“The object of art is not to reproduce reality, but to create a reality of the same intensity.”— Alberto Giacometti, sculptor
Storytelling is a Game
There are only small differences between games and works of art. The main difference is the involvement of more than one person. Games involve collaboration while the appreciation of art is solitary.
Art is usually created by one artist and experienced in one person’s imagination. Many can be present, but each has their own experience. Most games involve more than one person, though there is a growing inventory of single-person games. Among them, some are artistic, though they’re mainly entertaining. We’re starting to see games that focus on expression and creativity.
Games will have a hard time becoming works of art as long as they’re created for a market that’s juvenile and unappreciative. Some art is interactive, whimsical, and entertaining but it hasn’t been gamified. Multi-person games, involving two or more people, have a narrow niche and more difficulty in becoming purely artistic.
The defining characteristic of art is its suggestion of something you don’t know what to do with; it generates a paradox. As long as something must be entertaining, it’s difficult to also be paradoxical.
Multi-person video games are expensive to create, some cost $100 million dollars, more than the cost of producing a movie. To submerge you in your imagination either requires a big budget or a child’s mind. If games are to become art, then we need an audience that has not yet been created.
There is also the issue of pacing. Games have built-in clocks—their alternating turns, the duration of their puzzles, and the pace of their rewards. Novels have pacing too, but it’s more varied. Literary works can add digressions, a game can only digress when the digression brings all players with it. This difficulty in shifting the pacing of a game affects the storytelling.
Gamifying Drama
The trend to create serial dramas was credited to Charles Dickens in 1836. The number of serial dramas has now overtaken single-release movies, as you can see in the offerings of streaming media companies like Netflix.
These were called soap operas in the 1950s, whose quality and budgets were minimal. Today’s budgets are huge though their quality remains poor. They are pay-for-play entertainment, not works of careful authorship. Serial entertainment has not made a good platform for art.
It takes more than just a continuing plot to create a meaningful world. Authors of the serial format rarely create themes that span more than a single story. Each episode of the travel adventures in The Pickwick Papers (Charles Dickens)—called the first serialized novel—the 007 spy series (Ian Fleming), and the detective stories of Sherlock Holmes (Arthur Conan Doyle), all conclude at the end of each installment.
“‘Literature’ is not a big enough category for Pickwick. It defined its own, a new one that we have learned to call ‘entertainment.’”— Nicholas Dames (2015)
Themes spanning more than a single book are contained in Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, Frank Herbert’s Dune, and J.K. Rowling’s Harry Potter. Many blur the boundary between having a single plot and being a series of adventures.
Screenwriters are creating movie franchises, but this has not generated literature of any quality. A quick look on Netflix shows most of the offerings are serialized. None rate as literature and most are poor movies. Even the most popular, like the Star Trek and Star Wars franchises, are not literature.
Neil Gaiman, author of great children’s stories (The Graveyard Book and Coraline) also creates video serials (The Sandman, Good Omens, and Dead Boys Detective Agency). But the video serials lack the quality of his writing due to the format, cost, involvement of many authors, directors, producers, executives, and limitations of Gaiman himself.
Most great literature is ahead of its time, while entertainment must be popular in its time. This debases the themes and trivializes the content. Existential questions don’t attract the average viewer who is celebrity-obsessed and poorly read.
Dramatizing Games
Movie remakes are a special kind of serial. Theatrical remakes are often better than the originals, while movie remakes are usually worse. Live theatre aims for quality while movies aim for profit. Consider King Kong, Peter Pan, Dracula, A Christmas Carol, and many others.
Viewers of remakes expect novelty and familiarity, and this is similar to the expectations of those replaying a game. Game replay rarely delivers the novelty of a movie sequel, but it could aim to.
Current games don’t remake themselves with each playing, but this is changing. Most of the board games I’ve designed change on each playing due to rearrangements of the board, resources, rules, objectives, and game play. Traditional board games changed only through the action of the game, but the genre has gone well beyond this.
I use asymmetry to take this further, and asymmetry can be built into any level. Clients vs. Architects satirizes the genre of simple attack games like Monsters vs. Aliens and Plants vs. Zombies. It goes to the intellectual high end of architecture where we’ve seen a good deal of monstrous behavior.
Monster Architects vs. Client Zombies
Architecture, the most utilitarian of the arts, is an appropriate landscape for the monstrous profit motive. In Clients vs. Architects each board is different, just like every architectural commission.
The game reflects construction in real life that is both a puzzle and a maze. And while great architects create great works, it’s their reputation that’s most enduring. The client may use the building but, to an architect, they’re just one consumer among many. The client’s essential purpose is to further the architect’s reputation.
I’ve found it easy to create games that are unique in appearance, form, and function. The game industry, still largely producing consumer toys, has yet to rise to the level of art. Clients vs. Architects attempts to combine all three: entertainment, art, and story. It will not be mass produced; it will only be available as a pre-order through the Kickstarter campaign.
The campaign will start October 1, 2025 and run for 3 weeks. We need to pass the funding threshold in that time or nothing will be created. After the campaign ends, and if it has succeeded, new orders will be accepted for about another month.
If you’re reading this before October 1, subscribe to the email list for news and updates: https://clientsversusarchitects.eo.page/81csy
If you’re reading this after October 1, pledge on our Kickstarter page:
To see the large collection of artist games I designed, go to my games page: https://www.mindstrengthbalance.com/alternative-education/games-system/
References
Dames, Nicholas (June 2015). “Was Dickens a Thief?”. The Atlantic. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2015/06/was-dickens-a-thief/392072/
