Here’s something I wrote about games as art, eons ago, when somebody on the Internet made me all mad. Someday I may finish it, and update its bunch of busted links, but for now I offer it up in rough form, in honor of the Art History of Games (#AHoG), happening this week here in Atlanta. Please consider this a work in progress.

Who said games can’t be art?

Famously, Roger Ebert did. Back in 2007, in a response to comments decrying his earlier opinion that video games are not art, Ebert wrote, “Games may not be Shakespeare quite yet, but I have the prejudice that they never will be, and some gamers are prejudiced that they will.”

Last week, film critic Devin Faraci of CHUD.com published an editorial adding his arguments to the ongoing debate. Faraci’s editorial came after his comments in a news item on a possible Shadow of the Colossus film triggered a debate (on Twitter) about whether or not video games are an art form. Faraci says video games aren’t art, and the Internet is full of people who disagree with him.

I disagree with him, too, but I was more interested in understanding his argument. Aside from Ebert’s opinion, I’d never read a serious argument for why video games shouldn’t be considered art. Ebert’s argument is concerned with both form and quality—he says games do things art shouldn’t and that they aren’t much good, besides. Faraci’s argument is completely categorical—he says games are not an art form because they do not do what he says art does.

Chuck Wendig, who’s both a brilliant writer and a clever game designer, wrote his response to Faraci’s editorial right away, but I’m not completely on board with it. Chuck’s written a host of short stories (one was even published at CHUD, I think) and designed Hunter: The Vigil, so you know he has some experience with games and the arts. But in his response Chuck merely disagrees with Faraci and Ebert.

Here, I’m going to make my case for why some games are art.

// Read this one.

I’ve been holding on to this question for a while, but I think it’s a good one:

What is the worst RPG session you ever presided over as GM?

Why? What went wrong? What did you learn? What would you do differently? What would you do again?

// Share Your Answer

During a recent D&D game, a question came up about friction in the game mechanics between the resource-management portion of play — that is, the selection and deployment of daily powers — and the vagaries of random chance. Does it suck too much to have a daily power wasted on a bad die roll? Isn’t the daily power a resource the player should be able to spend and not be usurped by random chance? Doesn’t risk undermine the player’s resource management? Doesn’t it rob meaning from the decisions made in the design of a meaningful play turn for the PC?

My immediate response is: No. Risk doesn’t undermine the choice, because the risk is apparent. Risk must be part of the equation the player finagles when selecting when and how to use a power. The game isn’t one of resource management but of risk management, with resources involved.

If that doesn’t fly for you, though, think about this untested mod for the game:

Roll the die at the beginning of your turn and then select the power, attack, or Skill you want to employ using that number.

Thus, when your turn comes around, you roll a d20 and use the number generated to determine what course of action you want to take. Say you roll a 14, which you think is enough to hit the AC of the monster you’re facing. You therefore choose to try out an encounter power, much more confident that you’re going to hit with it. If you miss, it’s because you underestimated your enemy’s defenses — the choice was truly yours. As combat goes on, and a monster’s defenses are gradually determined by watching hits and misses go by, the player doesn’t choose when to employ a daily power and then hope to get lucky; instead, he waits around for a die roll good enough to warrant unleashing that daily.

// Read this one.

I’m going back through old drafts of posts and publishing things that I thought I’d build on later… but haven’t. So pardon my half-formed thoughts in these sorts of posts.

For example, my response to this great post by Ben Robbins:

Lately, I am much more aware of the efforts I go through to help players be aware of what the other players are trying to do. To me, players are collaborating writers on a narrative series, not just cooperative players in a game. Asking them to suss out the player’s hopes and plans for a character (not just the character’s) through roleplaying alone is a little like expecting a TV writers’ room to communicate solely through unfinished drafts of scripts — it’s inefficient.

Personally, I’m eager to maximize the story I get out of each session, even if that story comes across in a mix of sketches, unfinished monologues, and fully rendered dialogue. An RPG is played in jam sessions, not rehearsed performances. The players all benefit from knowing more about each others’ characters, even if that means the player sometimes knows more than the character — it serves the player-as-writer even as it gives a short cut to the player-as-character. That’s fine with me.

RPGs are limited-information games, even when they’re not. Respecting the amount of player information, in both directions, is vital. Too much time and energy can be wasted in even a great RPG session trying to send and decipher coded communications between players and GMs. Some of those codes can be great fun — like having characters speak dramatically about who they are and what they want — but if that code is trying to evoke the fun instead of actually being the fun, then it should be minimized on the route to actual fun.

// Read this one.

While sitting at a table watching Nanocon attendees playtest a nearly finished board game it occurred to me that all of the players seemed to be in an unverbalized conspiracy to not win. They weren’t deliberately trying to prolong the game, but neither had any of them had figured out any of the good routes to the vicinity of victory. And none of them seemed to care that they hadn’t. They were having fun working the moving parts, doing the rituals. And fun’s the goal, right? Or were they doing it wrong? And if they were doing it wrong, was that the design’s fault, or theirs?

So this question asserted itself in my mind:

To what extent should a game’s design promote its own successful play?

// Surely there’s a good answer after the jump…