I use the word melding because it fits the intermedial approach. As art evolves, we will see it, not as a sum of its parts, but as a whole. In the future, people won't think of film as a mix of music and pictures; they will think of it as film. Intermedia is art where a meeting of mediums achieves something that can't be done with one medium alone: a synergetic spirit must permeate the piece.
Dick Higgins intended this method of analysis when he defined intermedia, and later when he defended his word and distinguished it from multimedia. Multimedia is obsessed with the preconceived notion of media: we think in terms of what we already know. Indermedia asks us to look where mediums merge, to accept a piece as new.
Interestingly, or perhaps fittingly considering the decentralization of Fluxus and Mail Art, intermedial aesthetics are being adopted by low culture faster than they can be considered in ivory towers. Gamers, for instance, are beginning to demand narrative sophistication; and most players don't dissect their favorite games, evaluating music, dialogue, animation, and textures independently. They see a whole.
Admittedly, the game world has yet to reach aesthetic maturity (if there is such a thing). Yet, the form is not hopeless, and we can look to film as a precedent for this new tech-enabled art.
Film was once considered man’s most comprehensive art. And for good reason: a film must mix the composer's score with the dubber's dialogue, the cinematographer's frames with the director's eye, the screenwriter's dream with the editor's scissors, and (hopefully) the actor's humanity with the gazers' open hearts.
It's a lot to keep straight. But the industry seems to manage, and occasionally something artistic is released. (But how is this artistry determined? I listed all these industry jobs, is a film just the sum of its parts? No. Just as a poem is more than words and rhyme, a film is more than pictures and sound; and only the intermedial approach can do a piece critical justice.)
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Videogames are beginning to rise to a similar aesthetic occasion. Though most videogames are far from art, the conceptual motivation of indie developers is pushing the medium thematically deeper.
The largest obstacle to narrative development in games is still the programming loop. (One of Halo's designers famously said "In Halo 1, there was maybe 30 seconds of fun that happened over and over and over and over again. And so, if you can get 30 seconds of fun, you can pretty much stretch that out to be an entire game.")
Of the few games that have actually foregrounded this programming crutch, the most impressive is probably Every day the same dream. Molleindustria's existential flash game uses loops to create literal repetition in game. Every day the player wakes up in the same mundane misery while minimalist music relentlessly repeats. The goal is to escape the expected, and the game ends with a surreal suicide scene (whereas surviving is the goal in most games).
Another game that twists expectation to craft the existential is You Find Yourself in a Room. In this text-based adventure, the computer-narrator begins to punish the player for having human emotions. As the game progresses, the controlling computer has a self-realization and ultimately lets the game end. But, all the game's effectiveness rides on the exploitation of this structural crutch. So, the gimmicks are already obvious, even in these progressive games.
For the medium to progress, designers must to change their programming conventions, or else make them invisible to the player(s).
Written well, but lacking in cohesion or depth. Intermedia is introduced initially, then briefly explored as it exists in film, and then one aspect of video games is explored and in no way connected to intermedia. Its disjointed, and lacks a proper conclusion to bring it together.
ReplyDeleteHaving thought about it, analyzing games in terms of the programming loop is somewhat wrong. Sure, games do probably run with the basic idea of the loop, but its there for the repetition of check input-update. The update will happen, with or without input. There is really no other structure that games can run on to achieve this - input can be event driven, but continual updates of the world state must rely on a loop(a timer based event structure is viable, but that is essentially a loop in itself). However, the loop also does not necessarily lead to repetition, and in truth most games rely on a gradual or periodic change in state along with a gradual or period change/diversification of user inputs. Though the same loop repeats, the results are not the same since the state of the game has progressed in some way and what the player needs to do(or, much much more often how the played needs to do it) has changed. Really, it is this dominance of how things are done over what things are done that leads to most repetition in games. However, the tools with which they are made and perhaps the object oriented nature of some game design are probably other major factors that shape and limit games-code relying on the structure of other code, and thus being limited by it.
I will also say that You Find Yourself In A Room is interesting in that it in fact does not need to be programmed in a loop - no update is ever made without user input, and so it can be entirely event driven, and most likely is. This goes against the convention of games, and the game as a whole twists expectations in another way: instead of prodding the player to continue to a specific goal, it antagonizes the player and does everything in its power to make the player stop, daring them to go against the intentions of the game out of their own will rather than because thats what the current objective is. To me, anyway, that is the truly novel aspect of the game.
Thanks for commenting Andrey. (It creates the illusion of an audience.) You're absolutely right, of course. I still don't know enough about the medium to say anything incisive, so thanks for adding your expertise to the mix. Blog posts are living, breathing documents. Thanks for breathing some life into this one.
ReplyDeleteAlso, posting the link to Fourth Wall here (http://thefourthwallgame.com/?page_id=80). I was quite impressed.