Something I've noticed about American media culture - not just games, but also cinema, books, etc - is that they think that
the height of artistic achievement is to successfully introduce
slightly more sophisticated than average themes to a decidedly average audience. To create a successful compromise between artistic success and commercial success.
Or in other words:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Middlebrow
That's almost a new definition of 'middlebrow', but I think it really works in this context. Woolf's conception of it was tangled up with some fairly disagreeable and sneery blanket snobbery on her part (
all of these stupid ordinary bourgeois types trying to pretend they're exceptional highbrow individuals make it so much harder for those of us who really are). But gaming does seem to be suffering from this upwardly-mobile, self-validating mass insecurity about transforming its image from lowbrow slop into 'proper art', and its architects are more inclined to jam in what they see as 'artistic' tropes than to develop an individual, original voice organically.
And as a result there seems to be a rapidly developing uniformity to all of these Games Which Are Art, So Say The Press. So the 'artistic merit' stems either from the fact that they comment self-reflexively upon game mechanics (
Hey,
your onscreen avatar's not so heroic after all, even though you assumed they were!/
Hey, you've been following instructions from the game all of this time! Why haven't you questioned the validity of those instructions?) or that they nod to Big Themes Which Everybody Already Knows About (Hey, our fantasy setting has racism in it! RACISM, everybody!). The latter is just easy point-scoring; nobody could ever argue that Bioshock Infinite or Dragon Age have
anything of the most infinitesimal value to add to our existing understanding of racism, or about how revolutionaries can turn out to be just as morally compromised as the establishments they strive to overcome. It's just a trite yardstick by which a game's 'maturity' can be measured. It's affirmational elbow-nudgery; it doesn't
do anything, or explore the idea with the slightest bit of original thought. It just nods towards a pre-existing, pre-concluded theme and the audience feels good about themselves for recognising it, and good about the game because it's bothered to include them kinds of Important Things what appear in other art.
Inci Aral had
a nice little paragraph on this sort of thing in an authors' conference speech last year:
In my opinion some of the problems threatening the future of the novel are the market conditions that encourage uniformity. Publishers, for the sake of sales, steer promising novelists towards writing about a cheap kind of spirituality, sex, weak topical subjects, and encourage them to write about a corny kind of mysticism, turning the novel into a cheap thrill. These "fast food" books sell in their millions around the world, while novels of real quality sit in their thousands gathering dust on the shelves.
'Corny mysticism/cheap spirituality' just about sums up the appeal of the stories of most of these art games, for my money, particularly when it's mystic tosh thinly disguised as science-fiction, a la Infinite and the Mass Effect endings, but the self-reflexive stuff is so much worse - because it's not just an easy path to pseudish 'artistry' (you constructed a maudlin sideshow in your shooter depicting the emotional damage war can cause. +15 points) but because it comments lazily upon the limitations of games instead of making the active effort to improve the medium in its most obvious direction. Surely a game which bothers to give the player a chance to stealth or bluff their way past the guards has infinitely more value
as a game, both in the sense of an interactive challenge and an interactive narrative, than a game which forces you to kill those guards, then yells at you, 'YOU KILLED THOSE GUARDS IN ORDER TO PROGRESS. YOU ARE A MURDERER. THIS IS VERY DEEP. YOU SHOULD WRITE A BLOG POST REFLECTING UPON HOW YOU'VE COME TO QUESTION YOUR OWN PERSONAL ETHICS AS A RESULT'. It's vapid, vapid stuff.
