Let's just get this out of the way first. Yes, I chose to treat these three games as a single entry on my list primarily to get out of having to play them all 4-6 times in a row. I'm fairly confident I could have gone that route - I played through Bad Rats twice, so a good game is like nothing - but unlike Bad Rats or even Hatoful Boyfriend, I respect these games too much to subject them to that kind of gruesome spectacle.
It was not an arbitrary decision to group these three games together. They all occupied a similar mind-space in my head - they were "artsy" games, designed to put to the test the medium's cultural pretensions. I think, on balance, they succeeded. All three were visually stunning, with thoughtful gameplay that engaged with their core themes, and while I didn't find Braid quite as moving as the other two, I could see what it was going for, and the moods it evoked were effective, even if the text was not.
I have to wonder, though, whether "artistic" games are for me. The other thing these games have in common is that they all embraced a principled shortness. Not a one of them had anything I'd describe as padding. There was no doing a task purely for the sake of doing something. Everything you did had a point.
On one level, that is an admirable economy. You have a thesis. You trim away everything that doesn't serve that thesis. Say what you want to say and get out. Don't waste people's time. It's what a good storyteller does.
However, I'm starting to realize that storytelling is incidental to what I want out of video games. Don't get me wrong, stories are great. A good story will definitely enhance a video game, and it is a rare game that doesn't need some kind of story to give it structure. It's just, what story does chess tell?
To me, the ideal game is one that can be a universal activity, a hobby in itself. It should either reward different strategies or approaches, be an open-ended or abstract activity that is intrinsically engaging, or simply be so big that by the time you exhaust its possibilities, the beginning of the game will seem fresh once more. The kind of game I love doesn't just tell one story, it tells hundreds.
But I'm not some absolutist curmudgeon about this. I am definitely not saying that games which focus on a single story and tell it economically shouldn't exist. For all that I may wax rhapsodic about the Civilization series, and the way that no two playthroughs are exactly the same, and it is the nuance of this variance that makes an individual game interesting, I have to admit that those hundreds of subtle variations would be one big, boring blur to the uninitiated, and not a single one of its multitude of "stories" would be told with even a fraction of the artistry and power of something like Brothers - A Tale of Two Sons.
I think my experience of playing these three games has solidified something in my mind. "Are video games art" is the wrong question to ask. There are activities and creations that are of immense cultural value which nonetheless fall outside the narrow purview of things which can be described as "art." For example, if a demon threatened to erase from reality the text of Hamlet or the rules to chess, which would be a greater blow to our civilization? Yet the rules to chess are not art. Art goes into the creation of a chess set, and many chess pieces are beautiful sculptures in their own right (and even a mass produced plastic chess set had to be designed by an artist at some point), but the abstract thing, the idea those pieces represent, is something else.
And I think that's fine. By and large, video games are not art, but art is involved in their creation. And sometimes, as is the case with Brothers, Braid, and Never Alone, video games are art, from beginning to end, and I feel privileged to have experienced them.
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