Special | 7m 4s | Video has closed captioning.
Video games are important. They are a storytelling medium, a place for self-expression, a sandbox for the human imagination, and an extension of an ages old tradition of gaming. We play out some of the most essential aspects of our culture in games, and we learn more about ourselves and the world around us in the process.
Aired: 10/26/11
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Even though games are ancient, there is something about this moment in history that is special.
People are continually experimenting with video games, showing what this art form is made of.
They're exploring the limits of gameplay and mechanics.
Games are beautifully architected experiences that nonetheless demand participation from the audience.
I think that's incredible.
There's no other medium that can do that.
Games have been around for thousands of years, and they're among the most ancient form of human design, communication, and interaction and expression.
I would argue that we are now entering a ludic age, an age of play.
The problems facing the world today more and more require a deep understanding of complex systems.
If you have a chess board, for example, to play that game means to engage with that system, understand the rules of that system, reverse engineer what's a good move, what's a bad move, what's my opponent going to do-- speak the language of chess with your opponent in a space that's collaborative and competitive at the same time.
Every game that you play, it's like a little laboratory for understanding how systems work.
And I think that's why games have a special relevance to the time that we're in right now.
Roughly between 1980 and 2005, we knew what video games were.
We knew that new video games would always have to be sold on better graphics than the previous generation of video games.
We also knew that video games were these fairly involved things where you had to sit down for hours at a time to play, and we knew that video games were primarily for young men.
Then in 2005, all of this fell apart in one swoop.
We started getting a new console, like the Wii, which wasn't actually sold on better graphics than the previous console generations.
And we started being able to get games in all kinds of different sizes through all kinds of different channels.
Suddenly, you could sell games that had an entirely different kind of visual aesthetic, games that very openly were made on the cheap compared to the traditional big video games.
Minecraft is an example.
It doesn't try to have traditionally great photorealistic graphics.
It tries to have graphics that are openly made of little blocks and pieces, openly pixelated, openly technological.
It's a game design for people to design their own thing.
Let the player decide what they actually want to do, how they want to use this world.
There's a Tetris recreation in Minecraft.
There's a recreation of "Lost."
There's a recreation of "The Simpsons."
You allow the player to express themselves what they want to do with this world that you've set up, and you allow the players to decide how they want to use this world.
I think that games should continue to explore the experiences that they can offer people through interactivity that passive media can't.
I like games that are forcing you to interact with someone's story and forcing you to experience the things about it that are good and the things about it that aren't good.
Bioshock is asking you to explore this world and to make these choices about how violent you're going to be or not be.
How are you going to dispatch your aggressors, and are you going to make innocent people suffer for your agenda?
It's much more important that you make a decision to pull the trigger, and then you are the one who has to answer for it later.
Portal took the concept of the training level and subverted it, and then said what if you can't trust the game?
What if this soothing voice that is guiding you and teaching you how to play is actually part of the story?
It began to leave little environmental clues for you.
You could step outside the levels at some point and see where those who came before you hung out and went crazy and wrote on the walls.
And you start to wonder, well, who am?
Why am I here?
Even the simplest game is a series of mechanical choices.
That's why players and designers are so obsessed with the concept of choice in games.
Make choices meaningful.
Make them affect what happens in the game world.
Just adding the element of interactivity can make those narratives so much more complex and powerful, because you feel responsible for it.
What sets independent video games apart is budgets.
People who make independent video games don't have any money.
They don't have to make any money.
They're completely free.
They can tackle certain things that mainstream gaming can't.
Cactus is a slightly disturbed person.
He just draws from things that probably cause him anxiety and make him uncomfortable.
And I think he shows that.
Hot Throttle is this game where you're this man who thinks he's a car.
You take all your clothes off and start making car noises, and then you go around this race track with other humans who think they're cars.
The game just looks kind of disturbing, and everyone in the game looks pretty disturbed.
There's some sort of anxiety when you start playing it.
Jason Rohrer made this game called Passage.
His work is really incredible, because it's really, really personal, and it's tied to his family.
You start alone.
And it's a side scroller, and you keep walking.
And you get older, and you find someone, and you keep walking.
Your partner dies, and then you die, and the game.
It draws from a lot of emotions and a lot of really personal things.
That's something that doesn't generally get explored even in indie games.
It makes a personal connection to the developer, and then you know where the developer is coming from.
And it's trying to challenge people's perceptions of what is considered normative in games.
Those types of games that are opposition to what is in the mainstream, those are the types of games that I'm drawn to and I consider as art.
The biggest thing that games have to say about us is that we love journeys and that we love growing.
That's what I think is art-- telling a narrative about your life through this lens and showing other people.
Games can be art, but picking up something new, spending time with it, figuring out what the inner workings are.
They are an occasion for people to come together and play.
Games speak to the fact that we constantly want you challenges and new places to conquer.
