The Most Human Artform: Why Games Matter More Than You Think

By Paddy Kelly.

We need art. Desperately. As the world slides further from the place we thought we’d agreed on was desirable, and into realms most terrible, we need it more than ever. This became clear during the covid pandemic, when people under lockdown not only consumed vast amounts of TV, books, music and podcasts, but, in their desperation, started to make art for themselves, pouring their paintings and songs and sketches onto social media.

When things are at their darkest, people turn to art. In fact, if I were asked to pick one thing from our civilization to survive the fall, one concept to pass onto those who might follow us, it would not be our technology, or religion, or science. It would be our art. Art is who we are, and what we mean, our small scream at the universe before we all dissolve back into nothing.

Art Is More Than We Think It Is

There are people who believe they don’t even like art, but I disagree. What is football, if not an ever-changing artwork made of movement, colour, skill, pain and rapture? What is a perfectly built wall, if not a reflection of an inner desire to say something? Or a gorgeous sports car, movement made physical? Or an unforgettable meal, composed by a mad genius? Or the dance of numbers on the stock market, driven by equal parts desire and insanity?

Art is everywhere, and even though it can sometimes be hard to spot, we all crave what it gives us: that glimpse into the eternal.

Games: The Most Misunderstood Medium

Sometimes, these days, I can find that in computer games. Now, you might feel the desire to grab your coat, and head for the exit, but I implore you to hang on. In fact, if running was your first reaction, then you are who I’m trying to reach. Sit down. Take a breath. We have a journey ahead of us.

Computer games have a bad reputation, and I am the first to admit it’s often deserved. Emerging as money-making bar entertainment back in the 1970s, their creators quite soon started to probe the edges of what is interesting.

The Game That Couldn't Be Won

For example, in a very early game, Missile Command from 1980, you are trying to defend cities from an unending rain of nuclear missiles. You can shoot them down, and gain points, but they just come faster, and harder, and soon you’ll have to choose which city to sacrifice to keep the others alive. 

And then, which of those you will give up. Because there is no way to win Missile Command. You can just collect points while postponing the inevitable. Your cities, eventually, will all die. Your citizens will all burn in the hard light of those radioactive fires. But you anyway struggle along, to give your citizens a few more minutes of life, since that is all you can do.

This game, released during the cold war, made people think. And feel. And ponder. In fact, one of the game’s creators admitted to waking up in a cold sweat at night, because of his own game. Here, for maybe the first time, computer games were being used to give a unique experience that was born out of your interaction with a thing, and not just from the thing itself.

When Games Make You Think and Feel

That was 1980. As time rolled on, there came other examples. Many others. And today, with digital game distribution platforms like Steam, the selection of games that offer that kind of experience have exploded.

Imagine, if you will, a game where you are tasked with hunting down and destroying enormous beasts the size of mountains. As you kill them, you begin to understand that every death corrupts you. By your mindless slaughter, by just following orders, you uncover the truth that the ultimate evil is, in fact, you. You simply could have resisted. But you didn’t.

Consider a game where you play as a border officer in an unstable country. You must decide who to let through by examining passports and papers. You have a refusal quota to meet, so that your family can eat, and you start looking for excuses to turn people away, even the ones who should be allowed entry. And as the rules become more and more tangled, you find yourself faced with moral decisions. Turn away a deserving person because of a tiny flaw in their papers? Let in a bad person who offers you a bribe? You will be forced to face your own ethical and moral rules, and then forced to break them.

Empathy Through Play

There is a game where you play a character with mental illness who hears voices. An infection on your arm, you are informed by the game, will grow each time you die, spreading until it reaches your head, after which you can no longer play. Except … that isn’t true. The wound does not grow when you die. You just believe that it does. And the anxiety and paranoia you feel, mirroring that of the character you are playing, becomes real.

There is a game where you explore the lives of people in a dystopian city through the medium of frying eggs. Another where you are in hell and can only escape by play-testing games made by Satan, who, it turns out, is a game designer. There’s the game set in an endless office complex, where you can defy the person narrating your actions, challenging the concept of self-determination and free will. Or the one where you revisit your dead family’s house and experience, one by one, the final minutes of their lives, a game which includes the most heart-wrenching death of a character I can recall seeing anywhere in fiction.

There is a multiplayer game where, when you start, you enter as a helpless baby born to a random character who’s already playing. For the first ten minutes, you will be carried around by that other player, and must rely on them to keep you alive, until such time as you can move for yourself. A game that allows you to experience helplessness by making you, literally, helpless.

The Game That Disappears Forever

There are more. So many more. Games that offer experiences and ways of thinking you never thought possible. They are buried in a sea of bad copies, violent bloodfests, idiotic sequels, sure, but they are there. Waiting.

Computer games, if you ask me, are the most interesting medium existing today. Because they do what nothing else can: they drop you into the skin, behind the eyes, of another person, and let you experience another life.

And now, as my final example, I will present for you a small game that quietly came out a few years ago (fittingly, I’ve forgotten the name of it).

There is an island. It’s beautiful, packed full of life – plants, trees, fish, insects, stunning sunsets. It moves ahead in real time, one day per day. But every day, the island loses something. A bird, an animal, a species of tree … slowly, it becomes less beautiful. Less whole. And when something goes, it is gone forever.

When you join the game, you hear from the other players of how beautiful the world once was, of the things you only just missed. For thirty days this continues, things fading, never to return. New players entering, hearing about the perfection that was so recently lost.

On the last day, players arrive into a wasteland, with the merest specks of life still clinging to it. And then, once that final day has passed, the game’s server closes down. It all vanishes, to never be played again. All those who saw it will carry with them an indescribable loss, a yearning for the perfection they can never again see. Of that world, nothing remains but stories.

And soon, even those stories will crumble into dust.

Why It Matters

The computer games industry has made an enormous amount of rubbish. I do not deny this. But what’s also true is that, done well, games can deliver emotional reactions in a way that nothing else can. And is there a word for a man-made thing that allows us to think and experience in a new way? 

That gives us a glance into the mind of another, to feel what they feel?

There is. That word is art. So don’t be afraid. Reach out. Look for the art in games and in everything else. Because it’s always there. Waiting.