The Minecraft Artbox

February 23, 2012 by Leave a Comment

The recent explosion of Minecraft has, in many ways, been no less than an artistic revolution  in gaming. The basic, unmodified, version of  Minecraft creates a world generated out of cubical blocks that can be broken down and rearranged in almost any way the player so desires. It has preprogrammed monsters and NPC’s, but these can easily be turned on and off and placed in specific locations, making them a tool that Minecraft provides for artistic expression.  Minecraft also features an open source code, allowing anyone with the proper programming skills to make new versions and modifications of the program. I would argue that  Minecraft  is less a video game, but rather a tool for artistic expression that can be used as a game.

The vanilla Minecraft is, at its core, a tool for three dimensional modeling on a computer. However, if you add monsters to these model, it becomes a tool to create your own adventures. If you add signs, you can begin to provide textual context  to your adventure. You can begin to create a  story. However, the array of tools the player is provided are limited. However, this is where the open source of a program like Minecraft really shines.

The open source gives players the means to create their own tools for artistic expression with in Minecraft and allows for works of art unique to Minecraft as a medium. Once a player starts taking advantage of the open source of Minecraft, the bar of what can be done in Minecraft is not just raised, but almost completely removed. Now  players can download, or if the mod does not yet exist, create a mod to allow them to create audio recordings that can be triggered and played while interacting with in the program.  Beyond that, if a player wants to do something like create their own levels for Valve’s  Portal, Minecraft modifications can  provide them with the tools to do that. A modification can be downloaded which creates a fully functional portal gun and simulates the physics used in Portal with in Minecraft. Suddenly, with this simple modification, Minecraft has become both an adaptation of Portal and a tool that most anyone can use to modify Portal as a literary source.

Minecraft gives players almost limitless power to create original works of art, whether it be creating a model with in the game world, or adapting and modifying a previous work. I can not predict what the Minecraft community will produce with the tools it has been provided, it  has great potential to create unique and interesting works of art.

 

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Games are all about control

February 9, 2012 by 2 Comments

Of course that isn’t completely true, but many of the best art games I know of deal with the theme of control, typically at both the narrative and procedural level. In this post I’ll provide a few examples that try to back up this claim, and then try to figure out why this is true.

The word “control” is fairly embedded in video game culture. We play console games with a controller, ask friends which avatar they’re controlling, and tweak the control schemes of our PC games. In many genres (FPS, platformers, racing), responsive controls are critical for successful play. Indeed, if a player is not given choices to control the direction of the game’s narrative, the question of whether it is even a game arises .

The last game we played for this course, Judith by Terry Cavanaugh, has a narrative that is very explicitly about control. The character Judith is testing the limits of her husband’s control over her. The game design supports this by channeling the player to a single door each time, asking false yes or no questions, and by the end not even allowing a “No”.

Control can also be examined in Passage by Jason Rohrer, the first game we played. The control scheme of Passage is limited to movement in four directions, which in turn controls what you as a player can do in the game. This provides clarity to the procedural rhetoric, making it easy to interpret. It can also be read as contributing to the game’s message. Something along the lines of “Life appears to present limitless options to you, but you don’t really make any significant choices.”

The popular game Portal by Valve (and to a lesser extent Portal 2) has a narrative that is entirely about control.  GladOS is obsessed with controlling your progress through the test chambers, and at the “end” when you break free of her sanitized, controllable levels, she freaks out. Of course, then the real game begins. The interesting thing is, even post-test chamber your gameplay is severely restricted in order to create the puzzles. If you play through with the Valve developer commentary on, you can learn about the design decisions that they made to make players look at certain things in the proper climactic moment. Again, the illusion of control.

Many games could be looked at this way. Call of Duty games are sometimes criticized for being essentially on-rails shooters, where you make no decisions and have no control over the narrative experience. Of course, this is can also be read as a rhetoric about the life of a grunt soldier in a global war. So then, the interesting question: why do so many games, particularly the ones we think of as artistic or literary, address this one theme.

My tentative answer is that control is what game designers know best, so they “write what you know.” Crafting a compelling interactive game is all about limiting the player’s options to a few interesting ones. Puzzles are only interesting when they are difficult, with limited solutions. While a player expects direct control over their experience, it is really the designer who is manipulating your options at every turn who has an indirect control over the game.

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