Art as Games: Valve’s Louvre 1


When Valve announced that they had been col­lab­o­rat­ing with the Musée du Louvre to pro­duce a new title uti­liz­ing their ven­er­a­ble Source engine to pro­duce the world’s first first-person vir­tu­al muse­um, the gam­ing world was stunned that such a prod­uct would be devel­oped with­out any announce­ment until right before its release. Much con­fu­sion was gen­er­at­ed as peo­ple guessed wild­ly at how an engine pri­mar­i­ly used to devel­op FPS titles could be used to pro­duce what sound­ed like a glo­ri­fied visu­al ency­clo­pe­dia. The dis­cus­sion grew even loud­er when Valve announced that it would be a mul­ti­play­er title, even though no details about game­play had been released yet.

As part of a viral adver­tis­ing cam­paign, they have been invit­ing select per­sons to expe­ri­ence and cri­tique the core game play, though cer­tain details and fea­tures are sub­ject to NDA restric­tions (such as a ban on screen­shots, I’m sad to report). Imagine my sur­prise when I was invit­ed by Valve to par­tic­i­pate in the beta.

Obviously, I had no choice but to say yes.

What fol­lows is a com­bi­na­tion of nar­ra­tion of my expe­ri­ences, some com­ments on what I see in the game, and some relat­ed thoughts. We’ll start from the begin­ning of the game itself.

Our Story Begins

In the open­ing area, you look from your avatar’s eyes out the win­dows of the Paris metro as the cred­its gen­tly fade in and out of your Black Mesa Commute in a state­ly Helvetica. As your train arrives at the Louvre metro sta­tion, your first tuto­r­i­al popup appears announc­ing you can leave the train using WASD. The walk from the train to the tick­et counter offers plen­ty of shops and beau­ti­ful­ly script­ed NPCs, but noth­ing deserv­ing of your atten­tion, and noth­ing with which you can inter­act mean­ing­ful­ly.

The tick­et counter is staffed by a bored young Parisian man who wel­comes you to the Louvre in a cheer­ful voice and deliv­ers a help­ful speech:

Bonjour et bien­v­enue au Musée du Louvre. You have before you the world’s finest selec­tion of paint­ings, sculp­tures, jew­el­ry, and other art objects for perusal at your leisure. I hope that your expe­ri­ence here will be enlight­en­ing. Included in the price of your admis­sion is this audio­gu­ide, which will pro­vide you with more detailed infor­ma­tion about select works through­out the muse­um.”

The HUD popup indi­cates that your audio­gu­ide can be trig­gered by press­ing ‘E’ to inter­act with the tags for var­i­ous art­works. The ropes at the desk will not be removed until you suc­cess­ful­ly trig­ger the sec­ond wel­come mes­sage from the sam­ple tag at the tick­et­ing counter to ensure that you can cor­rect­ly iden­ti­fy a trig­ger. On repeat­ed playthroughs, you can skip this scene and jump straight to the atri­um.

The sec­ond help mes­sage ush­ers you toward the atri­um stair­well where your first real choic­es hap­pen. This is your point of depar­ture where you decide what kind of playthrough you’ll be doing, and what your char­ac­ter will be like. It would be some­thing of a mis­take to call Louvre a class-based game, as there aren’t any absolute restric­tions on what you do and how you play, but the first wing you visit does dic­tate some of the restric­tions on how you play through the rest of the muse­um.

Your are in a maze of twisty lit­tle pas­sages, all alike

Your first deci­sion is your choice of wing. You can begin by explor­ing loca­tions such as the Egyptian wing, the Etruscan exhib­it, the Greek pot­tery hall, any era of paint­ings, or you can select spe­cif­ic pieces such as Winged Victory or the month­ly “Temporary Exhibit” DLC pack­age to work toward. Especially on your first playthrough, this choice dic­tates your expe­ri­ence for the entire run.

For my first go, I opted to visit the first Temporary Exhibit, which was a col­lec­tion of Magritte paint­ings and var­i­ous sur­re­al­is­tic early 20th-century painters. I imme­di­ate­ly received noti­fi­ca­tion that I had unlocked the “Ceci n’est pas un Exploit” achieve­ment, and took my first step into the vir­tu­al muse­um.

Incidentally, Valve ambi­tious­ly packs Louvre with more achieve­ments than even the vaunt­ed Team Fortress 2, all of which fol­low their tra­di­tion of cheeky meta-humorous titles and achieve­ment ideas. Easier achieve­ments include “Walk Like an Egyptian” for straf­ing through at least one room of the Egyptian exhib­it, “Mona Lisa Mile” for bee-lining straight from the entrance to the Mona Lisa with­out trig­ger­ing any audio­gu­ide flags, and “Dan Br0wn’d” for talk­ing to an NPC named Robert Langdon who has some inter­est­ing but mis­guid­ed thoughts about sym­bol­ism. Longer term achieve­ments include “Bust a Louvre” for unlock­ing all per­ma­nent exhibits, a spe­cial astron­o­my exhib­it called “Mystery Science Theater” for using 3000 audio­gu­ide entries, and “Notre Game” for pass­ing the tests to become a cura­tor for an exhib­it.

Leaving the tick­et booth deposits you in the first mul­ti­play­er por­tion of the game. There are var­i­ous NPC tourists, other play­ers, and “cura­tors” who are community-appointed mods. Each play­er’s avatar appears to oth­ers as a pas­tiche of clev­er­ly craft­ed stereo­types based on your choice of playthrough. For jump­ing right into the absur­dist exhib­it, my avatar was gift­ed with thick horn-rimmed glass­es, a black turtle­neck, and a slim mes­sen­ger bag which rep­re­sent­ed my audio­gu­ide as an iPad app instead of the tra­di­tion­al speaker­box. The hall was filled with pudgy Midwestern tourists with gaudy t‑shirts, Japanese tourists with com­i­cal­ly over­sized cam­eras, and griz­zled old men in tweed jack­ets with leather elbow patch­es.

This is where the true expe­ri­ence began.

Every exhib­it hall has care­ful­ly ren­dered every real piece in the Louvre to scale in the dig­i­tal muse­um. You can wan­der through the actu­al lay­out of the Louvre and see every piece in its orig­i­nal con­text. The audio­gu­ide tags are some­what abstract­ed, as you can sim­ply focus the screen on a given piece and trig­ger the audio­gu­ide, which helps avoid issues of hav­ing every­one crowd around a tiny face­plate and acci­den­tal­ly key­ing in the wrong exhib­it tag. You can also open a sep­a­rate view of the piece in inter­ac­tive 3D if you want to mag­ni­fy a par­tic­u­lar sec­tion or explore details that you would­n’t be able to see at the actu­al muse­um.

Listening to the canned descrip­tions of every paint­ing and sculp­ture is much like vis­it­ing an actu­al muse­um. It tech­ni­cal­ly con­tains all the infor­ma­tion that a muse­um would pack­age with a piece, such as frag­ments of the artist’s biog­ra­phy and a few basic details about the tech­nique of a piece, but it’s about as ful­fill­ing as sit­ting through one of the long-winded NPC speech­es of Half-Life 2 that you actu­al­ly spent break­ing things with a crow­bar, or sit­ting through anoth­er tape jour­nal from BioShock. It’s appro­pri­ate, but it’s ter­ri­ble game­play.

The real game­play begins when you start a con­ver­sa­tion with anoth­er char­ac­ter. You can strike up con­ver­sa­tion with NPCs with the ‘E’ key, and walk through Mass Effect-style dia­logue wheels to hear some canned reac­tions to a paint­ing to col­lect either his­tor­i­cal infor­ma­tion or mod­ern inter­pre­ta­tions of a piece. Talking to a Midwesterner in front of one of Magritte’s self-portaits yields com­ments such as “So, he could­n’t paint faces?” and “I think this means he liked New York.” Talking to a tweed-clad art pro­fes­sor will inform you about Magritte’s career as a wall­pa­per design­er, with options to inquire fur­ther about Magritte’s biog­ra­phy or the NPC’s favorite works in the hall. Certain dia­logue branch­es will yield infor­ma­tion that unlocks dia­logue branch­es with other char­ac­ters, like the art his­to­ri­an’s details on Magritte’s biog­ra­phy mak­ing it pos­si­ble to unlock con­ver­sa­tions with the Midwesterner (who hap­pens to be a real estate con­trac­tor) about the design lim­i­ta­tions imposed by wall­pa­per’s require­ment to be small sec­tions of repeat­ing pat­terns. It may be obvi­ous­ly didac­tic, but it’s an inter­est­ing set of puz­zles to work out, and the dia­logue is almost as good as BioWare prod­ucts.

More impor­tant­ly, you can engage in con­ver­sa­tions with other PCs. The dia­logue can either hap­pen with a sin­gle play­er in the exhib­it hall, or with a group of play­ers in a vir­tu­al “Coffee Shop” screen which whisks your view away to an abstract­ed cafe while your avatar slow­ly wan­ders the muse­um floors con­tem­pla­tive­ly.

This sec­tion of the game is what will attract the most atten­tion and crit­i­cism. Ostensibly noth­ing more than a chat room with 3D graph­ics and fully ani­mat­ed char­ac­ter respons­es trig­gered by your emoti­cons, the Coffee Shop is a place where you dis­cuss dif­fer­ent pieces with other play­ers. You can speak either with your micro­phone or with an instant mes­sag­ing prompt. There are eas­i­ly search­able menus for artists, spe­cif­ic works, and gener­ic sum­ma­ry details of dif­fer­ent eras and styles which can be quick­ly and eas­i­ly linked to other play­ers. The effi­cient and styl­ish infor­ma­tion of deliv­ery is high­ly rem­i­nis­cent of the Civilopedia from the Civilization series, and lets you quick­ly ref­er­ence dif­fer­ent pieces, per­sons, and move­ments in a way that’s seam­less­ly inte­grat­ed into the game’s engine.

The Coffee Shop also has an easy tool for select­ing spe­cif­ic parts of your con­ver­sa­tions and adding them to the Community Notes for an art­work or an exhib­it. The Community Notes are a repos­i­to­ry for play­ers’ thoughts and analy­ses of dif­fer­ent top­ics that are some­where between a wiki and a forum. A sim­ple Up/Down vote sys­tem lets users rank con­tent. One excit­ing announce­ment from the Louvre states that Community Notes will even­tu­al­ly be made avail­able in the real muse­um at spe­cial ter­mi­nals to be installed early next year.

There is no spe­cif­ic objec­tive of the Coffee Shop. Its sole pur­pose is to pro­vide a forum for high­ly inter­ac­tive and information-rich dis­cus­sion of art­works. This is both a great strength and a great weak­ness, because it pro­vides a beau­ti­ful and easy forum for media-intensive dis­cus­sion of art, but it’s also eas­i­ly sub­ject to trolling and vacant con­ver­sa­tion. The “Vote to Kick” option helps expel the trolls, but there’s no auto­mat­ic way to keep con­ver­sa­tion focused on art­work.

Take a key for com­ing in

What will be the most con­tro­ver­sial sec­tion of Louvre are the check­points between exhibits. Your first exhib­it is avail­able auto­mat­i­cal­ly, but sub­se­quent exhibits are unlocked sub­ject to approval through cura­tors or through auto­mat­ed tests. To me, it felt like an uncom­fort­able fusion of the best of edu­ca­tion and the worst of edu­tain­ment titles. The auto­mat­ic tests are mul­ti­ple choice tests that ask about basic facts about dif­fer­ent art pieces, like match­ing a sculp­tor to her most famous piece, or select­ing the name of a painter after see­ing 3 pieces by said artist. The tests have thou­sands of pos­si­ble ques­tions that are reviewed, refreshed, and replaced con­stant­ly by var­i­ous offi­cial project con­trib­u­tors, but I expect that they will invari­ably be solved pri­mar­i­ly by Google rather than by play­ers them­selves.

The alter­na­tive to auto­mat­ed exams, “Curator Examinations,” are both bril­liant and doomed. As I men­tioned before, cura­tors are community-appointed experts in a par­tic­u­lar wing. Valve and the Louvre ulti­mate­ly mod­er­ate who gets approved for the posi­tion through a process that they have not yet made pub­lic, but the nom­i­na­tions are avail­able to the gen­er­al pub­lic. Every instance of an exhib­it is guar­an­teed to have at least one cura­tor at all times, who is avail­able for chat and exams.

Yes, you can con­verse with a cura­tor as a sin­gle play­er or as a group to get approval to enter anoth­er exhib­it. Through a free-text or micro­phone con­ver­sa­tion with the same Coffee Shop tools above, you can demon­strate your level of under­stand­ing of a sub­ject to a cura­tor, who can then award you with var­i­ous acco­lades, rang­ing from “Creative Interpretation” to “History of the World, Part I.” It’s the best of one-on-one teach­ing com­bined with the dread­ful hell of a call cen­ter expe­ri­ence.

Ostensibly, cura­tors will be peo­ple who demon­strate a pas­sion and knowl­edge for art, and want to work with oth­ers to help expand their abil­i­ty to under­stand art as a social, his­tor­i­cal, eco­nom­ic, psy­cho­log­i­cal, or aes­thet­ic phe­nom­e­non. Anyone who can prove they know enough about a given exhib­it can act as the gate­keep­er to other areas of the muse­um. It’s a great way to cre­ate experts on a given sub­ject, and make their knowl­edge avail­able to the world.

It’s also a hor­ri­bly arbi­trary sys­tem with no uni­ver­sal stan­dards for decid­ing who has demon­strat­ed exper­tise in a sub­ject, and who is blow­ing smoke up your ori­fice. Arguably, this is the same prob­lem with art crit­i­cism as an aca­d­e­m­ic sub­ject.

The Good

Since I was par­tic­i­pat­ing in the beta ver­sion, I had time and oppor­tu­ni­ty for exten­sive con­ver­sa­tions with other PCs who had been hand-picked to play the game. Every cura­tor I spoke to was bal­anc­ing, at most, two other PCs with my own con­ver­sa­tion, so dia­logue was delight­ful, thought­ful, and exten­sive. I was able to earn my way out of the Temporary Exhibition by dis­cussing a com­par­a­tive analy­sis of some of my favorite Magritte and Dali paint­ings with the cura­tor, and shared a fas­ci­nat­ing dia­logue with anoth­er play­er about how the Cubist stylings of the cru­ci­fix­ion face of Gaudi’s Sagrada Familia cathe­dral rein­forced the sto­ry’s themes of dehu­man­iza­tion and abstract sto­ry­telling.

In short, I expe­ri­enced the game at its very best. It’s a beau­ti­ful forum for dis­cus­sion. It’s focused, immer­sive, exten­sive­ly detailed, and pro­vides every tool one could hope for in hav­ing an informed and eru­dite dis­cus­sion about art. It’s a majes­tic ency­clo­pe­dia of art­works con­densed into a sin­gle loca­tion that trumps the Louvre, the Guggenheim, and the Prado if they were all rolled into one sin­gle muse­um.

I still found it some­what lack­ing as a game.

The Bad

What kind of game makes your con­tin­ued progress sub­ject to whether or not you learned the title of five paint­ings and penal­izes you if you only get four out of five? A need­less­ly pedan­tic one. But would the game be bet­ter if its auto­mat­ic tests were eas­i­er? I think there would be less sense of accom­plish­ment, and cer­tain­ly less under­stand­ing of the sub­ject mat­ter if the tests were made eas­i­er. And again, the shad­ow of Google hov­ers over all prospect of challenge-by-information.

Enjoying art is not an innate­ly com­pet­i­tive activ­i­ty, while vir­tu­al­ly all games are, even if the play­er is only com­pet­ing against the game. There is some sense of accom­plish­ment in see­ing how many new branch­es of the muse­um one can unlock, an expe­ri­ence which is enhanced great­ly by the vir­tu­al Louvre’s abil­i­ty to add new wings that the real muse­um does­n’t have space to accom­mo­date, and the achieve­ment sys­tem gives the same arbi­trary stan­dards of suc­cess that they grant to any other game. This still does­n’t change the fact that art crit­i­cism is about learn­ing to see and under­stand the world through sym­bols, which ren­ders an objec­tive stan­dard of progress or com­ple­tion to be non­sen­si­cal.

Furthermore, even in my lim­it­ed expo­sure to the game, I found it dif­fi­cult to sup­press my nerd rage at dis­cov­er­ing a play­er whose sole knowl­edge of Renaissance art came from play­ing Assassin’s Creed II had unlocked the sec­ond wing I explored and had only used his audio­gu­ide twice. He obvi­ous­ly did­n’t know any­thing about what he was look­ing at, bla­tant­ly ignored the images and read­ings we select­ed, and his dis­cus­sions in the Coffee Shop con­sist­ed most­ly of “I think it sucks.”

Seeking to bring enlight­en­ment to the trolls only caus­es them to bring trolling to enlight­en­ment.

The Ugly

Several min­utes after my fel­low play­ers and I voted to kick him from the Coffee Shop, it struck me that this sort of elit­ist exclu­sion was going to lead to a very fast and obvi­ous divide among Louvre play­ers. Excising the troll from our dis­cus­sion was­n’t going to help him learn about art or how to be part of our dis­cus­sion. Furthermore, who’s to say that he real­ly want­ed to par­tic­i­pate, but could­n’t artic­u­late his thoughts in a more pol­ished fash­ion than declar­ing whether some­thing “sucks” or not? I might get kicked from a dis­cus­sion later because a bunch of Pre-Raphaelite fanat­ics think I took a cheap and easy route into an exhib­it by start­ing with 20th cen­tu­ry art that most­ly touch­es on themes that are still wide­ly dis­cussed even in pop­u­lar dis­cus­sions.

This is the fun­da­men­tal prob­lem. There’s a two-way dia­logue between art and video games, and there’s a lot of over­lap, but there are some fun­da­men­tal dif­fer­ences that Louvre fails to bridge. Art is not, gen­er­al­ly, inter­ac­tive. Games require cer­tain fea­tures (rules and inter­ac­tive ele­ments) to be games. Attempting to turn art into a game is an inter­est­ing con­cept, one which I believe will be enhanced and smoothed out as Valve releas­es more DLC and can patch some bugs, but turn­ing ‘pure art’ into ‘pure game’ is some­thing of a con­tra­dic­tion. Attempting to com­bine two parts inher­ent­ly trans­forms them into some­thing that is not iden­ti­cal to the orig­i­nals, and some­thing gets lost even when the new result is some­thing inno­v­a­tive, inter­est­ing, and fun.

The ten­sion between the auto­mat­ed progress mechan­ic and the mod­er­at­ed progress mechan­ic cuts to the heart of the mat­ter. A play­er can mem­o­rize and search for all the facts about a piece of art they want and still claim not to under­stand it and not be able to artic­u­late any thoughts about it. Similarly, a dif­fer­ent play­er can have all the fas­ci­nat­ing dis­cus­sions and aes­thet­ic expe­ri­ences they want while get­ting frus­trat­ed with the fact that the game does­n’t let them look at more exhibits with­out stop­ping to talk for the fifth time about how Etruscan sculp­ture influ­enced bod­i­ly forms in Greco-Roman sculp­ture. It’s hard to pick out just who the audi­ence for this title is.

Final Thoughts

I’ll still buy Louvre when it’s released on Steam. It uses the best fea­tures of a video game (end­less expan­sion, immense­ly detailed visu­als, and rich context-sensitive infor­ma­tion) with the best parts of art expe­ri­ence (broad diver­si­ty of pieces, forums for dis­cus­sion with other play­ers, and no fixed require­ments for par­tic­i­pat­ing). It’s frus­trat­ing to strug­gle at the bound­ary of the two media, as the ‘game’ aspects of Louvre some­times feel forced, restric­tive, or arbi­trary, and the ‘art’ aspects of the game can feel more like a glo­ri­fied chat room with fewer lol­cats. Ultimately, it’s a new idea that explores the rela­tion­ship between games and art, and beau­ti­ful­ly show­cas­es how each is not the other despite hav­ing pro­lif­ic areas of over­lap.

This post is a satir­i­cal thought exper­i­ment. Valve is not actu­al­ly devel­op­ing such a title, though I’ll be happy to send them my résumé if they want a project direc­tor to head devel­op­ment.


About Jarrod Hammond

Jarrod Hammond doesn't always blog, but when he does, he does it for the Ontological Geek. He spends the rest of his time gaming on his PC, or apologizing to his wife for spending too much time on his PC. He lives in Kansas City, MO.


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