Fun Inc. (13 page)

File-sharing and gaming communities are very different. But to those ‘digital natives’ in their early teens embarking now into the online world, the barriers between friendships, play, cultural discourse and everyday communications are increasingly not so much permeable as non-existent. With online ‘counter-culture’ fast approaching the point where it has a similar number of active participants to the mainstream culture it is supposed to be against, it’s time to realise that games represent a substantial social force that needs to be plugged into the mainstream of cultural and political life as rapidly as possible. Politicians and businessmen hoping to thrive in the digital world would do better to study games for tips on everything from leadership to community organisation than to waste their time discussing the vanished dream of an unmediated society.

C
HAPTER
7

Clouds and flowers

In December 1895, the Lumière brothers, Auguste and Louis, showed the first films of real-life images to a paying audience, in Paris. In jerking black and white, people watched workers leaving a factory, bathers splashing around in the sea and – most famously – a train rushing into a station, the sight of which sent many spectators running out of the room in terror. It sounds banal today, yet such was the novelty and astonishing power of the moving image that many people simply could not believe it was being generated by a machine.

Here was a medium, but not yet an art form – much as, several thousand years earlier, the earliest known forms of writing had emerged not as a means of self-expression, but as a simple accounting method for tallying Mesopotamian crops and taxes. Film, too, for its first decade, was largely a novelty, a technological wonder whose purpose was simply to amaze – and turn a profit. From around the turn of the century, film increasingly became a medium of public entertainment as well as mere spectacle; but the notion of multi-reel ‘feature films’ did not become widespread until the time of the First World War, some twenty-five years after the moving picture’s debut. The advent of sound, in 1928, was another watershed for the medium, but although great cinematic works were now being produced, it took several decades more for film to master its own, unique artistic language: cinematography. It took time, too, for audiences to expect more from it than raw wonder or exhilaration; yet today it would be difficult to find a single person who does not admire at least one film as a work of art.

When it comes to video games, however, any enquiry will soon turn up people who’ve never even played them, let alone consider them of any artistic interest. This is hardly surprising. Commercial games have been around for less than four decades and, at first glance, it can seem that most of them remain, in artistic terms, at the level of cinema’s train entering a station – occasions for technological shock and awe rather than for the more densely refined emotions of art.

Yet the nature of games as a creative medium has changed profoundly in recent years; and, increasingly, it’s become difficult to draw any firm dividing line between many of the creative processes that go into making a successful game, and those that go into creating a film, or even a work of literary fiction or two-dimensional art. Take the case of Justin Villiers, an award-winning screenwriter and film-maker who since late 2007 has been plying his trade in the realm of video games. A decade ago, his career move would have been unthinkable for anyone serious about the artistic values of the medium they were working in. Today, though, he believes that distinction has almost entirely vanished. ‘In the old days the games industry fed on itself. You’d have designers who were brought up on video games and tired genre movies writing games themselves, so they were entirely self-referential; all the characters sounded like refugees from weak
Star Trek
episodes or
Lord of the Rings
out-takes. But now, there is new blood in the industry: not just in the writing, but in the whole creative process; people with backgrounds in cinema and theatre and comic books and television.’

It’s a process that has, if anything, been accelerating with each passing year: the quality of writing attracts A-list actors, the financial success of games and the shifting demographic of their audience draws in leading directors and composers and even authors. Indeed, the sheer speed of this transition is now one of the defining artistic facts about the medium. Every year, Villiers explains, ‘a new game will appear that wows us with something never seen before: a narrative design, a game play technique, a hardware coup. It’s an industry growing fast but not remotely close to being fully realised. In the area in which I work, writing and direction, games are just starting to offer real catharsis, or to bring about epiphanies; they’re becoming more than simply tools to sublimate our desires or our fight for survival.’

In terms of the analogy with film, he continues, ‘it reminds me of the late 1960s and early 1970s in film-making, because there were no rules, or, as soon as there were some, someone would come along and break them. Kubrick needed a lens for
2001: a Space Odyssey
that didn’t exist, so, together with the director of photography, he invented one. For
The Shining
, he wanted the camera to move in a certain way, so he invented the steady cam. It’s like that in the industry right now. Around a table you have the creative director, lead animator, game designer, sound designer and me, and we’re all trying to work out how to create a moment in a game or a sequence that has never been done before, ever. We’re literally having to invent new methods and technology to realise our dreams.’

The issue of compromise is also not as fraught as might be expected, given the demands of writing for an interactive medium. ‘Where there’s money there is of course compromise,’ Villiers explains. ‘But, if anything, there is more freedom in game development. Television and film have settled into tired, sellable genres being made by people desperate to keep their jobs as advertising revenues fall and people consume other media. Games are still in a position to startle and surprise.’ This ability to experiment is one of the most significant artistic assets gaming has. It is, now, a very big business indeed, yet the idealism and energy of the bright young people flocking towards it is a powerful counterbalance to the deadening hand of commercial realities. Where bestselling books and top-grossing films are often formulaic, the games charts are consistently packed with clever, innovative, paradigm-busting titles whose production standards – and whose close relationship with a critically engaged audience – are second to none.

Exactly how artistically sophisticated the process of creating a modern game is can only really be appreciated by looking at the process in detail. With over 220 employees, Blitz Games Studios is one of the largest independent makers of video games in Britain – and a fine place to follow the intricacies of turning a major game from a concept into a playable reality. It’s a process that, as Blitz’s senior concept artist Bob Cheshire knows better than most, demands much more than mere keyboard and mouse crunching. ‘Drawing and painting, these are the most important things for anyone wanting to do my job. Plus the ability to turn over ideas fast and to create a world from scratch, visually. You have to be able to conjure up everything from brands and logos to products, furniture and streets.’ A typical mainstream game involves producing many hundreds of hand-made images before any computer is even touched: drawings that provide the conceptual context – and inspiration – for the teams of other artists who will bring every detail of a new world to life.

After the concept art, a game’s dedicated three-dimensional art team step in to turn these sketches first into detailed schematic drawings, then into 3D models composed from polygons. Again, traditional art skills top the list of requirements for anyone in this sector: the ability not only to sketch by hand, but also to model in clay, and to understand the contours and musculatures of both people and objects. Even when a three-dimensional world exists, however, less than half the artistic battle is complete. Now life and motion need to be conjured, another set of skills rooted in long-established artistic principles rather than hard science. The key textbook for young animators teaches the same 12-point method that Walt Disney’s studio established in the 1930s. Momentum and the illusion of weight can make all the difference between something that appears to possess real life and something that merely moves – and, given that every object within a game is by definition mere weightless pixels, it can only be produced by careful artistry.

Then comes the sound. Unlike a film or television programme, a game begins entirely silent: every sound in it must, like every graphical pixel, be conjured from scratch, via a combination of location, studio and stock work, not to mention voice recording and music. This includes the entire business of scripting and directing what may be up to 100 hours or more of in-game scenes and interactions; complete with, increasingly, motion-capture techniques pioneered by the film industry that transfer real actors’ performances almost directly onto computer-generated characters. There’s no chance of drumming up a coach-load of extras for crowd scenes, of course: everything you see in a game will have followed the same labour-intensive path of concept art, 3D modelling, surface texturing, animation and the addition of sound.

It’s only after all this creation has taken place that a game is actually slotted together into a coherent whole, integrated with its rules, layouts, interface, control systems, rewards, structure and dynamics. After all this, the studio then faces a mammoth series of quality control milestones to be passed, with testers putting in hundreds and even thousands of hours to ensure that every element of the game functions as it should. In a virtual world, nothing can be taken for granted; there is no reality beyond the fiction the game itself generates, and this must be maintained at all costs.

Much of this process is remarkably similar to the engineering behind some of the most critically acclaimed – and commercially successful – films of recent times, those produced using computer animation by Pixar Studios. From its first feature film,
Toy Story
, in 1995 to its tenth and most recent,
Up
, in 2009, Pixar has set a new standard for world-building that is in many ways impossible to distinguish from the processes described above at Blitz. From concept art to three-dimensional animation, the skills involved are identical and, given the ever-increasing power of computers, there’s every reason to suppose that games every bit as stunning as Pixar films will be appearing before too long (in fact, the best modern games are already coming pretty close to
Toy Story)
.

Graphics, though, aren’t primarily what make Pixar films – or indeed any films – great. Their claim as art rests on a combination of plotting, characterisation and great cinematographic skill, and it’s here that the discussion begins to get interesting. Although games can borrow much from other media, it’s in their own unique qualities that their most significant artistic claims really stand or fall. The most important single factor here is interactivity: the constant feedback between user and game that sets games entirely apart from other media, and that brings with it a set of urgent aesthetic questions. If video games are art, what kind of art are they? What is unique and particular to them? And, perhaps most important, just how great is their potential?

Rhianna Pratchett, daughter of the bestselling fantasy fiction author Terry Pratchett and herself the lead writer for some of the most critically and commercially successful console titles of recent years, is someone to whom these ideas are familiar. Her father, the creator over more than twenty-five years of one of the most richly imagined and wittiest fantasy worlds in literary history, the Discworld, was heavily involved in 1995 with what proved to be the first of four adaptations of the Discworld into a video game. Terry Pratchett is also, as he’s noted several times in interviews, an avid PC gamer who believes in taking the medium seriously, and who can boast the rare distinction of having given in 2008 a live interview entirely from within
Second Life
(when, asked whether
Second Life
would appear in any of his books, he replied, ‘As far as I am concerned, my books are
Second Life’)
. For Rhianna, though, it’s an equation that operates precisely the other way around: the games are the primary medium of expression, with journalism and other writing very much a secondary concern. Consequently, her perception of games’ artistic capabilities and their limitations is an acute one. ‘They’re not always good art and they occupy a different definition of “art” than we’ve previously been used to. They embody the art of the journey: interactivity, exploration, adventure – a kind of high-octane theatre with a shattered fourth wall.’ And their limitations? ‘Aesthetically speaking, there are some incredibly beautiful works of art in the video game world. However, I think there’s certainly a lot of scope to improve the emotional and narrative depth in games and create deeper and more immersive stories and characters.’

Games, she believes, are a medium in which both writers and artists can scale similar heights to those they have achieved in other media in the past – but only if they’re able to embrace the differences of the new form. ‘I really enjoyed the way in which
Bioshock
used environmental storytelling to underlie its core narrative,’ she tells me, invoking one of the most praised games of 2007 and a title that’s still an industry benchmark for its architecture (it’s set in a parallel world in the year 1960 within a submarine art-deco-inspired dystopia that one’s of the most memorable unreal places it’s ever been possible for a gamer to visit). Similarly, the work she’s most proud of doing herself is more of an achievement in incremental world-building than a single flash of inspiration: ‘I think my work on the
Overlord
series has probably been my proudest achievement as a whole. This now encompasses four and a half games
{Overlord, Overlord: Raising Hell, Overlord II, Overlord: Dark Legend
and
Overlord: Minions)
. I’ve established a great working relationship with the developers (Triumph Studios and Climax) as well as the publisher behind the titles (Codemasters.) As well as writing the scripts, co-designing the stories and directing the audio on the titles, I was also involved in the marketing and PR behind them. It’s allowed me to give the series a very consistent voice, which so few writers get the chance to do in this industry.’