The task of videogame critics is to recognize and elevate culturally important games. They need to point out to the audience that Dear Esther is more important artistically than Bioshock, and motivate the argument. This does not need to lead to the public playing or even liking Dear Esther more than Bioshock. They don’t even need to understand its critical elevation -though that is of course preferable. They just need to respect the game as superior. It is important to make these distinctions for a medium to move forward. To make progress, we need to identify and honor a small selection of the medium’s output as artistically superior, disregarding its popular or commercial success.

This is not an easy task. The critic will need to take unpopular positions. This is difficult in a context of Liking and Following and PlusOne-ing. And it may require elevating only certain parts of certain games. It will take courage to say that the city simulations in Assassin’s Creed are more important than its combat or its plot. And lastly, but almost impossible given the current scarcity and thus fragility of culturally relevant videogames, the critic will need to be harsh on exemplary works and point out their artistic shortcomings, for instance in comparison with art in other media.

Videogame critics should not be videogame fans. They are not part of the public. They are not looking to be popular. Their responsibility is to the medium and its place in culture first, ergo to humanity as a whole. The benefits of their work on a larger social level happen over the long haul. There are no easy quick victories.

Critical elevation of culturally important works does not imply rejection of culturally inferior works. The latter have a function (fun, entertainment, social opportunities, etc). However, confusing this function with artistic merit is the surest strategy to prevent the medium from reaching the status of other media, or achieving comparable quality and diversity.

For any of this to have any sort of impact, the critic will need to establish him- or herself as an authority. And this could prove difficult today given the unpopularity implicit in the task, as mentioned above, and the widespread cynicism versus the very notion of authority. One possible strategy could be to appeal to the above average intelligence of many game developers and players. If the critic can make a superbly reasoned argument, he or she may not succeed in convincing the public, but he or she may gain their respect. And respect is all we need.

If game reviews try to answer the question “Is this videogame a good game?” then game criticism should attempt to answer “Is this videogame a beautiful work of art?” And the terms “beauty” and “art” should be used with all the weight attributed to them through history. Where videogame reviewing happens within a context of consumers and fans, videogame criticism happens in service of the entire human population. The task is not to encourage gamers to appreciate artistic videogames. It is to demonstrate to the world which videogames are worthy of cultural esteem and why.

As Slow As Possible (ASLAP) was inspired by a composition (“ASLSP”) of the famous and notorious American composer John Cage. The original tempo instruction for the performing musician was: as slow as possible. This resulted in performances typically lasting between 20 to 70 minutes. Is this slow enough? How slow is “as slow as possible?”

The city of Halberstadt, Germany, is currently conducting an organ performance that will last 639 years. The last sound change occurred August 5, 2011, and the next sound change will be July 5, 2012. Is this as slow as possible? Is this the final word on the slowness of musical performances?

A performance of 639 years spans the lifetime of many human generations. This performance is certainly using a time scale uncommon to the human experience.

One aspect of ASLAP (the videogame) and of ASLSP (the composition) is the perception of time and of the human time scale (that goes from birth to death).

What does an instruction like “as slow as possible” mean for a videogame? How slow can a game be? ASLAP presents this question to the player. At what point does the player become a viewer? Which strategies are required to play a game, which is breaking the standard time length for videogames? How do you organize your life around playing a game in “realtime” which could take 20 years? Or 200 years?

ASLAP starts slow, you need to “phase yourself in.” It starts slow and gets slower and slower. And slower. Ad infinitum(*). Each player should decide for her/himself, how slow “as slow as possible” is.

What kind of game then is it? ASLAP can be described as a game in search of a puzzle game, though there should be enough time left to find the game in the game. The musical structure of ASLAP (the videogame) is very primitive. Two notes switch endlessly back and forth and each note plays longer and longer. It is a found footage game from the 70s, from the lost works of Ewon Gral. It is a living painting and a still life (nature morte). It has its own consciousness (*).

(*) still needs to be proven.

On Valentine’s Day, indie game developers axcho and knivel released a little game called The Love Letter. It’s a free, five-minute experience, a slice of life as the most popular boy in school. But things aren’t so easy at the top, especially when you find a mysterious love letter in your locker and you have to read the whole thing during passing period without any of your so-called friends catching you.

“It’s hard for me to say where The Love Letter fits in the spectrum of game to notgame. The purpose is to get across a particular five-minute experience, not to make it about a challenging game with a lot of replay value,” says axcho, who wrote the code for the game.

While there are no points, achievements or levels to be found in The Love Letter, it is possible to win or lose. Getting caught by another student while reading your love letter results in a cute but painful shaming in front of your peers, and a quick trip back to the title screen to try again. If you do get to the end of the letter without anyone seeing you, you are rewarded with an awkward but adorable encounter with your secret admirer, and a satisfying “the end” that makes it clear you’ve met the game’s expectations.

Still, there is a balance to be struck. You could call it a casual stealth game with only one level, but that would be missing the point.

The Love Letter was originally a 72-hour creation for the Ludum Dare 22 game jam, where hundreds of participants all over the world spent a weekend making games inspired by the theme of “alone”. The game’s author knivel says that the brief development time encouraged him to try making a short, scripted experience that really explores the competition theme rather than simply trying to make a fun game that people would want to play over and over again. It lasts for five minutes because that’s as long as it needs to be. It’s not particularly deep or profound, but it stands on its own for five minutes, without all the gameplay fluff that would be needed to sustain a longer playing time.

As one player mentioned on the notgames forum,

“What made this for me was the fact that the game didn’t try to ‘challenge’ me with levels, achievements, or points. It could have been more ‘fun’ and earn more flash portal money if you went that route. I can imagine myself adding more challenging level design and mechanics to this until the game ends up as this soulless fun machine.

But you sir, made this with the notgames mindset and left me with something pure and sincere. Thanks for that.”

We’ve all seen shallow themes stretched out to hours of gameplay, whether in killing monsters or clicking cows. But while some developers choose to reach for lofty heights with themes that deserve such extended introspection, others like axcho and knivel simply take something sweet and fresh and give it all the time it deserves. Five minutes.

This quote says it best:

“If Dear Esther is the main course, The Love Letter is my dessert.”

You can read more about The Love Letter’s development on axcho’s blog.

Swedish indie game studio Woolly Robot has just released its poetic title Flight of the Fireflies for iPad. Flight of the Fireflies is an atmospheric and experimental game where you guide a swarm of musical fireflies with your finger. The game is available through the App Store for $3.99.

“I want to create games that are more about having an experience than about being challenged. Flight of the Fireflies is an experiment to see how much you can take the game out of a game, but still have an immersive experience,” says the game’s designer Jonathan Hise Kaldma.

The game design isn’t the only way that the game pushes boundaries. Unlike in most games, the music isn’t pre-recorded, but is generated dynamically while you play the game. Each firefly is a separate tone, and as you collect more fireflies, the music builds up and becomes more complex. Also, the environments in the game aren’t painted or rendered, but made from photographs taken in and around Stockholm, Sweden.

“One of the inspirations for the game was an exhibition by photographer Gregory Crewdson. I always felt like games could use photography more, so I went out with a camera around Stockholm to try to capture the feelings that I wanted to convey in the game,” says Hise Kaldma.

One of the problems the studio has faced with the game is how to best describe it.

“I call it a game, since it comes from that tradition. But I know some people wont think it’s a game since you can’t really win or lose,” says Hise Kaldma. “I don’t really care if people call it ‘interactive art’ or something else instead. As long as they don’t think it’s inaccessible or hard to understand, because it’s not. Anyone with an open mind can enjoy it.”

Woolly Robot is the indie game studio of designer Jonathan Hise Kaldma from Stockholm, Sweden. He is an active participant in the Notgames Initiative, the collective of game designers that explores the potential of video games as a new medium. Flight of the Fireflies was exhibited at last year’s Notgames Fest in Cologne.

Flight of the Fireflies – Trailer from Woolly Robot on Vimeo.

NOTGAMES RELEASES IN 2012

The first release, on January 31st, is “Flight of The Fireflies” by Jonathan Hise Kaldma at Woolly Robot: an iPad application featured in last August’s Notgames Fest in the Cologne Game Lab during the Game Developers Conference. On February 14, then, The Chinese Room will release the new version of “Dear Esther”, also featured in the Notgames Fest. And finally in the first quarter, György Dudas will release “As Slow As Possible”.

In the second quarter of 2012, Shane Edward Semler of Ghostwheel Games is set to release “Alien Worlds Explorer” for iPad.

The third quarter of 2012 will be the busiest of all. Dan Pinchbeck of The Chinese Room will release his mysterious “gameB”. Jeroen D. Stout of Stout Games, creator of IGF 2011 Nuovo nominee “Dinner Date”, will release “Cheongsam”. Plural Games‘ Nicolai Troshinsky, also nominated for the IGF Nuovo award in 2011 with “Loop Raccord”, will release his new “Landscape”. Woolly Robot is set to release their “Unannounced notpuzzle game”. And last but not least, Tale of Tales, creators of “The Path” and “The Graveyard”, both IGF finalists as well, will release “Bientôt l’été”.

To end the year in beauty, The Chinese Room will release their “Everybody’s gone to the Rapture” in the fourth quarter of 2012.

The full list can be consulted on the Notgames blog.
http://notgames.org/blog/releases
This page will be updated continuously. New titles and release dates have already been added, with certainly more to follow.

THE NOTGAMES INITIATIVE

Tale of Tales’ Michaël Samyn started the notgames initiative in 2010 as a gathering place for developers who wish to explore the potential of videogames as a creative medium, beyond the confines of conventional game design. Notgames is not a category but rather an invitation, a challenge, a design method. The members of its community have already produced several titles that did not pass unnoticed. Next to the authors and work mentioned above, Frictional Games created multiple award winning “Amnesia: The Dark Descent”, Krystian Majewski is the author of recently released “Trauma”, Erik Loyer produced the iPad hit “Strange Rain”, Erik Svedäng made a big impression on the iPhone with “Kometen”, and so on.

“Everyone with an interest in developing videogames outside of the boundaries of rigid game structures is welcome on our forum,” says founder Michaël Samyn. “We prioritize quality over quantity and we are not in a hurry to grow, but we are an open community and welcome all. Our purpose is to help and support each other with the difficult task of creating without conventions to fall back on. In all peace and sincerity.”

Notgames also has a Tumblr stream, a Facebook page, a Twitter account and a blog.

Almost 10 years ago, Auriea and I switched from the web to video-games as a medium for our artistic activities. We had already been playing some video-games and they had inspired our work here and there. But somehow it had never occurred to us that we could make them ourselves.

When you come to video-games late, like we did, when you missed Mario, skipped Zelda and can’t distinguish too well between childhood memories of Hide & Seek and Pac-Man, video-games seem like an exciting new medium for artistic creation! In video-games you can make living worlds to explore, you can breathe life into artificial characters, you can set up conditions for situations without knowing how they will play out, you can create a visceral form of visual poetry that makes the separation between the art and the spectator very small. How could our artists’ souls not be attracted to all this potential? Indeed, this medium seemed like a godsend to satisfy centuries of artistic desires. The desire of the artist to become one with the spectator, the desire of the spectator to step into the mysterious world imagined by the artist. It was pretty clear to us: the medium of video-games is the medium mankind had always been waiting for.

As newcomers to a field, we started to investigate our new surroundings. We visited conferences and fairs and played hundreds of video-games. From the most well-known to the plain obscure.
We ended up confused and disappointed. Yes, we did find the worlds and characters and situations and even the poetry that comes so natural to this medium. But we were surprised to find that most video-games were structured in a way that prevented us from engaging with this content. With almost no exceptions, each video-game put obstacles in our way that we needed to overcome. The connection between these obstacles and the fictional world they were placed in was mostly rather vague and often even absurd.

It seemed to us that the things we were interested in -the imaginary world and its fictional characters- only served as visual presentation of an underlying system. This would explain the shallow characters, the cliché story plots and even the bad walk cycles of the avatars that you are staring at for hours on end. Only then it dawned on us that video-games were essentially games! That’s why they were called video-games. All this amazing technology, the spectacular realtime rendering, the sophisticated artificial intelligence, the revolutionary non-linear story-telling and mind-boggling capacity for interaction were used only as a way to present dull sports-like games.

Playing these games was not about engaging with characters at all. It was about winning or losing. It wasn’t about exploration at all. It was about attaining goals. It wasn’t about having a good time. It was about getting rewards, getting results. We were dumb-founded. It was as if somebody took a big brush and scribbled a tic-tac-toe grid over Botticelli’s Birth of Venus. What a terrible waste of a perfectly fine medium!

What have people done to amuse themselves with computers since the CD-Rom era? Why hasn’t anyone made another Ceremony of Innocence since? What happened to the promise of exploration made by the first Tomb Raider? Why had people not realized that most of us were playing Myst for its world and its stories, and not the arcane puzzles? Why had developers continued to refine the simulation of fire arms rather than the immersion in virtual landscapes? And where does this damn loyalty to the 8-bit stone age come from?

I have no idea. Maybe it was easier to come up with rigid games than wrangle with wild fantasies. Maybe the technology was not accessible enough to artists. Maybe the industry was satisfied with its commercial results and reluctant to expand. Maybe the art world didn’t care enough.

I don’t know. But what I do know is that the desire is still there. We all know what we want from this medium, from the medium of video-games. We want it to deliver on the promise that art has been making for centuries. We want to visit other worlds, we want to walk in somebody else’s shoes, we want grasp a little bit of what it means to be in another situation. We want this medium to make our lives richer, our understanding of the world more intense, our connection to other people more profound. We want to live through adventures. We want to see the attack ships on fire off the shoulder of Orion. We want to watch the C-beams glitter in the dark near the Tannhauser gate.

That is what video-games promise us on the back of the box. That is what gamers talk about when they reminisce their hours of playing. That is what excites non-gamers when they hear about this medium. We all like playing games just fine. But this is about something else! Something more! Something much more profound. This is not a game.

I’m delighted to see that, despite the setbacks of the previous decade, the first glimmers of hope have started to appear on the horizon of the video-games medium. That is what is presented in this exhibition. Video-games created by passionate people intent on exploring the potential of this new medium. Unsurprisingly, most of these have been created by independent developers, individuals or small teams working on shoestring budgets. It’s hard work. And we’re going against the grain. But we all believe that this work needs to be done. We owe it to this medium. And we owe it to humanity. We will find a way.

I would like to thank the Cologne GameLab for organizing this event and designing this truly wonderful exhibition. Maybe it will become historic. Maybe this will be the turning point. Maybe video-game developers and artists will respond to the wake up call. We have a wonderful new medium here, let’s make something with it!

Open your favorite music program right now, play some music, and turn on the visualizer.  Look at it for a minute or two.  Put it in the background while you read the rest of this essay.

Back yet?  Good.  Now, what you’ve been looking at is art.  I don’t mean to say that it’s Art with a capital “A”, or even that it’s any good–all I mean to say is that you’re looking at some form of creative expression, as distinct from the music you’re listening to as a film is from its soundtrack.  If we agree that fractal art is a legitimate form of creative expression, it’s hard to say your visualizer isn’t.  But…what kind of medium is it?

It’s a moving image, so it’s certainly not prose or a painting, and it doesn’t seem to be film, because you never see the same thing twice, and what you see is dependent on the music.  It’s tempting to call it a game, but I think this is a mistake.  It’s not like any game we’ve seen before: it has no objectives or goals, no notion of progress or completion, and very little interactivity.  In fact, the little we can do to interact with it–change the music–results in the least interesting behavior.  It looks much better if we just let the music play.  The program is interacting with the music, not a player–you don’t “play” this game at all, you only watch it!  It doesn’t even seem to have rules except in the most abstract sense of the word.  You could, I suppose, argue that it still counts as a game, that the music is the “player” and the lines of code that govern the program’s behavior are the “rules”.  But doesn’t that seem like cheating a little?  If the categorization were that simple, we would still be calling films “photoplays”.  Why don’t we?  Because calling them photoplays is a disservice to the unique strengths and weaknesses of the medium.  Can you imagine what film would be like if we still thought of them as “plays, only on a screen”?  The film industry would be a joke!  A film that was shot on location instead of on a set would be considered experimental, and a film where the camera moves from place to place instead of remaining static would be the height of avant-garde.  No one would have even thought to actually cut and edit the film! The same is happening now with video games: because we call them something they’re not, because we still think of them as “games, only on a computer”, we limit what they are capable of.

Look back at your visualizer.  What you’re looking at is not a game: it is something new entirely.  The fact is, games are not new.  Games have been around longer than movies, longer than books, longer than the written word.  Kittens play games; they are probably older than language itself.  Games are not new. Computers are.  Computers have given birth to a medium of expression so unique, so bizarre, so unanticipated, that we can only name it by comparison with what it is not.  This medium is not the medium of video games.  Those in the video game industry–even those on the very edge of the avant-garde–still hold to the assumption that games are made to be played.  But programs don’t have to be played.  They don’t have to be interacted with.  They don’t have to be “fun”.  Like the best true art, they can be beautiful for their own sake.

I don’t mean to say that we should stop making games.  Computers are a wonderful tool, and–as with dozens of other media including film, painting, photography, and music–they have allowed us to do things with games that weren’t possible before.  I don’t even mean to say that games can’t be art, in the highest sense of the word–Brenda Brathwaite’s Train, a game made without a single silicon chip or digital display, is as much a work of Art as any painting or song.  What I am saying is that by fixating on games, we are ignoring the potential of this new, unnamed medium.  What’s worse, by confusing this new medium with the medium of games, we’re putting severe limits on what we can do with it.  Film gave us a new kind of stage play, true–any play, after all, can be translated into a film.  So, too, can any game be translated into a video game.  But in both cases, the true potential of the medium lies in the things it can do differently than what came before.  Games can be wonderful–and like plays, they have strengths that their successor lacks–but these new programs, these notgames, have the potential to be so much more.

Even if there is a minor strategic advantage to winning the loyalty of your colleagues, their personalities are so outspoken that it is virtually impossible not play this on a more personal level. There’s certain characters you like more than others. There’s several you can imagine your commander being romantically attracted to. And the game does offer opportunity to pursue this. My commander Sheppard had a wonderful intimate encounter with an alien scientist called Tali, whose body was so susceptible to infection that she had to wear a space suit at all times. It was terribly romantic.

And it wasn’t just romance. There’s a lot of talking in Mass Effect. In a way, it feels like all of the interactions in the game are designed for the sake of narrative. That’s virtually unique in video games. The backstory to the game is rather dull and conventional, but it serves well as a backdrop for your relationships with the other characters, both on your ship and on alien planets. The entire game revolves around these relationships. Even the numerous shoot-outs don’t feel as much like game challenges (at least when played in easy mode) than they do like opportunities to bond with your team mates. For each mission, you chose two people to join you. With these two, you share the tediousness of the game, which adequately expresses the tediousness of the combat situation, tightening a bond between you, as a result of shared suffering.

Each of the characters has a personal issue they need to resolve. You can decide to help them. And when you succeed, their friendship for you will increase. So success or failure of these missions feels much more important than in other games where failure often just means that you have to redo the mission until you get it right. Unlike in most video games, failure is a valid outcome of a mission in Mass Effect 2. And failure means that you have disappointed a friend. I guarantee that it hurts, when you’re really fond of someone and you fail to help them with a problem that was very important to them. I can never think of Samara without regret. When I see her meditating on the floor of her cabin, introverted, unwilling to talk to me. It hurts the way a virtual bullet never could.

It’s a heart warming experience to converse with the crew of your ship. Even if, and especially because, these interactions have no effect on the game’s outcome. You simply engage in them for their own sake. Flirting for the fun of it, sharing jokes or just looking out at the stars together. Friendly warmth in the freezing vacuum of space.

The depth of these relationships, is felt when choosing team members for particularly dangerous missions. There is no way that you can select your virtual lover to go on a suicide mission, even if she’s the most suitable for the job. It’s a strange sensation to be so attached to a character that your performance as a gamer becomes irrelevant. The kind of sensation that is really unique to this medium and that should be explored further and by more developers.

Because there’s still a few areas where the experience could be improved if developers radically choose to make their work about people, and not about objects and systems. For instance, your relationship with other characters only really develops on the ship. If you’re on a planet or in combat, your team members seem to have forgotten how close you two are (or not). Combat is all business. That’s a pity. Also, having shared a dangerous situation only emotionally effects you, the player. It doesn’t seem to change the feelings of the people you shared it with. It’s as if they forget the hardship as soon as they return to the ship.

Another inaccuracy is the fatality of decisions made in the course of a relationship. The game does not allow you to apologize or to clear up a misunderstanding. Any attempt to be friendly with a person after a conflict is futile. They will remain stubborn and sulking for the remainder of the game. Relationships also don’t evolve on their own. They just sit and wait for you to do something. On the one hand this contributes to the gravity of your decisions. But on the other, the rigidity of such a structure makes one unpleasantly aware of the hard computer logic that runs underneath the experience. It spoils the mood.

In the end, Mass Effect 2 is an exhilarating ride. Not because of its epic kitsch backstory, its combat with supernatural weapons or its Thunderbirds-are-go fetishism of futuristic machinery. But because it’s about people. And about relationships between people. Through the exploration of relationships with characters we are unlikely to encounter in real life, we can broaden our affective horizons. We are invited to deal with all sorts of exotic concerns, and learn about ourselves as we do. As such, Mass Effect 2 is an emotionally enriching experience, a shining example of the potential of video games as an expressive medium.

It’s not difficult to imagine Uncharted 2 as a movie. Indeed, the story takes many of its elements directly from adventure films in the Indiana Jones style. But what’s more surprising is the game’s uncompromising linear structure. If videogames would be that abundantly creative universe that the potential of its technologies promises us, Uncharted 2 would be a revolution! The very idea that an interactive experience can be so linear is brilliant. It contradicts every instinct we have about the merits of the medium. And yet it works. Uncharted 2 is a very entertaining ride, with only a few bumps in the road that, while utterly destructive for the linear flow of the experience, we’ll choose to chalk up to lapses in concentration of the designer, carelessness of the quality assurance team, or simple habitual residue from videogame traditions.

But why does Uncharted 2′s linearity feel so fresh? After all, on the surface, its structure doesn’t seem to differ much from Donkey Kong or Mario. You control a character and move it towards a certain goal while overcoming obstacles set up by the designer.

One reason seems to be that the goal of the game is actually unknown to the player, crushing the assumption that linear games are always goal-oriented. In this way, Uncharted 2 is more similar to a suspenseful book than a game. In games your mission is to overcome challenges and achieve a certain goal. This is a perfectly linear construction as well. The difference is that the linearity is known, and is deeply felt as the top level of the structure that supports the experience.

In Uncharted 2, you only really experience linearity at the micro-level. At each moment in the game, you know exactly what to do. Why you do these things is often unclear. You don’t need to know this as a player. As long as the hero you’re controlling knows. He knows where he’s going. You don’t need to. And the design of the game cleverly takes most of the guesswork out of the equation. It’s usually quite clear exactly what you need to do to fulfill your avatar’s -sometimes secret- wishes.

There’s not much skill required to get through the game. Nor much creativity either. This makes Uncharted 2 potentially very accessible to a wide audience. We can get the emotional effect of playing -triumph, progress, etc- without have to go through the difficult progress required by most other games.

The emotions of playing are very compatible with the nature of the adventure narrative that underlies Uncharted 2. Indiana Jones is also about overcoming challenges, being triumphant, sometimes frustrated but not for long because our hero is very smart and resourceful. Like its cinematic inspiration, there’s no need for expression of any other emotions.

This is why it makes sense that the characters in the story express no other emotions than the emotions one might experience when playing a game. These relatively primitive emotions fit the charming boys’ adventure fantasy well. Despite the existence of a love triangle in the game, for instance, the characters never express any real love or affection or empathy, beyond some clumsy, youthful innuendo here and there. This ensures that the little boy in all of us is never confronted with complicated issues, and the adventure can simply continue.

Thanks to its smart application of linearity, Uncharted 2 is one of the first videogames that almost feels ready for breaking through the niche barrier and draw in the mass audience. If the designers of Uncharted 3 can find the courage to remove the awkward shooting sequences, and perhaps allow their characters a slightly wider range of emotions to express, videogames will have become a worthy successor to mainstream cinema.