Video Games and Cultural Change

Do Video Games have the potential to bring about important cultural change?


This is what i will be basing my essay around, I decided to approach artistic games. After a talk with Sharon I'll be taking it in the direction of how games are used as experimentation.
Previous games have set a mould, similar to how renaissance art set the mould for paintings. After a certain amount of time, things come along to break/disrupt those moulds. Avant Garde movements did just this, I believe games have begun to do this already, games like Dear Esther is technically an FPS but it plays on a different mechanic. The game bases around exploration in a beautifully done environment with a hint of a story.

To begin with I want to compare games to another type of media that has already progressed further within itself than games has. Games are still fairly young. The Atari game system came out in 1980, you could say games are, therefore, only 25 years old, compared to films this is very young. There is a lot of potential for video games. With the advances in film, we are sure to see vast progression within the video game industry. It's already progressing at lightening speeds with Virtual Reality being a real consumer product.

The two main topics I will be covering are:

Unique styles of playing, disruptive game-play. How a game can break the norm and make you play in a different way?

The second topic will be games as works of art, how something is seen as aesthetically pleasing or having a certain beautiful quality to it. 

Cubism is an early 20th century avant-garde art movement that revolutionized European painting and sculpture. Pablo Picasso and George Braque are two of the movements pioneers. They produced work such as the 'Violin and Candlestick' which challenged conventional methods of painting.
In Cubism objects are broken up and reassembled in an abstracted form. Instead of one viewpoint being represented the object is broken up from many perspectives and portrayed as though the human eye would see it. We are at this stage in games now, games that challenge the conventional model are beginning to be released. A game that portrays this idea of challenging convention is 'Fez'. Fez is a game in which you have a game world and various levels on a 2D platform but in a 3D space. You twist and turn the map to change the perspective thus allowing you to progress.
Another game that is unconventional is Dear Esther. As well as playing it myself I had an impartial 3rd party play it and tell me what she thought during game play. Usually within a game you'll be told what to do or where to go, generally just how to progress throughout the game itself. I'll begin with their experience and then compare the two experiences. The first thing I asked was if it was easy to find out where you need to go because there is nothing to guide you. She struggled finding where you need to walk which immediately suggests it won't be your typical game, there is also no HUD suggesting objectives. Within the first 10 minutes the subject had already become slightly irritated by the lack of instructions directing her through the game world.
The game itself is mesmerizing. After simply watching someone else play it the story-line was mind-blowing. An example is when you come down onto the beach before you go into a cave, the narrator talks about someones rib cage, then down on the beach you come across the remains of a hull which looks like a rib cage. Whilst exploring the caverns you come across this opening where he's talking about being lucid and ascending upwards at the same time the opening is glowing and when you look up you see a small white light. He also goes on to talk about how he feels like hes adventuring through his own body as you're walking through a cave system that could resemble the insides of a human.
Dear Esther is a very unconventional game. When talking about cultural change, feeling come under that. How something makes people feel and therefore whether or not its likely to influence someone. As I was playing it it opening my eyes slightly, I could feel something from playing it. An interesting article I came across was based around the 'Bambi Effect', after the film Bambi was released, hunting decreased slightly. Media can be extremely powerful when presented in the correct way, and the correct way is connecting to someones humanity.

A media that has already affected us as a society is film. When you watch a film, you can't help but attach some meaning to it through your own experiences or may what you wish to have as an experience later in life. Take a romantic film, depending on the type of viewer you are, you may wish to have those experiences within your own life.
The TV series Cathy Come Home depicts the story of a woman and her husband that have fallen upon hard times. The show was so convincing as it was the first program showing this subject matter that the actress had people come up to her in the street and press money into her hand believing she was actually homeless. It really brought to light the impact of poverty.
Another show which has a similar effect is Eastenders, it has been known that when characters die in the show, fans send in flowers and cards grieving the death of the character because they've become so attached to them. To me this seems alien that one could become so attached and immersed in something they see on television but it goes to show, the media can have a huge effect on people.

Films have also been a source of knowledge in many cases. You can use films as research and ways of learning. A film like Schindler's list would be a good example. Many people know about the holocaust but this film showed you how gruesome it could be. 

"Now, the sense of immersion isn’t new to Lost. Anybody that’s tried the Rift knows the feeling, but the use of credits and music played off my preconceived notions of what I was watching. My brain triggered off them, informing me it was a movie, and then that movie seemed to spill out across my entire field of view. The imagery, while not photorealistic, took advantage of being animated to overcome many of the resolution problems that can plague other VR demos."

This is taken from an article published on theverge.com, it's a guy talking about his experience watching a demo film by Oculus. This is clearly a very exciting technology. It really made him feel something as he was watching it. He goes on to say that whilst being aware that it was VR, it didn't 'feel' that way. It was totally absorbing and quite tense in parts. This is the effect of immersion, which is why its so powerful, on top of television which is already immersing, this is the key to taking it a step further. 
When talking about television, another subject that went against the norm was the documentaries. The idea of portraying non-fiction material was powerful and questioned when it first came about. Something similar will happen with games, something will be released that is questioned as it'll be on ethical borders
I wrote about VR in a previous essay and in that I talk about how VR will be the future as is suggested by so many critics and futurists. VR will change how we connect with games and ultimately how we perceive them as a society.

Games can be used as methods of experimenting artistic styles as well as mechanics. I feel that these games are particularly important as they help push the boundaries of finding out what consumers want. A game that always comes to mind as a very artistic game is Journey. I've spoken about this game before as its one of my personal favourites. An aesthetic quality to a game is extremely important in most cases, you're more likely to pick up a game in the first place if it pleases you to look at.

"the art style is the deciding component that has the power to “make or break” a video game.  In other words, it becomes the dynamic that creates an unmatched, immersive, and beautiful experience." 

When visuals are talked about, it's not just whichever game is the most realistic or the most impressive graphically, it's which games are aesthetically pleasing, so particular styles that are well designed. The Prince of Persia game from 2008 was a particularly pretty game to me. I found the style, whilst not graphically impressive, pretty. 
Another game that experiments with a 'new' style is a game called Fortune Winds: Ancient Trader. The whole game is laid out in an oriental style.

I believe games that use styles such as this are educational to a certain capacity. They subconsciously show us the style in which old works from China would've been created, you learn something just through playing the game. I think this can be the head of disruptive game play, something that changes beliefs on what a game is without you fully realising. 

Art in video games will always continue to change as the ways we produce art are always changing, for example recently digital painting was used as a method to produce artwork for games as well as 3D modelling. With rate of technology there will be new methods introduced that break those norms too. Linking back to cubism I believe that we will see something similar with games. So whilst you're playing a game and moving your head around the environment changes based on what you'd be seeing in real life. The HUD would adapt based on what you were looking at making it a much more natural process than having a fixed HUD that stays the same throughout the game. The environment itself could change based on your own environment, so take the Google Glasses for example, they're a HUD on what you can actually see already, I could  see a game taking your environment and changing itself to where you are and whats around you. It's all conjecture at this point but its based on things that have already happened in other medias. Film used to be shot on reels and now you can carry one around in the palm of your hand. 

"As computers move toward the creation of virtual 3d worlds that are free of the monitor so will game makers become free of them. There will come a time that game makers actually see three dimensional models of their games as they make them."

All media seems to work together in a strange way, for each advance in one field it propels another field further forward and so on. Technology works with and adapts to any media which is why games still have so much potential to influence our society. For the moment I see things such as iRobot/Total Recall's future predictions being likely. Subtle adaptations to the way we live.

Games do have a huge impact on us as a society because of their far reach to all ages, games are played by all ages now meaning the market is huge and the way we perceive things within game worlds is always changing. I use films as an example for these as films are an old media. The way games are currently exploding it's not too far-fetched to think of games having a similar impact, if not an even greater one. Games are far more interactive than films and therefore have a greater potential to affect us as a species.