Art in Video Games: Dear Esther Review

Thanks to the glory that is the summer Steam sale, I picked up the indie “game” Dear Esther this week. I had seen trailers for it and was intrigued, but like most games, I waited to see if I could get a deal on it. Steam and its frequent sales has bloated my “To Be Played” pile of video games greatly, and for that, I have to thank Gabe Newell. For those people *COUGH*IDIOTS*COUGH* who think such deep discounts hurt the video game industry, I direct them to this image. I’m not here to discuss the practice of deep discounting, though. I want to discuss the game Dear Esther and how it relates to the rather silly argument over videogames as art.

I booted up the game this week and finished it in a little over an hour. This may seem like a short playtime, but given that I only paid $3.74 for it (that included the soundtrack), I’d definitely say I got my money’s worth. Calling Dear Esther a game, though, is a bit of  a misnomer. It’s certainly not much of a game. There aren’t any real puzzles to solve, or much interaction other than walking over an island through a first person perspective. There’s nothing to fight, nothing to shoot, barely any controls whatsoever besides the act of walking and swimming upwards when your character happens to fall in the water. You could call it a walking simulator, though it never really approaches aspects of simulation. Walking is more the method the game uses to get you through the story, involving voiceovers from your character ruminating on the island, as well as dealing with the loss of the titular Esther.

As I walked through the game, I was struck by how many assumptions the vocabulary of videogames imposes on me. I kept expecting to be able to click on things to pick them up and examine them, or to find some sort of lock that I would need to open either by finding a key or solving some sort of logic puzzles. There’s none of that, however. There is only some of the most gorgeous scenery I’ve ever witnessed in a videogame. The only challenges or accomplishments to be had are finding the right path to advance the storyline with another voiceover monologue, or to find my way to the next zone/chapter in the game. As a videogame, with the traditional juxtaposition of challenge and achievement removed almost completely, it’s a failure. I can’t say it’s a FUN experience, but it is an entertaining one. I’m glad I bought it and played it, though I’m also glad I didn’t pay full price for it because I am a cheap bastard.

As a work of art, though, I think it succeeds. And this is the crux of why I wrote this piece. There has been long debates on the Internet about whether videogames can be considered works of art, on par with some of the great works of literature, cinema, painting and music. One notable critic who is firmly in the camp that videogames cannot be art is Roger Ebert, and I’m quite sure neither playing Dear Esther or reading this piece will change his mind. For myself, I have never had to ask the question because I assume it’s a given. Of course videogames can be art. They are, after all, the result of a collaborative creative process. If Dear Esther had been a film at Sundance, the question would never have been asked “Is this art?” The cinematic medium has long ago been established among the intellectuals who care about such things as an art form. Dear Esther is a tone poem, an art installation freed from a physical location. It has all the pretentiousness of a snooty art film (“It insists upon itself” – incidentally I share Peter Griffin’s view on The Godfather), though in this case I really don’t mind it because it IS an art film. The only difference between this game and an art film is that the viewer becomes the camera rather than being restricted by the director’s choice of framing the scenes as he wishes.

Dear Esther is not the first game to approach the level of art, in my opinion, it just happens to be one of the first that insists it be considered through more than the filter that interactive gaming imposes on the viewer. I’ve never doubted videogames could be art, whether they are intended as purely “artistic” or just happen to approach that hallowed designation because of excellence. Games like Deus Ex, Thief, Freedom Force, Mass Effect 2, Wasteland and others have always been considered art to me.

 

July 20, 2012 at 4:04 pm | Video Games | No comment

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