooter in my life now that I have Animal Crossing.”

So when you’re talking about a game as a product, stop talking about its narrative options or a certain level of “interactivity” as if it’s a feature. Not because those things aren’t a feature — they might be, to you — but because you’re confusing the discussion of widespread product utility with the discussion of personal artistic preference. When we’re analyzing the narrative or mechanics of a game, we need to get rid of the talking point about what a given artistic choice might have done to the game’s sales as a product. With the increasing access we have to game developers, able to scream directly into their inboxes about what we don’t like, we are negatively affecting how games get made, as devs scramble to please everyone by cramming in half-implemented features.

When we act as if our purchasing decisions are affected more by product customization than by meaningful narrative or mechanical feedback about our choices in-game, we are voting with our wallets, voting for more Facebook games to scalp your grandma, more games with empty third acts because reviewers never finish them anyway, more games pushed out seasonally like phones, palette-swaps over last year’s tech.

interactivity is financial influence

The games-as-service paradigm has created a desperation in our corporate overlords, the need to continue printing money based on ever smaller offerings of actual product. They would like you to associate the feeling of accomplishment and completion with the act of purchase. Interactivity is financial influence.

This is the disturbing face of late-stage capitalism, and it’s why this confusion about whether games are art or a consumer product only serves those intent on exploiting the medium for profit. In an attempt to seem more relatable and emotionally manipulate you more effectively, corporations position themselves as people, people who make funny jokes on Twitter, people you might have a beer with. This is a prelude to the disturbing bit: the bit where they guilt and shame you for not buying their product as if they’re a family member whose feelings you’ve hurt. The bit where a corporation’s followers defend them online with the kind of drooling zeal that clearly expects a nude pic from Sony in return.

This is the world we chose, in the standard way, by voting with our dollars. We told them that the kind of interactivity consumers truly respond to is the ability to change games by cracking open our wallets. Here’s the thing — when you use money to convey a message, that message only gets to the people who take your money, and once they have your money, they don’t care about your message anymore. What a game might have meant to the medium, might have done with interactivity, what it was trying to say as a piece of art… no one will even have a chance to find out until they’ve already spent their money, already lost the attention of the people determining what games get made and how. 

When we support these practices, when we pay for customization rather than interactivity, when we clamor for preorder bonuses, when we assert that games pushing the boundaries of the medium cannot be games at all, our money goes from people who don’t care about games as a medium, largely into the pockets of developers who don’t care about games as a medium, who are bolstered by their success to make more games that make the medium measurably worse. We can do better, both as consumers and as lovers of games as art, if we pay just a little bit of attention to which hat we’re wearing at any given point in time.