Nic Kelman

Explores the art and design of video games and discusses the new medium's relationships to traditional art and design forms.

Video Game Art

Tim Pendry

This is already out of date (written in 2005) but makes a good case for understanding video games as heirs to the mythological and legendary traditions in the arts (as a revival of more ancient forms) - and for the potential for video games to become a recognised art form in their own right. Kelman over-plays his hand here. Video games are culturally very important and (in my opinion) a psychologically progressive force, despite their traditionalist, militarist and aspirational subject matter. But, if we compare the form to cinema (which Kelman does), the genre should now be in its creative heyday, equivalent (in terms of its technological date of birth) to the Golden Age of Hollywood and already able to appeal back to an Eisenstein and a Lang. In fact, video games had, in 2005/2006, achieved nothing like the depth of narrative or sophistication of cinema. I am not up to speed with developments since then so it would be interesting to see other opinions on the possible emergence of 'auteurs'. In animation and comic books, 'auteurs' of a sort have appeared although these tend to be corporate studios with an extended and integrated vision such as Studio Ghibli, Marvel and Fortiche (the stunning 'Arcane' of Linke and Yee). Perhaps Final Fantasy stands as something more. But, as of 2005/2006, the standard model (as evidenced by Kelman) of a protagonist undertaking a quest against an antagonist and being tested along the way may be 3,000 years old in form but that alone does not make it great art. However, the book is worth reading for two reasons. It contains a wealth of visual material (though my cheap edition was poorly edited) and it produces a theory about video game narrative and artistic production that shows us that the form must be taken seriously. It certainly had, even then, the potential for greatness once technological barriers are dealt with and the costs for small niche operators brought down. Exactly what the increasing involvement of AI brings to the form has yet to be fully determined. Regardless of the claims about artistic merit (it has to be said that Kelman raises some useful populist points about the nature of art in our global late-capitalist culture), video games have long since matched and even eclipsed the cinematic and music industries as entertainment. They are not only the dominant artistic offer for most male adolescents but they are building a strong female audience and gamers are taking their interest well into their twenties and thirties and beyond. The demand for sophistication is there. The sheer scale of some of the major games offers is now breathtaking, Their creative staffs match those of the Hollywood extravaganzas with which they compete for attention. Where Kelman is most acute is in his analysis of the psychology of gaming which has embedded the gamer in a world of guided imagination where the protagonist is not empathetically observed as a ‘he’ or ‘she’ ('like me') but as an ‘I’ ('is me') There has been another recent resurgence of panic about video games – academics of a certain type require anxiety to win funding in straitened times – This has linked to the claim that the younger generation are progressively losing their ability (relatively) to empathise. But I, for one, am not worried about this claim. Excessive empathy means the neglect of the individuated self in favour of others who can exploit kindness for their own ends – whether to avoid action or to control people for their far less empathetic ends. If modern kids are learning not to be sentimental and to deal with emotional blackmail and manipulation by learning a dash of Nietzschean ethics through video games, then this may not be such a bad thing. As Kelman makes clear, the mythic structure of the video game market represents much the same process as Joseph Campbell described for myth – only the tale of individuation is not told by a village elder guiding the young male into socialisation. Insread, the young male or female themselves is being guided by a template that the market, serviced by people like themselves, offers them on their own terms. This fact, of critical cultural importance and closely linked to the global market, will be deplored by all communitarians, socialist or faith-based, but it should be welcomed (with caveats about the degree of manipulation) by all true libertarians. The differences from traditional hero-quests are fascinating. They say something important about the reality of being human, as a being beyond the socially constructed reality that the ideologues and priests like to impose on us from early childhood. The essence of the protagonist (the ‘I’ who is playing) is that he is the hero, played as an ordinary person who becomes extraordinary. This is very different from communitarian ‘myth’ where the ‘I’ is directed to emulate or learn lessons from a separate ‘he’ or ‘she’ who recognizes the individuation process but only in order to bring it within the tram-lines of conservative society. The transformation of the hero is both ‘fated’ (by the gaming template) but also an emotional experience that, in ‘faking’ transformation, transforms the mind, possibly the brain, of the young person. He becomes, in his own head, special and so, since he feels special, he is special to all intents and purposes. Kelman notes a number of oddities about the mythic process. The protagonist can choose to be good but a new and popular template has emerged where the player can choose to be evil in a Luciferian act of rebellion against social norms. Often, there is a character who is evil and selfish but who nevertheless does good acts against his own kind or those even more evil. We should not be alarmed. This is a working out of the reality of animal desire under safe conditions. The failure to work this out and pretend that the young human male, in particular, is not filled with dark as well as light may be at the heart of that submission that makes the banality of evil so obvious in those who have been crushed into the acceptance of taking orders. Although some will militarise themselves thinking that life will be like the game (clearly, the dimmer ones), the stronger ones will deal with the dark side in themselves and emerge very much in the light, less likely to be charged in the future with ‘only obeying orders’. Kelman traces the modern mythic anti-hero to a cinematic model, Clint Eastwood’s Man with No Name. The lack of a name is mimicked by the removal of the face in some ‘dark’ protagonist story-lines. Just as fifty-something males identified with the morally ambiguous and unengaged Sergio Leone character who, nevertheless, seemed to do the right thing because it suited him, so their kids have been playing the same fantasy with ‘no-faces’ to the same liberating effect. Kelman treats the ‘American Soldier’ as a separate and new mythic character, puzzling at its popularity amongst foreign youth who can otherwise be deeply negative about American foreign policy. This has become more so since the book was written although the range of nationalities in war gaming has increased since. But the clue is in his own analysis. If a young male can identify with a hit man or a demon, he can identify with the American Soldier who can have demonic aspects (he is competent and strong) without the young male wanting to be a demon. In a time of American global power, the real American soldier can be seen as a demonic force almost beyond good and evil, claiming good but doing bad, and so quite capable of reversal into the mythic character of video gaming. How this will change as America’s stock drifts with economic crisis and absurd foreign policy choices is unsure but the American soldier will probably remain a powerful mythic figure, matched only by the Roman legionary, possibly for a thousand years. It is as if the claim of America to bring justice to the world remains a mythic force in the minds of the global population but that, in so being, it moves further and further away from the reality. One can imagine quite easily Islamic youth being fired into resistance by the very act of becoming an American soldier in a game. The force is all. This is confirmed to a degree by another mythic oddity in the formation of another version of the protagonist - the presentation of women. There are love interest figures as allies (for male and female players) but the women who are direct protagonists are never sexual in an overt way – they are either virginal innocents to be protected or kick-ass women who do not need to be protected. This seems counter-intuitive, given the market. But Kelman solves the mystery. We return to the fact that the player is an ‘I’ and not a ‘he’. He is not looking at a woman or girl protagonist as an object of desire. The interesting factor is that the love interest is often doomed, the adolescent can wallow in the loss of what he never had. He is the subject and the interesting thing is that young males are choosing to be females in game play without embarrassment or sexual doubt. They become females for the duration. They do not become homosexual or temporary futanari but gaming may contribute to the non-binary narrative. This should not be such a surprise. Strict gender demarcation is an aspect of communitarian socialisation but the libertarian tradition has always accepted gender complexity. The theory of alchemy has a definite sexual analogue in terms of the path by which a person becomes ‘individuated’ and video gaming might be said to be artistically alchemical. Whereas traditional myth always emphasised the differences between the sexes, the new mythos permits gender switching in the imagination as an aid to individuation. It may even be (returning to the issue of empathy) that it is empathy is not in fact reducing in power. The subject of empathy is changing – from the abstract universal other, beloved of the liberal and communitarian alike, towards the ‘person’, including the person of the other sex, who is in immediate relation with the player. This suggests an intensification of that old military truth – that a young male fights for his buddies and not his nation. He becomes his buddies in the line of fire which is why he will die for them. Kelman calls it far-fetched that young males would want unconsciously to ‘be’ the other sex but this is simply a failure of imagination. It is massively taboo for males above a certain age to ‘imagine’ gender swapping but recent research indicates that the young in the West are both very liberal and are capable of distinguishing between fantasy and reality. Western culture, until recently, was terrified of the sexual imagination and so it encoded taboo about sex and violence wherever possible. Only the few could even imagine at what was being hinted at. For someone raised in (say) the 1940s or 1950s, to imagine sexual ‘complexity’ was to be ‘deviant’ but recent research amongst secondary school boys in the UK (across all classes) appears to suggest that they are not merely ‘tolerant’ of gay culture (in that patronising way of liberal straights). The young increasingly consider it normal enough to play with its forms themselves without embarrassment while not being gay or transgender themselves. Of course, this has transmuted into a degree of external collective narcissism but it is largely a virtuous tolerance of others. The playing with ‘being women’ (albeit unconsciously) no doubt has an erotic component but it is not homosexual. Video games and the internet represent the first occasion in history where ‘becoming’ the ‘other’ (woman, demon, killer) can be intensely experienced. It is mentality-changing and yet it can be sloughed off like a snakes skin when the story is over WITHOUT any sense of being observed or judged. This must be progress. I have emphasized the psychological dimension of the protagonist because it is the player who buys the game and he (increasingly she, who gets to play at being a boy of course) has to be comfortable with the offer. Video games operate in a global free market with vigorous competition between American and Japanese forms so nothing can be supplied that does not get to the core of the needs of the vast majority of normal, healthy young people. However, Kelman also looks at the standard narrative style in gaming, the environments created for the action, the influence of animation and illustration, the raft of antagonists and allies the gamer has to deal with, the role of objects and the growing trend towards realism. In all but the last, Kelman is persuasive that we have been seeing a renaissance of mythic forms that have otherwise been buried under the sheer weight of Literature and High Culture. The link between the ‘levels’ of gaming with the tests of legendary stories and of the final denouement in which our ‘hero’ overcomes a monster with its gaming counterpart is fairly obvious. Each video game represents a major investment of intellectual capital because the modern gamer is highly attuned to the consistency and viability of the game’s ‘universe’. The effect is one of immersion, close to lucid dreaming, watching a movie and even reading except that the body, through controls, is being engaged – the chances that this is changing brain structure are fairly high. Kelman explores to some extent (though with no great depth) this issue of relationship to reality because the gaming experience is often designed to be ‘more real than real’. This means hat our normal perception screens out a great deal of reality but the games developer takes special care (increasingly over time) to emphasise the reality of the artefacts and environments no matter how conceptually fantastic. All in all, a useful and entertaining book for non-specialists but probably superseded by other texts since.

Video Game Art

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