Time In, Fun Out
I’ve been playing Braid, and thus reading about Braid, and reading the creator’s blog. And, because he links to a lot of indie games that seem primarily to be intended as art pieces — and because Braid itself seems inclined to think of itself as an art piece — I’ve been pondering the well-worn questions ‘Are games art?’ and ‘Should games be art?’
I think the answers to these questions are always mired in the respondent’s definition of ‘art’, and in an act of rebellion I’m not going to try to define art at all. I’m going to go with the time-honored ‘I know it when I see it’ definition, and assume that Braid is, in fact, art — and that Soul Calibur IV isn’t. You can draw whatever conclusion you like about my definition of art from that; I think part of it has to do with how self-conscious the game’s creator is about the issue of art, but that’s not the whole of my definition.
The pitfall of making a game as an art piece is that you’re likely to make art, but unlikely to make a game. For the sake of argument, let’s assume that Empire is art. That there’s some lesson to be taken from it, and there’s some meaning, and watching it can be enlightening and uplifting. I’m not saying that’s necessarily what art is for, and I think I’m being generous to Empire, but for the sake of argument, I’m going to assume these things are true. So: would I play a game that was to games what Empire is to films?
Hell no. And I think anyone who claims they would is lying.
I don’t know that I can define the function of a painting, or a film, but I can sure as hell define the function of a game: to be entertaining. I want to spend time playing a game, and have fun. Time goes in, fun comes out. After all, you can’t masturbate all day long; you will eventually get chafed. Everything else a game does is secondary to this equation: Time + Game = Fun.
That includes art.
I confess to intentionally avoiding ‘feel-bad’ movies. I’ve never seen Requiem for a Dream. I loathed The Mist. And while I’ve appreciated Schindler’s List and Trainspotting and hell, even The Dark Knight, I don’t have a lot of urge to watch any of them a second time. Without trying to figure out what the purpose of a movie is, I can at least say: my time investment in a movie is small, and my emotional investment in a movie is small. A movie doesn’t ask me to be any of the characters; a movie doesn’t care what decisions I’ve made; a movie doesn’t present its art as a consequence of my actions. It’s passive. I watch, then I think ‘huh, that was interesting’ and I go home.
Games, on the other hand, are demanding. They want me to take responsibility for what happens on screen. They want me to believe that their message, if there is a message present, is revealed because I wanted it to be — that I have some volition within the game’s structure. If something bad happens, it’s my fault as much as it’s the game designer’s fault. I’ve never understood people who play Grand Theft Auto games and murder prostitutes for cash. I feel guilty when I choose the ‘evil’ options in Bioware games.
So a game can certainly have a ‘message’ or a ‘meaning’ or ‘make me think.’ And I’m not, generically, opposed to games having these things. It often makes for a more involving and engaging experience. If I couldn’t choose to murder the little girls in Bioshock, I wouldn’t appreciate saving them as much.
However. The first thing a game needs to do is be entertaining. If a game fails to be entertaining, I don’t actually give a shit about its meaning or its message. Games have a purpose. Time in, fun out. Period.
Braid works, and it works very very well. You should probably be playing Braid now instead of reading this. But Braid works precisely because it gets the basics right. Time goes in, fun comes out. The gameplay succeeds. Having succeeded at gameplay, Braid is then free to ask Meaningful and Important questions. Braid can make me feel genuinely bad for the little enemy guy I’m trying to save from an evil plant; the tenth time I get that little guy killed, and I rewind to save him, I feel a great sense of relief that time is flexible and he’s not dead for good. Braid can do this because the play is already there.
Time in, fun out is the foundation. Whatever you build the house out of, whatever architectural shenanigans you bring to its construction, are irrelevant if the whole thing is going to fall apart because your foundation is rotten.
I played the demo of the new Alone in the Dark game, and the point was driven home. In the first few minutes of the demo, I’m powerless, weak, being shoved along towards my execution by a thug with a gun. If I try to resist him, he warns me, and then ultimately kills me and sends me back to the beginning to try again. The only way to proceed is to allow yourself to be herded along, responding to each barked order promptly and without fuss. By the end of this sequence I was seething with rage, and when the game snatched the jerkoff away and killed him in a non-interactive cutscene, it was all I could do to keep from immediately quitting. In the scenes that followed, I faced a variety of incomprehensible threats, was trapped by fire, and ultimately reached a challenge I simply couldn’t be bothered to solve. At no point did I feel rewarded; my character never seemed competent, and I never got to take any sort of vengeance on anything for the initial abusive segment. I felt like I’d been kicked in the nuts and then told to walk it off. I wanted to lash out, to do anything that felt like a positive step forward, even if it was just a line of snappy dialogue. Time in: 30 minutes. Fun out: zero.
I don’t care how attractive the character design was. I don’t care about the awesome lighting. I don’t care about the story, and I don’t care about the scary monster effects, and I certainly don’t care about the (yawn) amnesiac protagonist. I could have cared about that if there had been any fun generated in that first 30 minutes — but the game failed at being a game, and that rendered everything else it was trying to do irrelevant.
When making a game, ask yourself at every moment: Does time in = fun out? If so, congratulations. You’ve earned the right to make your game a piece of art, or a tech demo, or a political statement, or whatever. You’ve earned the right to use your game as a platform for your own personal crusade. But if not, you can be the game world’s version of Michaelangelo sculpting the Pieta and it won’t matter. I won’t play your game, and neither will most people. Your deep and profound meditations on loss and love will go unheard, and your only recourse will be angst-filled blog posts about how the mainstream audience just doesn’t get art, man, it’s like they’re all sheep and stuff.
Braid is art. But it earned the right to be art.