Is Art Games?
The “are games art?” debate has been rumbling on fruitlessly for what feels like an age, with an occasional spike when some new release contains a particularly emotional cutscene. Twenty years on from Aeris’ death scene and its ability to elicit tears, Final Fantasy VII remains a flashpoint in discussions on the artistic merits of the medium. Injections of high drama or poignancy into high-profile genre pieces remain the prism through which games’ broader merits are usually judged. Some canny developers, though, avoid contention entirely, by approaching their work from the opposite direction. Forget making art from games – instead, make games from art.
A quite literal example of this is the recently released interactive adaptation of Van Gogh’s The Night Café by Borrowed Light Studios. Designed for use with virtual-reality headsets, it utilises the transportive properties of those devices to offer a new perspective on the piece – perspective being a pretty integral component of the original. When games are described as being “painterly”, it usually just means that they’re vividly coloured and flatly textured. But Night Café pays just as much attention to composition and framing as it does to more traditionally valued elements like lighting. Despite subtle object motions lending the scene a more immediate sense of vitality, though, giving the player power of camera positioning inevitably means that some angles end up feeling more static than the painting. But as an experiment in immersive art, it’s a definite success, with its many references, subtle and otherwise, to some of Van Gogh’s other paintings a great pleasure.
In the realm of original work, the Triennale Game Collection is a series of pieces for mobile devices, commissioned for the Triennale International Exhibition in Milan. Consisting of five games from developers in Europe and the US, they range from meditative digital toys to disorienting pictorial mazes that link physical and mental space. The centrepiece is Cardboard Computer’s Neighbor, which appears to be a rather direct interpretation of the phrase “sandbox game”. Set in a real dust bowl of a valley, players control an enigmatic, beponchoed figure as they harvest aloe, bury trinkets and make offerings on a mysterious altar. Playing it thankfully doesn’t conjure up questions regarding art versus entertainment. Instead, you’ll be the good kind of mystified.
BoxBoxBoy!
HAL Laboratory – 3DS
In puzzle games, there’s a fine line between simplicity and austerity. Removing any extraneous design elements usually serves to enhance clarity, but if taken too far, it can lead to total detachment. HAL Laboratory doesn’t exactly have an extensive history in the genre, but it’s certainly been a quick study. BoxBoxBoy!, the sequel to last year’s surprise pleasure BoxBoy!, knows exactly where to stand.
The presentation isn’t exactly resplendent. Mostly presented in monochrome, the game doesn’t even utilise the 3DS’s headline feature, not even for some tokenistic depth-of-field effect – this is strictly a 2D affair. But the subtly distinctive animations of Qbby, the player character, amuse even as they signify available actions. Played as a side-on platform game, the objective is simply to get from one end of each level to the other. In order to pass obstacles such as spike pits and sheer cliff faces, Qbby can sprout, fungus-like, boxes from his body, equal in size to himself. He can then deposit and shift these about to act as bridges and stairs, or sometimes as shields against lasers. BoxBoxBoy!, like its predecessor, is extremely methodical when it comes to increasing level complexity, never wanting to introduce more than one idea at a time. It takes a fair few levels before it introduces the concept of using a string of boxes as a sort of grappling hook, and things slowly get more intricate from there. Almost all frustration is sucked out, at the expense of adding intermittent tedium. The biggest advancement from the first game is the increased prominence of a previously fleetingly used ability to create more than one distinct set of boxes at a time. The sequel’s name then is pretty fitting – totally silly, while also being bluntly straightforward.
Like a Boss
Streets 1:12 – GoldenEye 007
As speedrunners so frequently and amply demonstrate, the most daunting challenges in games, ahead of any set-piece boss battles, are the ones we set ourselves. And few of these feats require the daring, luck and exquisite choreography of racing through GoldenEye’s “Streets” level as quickly as possible. Ryan Lockwood’s hugely impressive time of 72 seconds may have been surpassed in recent months, but the frenzied, vulgar and at times incomprehensible self-commentary accompanying the YouTube video of his accomplishment make his run the most formidable and legendary of all.
Words: Leo Devlin
