Maybe Train is Brenda Brathwaite’s boldest statement on the fact that games can be art. By now, you should know that it is a board game about the holocaust that makes all sorts of uncomfortable questions to the players. There is only one copy that can be played at exhibits, its instructions were written using an SS typewriter and before every exhibit a glass is broken to convoke the sheer and silent violence of its theme. It certainly is bold, well renowned, an almost undeniable art-game and, nonetheless, most of us will never play it.

When Brenda was making her board game she faced a choice: to stick to the gaming experience or to go for a more artsy path. The former would ultimately have meant that the game should be at everyone’s reach, that the experience itself was the work of art. The latter demands for the game to be an object, unique and non-reproducible, a perfect candidate for museums and art exhibits. Brenda chose the latter.

Our society, regarding arts at least, is obsessed with an “originals” fetish. We value more a manuscript than its printed version, even if the hard-to-read author’s handwriting doesn’t alter our reading experience at all. But video games don’t have that luxury: they’re digitally rendered to play in a specific system. We don’t covet master cartridges to measure the value of a game and, now that everything’s going downloadable, we’re starting to lack a physical shape to contain our experience. Even the most unique arcades are mass produced to justify the cost of their development. Stating that video games are a means to art as valuable as any other seems like a bleak panorama at best. This is not an artistic truth, it’s an economic one.



Looking back at art games in general it seems like this choice was not only Brenda’s. We know that Tale of Tales’ productions (The Path, Fatale, The Graveyard) are barely interactive and thus we ask ourselves if we should call them games at all. The Marriege, by Bob Humble, is such an abstract effort that, without a proper declaration of the author’s intention, we would disregard it as yet another onanistic artsy endeavor (some people still do). Daniel Benmergui’s creations are great, but they still feel like experimentations on narrative rather than full experiences. And Jason Rohrer’s The Passage feels the same way, while the victory of Sleep is Death depends heavily on user generated content. Maybe Braid stands alone, between mainstream and artistic, but that’s a discussion I’ll leave for some other time.

Nevertheless, with all their faults, for those that look forwards to video games being recognized as an art-form, these are good signs. They’re signs that we will win, that we’ve already won. These games are changing the way we perceive the media, their means and their significance. We’ve changed the paradigm from considering them merely toys to the search of meaningful experience, and not just in the artsy games, but in the mainstream ones as well. Consumers are demanding more than graphics, gameplay and sound, and bigger companies are taking notice.
Sometimes, merely existing is enough. Sometimes it’s more about making a gesture, rather than what gesture you make. The early 20th century was filled with art movements that spurred manifestos here and there. Their importance lay not in what they proposed as new ways to make and appreciate art, but in that they proposed them. Jason Rohrer’s New Gaming Manifesto is important in that sense.

I think it’s rather obvious that I don’t really hate art-games. I can understand people that do most of the time. They can be frustrating and slow and just plain no-fun. But I see them for what they could be, what they could mean, rather than what they are. I’m biased, that way.

So maybe Brenda’s was never a choice at all. It was what she needed to say, that hers was not just a game: it seemed like a game, played like a game, felt like a game and smelled like a game, but it was mostly art. Now the questions and the consciousness of the new media are out there, and it will never fade. The gap is not yet breached, but we’re crossing it.

I generally prefer constructive criticism. It’s not that I don’t like pieces that bash on awful games, on gaming or that I don’t love Jim Sterling’s over-the-top sarcasm, but what really gets me going are articles that deal with new possibilities, problem resolution or try to take a new approach towards an old subject and, thus, end up enriching my own point of view. It's in this spirit that I’ll take on the following subject, and that’s why I’ll try to avoid giving examples of how things have been done badly.

Many times now we have delved into how sex scenes in games just have a wrong feeling to them, or how insensitive or out of place they seem regarding the overall narrative. We all know that adding a sex scene for its own sake, just because all the cool kids are doing it, adds nothing to the overall experience. I have reflected upon how to improve this, and have come to two possibilities that could be explored in the future.

The first one deals with a better understanding of narrative and its particular relationship with this medium. Narrative deals with the telling of a fact (factual or fictional), or how we get from point A to point B. Good narrative usually has a beginning, a middle and an ending. When done right, narrative can convey emotions or reflections (you know, stories that “make you think”) on its readers, viewers or, in our case, players. Also, good narrative can be measured by how its elements and technique relate to each other to enhance the overall experience AND the core idea.

Let me give you a brief cinematic example with some spoilers. In the movie Zombieland, we learn through exposition that Tallahassee hates zombies because they took away his puppy. Immediately after that, we get at least one snarky smirk by seeing a short musical montage of this tough guy pampering a puppy dog. We laugh, we find it funny and we go on. Later in the movie, we learn that what he actually meant by “puppy” was his own son. The same montage is displayed, now with sadder music and a child instead of a dog. The scene works past the cliché of the tragic badass because it got us emotionally involved in the funny version. We laughed, and now it’s awful. Immediately after that, Tallahassee wipes his tears with dollar bills, and we laugh again (harder, as a contrast with the gloomy atmosphere prior to that), because the movie is a comedy. Pacing, music, editing, a sort of Chekhov’s gun and character development work together to have us more emotionally engaged with the movie without losing track of it.



Now, a sex scene should be one of these elements in the overarching plot. It should work with it and not just try to fit in. Be it used for character development, plot development, to help the pacing, convey emotion, create red herrings, it can’t just be there for the sake of it. Movies and books have learned how to do this, more or less, with rather hit and miss results. There are some great sex scenes out there, and if you’re interested in seeing one, I recommend you grab a copy of Silk, by Alessandro Baricco. It’s a really short book, and has a pretty explicit sex scene that does not try to exploit cheap arousal. I won’t spoil it any further.

Now, the thing is, video games are not books, nor films. They should try to experiment and develop their own language, rather than borrowing from other media. Sex is a great place to start analyzing this, because for it to work well, it should work on many levels. But let’s start with the basics, shall we?

For sex to work we should already be engaged with the characters and their relationship. We should care that it happens. The way we traditionally engage with characters is through empathy, a sort of emotional identification. Traditional media conveys empathy in many ways but mostly by giving their characters traits that we can relate to (be it through identification with our "self" or "alter ego"). Stereotypes are shortcuts for us, as novices in a fiction, to more easily identify with this or that character’s trait. This way you can end up with one-dimensional characters or, with some character development, the characters could evolve into something richer and more fulfilling.

With videogames things are different. With videogames, we can relate to a blue pixelated shooting robot, to a metaphorical emo-ish time-manipulating avatar, to a bunch of little balls of goo or even, god forbid, if Tetris had even a remote semblance of narrative, we could even relate to falling blocks. Why is that so easy in videogames? Because we don’t need to identify with a character’s traits: we’re already playing their role.

In videogames identification is a given (much exploited in the SNES era RPG silent-character archetypes) and it’s character development that causes dissonance. Even today, with more complex narratives and characters, we spend most of the game time on our own, manipulating the silent character that reacts to our every whim. It’s plot and character development that interrupt this sort of one-sided trance. Even with dialog trees to give us a sense of interacting with the plot, momentum is broken by interrupting gameplay. The whole formula is reversed.

I don’t mean that games should settle for underdeveloped writing just because of this. On the contrary, I think games should strive for a new kind of writing, a writing suited for the medium, a writing that enhances the medium, not one that has to cope with it. Not only this, I think developers should be encouraged to try new narrative dynamics (yes, that final “s” makes that a plural) that are unique to the medium, gaming dynamics that could tell a great deal of the story on their own.

The second possibility (yes, it took me quite long to get here, remember the second paragraph?) deals with not just adding sex scenes, but having gameplay revolve around sex. I don't mean for sex or arousal to be the puprouse of the gaming experience, but to consider the use of sex as an element that can convey something else. Some years ago, I started to write a book called something like “The boy with the mutant penis”. It had no plot, and no character development. It was a compilation of surreal sex scenes that, in juxtaposition, were meant to convey the boredom, emptiness and apathy of its main character through repetition and exhaustion of its topic. Clichéd as it might have been, I only quote it as a personal example of how sex can be used to convey other things.



I think the first possibility I gave was more suited to big budget titles, and that indie developers have a better chance to nail the second down. Yet, the best example to date that I can come up with may be Silent Hill 2. It doesn’t even have a single sex scene (well, apart from that dry-humping one), but right now no one can deny that sexuality is one of its main themes and it loves to dwell on it with more subtle (why do I have to stick my entire hand down that gross toilet hole?) and deliberately grotesque (why is Phallic Head raping those double-jointed mannequin legs?) results. The genius of it is that, while sexuality is almost omnipresent, the game uses it to enhance the complexity and the compelling level of its narrative. It does not go around saying “Hey! We have sex in here!”, but at first we suspect it’s there and then we know it’s there. And, oh boy, it's there!