If Video Games Are Art, They Must Be Treated As Such

I recently read an article claiming that all video games should have a difficulty option. The primary game that the author posits in his article is Bloodborne, which is a spiritual successor to the Souls series of games, namely Demon's Souls, Dark Souls, and Dark Souls 2. These interactive experiences are universally infamous for being insanely hard, and have been described as punishing, merciless, and even sadistic by game journalists and reviewers time and time again. Bloodborne continues the tradition.

A typical Bloodborne encounter

The author argues that every game should include an option to dial the difficulty back, which is not an uncommon option to be found in most video games. In general, a video game will have at least three difficulty tiers: Easy, Normal, and Hard. This slider has an obvious purpose - not all gamers are equal in their skill and they don't all have an equal amount of time to devote to a particular game, so providing the option to dial the difficulty back makes sense. The author acknowledges this fact, but then goes further to argue that every single game should be designed with this option out of a concerted effort to make the game as accessible as possible to as many people as possible. Every game, including Bloodborne. More people playing a good game can't be bad, right?

Actually, it can. Difficulty is one of the core pillars of what makes Bloodborne tick. It is so essential to the very ethos of the experience that if it were to be removed, you would quite literally be playing a different game. Bloodborne has been painstakingly designed to provide the player with a truly phenomenal experience, over and over.

That experience starts with the player coming up against a challenge that is just ridiculously, insanely impossible. Maybe it's a boss the size of a building who can lop off two thirds of the player's health with one swing, or a mob of enemies who surround and obliterate the player before he can even get his bearings. The player tries, and is killed quickly. The player learns something. He then tries again and gets a little further, but dies a second time. This may happen ten times, but the game is educating the player - trusting him to grow, to learn, and adapt. On that tenth try, the player finally does it. He deals that killing blow. What comes after is simply jubilation. He springs up from his seat, punches the air, maybe screams a throaty, satisfied "YES," and knows that he earned that victory, and even more, he knows that he just got a little better at this crazy game.

He's also met with this message. It's satisfying to say the least.

That experience is the core of this game, and an easy mode would shatter it. Someone who wants to play Bloodborne on easy mode doesn't want to play Bloodborne at all. They're not interested in the actual feelings that the game conveys, the core thematic thread that runs through its whole length. They're not interested in the meticulously fine-tuned piece of art that the developers labored over for years. They want to play a cool fantasy game with some swords and some monsters, and on easy mode, that's all Bloodborne will amount to.

Let's come at this from a different angle. I love the film No Country for Old Men. It's probably my favorite movie. It deals with some incredibly dark and disturbing subject matter and presents some incredibly dark and disturbing imagery to its audience. The film is using these images to say things about the world around us; the nature of evil and violence, the pessimism that good people can take on when confronted with horrors too awful to fully comprehend, the ways in which men of different ages can greet these horrors that threaten the good things of life, the futility of giving one's self over to nihilism and chaos, etc...

Now, someone comes up to Joel and Ethan Coen, who directed the film, and says he's heard that No Country for Old Men is really great. He's read reviews that say the cinematography, editing, acting, writing, music - all of it - is fantastic (all true, because it's the best frickin' movie ever). He's really interested in it. But then he says he's also read that there's a lot of yucky stuff in the movie. Lots of brutal violence, language, dark themes, etc... and he just doesn't have the stomach for all that. So he goes on to ask if Joel and Ethan could maybe put together a cut that just removes all of that stuff. "I just really wanna watch your movie," he says, "and isn't it a good thing that more people would see it?"

He has no interest in watching the film and piece of art that is No Country for Old Men, the film that the artists have carefully and deliberately crafted - he's just interested in watching a well-made movie. Lucky for him, there are plenty of well-made movies out there that don't have any disturbing content or imagery in them, and he can watch those. No Country for Old Men is not for everyone. Not only is that perfectly fine, it's absolutely necessary. Some of the best, most important pieces of art in the film medium are difficult, even ugly, on some level. By their very nature, they're not for everyone, not even close. But my goodness, what incredible stories they tell.

Art itself is incomplete if there is no room for works such as these. There must be room for them. And to alter and deface them would be nothing but a disservice to the artist's intentions. But let's get back to games, shall we?

There is still some debate as to whether or not games are art to begin with. People who are passionate about games, like myself, usually fall firmly on the side that says they are, or at the very least, can be. Only an ignorant man would refrain from admitting that art goes into games. Drawing, painting, sculpting, writing, composing and editing are only a few of the artistic crafts that coalesce to make a working video game at the end of the day. But I want to be careful to not fall into the "anything is art," trap, for that can't be true. No, ultimately, what makes something a piece of art is whether or not it was designed for the purpose of making someone ponder or feel something (or at least that is the definition that I subscribe to).

This is a video game 

Unfortunately, there is a big problem with a lot of the people in the "games are art" camp that I inhabit. Too often, I find people who will go blue in the face insisting that this medium is artistic, that it can be beautiful, affecting and evocative. But then as soon as a game comes along that does something truly artistically difficult, these people will, rather embarrassingly, completely ditch their "games are art" premise and resort to childish statements like "Oh, stop being so artsy fartsy," or "C'mon, it's just a game!" Is it really? Because a minute ago you were trying to convince me that your favorite game is some sort of modern day Mona Lisa. A minute ago, you seemed to take this "games are art" thing seriously.

So a game like Bloodborne comes along that is doing some truly difficult things (I haven't even mentioned the labyrinthine level design, or the esoteric storytelling), and of course, there are some people in the gaming community that are crying out, claiming that it's too hard and that it should be whittled down to something it's not. They want something more approachable, something easier, something that they can feel more at ease with when they play it.

Some games don't want you comfortable.

The problem is that "at ease" and "approachable" aren't even in Bloodborne's vocabulary. Its designers want you to feel terrified of what might be around the next corner. They want you to feel off-balance, unsure of how to proceed. This is completely vital to what they want you to feel next: victorious. Educated. Faster. Sharper. Even joyful. This is how Bloodborne makes you feel. Beyond all its visual beauty, brilliant level design, and near-flawless mechanics, this is how and why Bloodborne is art.

Let's hope its developers never let the moaning of a few hypocrites convince them to deface their own work.