How Plato’s Theory of Ideals Fits into the Art of Game Design
I recently found a new game philosophy channel on youtube called Gamedenker. The channel has some really insightful videos but today I wanted to talk about a video that challenges our normative design philosophy that states that all games are art.
If you had asked me before I wrote this article, I would have said that everything is art. Or at least, an art. But I’ve discovered the definition of art changes depending on who you ask. Google says that art is ‘the expression or application of human creative skill and imagination… producing works to be appreciated primarily for their beauty or emotional power.” Is that a video game? Sometimes, but sometimes not.
In the video above, Gamedenker relays famous film critic Roger Ebert’s opinion that “video games will never be art” because games have a system of rules and objectives, which is in itself not art. Gamedenker argues that games borrow artistic qualities from other mediums, but that what makes games unique is the interactive bond they formulate with players, not the art form itself.
Excluding the fact that games have amazingly 3d or 2d rendered artworks in them, the argument stands that gameplay as a medium is not art.
Now before I continue, I want to say that games and video games are all different and can create all sorts of experiences. This makes them extremely tricky to pin down, as even a loose interactive experience and a competitive game are rounded into the same video game category. I would for this article like to divide games into two categories, arena games, and single player games. In this way, I can better explain all games as an artform.
I believe that a narrative, or designed experience, is what makes all games art. Games have creators, that put time and artistic energy into curating experiences for their players by utilizing storytelling techniques. This is applicable to both single player games and arena games.
The argument that arena or sports games are not an artform makes sense on the surface, but even classical sports games like Baseball have a creator, and with that, an experience. Sports or arena games usually invoke an experience akin to war within its players. In addition, the bystanders or fans also directly connect with these games for the story or narrative of the arena it provides. Take the fabled sports rivalry of the Yankees versus the Red Sox. That’s a game with a compelling story that draws sides and interest.
Storytelling is considered the purest art form, and without it most great pieces of art couldn’t be accomplished. Following this formula most single player games have some narrative or story, thereby making them all art. Looking at interactive storytelling games like Dungeons and Dragons, it could be argued that most narrative driven games are just interactive stories. With arena games, they do this by containing each play session. With narrative driven games though, you don’t get a victory or win screen. When the credits roll you don’t even say that you won the game, you say you “beat” it. This is all implying completion of the medium, similarly to how we would say we watched or finished a movie.
Art should not seek to imitate life but rather it should “aim to redeem [life’s] sufferings by idealizing it.”
When it comes to the art of game design I like to keep Plato in mind.
The classical Greek philosopher argued that the artist tries to mimic a thing without possessing true knowledge of that thing, or as Plato might call it, it’s “thing-ness,” and therefore does not (and can not) speak the truth about that thing. Plato used the metaphor of the three beds to help his students understand this view: Three beds exist. The first bed exists as an abstract concept– it is the true ideal, the purest form of a thing. The next bed is built by a carpenter as a manifestation of the abstract ideal of the first bed. It is physical, built by hand with the carpenter’s skills, and is an imitation of the ideal of the first bed. A painter comes along and decides to paint the third bed. The painter is not creating an actual bed, only a representation of the carpenter’s physical second bed, which is itself an imitation of the abstract ideal of the first bed. Plato’s theories of forms also suggests that life — the second and even third bed — are only “shadows” of truer forms, existent invisible to us in truer states. What if artists stopped trying to recreate what we saw in the world, and instead, as Gamedenker says, tried to construct an idealized world, one better than the one we live in. With the rise of Virtual Reality, this concept becomes more and more meaningful.
The most probable reason some critics don’t see games as an artform is they are too narrow minded in their definition of a game, or art. As most video game scholars compare this time in the medium’s development to ancient cave painting scribbles, games have a lot of growing to do if they want to be taken more seriously. To help bridge this gap, Gamedenker suggests that video games should focus on Plato’s ideal experiences. Focusing less on numbers, graphic visualizations, and even plot twists and turns, and more on what the interactive experience is trying to say. As artists and game designers, we must mimic the ideal reality that we are trying to convey to the player.