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Getting the Shine

Spend much time doing something and you'll find yourself justifying your actions to yourself, either by making excuses for your behavior or trying to turn it into something positive or lucrative. The most obvious example of what I mean is when the serious athlete decides to try to become a professional. Maybe he's been playing baseball or basketball or what have you extremely well up until that point and has been devoting all his free time to honing his talents. But when he makes that conscious decision to step up his game to pro level, that's when he truly decides to go all out.

Riddle: When are games more than just games?

Meanwhile, we know that there are many people out there who spend inordinate amounts of time playing games. I happen to be one of them, and, being someone whose profession now revolves around this activity, I can cite myself as one example of what I described in my first sentence. When asked why I became a game journalist, my answer is pragmatic: It was the only way I could afford to play all the games I wanted to play, both financially and in terms of time. Some gamers are far more closely analogous to the professional athlete example, while others surmise that games are so stimulating that prolonged exposure to them is no different from spending an equivalent amount of time enriching oneself educationally or culturally, say by reading history books in the library or studying paintings in a gallery. Let me speak to both these types of cases in turn and, to some extent, compare them.

This weekend I watched Gamers: A Documentary, a new feature-length film about Counter-Strike and the people who play it seriously. In the interest of full disclosure, I should mention that I'm actually in this film at a couple of points, though I have no vested interest in its success. I mention it not just because I liked it but because this movie proved something to me that I never really thought possible: Gamers really aren't a bad subject for the camera, actually. I've long held the belief that the biggest obstacle preventing games from becoming a professional sport isn't so much that the game of the moment changes frequently (though that's a big issue to be sure), but that gamers themselves frankly aren't always the most photogenic people. We're not celebrities or professional athletes. There's nothing outwardly or even inwardly remarkable about us.

Answer: Very, very rarely.

But maybe that's just it. We can relate to one another. The second half of the film follows a CS clan as it attempts to win the CPL tournament for a substantial cash prize and the title of world's best Counter-Strike team. And it's genuinely exciting to watch. These are regular guys, all seemingly pretty smart and educated, and they happen to be extremely good at this one game--and they play it with such determination that watching them is definitely intriguing. The fiercely competitive nature of the tournament environment depicted in the film is comparable only to a sporting event, if anything.

I think games still have a very long way to go before they can be widely accepted as a competitive activity that's worth following and worth watching. But this film has helped reaffirm my belief that if someone chooses to get so incredibly good at a game that he truly loves to the point where his skills can earn him money and justify all that time he's spent practicing, then more power to him. I felt the same way when I heard years ago about how high-level EverQuest players started selling their characters on eBay. Seriously, good for them.

Those who become exceptionally good at popular, competitive games are relatively rare. Those who try to elevate the act of playing games into something more important than it actually is are probably a lot more common, simply because it's a lot easier to sit back and do that than to become a top-ranked Counter-Strike player, for example. What I'm referring to here is a segment of gamers who think that games are art. You'll see these people crop up on message boards and such from time to time, or maybe such thoughts have crossed your mind before.

Games can be artistic, but that doesn't make them art.

To anyone who thinks games are art, let me explain to you in one sentence why you're wrong: Art is intentional. It's as simple as that. Regardless of whether it's "good" art or "bad" art, one thing all works of art have in common is that the individual or individuals responsible for those works intended, from the get-go, for those works to be art. There, I just saved you a semester in college.

Many games today have artistic qualities, to be sure. Among the people making today's games are some extremely talented visual designers, musicians, sound engineers, and programmers. However, their intent is to make a successful entertainment product--to make a game that is a lot of fun to play and is a commercial hit, rather than something that will be emotionally and intellectually stimulating for someone looking at it in an art gallery.

An image from "Do you have the Shine?" by Johan Thurfjell.

Games, by definition, are not art. By definition, they're games. Nevertheless, the medium that games use--interactive, fictional computer-generated scenarios--can by all means lend themselves to art. My brother, who doesn't play or like games, recently described to me a piece called "Do you have the Shine?" by a Swedish artist named Johan Thurfjell, which Alex saw on display in a New York art opening. In his words:

"This was a first-person interactive DVD (read: video game) where the object is to navigate one's tricycle through a Resident Evil-looking floor plan of the Overlook Hotel from The Shining without running into the dead twin sisters. You remember this from the movie, right? The game runs on a Mac, and there are only three keys involved: the up and down keys and the space bar. The up key moves you through the corridors (you get 1,000 points for rounding each one safely), the down key stops you, in effect doing nothing, and the space bar allows you to ostensibly shield your eyes when you do run into the sisters. That said, the purpose of the game is, in effect, to see the sisters and subsequently die."

I have only my brother's description to draw on, but it's enough to make me very interested to see "Do you have the Shine?" for myself. Johan Thurfjell must have realized that the interactive nature of things like video games is a very unusual property with a lot of artistic potential, and he went and did something with it. What he ended up with doesn't sound like a very good game, but it does seem like something I'd pay the admission price for a museum ticket to see.

I still believe neither that games are professional sports nor that they're art. The fact that some people consider them to be one or the other is possibly the best proof I have that they're actually neither. Nevertheless, I'm deeply interested in how games manage to have the properties of both these things, because to me this is good evidence of what makes games, the medium, so unique.

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