Go Forth, and Go Right – Art and Video games

Ironically, the simplistic action in gaming – moving through a level – might also be it’s most profound. If there’s one archetypal element that video games have long relied upon as a narrative device, it’s the Quest motif. Moving from the present to the future is humanity’s common theme, and games have illustrated this point with the simple action of moving across a stage from left to right. It seems basic, but its inclusion is at the heart of gaming, whether we as a community recognize its importance or not. In the all important “Are Games Art?” debate, such a motif indicates that games are capable of imitating, if not becoming, art when they recognize their reason for existence.

Games like Limbo, Journey, and Braid have been acclaimed as art within gaming – central to each of these tales is the act of progressing onward, forsaking all hope of returning unchanged to previous stages or places. The most grand of titles – Mass Effect and Zelda are prime examples – may have bigger budgets, yet each of them feature the journey motif with just a slightly altered camera perspective. The commonality of obtaining and completing a goal – think Frodo and the ring – is at the heart of these games and nearly every cherished gaming series.

With that in mind, a youtube video entitled “Go Right”  is making waves in the gaming community for illustrating how very often games tap the motif.  In the video, “going right” is the journey forward, and moving backward – or attempting to – is either forbidden or consciously realized as contrary to completing the goal. You may recognize many of your favorite series in this clip, but notice how very different they appear when the camera solely focuses on the action of “going right”:

I believe that good art, in the words of Elaine Scarry, decenters the one who experiences it because of the beauty contained within it. Decentering, in its most loose term, demands that you be overwhelmed and changed by encountering that art. Her theory contains several points, but it can be summed like this – what is good is beautiful and truthful. I’m not privy to the conversations of developers as they work on titles, but I wonder how many of them define beauty as good and true? Many games boast of having beautiful graphics, but that definition of beauty is superficial and misleads us away from what should be our focus – expressing the human experience. The result will be, as Scarry eloquently states, a movement that adds worth and an awareness of truth to whatever medium through which the art is expressed and to the person who experiences it:

“What has been raised is not the level of aliveness,which is already absolute, but one’s own access to the already existing level of aliveness, bringing about, if not a perfect match, at least a less inadequate match between the actual aliveness of others and the level with which we daily credit them. [. . .] Beauty is, then, a compact, or contract between the beautiful being (a person or thing) and the perceiver. As the beautiful being confers on the perceiver the gift of life, so the perceiver confers on the beautiful being the gift of life.”

We all partake of the same journey from birth to death, and must recognize that moving backward – not in reflection, but in an attempt to reclaim that past – hinders and negates our ability to become whole. How else to explain that in so many video games, standing still is often the worst offense? In the video, Spiderman – among a few others – looks directly into the camera when he isn’t moving towards the level’s end. Why does he do that?

Surely it’s more than to provide some cheap amusement, or to imbue personality into an otherwise emotionless, masked face? Furthermore, why doesn’t Sonic glare at you whenever you cause him to die instead of when you make him idly sit, preventing him from achieving the only goal – moving forward – he knows? Those characters simply reflect the wishes of some designer, but that designer has illustrated, however simply, that games are capable of reflecting our shared journey. Games involve, as Scarry mentioned, a contract, where you are expected to enable the protagonist to his journey’s end. Sadly, few games ever attempt to acknowledge their end of the bargain, leaving us with “realistic” games that have little importance and even less to say about life.

While the Quest motif typically involves two halves (completing the goal and returning home), most games imitate the grandest and oldest of all archetypes. It’s only a matter of time before a shift towards recognizing this motif as central to their worth as art and to culture occurs within gaming. To be honest, until this video, I firmly held – though I have argued that games expressed artistic qualities – the opinion that games could not be art because they inherently place attention on the gamer to control them.Yet now, there seems hope that attention will shift towards what is beautiful and good, forcing us to decenter ourselves and recognize our shared humanity as we attempt to go right.