Novelty and Mastery 2


So, a while back I said I was going to write a three-part series on Dragon Age II and things like enti­tle­ment, but as I’ve repeat­ed­ly tried to draft said arti­cles, I’ve real­ized that they most­ly amount to me whin­ing a bunch.  So, very briefly, here is a sum­ma­ry of the salient points I was going to make:

1. Gamers: if you want games to be art, don’t com­plain when devel­op­ers do things you don’t expect them to do.  It’s only not very good art that only caters to what you want and never attempts to expand your hori­zons.  If, how­ev­er, you only want games to be enter­tain­ment, then, you know.  Carry on.

2. Gamers: stop whin­ing all the damn time.  Seriously.  You sound like chil­dren.  Remember the stat that the aver­age gamer is 33?  No one famil­iar with the aver­age forum post is like­ly to believe that sta­tis­tic.

3. Companies (I’m look­ing at you, EA): while we under­stand you have to make money in order to make games, don’t turn out half-finished games hop­ing to pull a fast one.  You don’t hurt us, mind, but you do hurt your­selves and your fran­chis­es.  And you also look like jerks.

So, with those points said, let’s move on to what I real­ly want to talk about now: the con­cept of inno­va­tion, pri­mar­i­ly inspired by Portal 2.

The Catalyst

Last week I final­ly got around to play­ing Portal 2, and for the sake of this arti­cle, I am going to take it as read that the game is very, very, very good, both as a puz­zle game and as art.  I’m pret­ty sure this is an uncon­tro­ver­sial state­ment, but if you hap­pen to dis­agree, com­ment below and I’ll be happy to dis­cuss the point– I’m not going to waste a lot of time preach­ing to the choir up here in the main arti­cle, though.

So, upon fin­ish­ing Portal 2, as I began to think about what it was that made the game so great, I real­ized some­thing: the game, for all its bril­liance, seems to do rel­a­tive­ly lit­tle to inno­vate in the form.

It is far from stag­nant, but it gen­er­al­ly sticks to the tried-and-true for­mat Valve has used for sev­er­al games now: strict­ly first-person, silent pro­tag­o­nist, a “less is more” approach to plot, no (or at least very few) real cutscenes, and a prodi­gious amount of detail.  Further, while there are sev­er­al novel mechan­ics not present in Portal 1, most of these come from an exist­ing inde­pen­dent game whose devel­op­ers were absorbed into the stu­dio.  (This was true of the base mechan­ics of the first game, too).

In short, the game does­n’t real­ly seem to do all that much that is new, yet it’s nearly-universally regard­ed as bril­liant.  This seems at odds with the way we usu­al­ly talk about inno­va­tion as being a nec­es­sary part of a good game.  Games which do not bring any­thing new to the table are “stale,” or “tired,” we say.  We desire “fresh,” “new,” and “novel” con­cepts.

This seems, then, to raise a few prob­lems.

1. If games need to do new things in order to be artis­ti­cal­ly worth­while, how can we under­stand games like Portal 2 to real­ly be good?

2. If games must do new things in order to be artis­ti­cal­ly worth­while, does this mean that a game’s artis­tic value is entire­ly depen­dent on its posi­tion in time?  Does the same game become bet­ter or worse entire­ly because of its con­text, or is there any­thing we can under­stand to be pure­ly objec­tive about a game’s qual­i­ty?

In other words, what is it to inno­vate?

This is obvi­ous­ly a pret­ty big ques­tion, and I’m hard­ly going to be able to deal with every piece and sub­tle­ty it deserves.  Further, it has to do with a lot more than just video games, and as such, much of this post will be pret­ty applic­a­ble to any artis­tic medi­um.  But I think that there is a quick dis­tinc­tion we can make which will help us begin to answer these ques­tions.

This dis­tinc­tion is that between what I will call inno­vat­ing for­ward ver­sus inno­vat­ing upward.  Or, in slight­ly more palat­able terms, it is the dif­fer­ence between nov­el­ty and mas­tery.

(As usual, it is impor­tant to note that this is not a hard dichoto­my– many games and other works of art are very good at inno­vat­ing in both direc­tions, though some def­i­nite­ly pre­fer to empha­size one over the other.)

Novelty, or Innovating Forward

Strictly speak­ing, this is prob­a­bly what the word “inno­va­tion” real­ly means.  To aim for nov­el­ty in a work of art is to aim for new ideas, ideas which have not been done before, to “think out of the box.”  This, I think, is what is usu­al­ly meant by “inno­va­tion.”  These new ideas can be tech­no­log­i­cal advances, advances in form, or any other kind of push for­ward.

Novelty is about break­ing the rules, and allow­ing the artist and observ­er to expe­ri­ence new things which were not pre­vi­ous­ly con­sid­ered options in art.  Many of the artists, com­posers, and writ­ers we revere most are known at least pri­mar­i­ly for their con­tri­bu­tions to nov­el­ty.  Good works which aim at nov­el­ty aim to push bound­aries, and great works of nov­el­ty shat­ter the exist­ing rules and par­a­digms, all the while mak­ing us won­der why we ever imposed such strin­gent rules in the past.  Novelty is impor­tant because it pre­vents art from becom­ing stale or stag­nant, and it is gen­er­al­ly excit­ing, and fre­quent­ly icon­o­clas­tic.

The trou­ble with focus­ing on nov­el­ty, of course, is the risk.  New ideas are untest­ed, and while some are bril­liant advances, oth­ers are dead-ends.  Further, even if an artist does cre­ate a new idea which works very well, its first few incar­na­tions are like­ly to be halt­ing and awk­ward, as the artist strug­gles to come to grips with the ram­i­fi­ca­tions of the idea.  Thus, while most of the great works of nov­el­ty are valu­able in and of them­selves, (Beethoven’s Symphony No. 5 and Kurosawa’s Seven Samurai, though quite novel, hard­ly sac­ri­fice qual­i­ty to that end), oth­ers are pri­mar­i­ly mem­o­rable for their effects on the out­side world, rather than their own intrin­sic qual­i­ty.  As an anal­o­gy, we revere the Wright Brothers not for mak­ing a par­tic­u­lar­ly good air­plane, but for the act of mak­ing an air­plane at all.  As air­planes go, the Wright Flyer is pret­ty lousy.

Novelty is fre­quent­ly empha­sized in game devel­op­ment, and with good rea­son.  As we are still very much in the ado­les­cence of gam­ing as an artis­tic medi­um, there are a lot of fun­da­men­tal ideas we still need to sort out.  We are bare­ly learn­ing how to com­mu­ni­cate sto­ries well in the medi­um of video games, and are only at the very out­er­most edge of the sorts of won­der­ful ways this medi­um can be uti­lized for artis­tic expres­sion.  As such, most of what we need are good, new ideas.

Also, let’s not get too full of our­selves, it’s a lot eas­i­er to sell a game with a slo­gan like “new and excit­ing com­bat mechan­ics like you’ve never seen,” than “com­bat mechan­ics that are exact­ly the same as the last sev­er­al incar­na­tions of the series, but slight­ly pol­ished.”

The dif­fi­cul­ty we face with con­stant­ly empha­siz­ing nov­el­ty is that we fre­quent­ly end up with games that are full of a lot of good ideas, but aren’t ter­ri­bly well-executed.  I have played a lot of games of late (L.A. Noire, Metro 2033, Alan Wake) which, though full of great new ideas, fail to hold togeth­er when viewed as a coher­ent whole.  The new ideas them­selves often need much more atten­tion, or are, in some cases, so novel and inno­v­a­tive that the artists who had the ideas have no idea how best to employ them.  We end up with a lot of games that are inter­est­ing as mile­stones to mark the begin­nings of ideas, but rel­a­tive­ly few games that will stand the test of time as truly worth­while expe­ri­ences out­side of their imme­di­ate con­text.

The dark side of nov­el­ty, of course, is that it’s addic­tive.  It’s fun and excit­ing to break the rules, and this leads to the cre­ation of nov­el­ty for its own sake in art.  That’s the sort of behav­ior that results in ran­dom, non­sen­si­cal “per­for­mance art” pieces that serve lit­tle pur­pose beyond sim­ply being odd or novel.  So far as I know, no one has sat, naked and cross-legged, in the mid­dle of Times Square with a baked pota­to bal­anced on his head while a woman plays “Scotland the Brave” over and over again on an ill-tuned bag­pipe for three straight hours.  That would cer­tain­ly be novel.  But it would prob­a­bly not be ter­ri­bly worth­while.

That, of course, is an extreme exam­ple, but the point holds in games, too.  It is impor­tant to remem­ber that nov­el­ty is not an end-in-itself.  When one exper­i­ments with new ideas, the goal is to find bet­ter ways to com­mu­ni­cate ideas or cre­ate expe­ri­ences.  The goal of think­ing out­side the box is to allow your­self to see things from a dif­fer­ent per­spec­tive, there­by enabling you to notice details or con­cepts you might have missed.  It’s not that there is some­thing inher­ent­ly more valu­able about the out­side of the box.

In this way, nov­el­ty is forward-moving inno­va­tion– it takes the medi­um into new and inter­est­ing places, and opens up new ways of expe­ri­enc­ing games.

Mastery, or Innovating Upward

Johann Sebastian Bach is not a com­pos­er gen­er­al­ly asso­ci­at­ed with inno­va­tion or nov­el­ty.  Bach did not real­ly intro­duce new forms of music into the baroque lex­i­con, nor did he sub­stan­tial­ly change the types of instru­ments usu­al­ly used in baroque music.  Towards the end of his life and after his death, he was regard­ed as being some­what old-fashioned when com­pared to the new and excit­ing “clas­si­cal” style.  Bach, in short, is not par­tic­u­lar­ly famous for break­ing the rules.

What Bach did do is take the exist­ing rules and forms of baroque music and use them to pro­duce most of the best exam­ples of that style of music in his­to­ry.  No one before or since has shown such utter mas­tery of the forms of baroque music, and it is dif­fi­cult to imag­ine that any­one ever will.  Bach, then, did not break the rules or push music for­ward, as such.  Instead, he explored and unlocked the true poten­tial con­tained with­in the exist­ing ideas — pushed them upward to greater heights than they had yet seen.

I believe this should be under­stood as a kind of inno­va­tion, because while you would not say that Bach gen­er­al­ly did things that were novel, exact­ly, nei­ther could you say that he was stag­nat­ing the form.  He pushed music to great things, and stands pret­ty much undis­put­ed as one of the great­est com­posers of all time.

We value this brand of inno­va­tion because it allows us, gen­er­al­ly, to have deep­er expe­ri­ences than those con­cerned pure­ly with nov­el­ty.  Observing or inter­act­ing with a mas­ter­ful work of art may not always be as ini­tial­ly excit­ing, but by choos­ing to worry less about how to break the rules or where to push the enve­lope for­ward, the artist can focus instead on cre­at­ing the deep­est, purest expe­ri­ence a given set of rules or con­ven­tions allows.  In other words, while it is def­i­nite­ly good that not all poet­ry needs to be in son­net form, the son­net can be used to pro­duce won­der­ful works of art.

Focusing too much on mas­tery is not with­out its draw­backs, how­ev­er.  It is a rel­a­tive­ly short step to go from “obey­ing the rules of the son­net is a great way to write poet­ry” to “all poet­ry must be writ­ten in son­net form.”  If a medi­um or a cul­ture focus­es too much on mas­tery with­out any room for nov­el­ty, it will even­tu­al­ly stag­nate.  After Bach, there were real­ly only so many more things that could be done with his con­ven­tions.  It is rather unlike­ly any­one is going to write a bet­ter baroque chorale.

Gaming, as I men­tioned before, does tend to focus on nov­el­ty over mas­tery, and I think that makes sense.  Many of the rules and con­ven­tions of gam­ing are so new and untest­ed that it makes sense to keep try­ing on new ideas.  But it is nev­er­the­less help­ful to some­times take a step back from the arms race and sim­ply use the tools one has to pro­duce some­thing like a great work of art, and that’s the sort of game Portal 2 is.

Portal 2 isn’t per­fect.  For one, there are a few too many sweep­ing envi­ron­ments with lit­tle to do other than “look real­ly hard for the one patch of con­crete you can por­tal to.”  (Though I think “there are too many pret­ty things” is a pret­ty good prob­lem to have.)  I don’t exact­ly mean to sug­gest that it is the apoth­e­o­sis of the cur­rent first per­son puz­zle genre, or that it ought to be under­stood as a Meaningful Game (though I think it maybe stands a bet­ter chance at that title than most).  That said, it is very hard to imag­ine what Valve could have done to make Portal 2 sub­stan­tial­ly bet­ter.  For while it does not seem to push the medi­um for­ward that much, it cer­tain­ly shows mas­tery and inno­vates upward by using Valve’s con­ven­tions about as well as we’ve ever seen them used.

Upward mov­ing inno­va­tion, then, or mas­tery, seems to be the process of tak­ing pri­mar­i­ly exist­ing rules and cre­at­ing the best work of art one can out of that sys­tem.

Conclusion

As I said before, these are not hard, strictly-delineated cat­e­gories.  Most games that inno­vate do so in at least some of both ways, and many of the true greats in art simul­ta­ne­ous­ly restruc­tured the way peo­ple viewed the medi­um and show­cased excel­lent exe­cu­tion of the new ideas they spawned.

So, I wish to con­clude with a few bul­let points.

First, that nov­el­ty is not an end-in-itself, that for­ward inno­va­tion must be done with pur­pose, and not just for kicks.

Second, that you should never be afraid to try out new ideas if you think there is any chance the new ideas will bet­ter serve your ends than the ones you’re com­fort­able with.  Gamers: remem­ber that you are not enti­tled to games remain­ing exact­ly the same, and never chang­ing the for­mu­las you like.  Developers should be free to try new ideas with­out fear­ing con­stant screech­ing of fan­boys at every change.

Third, that even as we strug­gle to push the medi­um of video games for­ward through the intro­duc­tion of novel ideas and con­stant for­ward inno­va­tion, occa­sion­al­ly it is good to take a step back, look at the tools we have cre­at­ed, and show­case the won­der­ful things we already know how to do.  Games like Portal 2 may not reshape the medi­um the way Doom or Super Mario Brothers or World of Warcraft did, but they do show­case the great things that artists can do with games, even as they help pave the way for the next great works of art.

Postscript:

I had intend­ed to work in a link to this arti­cle, but the para­graph in which it was to reside has since been proven unwor­thy.  So, though it’s not imme­di­ate­ly rel­e­vant to this topic, it’s about Portal 2, and it’s an inter­est­ing ques­tion.  The blog on which it was post­ed is also very much worth check­ing out– the author has some very inter­est­ing and intel­li­gent things to say about games, and I find it par­tic­u­lar­ly inter­est­ing because he fre­quent­ly talks about rac­ing games, a genre with which I have lit­tle expe­ri­ence.


Bill Coberly

About Bill Coberly

Bill Coberly is the founder and groundskeeper of The Ontological Geek, now that it has shifted over to archive mode. If something on the site isn't working, please shoot a DM to @ontologicalgeek on Twitter!


2 thoughts on “Novelty and Mastery

  • Wombat of Doom

    I sup­pose I should spec­i­fy that when I say Portal 2 isn’t ter­ri­bly novel, I don’t actu­al­ly know what’s going on under the hood. The game could have pushed for­ward a renais­sance in the world of cod­ing, but if so, I haven’t heard any­one talk about it as such, and I would­n’t prob­a­bly be able to tell, any­way.

  • Fizban

    One thing that MMOs like World of Warcraft add to this very inter­est­ing topic is a kind of longevi­ty that your typ­i­cal game/artwork does not have. Where most games, if they want­ed to increase their mas­tery, would need to release a sequel (and one might argue are forced to increase their nov­el­ty to ensure reten­tion of mar­ket share — although your argu­ment seems to be that Portal 2 does not do this), games that have no appre­cia­ble end have the oppor­tu­ni­ty to increase their mas­tery curve on the fly by con­tin­u­al­ly releas­ing updates and pol­ish­es on the exist­ing game.

    Is there anoth­er genre of art that allows this per­pet­u­al improve­ment? I can’t real­ly think of one.

    (I’m not say­ing WoW is art. But if it were, it would bring an inter­est­ing dynam­ic to the ques­tion of for­ward and upward inno­va­tion.)

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