VIDEO GAMES : MOTION, SENSITIVE / THE NEW YORK TIMES ( RECOMMENDED READING )

November 26, 2010

Motion, Sensitive

By SETH SCHIESEL


WHAT does it mean to play a game?

As someone who spends at least 1,500 hours a year alone in my house playing video games, I can tell you it has always meant pressing a lot of buttons.


In video games there has traditionally been a button for everything. Press a button to jump. Press a button to punch. Press a button to shoot. Press a button to throw. Press a button to catch. Press a button to run. Even press a button to speak. Along with moving a mouse a few inches or twiddling some thumb sticks, this is what it has meant to play a video game.


Now I have nothing against buttons; they’ve been good to me. But as an entertainment interface, they can be profoundly abstract. Unlike the act of changing a channel or activating a stove, playing a video game is supposed to be fun. And yet the physical mechanics of play — pressing buttons — have usually had nothing to do with the actions being evoked.


Now that is finally changing. Music games like Power Gig and Rock Band 3 are beginning to incorporate real musical instruments. Microsoft’s new Kinect system sees you and listens to you in your living room, letting you jump, swing, kick, or just sit on your couch and speak aloud to control what happens on your television. Meanwhile Internet games like Eve Online and World of Warcraft are defined not by the adventures created by their developers but by the global social communities and political systems created autonomously by the players within them. Throughout, from the personal to the physical, the line between the real and the virtual is beginning to fade.


From the beginning of video games’ mass popularity in the 1970s with the likes of Asteroids and Pong, until quite recently, the technology behind them has been so primitive that there has never been even the conceit that a video game could approximate or represent a genuine, nonelectronic human activity.


But as the barrier of buttons give way, rather than sucking us into an electronic world, as in the movie “Tron,” it turns out that the electronics are coming to us; the machines are learning to understand and facilitate real human action and behavior. The result is that video games are poised to become more engaging — physically, emotionally and perhaps even intellectually — than they have ever been. But they will do so not by dehumanizing players but rather by bridging the gap between media and actual personal experience.


And that, I’ve come to realize, is what art is supposed to be all about.


About a year ago I found myself trying to figure out how video games relate to traditional, non-interactive forms of artistic expression. I was struggling to articulate a sense that playing a game could be similar to consuming a painting, the symphony or the ballet.


And then a friend gave me a copy of “Art as Experience,” John Dewey’s seminal 1934 work on the philosophy of art, and it became clear: art exists not as artifact but as we engage with it. As Dewey puts it: “The product of art — temple, painting, statue, poem — is not the work of art. The work takes place when a human being cooperates with the product so that the outcome is an experience that is enjoyed because of its liberating and ordered properties.”


With no media do humans cooperate so intimately as video games. This is precisely why games have been the most popular new mass entertainment of recent decades. And this is also why the emergence of more physically natural and socially meaningful ways of enjoying games is so rich with creative possibility.


Bernard Chiu, chairman of the musical instrument company First Act, fully understands this. Over the last several years his company has invested more than $30 million to develop the first music video game that uses a real electric guitar as its controller, Power Gig: Rise of the SixString.


“The idea is to make guitar playing more enjoyable and fun,” Mr. Chiu said in an interview in his office on Boylston Street in Boston, shortly before the game was released in October. “My goal was really to create a game with a real guitar that is going to be fun, and while they play they also learn the fundamental concepts of playing guitar.”


“It’s really a stealth learning process,” he added. “If I sell the guitar alone, they just don’t like the hard work of learning to play guitar.”


Power Gig comes five years after the original Guitar Hero defined the modern music game. Developed by Harmonix Music Systems, across the Charles River from First Act in Cambridge, Mass., Guitar Hero was one of the revolutionary products (with the Wii and World of Warcraft) that helped rescue video games from cultural irrelevancy in the middle of the last decade.


Guitar Hero and its offspring Rock Band have always seemed to offend certain sorts of music snobs. “Well it’s not a real guitar.” But that was always the point of the plastic guitar-shaped controller with its colorful buttons: self-consciously to mimic the reality of a guitar in a way that could convey at least a bit of the visceral, rhythmic joy of making music (which they certainly do) without the responsibility of actually having to make music.


So the old Guitar Hero devices have been representations of the idea of a guitar. That some music purists have found that offensive brings to mind “The Treachery of Images,” the 1929 painting by René Magritte that proclaims (in French), “This is not a pipe,” underneath, of course, an image of a pipe.


In one sense the problem with Power Gig is that it is too real. Playing it, my fingers throbbed, my wrist cramped, my shoulder ached.


“Ah yes, this is why I never learned to play guitar,” I remembered, ruefully. If you’ve never done it before, attempting to use a real guitar, even as a game controller, is a physically wrenching learning experience. Meanwhile the Power Gig software does not even teach you how to play real guitar beyond a few basic chords.


Rock Band 3, on the other hand, is much more felicitous in how it bridges the gap between a game and actual guitar playing. In Rock Band the singing has always been real, and the drumming has been close enough. Now the series comes with an electronic keyboard from which you can tell the game to require proper notes and an ingenious hybrid guitar that uses real strings and 102, yes, buttons placed exactly where the frets would be on an analog guitar.


So when you play Rock Band 3 in its most advanced mode, you must move your hands just as they would on an actual guitar during a song, but without the callus-inducing pain of pressing strings on frets like Power Gig. But the most compelling factor is that you, the user, can tell the game just how real or how abstract you want it to be. On easy modes all you have to do is press four colored buttons in rhythm; then if you’re ready you can step into playing specific notes.


Yet not even Rock Band 3 allows you to make your own music, which Alex Rigopulos, co-founder and chief executive of Harmonix, readily acknowledges. His company got its start making computer software that let people control sounds, if not compose actual songs. As Mr. Rigopulos recalled, his company’s first product, the Axe, allowed users to manipulate notes on a computer with a joystick. Yet the Axe only sold a few hundred copies. Guitar Hero (and now Rock Band) have sold millions.


“They are performance simulators,” Mr. Rigopulos said of his company’s current games. “There is not really a creative dimension to them.”


“Realistically, if you give the average consumer total creative freedom, it’s somewhat paralyzing,” he added. “It’s like if you just hand someone a paintbrush, most people don’t know what to do with it. It’s always striking the balance between freedom and constraint. And for your average consumer you have to give them objectives and criteria for success and failure. For many people, being creative feels like work and the creative impulse isn’t something that most consumers are motivated by.”


The music games that actually give players control of the music these days don’t rock ’n’ roll, but rather play in the realms of electronica and hip-hop. DJ Hero 2 from Activision comes with a fake turntable that, while not a real record player, conveys some of the tactile reality of how it feels to be a D.J., from rewinding a jam to choosing effects. The new Def Jam Rapstar from Konami goes even further, allowing you to flow freestyle over recorded beats.


But what if your body itself is the game controller?


Of the major game console makers, Nintendo was the first to start doing away with buttons. While Microsoft and Sony were busy trying to make more realistic high-definition explosions, Nintendo was realizing that all those buttons on game controllers were alienating hundreds of millions of potential players around the world. The answer of course was the Wii, with its intuitive motion-sensitive controller that has drawn families and women into gaming in a way they never had before.


But the big boys, Microsoft and Sony, have not been too proud to learn from their rival, and this fall they introduced systems that go beyond the Wii in bringing natural human movement into games. The less ambitious of the two is Sony’s Move for the PlayStation 3, which is basically a more accurate and precise version of the Wii control wand. Coupled with the PS3’s high-definition graphics (the Wii is not high-def), the Move replicates certain types of physical activity, like golf, Frisbee tossing, bowling and sword fighting, more accurately and enjoyably than has ever been possible in the living room.


But Microsoft’s Kinect does away with electronic controllers altogether. With Kinect you just stand in front of the TV and move your body to make things happen on the screen. You actually dance and throw and kick and punch and running (in place). You are performing the actual yoga pose or exercise. You can even talk to it and it understands (though only for basic menu commands at the moment).


With products like Rock Band 3 and Kinect, the art is becoming a real experience. It is a phenomenon familiar to serious players of online role-playing games, where managing relationships with other people is at least as important as the science-fiction or fantasy action of the game itself. In Eve Online high-level political leaders with names like SirMolle (Swedish), Vuk Lau (Serbian), UAxDeath (Russian) and the Mittani (American) have directly shaped the game playing of tens of thousands of other players around the world, and yet can be laid low by individual acts of deceit, misdirection and plain old incompetence, just like politicians in real life. In a persistent online game, without other people to cooperate and compete with, there is no game at all.


I suspect Dewey would have understood all this quite readily. As games become more real, the experience of them is bringing people closer to art.