Unconvinced Pete: The Pitfalls and Promise of Interactivity

I’ve often heard the argument that interactivity is a problem for games as an art form. The idea is that by introducing interaction, the player’s actions and whatever meaning the art is trying to convey can too-easily fall into conflict. You might be in the most serious piece of story exposition ever, but that is completely undermined if the player can be running around jumping on peoples’ heads all the while. The only way to guard against this would be to remove from the scene the thing that separates games from other art forms: the interaction. Today I want to argue briefly against the idea I set out above but mainly something that is less talked about: the unique ways in which interactivity can convey artistic ideas.

The reason that I don’t worry about interaction allowing the player to spoil the artistic intention of the game is simply that this problem can arise in all art forms. If I’m reading The Catcher In The Rye and I want to imagine that Holden Caulfield sounds like Elmer Fudd or only pay attention to every other paragraph or other such nonsense, that’s well within my power. Sure, the difference with games is that I am directly using the game itself to inflict my sabotage but what I am doing is essentially the same sort of act: I am refusing to engage with the book just as I am with the game.

A deeper problem for games might be ‘accidental’ sabotage, where the player is trying to engage with the game but it is not responding appropriately. For example, a player might make one choice earlier on, and a different choice later, and there might be a conflict between these two choices that the game doesn’t acknowledge. But that seems to me to be a problem with the game, not the interactivity, similar to how a plot hole in a film might spoil things for people who notice it. Player choice adds a layer of complexity which makes it more likely for these cracks to appear but that is a problem for designers to solve.

I’m forced to conclude that the problems that interactivity brings are either functionally similar to the problems experienced in other non-interactive media, or they are such that they could be fixed through better design. As for the sorts of rewards that interactivity can bring, that’s a whole box of tricks that is really only now starting to be properly explored. The examples I am about to give are just a couple of the ways that games designers are starting to understand how interactivity can be used uniquely to its advantage as a medium.

Would You Kindly

Towards the end of the game Bioshock, it is skilfully revealed that ‘would you kindly’ is a hypnotic trigger phrase that compels the main character to do whatever follows. The game shows brief flashes of all the times that the character was asked if they would kindly do something, and this moment is made all the more striking because the player was in control of the character while these hidden commands were being given. The point is made all the clearer by the artful (but brief) removal of interactivity for a short moment afterwards.

This raises all sorts of interesting ideas, such as how feeling as if one is acting under free will may or may not equivalent to actually having free will. This idea is brought forward with emotional force thanks the use of interactivity, because the player certainly felt like they were in control at the time and yet now is forced to look back on how they unthinkingly did whatever they were told. If they play the game again, they will get a different but complementary experience – aware that they are a puppet due to knowledge of the ending, but still helpless to do anything but play along if they wish the story to progress.

Empty Space

When I heard that a film of Shadow of the Colossus was being planned, one of my first thoughts was that the titular colossi could come across very well, cinematically. My next was that one of the things that film would struggle to convey in the same way that a game can is just how much space there is in the way it is paced. There are long sections of that game where nothing is happening except for a man riding a horse, occasionally checking a sword that he uses as a sort of compass.

In film, this would no doubt be shorthanded or they’d try to find ways to fill the space like adding dramatic obstacles or characters, and some of the loneliness that the game so powerfully evokes would be lost as a result. This is not to say, of course, that films have no methods they can use to convey such loneliness; I’m sure that many films do so excellently. However I would argue that because of their interactivity, that tether that connects the player to what is happening, games have a natural advantage in being able to maintain lots of different sorts of pacing. A more recent example of this would be Limbo, a game whose pacing helps to present a particular brand of oppressive, menacing solitude that I do not think could be properly translated to other media without compromise.

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What I’ve described here barely scratches the surface, not only of what is currently being done with interactivity but what could possibly be done in the future. The most artistic uses are no doubt those which I haven’t even thought of, those that will take me by surprise and make me wish I’d thought of it first. So let’s stop thinking of interactivity as a handicap, an obstacle that designers must step around in order to convey their ideas clearly and instead embrace it as the most important expressive tool that can be used to make games relevant as an art form.