A Better Aesthetics

Avatar image for gamer_152
gamer_152

15030

Forum Posts

74573

Wiki Points

710

Followers

Reviews: 71

User Lists: 6

Edited By gamer_152  Moderator

No Caption Provided

When we talk about media, we throw the term "aesthetic" around like confetti. We might praise the "aesthetics" of a film, say something matches our "aesthetic", or even use "aesthetic" as an adjective. In video game discussion, in particular, we're no strangers to the word, and we have a deeply ingrained idea of what aesthetics mean to games. In mainstream discussion of the medium, "aesthetics" refer to the visual and perhaps also auditory aspects of a title. We take aesthetics to be the wrapper for the "core" content of the experience, and that core is the mechanics. In this mode of thought, the aesthetics or sights and sounds of the game are skin deep, but the gameplay is the heart. In my experience, video game fanatics also often take these aesthetics to set the tone of a game while they see the play as existing independent of tone.

No Caption Provided

It feels like second-nature to slice games into aesthetics and core. However, it's far from how the enthusiasts of other artforms (I'm using the broadest possible definition of art here) discuss the objects of their interest. For example, when we look at the film Titanic, we don't say that it has aesthetic elements that put across feelings of love and sadness and then other underlying elements working separately from those emotions. We say that everything, from the cinematography to the music to the acting, is functioning in unison, producing that overall emotional aesthetic of romance and sorrow. Or, in sculpture, we don't talk about what the look of Rodin's The Thinker conveys and then start describing some more essential element of it. The statue expresses emotions and themes of intellect, strength, and tension, as well as showing the skill of the artist, and it does that through its shape and composition. There's no deeper non-emotional, non-thematic layer which is more important to the work; sculptures speak to their audience on an emotional and thematic level.

Observing that all of a piece of media's faculties build towards a certain emotional or thematic totality has served the analysis of those artforms pretty well. It's why we talk about impressionist painting, brutalist sculpture, gothic prose, Victorian architecture, punk fashion, R&B music, or beat poetry. Take away any of these terms, and our ability to describe creative works would decline sharply. Yet, in games, we're often not used to deploying holistic descriptors.

No Caption Provided

Non-video game creative works can have emotionally, thematically, or culturally conflicting elements. It's also true that any of them may experiment with combining different aesthetics. However, we still recognise the aesthetics as soaking all the way through these works, and we notice that the elements interact with each other. We rarely suggest that there's a wrapper-core dichotomy at play there. In fact, if aspects of a piece of art or entertainment are conflicting or merging, then it's proof that they do not exist independent of each other.

The word "aesthetic" also has numerous definitions, but in the above examples, the term refers to the general styling of a work; the aesthetic components are anything that creates the experience for the audience interacting with the work. Change the aesthetic, and you change the experience. You'll notice that while a lot of art uses an overall identifier of its style or genre, we often define games only by their playstyle or even by isolated mechanical aspects. E.g. "Strategy" or "first-person shooter".

No Caption Provided

These name tags pin down some of the formal characteristics of the play but don't say anything about the setting, sound, characters, narrative, structure, or other considerations which give a game its unique flavour. Various sites, critics, and fans have somewhat acknowledged those missing pieces, and so, occasionally, we describe games as having a theme or aesthetic genre alongside their mechanical genre. Maybe you're playing a medieval strategy game or a WWII FPS. This way of describing titles provides some good insight into their content, but it still leaves a lot out and reflects a mindset that places a hard dividing line between play and audiovisual styling.

Comparing video games to other art, this might, at first, seem to be the only sensible way to talk about the format because it's not like these other creative media. For plays, films, TV, photography, graffiti, music, and countless other forms, we use the term "aesthetic" to describe visual and/or sonic traits, but video games also have an interactive component. So, why not emphasise that by saying that they have audiovisual aesthetics, and then, mechanics which exist in addition to those aesthetics? But look a little closer, and you'll see that these other artforms have also developed facets that didn't match what we'd traditionally called aesthetics. Yet, we have still accepted their unique modes of expression as aesthetic.

No Caption Provided

For example, theatre predates films, and in theatre, we can say that the settings, costumes, scripting, lighting, acting style, and scoring all constitute part of the aesthetic. Film took this formulation and then added cinematography and editing to the mix. But instead of us saying that films have aesthetic elements, and cinematography and editing, which exist as extra non-aesthetic elements, we accept cinematography and editing as part of the aesthetic. Or there's colour television which added a spark that black and white TV didn't have: the tones of the rainbow. Of course, black and white TV had its own aesthetics: the film aesthetics we discovered above, but we don't then think of black and white TV as the old black and white film aesthetics married to colour; the colour is part of the aesthetic. Because, again, we use the term aesthetic to refer to any stylistic capacity, even if it's one we haven't seen in art before.

We can never fully uncouple the new elements that these forms of media introduced from their more traditional aesthetic carriages. You can't talk about "editing" and "cinematography" entirely independent of the still image. Films may be composed of still photos, but how motion works between those frames and how you edit sequences of images together decides how those images are perceived. Conversely, you can't talk about how to cut or move through a shot without talking about the pictures that make it up. When we watch a film, we draw part of our aesthetic impression from the still images and another part from style with which those images are brought into motion. In the example of colour TV, there's no reflecting on the role of the colour without considering the underlying objects and characters that colour fills in.

No Caption Provided

The components of video games often intermingle to similar ends. We can try and segregate gameplay and audiovisual aesthetic, but there are as many examples of them contextualising each other as there are video games. Think about Ice Climber's graphical and auditory elements that depict hiking up a mountain, and then think about its gameplay which is about vertical platforming, and how the two reinforce each other. See Warhammer: End Times - Vermintide, a game that mechanically has us fighting throngs of enemies at once, and visually and sonically frames those enemies as rats: creatures that come in swarms. Its gameplay context makes sense for its audiovisual context, and that audiovisual context makes sense for that gameplay context. Remember Kerbal Space Program, a title which appears to us as being about rocketry and contraptions comically spinning out of control and runs on gameplay about experiments in physics and engineering. Consider how the play in PaRappa the Rapper changes speed with the music. This mode of thinking even works for a mostly abstract game like Rez which mechanically deploys rows of enemies that you can destroy in one hit and visually sets off a burst of light when you do, creating an aesthetic of business and intensity. We could do this all day.

And the effect goes the other way. There are examples like Resident Evil 6 whose horror trappings suggest a harrowing, disempowering experience, but whose play abandons the anxiety-inducing mechanics of former Residents Evil for more conventionally empowering shooting. And we've all played games that tell us there's some cataclysmic issue that we must resolve ASAP, but that encourage us to be anything but urgent. Maybe you need to save the kingdom, the planet, or the damsel from some imminent danger. But a surfeit of side quests, collectables, and bonus challenges mean that moving slowly and having the protagonist act like they don't care about the impending danger is the optimal technique. I find gamers are generally less receptive to the idea that mechanics and audiovisuals might be working against each other rather than with each other, but it bears thinking about.

No Caption Provided

Games convey their play states through graphics and sound. Without what you can see and hear, there is no mechanical interaction for the player, and there are always decisions to be made about what images and sound are appropriate for announcing the systemic information. In that sense, visuals and audio can never live separately from gameplay; the stylisation of the audiovisuals affects how we take in the gameplay and vice-versa. Similarly, if "narrative" is our word for a series of events told in order, then gameplay intrinsically creates narratives.

Given what we've discussed here, there's a lot of worth in seeing the gameplay as an aesthetic element itself. This is not my idea; it's been around in academic game circles for a long time, but if we follow the lead of other art theory, and see the aesthetic as anything that brings about an experience in the audience, then mechanics are also aesthetic. This is not just semantics: when we see gameplay as having an aesthetic, it encourages us to approach it with the broader lenses that we use to analyse other art. We don't just have to put play in a box of "cover shooter" or "flight sim" or whatever other genre labels might apply. We can also look at gameplay and ask questions like:

  • How much is it about challenge, and how much is it just about the feel of our actions?
  • How much is it about skill or luck, or is it about neither?
  • What behaviour does the game encourage?
  • Is it about winning, or is it about just seeing how far we can get?
  • What talents is it testing?

And if we understand games as wholes and not just configurations of non-interacting parts, then we can also describe the games in their totality as having an aesthetic instead of just trying to define a gameplay aesthetic and an audiovisual one. We can fire off questions like:

No Caption Provided
  • What activities does the game depict?
  • How much is the game about realism and how much is it about escapism?
  • What's its pacing?
  • How much is it about immediate gratification and how much is it about a long-term appeal?
  • Is it about iterating on what we've experienced before or continuously moving into new experiences?
  • How much do we, as players, determine the experience and how much do the developers get to decide it?
  • Does the game provide a feeling of sociability or a sense of solitude?
  • What perspective does the game work from?
  • How does the player relate to the world, if there is one?
  • How varied is the range of experiences in the game?
  • Where is it like other games and where is it different?
  • Is it made up of tightly-defined "sessions" or does the play flow more continguously than that?
  • How does it frame its challenges?
  • How does the game transport us from one challenge to another?

Many of these lenses that we apply to overall aesthetic, we can also apply specifically to the gameplay aesthetic. There are countless more questions we can ask to determine the nature of a game, and some of the above questions we already ask in typical conversations about the medium, but many of them we don't, and many of them, we should ask more. Questions about realism or randomness are as efficient or more efficient than phrases like "stealth game" or "management sim" in communicating what a title is like to experience. I also do not believe that we should see the audiovisual as frivolous in comparison to the mechanical.

No Caption Provided

Most of the great works of art only use sights, sounds, or a combination, e.g. Da Vinci's Mona Lisa or Beethoven's 5th Symphony or Michelangelo's Pieta or Spielberg's Schindler's List. Yet, these media are held in high esteem because what we see and what we hear can be incredibly powerful. And again, gameplay is almost always conveyed through sights and sounds. This is not to say that you should view any game as the graphical equivalent of the Mona Lisa or the sonic equivalent of Beethoven's 5th; but it is to say that we should challenge the idea that graphics, music, and sound effects are just pretty fluff while play is some magic ingredient which adds the meaning or the fun or whatever central theme or emotion.

To make it clear how this method of analysis might work in practice, I'll apply some of the above questions to a few games and provide the answers, as I see them. We'll use Ubisoft's 2013 hit Rayman Legends as our first guinea pig.

How does it frame its challenges? / What perspective does the game work from? / How much is the game about realism and how much is it about escapism?

Ubisoft uses a cartoonish style for the title. That style is present in not just the visual art, but also in the loose, slapstick movement and cardboard enemies. We can also see it in the whimsical character designs and music, and the final levels of each world which set platforming to songs.

Does the game provide a feeling of sociability or a sense of solitude? / How does the player relate to the world, if there is one?

While we can play the game as a multiplayer title, even in the single-player, it themes the enemies as invaders or predators in natural worlds and its collectables as happy little creatures. This means we're always close to a smiling face. It also creates a social dynamic of conservation and guardianship between ourselves and these lands.

No Caption Provided

What's its pacing? / How much do we, as players, determine the experience and how much do the developers get to decide it?

Players may decide to skip collectables and breeze through levels, or keep an eagle eye out for them, setting a deliberate pace. But either way, Legends is generally eager to keep up the flow of movement, with that flow figuring into its upbeat and zany nature.

Is it made up of tightly-defined "sessions" or does the play flow more continguously than that?

Legends divides itself into levels which make up worlds. Each world is a self-contained tale instead of there being a singular narrative which glues them all together.

What behaviour does the game encourage? / What talents is it testing? / Where is it like other games and where is it different?

While it asks for the hand-eye co-ordination skills that many other platformers do, the abundance of and emphasis on collectables means that exploration is going to be key for most players.

So, while we might traditionally refer to Rayman Legends as a cartoon platformer, now we can talk about it with a range of new aesthetics identifiers:

No Caption Provided
  • It's lively.
  • It's light-hearted.
  • It's collectable and exploration-focused.
  • It's laid back about realism.
  • It allows for a lot of player choice in the ordering of challenges.
  • It's about helping out people and environments.

Hopefully, you can see how every one of those elements defines it as much as it being a "cartoon" game or a "platformer", and it's apparent how we can describe the title better by adding onto those aesthetic identifiers. You'll also notice that the answers to many of the questions we can ask overlap. In addition, I hope it's obvious how we can explain more about the game when we look for commonalities between various facets of it and think about how those facets refract through each other.

We'll put a couple more games under the microscope to help this idea sink in. Subject number two: Atari's Paperboy.

How much is the game about realism and how much is it about escapism? / Where is it like other games and where is it different?

In comparison to more fantastical games, Atari's Paperboy is emulating a real-world task with a silly twist.

Is it about iterating on what we've experienced before or continuously moving into new experiences?

As it's taking on the aesthetic of making a paper round, it's a very iterative experience with you playing the same routes on multiple in-game days.

No Caption Provided

What's its pacing? / What talents is it testing?

The pacing is fairly rapid, but Paperboy involves a lot of purposeful management of speed to balance haste against accuracy.

To break that down, it's:

  • Pseudo-realistic.
  • Silly.
  • Iterative.
  • Somewhat fast, but with variable pacing.
  • Testing accuracy and management of speed.

And a third example: Bullfrog's Syndicate. Here, we're going to generate a single description of the game's aesthetics from overlapping many of the above questions. This will show how we might move from bullet points to a whole passage describing a title:

What activities does the game depict? / What behaviour does the game encourage? / What talents is it testing? / What's its pacing? / Where is it like other games and where is it different? / What behaviour does the game encourage? / How does it frame its challenges? / What perspective does the game work from? / How does the player relate to the world, if there is one?

Syndicate is a turn-based strategy game, but most other turn-based strategy games just cast us as military commanders, where Syndicate's premise is one of running a for-profit corporation which treats workers as commodities. So, it has deployment sections which move relatively slowly and have us act tactically. However, the game is also about working out the ideal tax rates to bring in the maximum revenue without inciting rebellion. Plus, it has us controlling our workers' bodies by deciding how they're augmented, and unlike in similar games, the objective is not always to eradicate all enemies. It's often to protect or retrieve an asset.

No Caption Provided

A few more words of caution before I go: We need to keep in mind that aesthetics may change between the modes of a game. You can see how an FPS with a campaign mode, multiplayer mode, and wave-based survival mode would provide three different experiences, even if they all come in the one binary executable. What we call different modes or settings are, under many definitions, different games. We may (emphasis on may), therefore, define each mode as having a different aesthetic. Additionally, I'm not saying that we should throw away most traditional genre classifications. What I am saying is that those naming conventions are only some of the useful tools we have for describing what a game is, and that regularly, they don't tap into what describes a game best. Equally, we have to remember that holistic classifications of a game's aesthetic may not be an option when some aesthetic elements clash with others.

To summarise, if game studies do what other media studies do and view any part of a game that communicates ideas and feelings as "aesthetic", we can use "aesthetic" as not just a term for the visual and auditory, but also as articulating what it's like to play a game. Additionally, compartmentalising the play of games and their other attributes is somewhat arbitrary when we see that play is always communicated through graphics and sound. With that in mind, it often makes sense to view all the components of games as acting towards larger patterns and goals instead of each existing in an impenetrable bubble.

No Caption Provided

It doesn't work for every game; some mash together a story, play, sights and audio that don't gel, but describing that incongruity can also help us learn a lot about the game. This holistic aesthetics is something I've applied in my previous writing here, and I'm going to use it going forwards. Next time you play a game, I'd encourage you to ask some of the questions I laid out earlier in this article or come up with questions of your own. Often, learning the right things just means asking the right questions. Thanks for reading.

Notes

1. Image of Michelangelo's Pieta by Stanislav Traykov. Licensed under Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported.