The question “are games art?” is usually answered not by looking at the game as a whole, but rather its more conventionally artistic components. It’s easier to critique a game’s graphics, music, and writing separately, using conventional rules.
And that makes sense: games are multimedia experiences, separate pieces of art glued together to make a new piece of art. But instead of looking at the pieces, we should look at the glue.
Because games are experiential, a major ingredient in that glue is what the player feels while playing. There’s obviously the important bits - fun and challenge - but there’s also fear, frustration, delight, and triumph. While they may watch characters experience those emotions (as in a film), they also experience them directly. Because of that, games blur the lines between performer and audience in ways other mediums simply cannot.
id Software’s Quake, with its pioneering 3D technology and signature art style, is a prime example. Its simple mechanics and barebones story are primitive tools, but in the right hands extract the most important emotions of the horror genre. But most interestingly, it hits on parts of horror that are only possible through a video game.
To say Quake broke ground is an understatement. It was a game of firsts, or at least nearly firsts. There was the engine, an astonishing mound of code that brought 3D graphics to an ordinary home PC. There was also the level design, one of the best uses of verticality in a pre-Super Mario 64 era. Its multiplayer’s stratospheric skill ceiling also ushered in a new era of competitive gaming, effectively creating eSports.
But the idea was old. id Software had just made Doom, a game with a similar premise: you are the strong and silent type, you have lots of guns and move very fast, and everyone wants to kill you. Kill ‘em back and get to the exit. Both games are first-person shooters, both games feature labyrinthine levels, and both games borrow from a pantheon of horror influences.
But Doom and Quake are actually pretty different games. For one, Doom is laser-focused on combat, whereas Quake encourages more exploration. Doom’s levels run a steady pace, but peak occasionally; Quake is more stop and go, more off and on.
The aesthetics are distant cousins. Doom is a mashup of sci-fi, demonic horror, and 80s metal. It’s loud and bright, with shiny red demons, multicolored explosions, beams of energy, and glowing green goo. Your character’s avatar grins at you from the bottom of the screen, his blood-covered eyes igniting with rage as you reach low health. As you zoom around, guns blazing, you’re played off by low-rent industrial synth music.
Doom is cheesy. It’s what most games strive to be: fun. But if it’s a grin and a wink, then Quake is a thousand yard stare. It’s mean. It’s difficult and dark, with zero comic relief.
The setting is the main differentiator. Doom took place in real - well, “real” - places, with recognizable names: Mars, Hell, Earth. The maps themselves were designed for player enjoyment before realism, so they are not true-to-life, but the roots are in reality.
Quake trades plants and refineries for crumbling castles, dark crypts, and military citadels. The player is told they are visiting “dark dimensions,” other planes of existence that benefit from humanity’s aesthetics, but none of its influence. Indeed, these dimensions seem to have no purpose at all, other than to harbor Lovecraftian monsters that annihilate the first creature to walk in. That first creature - your avatar - has no face and the personality of coal.
These chaotic, disorganized collections of death are built with the singular purpose of killing you. Their designs are good for nothing else: the castles were not made to protect, the cities never built to house people. Through their dingy halls, squelches, roars, and rattles echo in the darkness. Wherever you are, you are not safe, and you are very far from home.
A core element of good horror is a sense of unease, of wrongness. You do this by messing with your characters’ (and viewers’) sense of safety. In the real world, we get spooked by the dark but end up home safe. In horror, home is no longer there, and the people who protect us no longer protect us. We’re vulnerable and alone. Quake does this with its setting.
The Texas Chainsaw Massacre (1974) had a similar trick: a small town with no name, where stranded visitors are targeted by Leatherface...only to find out that the entire settlement is controlled by his cannibal family. When hope finally arrives, it’s in the form of a passing truck driver who picks up the now-hysterical protagonist as Leatherface dances in the sunset.
King’s It (1986) and 11/22/63 (2011) use a similar technique of an adversarial setting: the fictional town of Derry, Maine. Derry and the monster that kills its children seem to be intertwined, a place that has achieved sentience. The narrator of 11/22/63 explains the wrongness present in the town, an unnatural energy that puts him ill at ease:
This was the town where Harry Dunning had grown up, and I hated it from the first. No concrete reason, I just did. The downtown shopping area, situated at the bottom of three steep hills, felt pitlike and claustrophobic...running through the center of town was a canal filled almost to the top of its moss-splotched concrete retaining walls with black water.
So while Quake’s setting captures that feeling, it does more than just show it to you: it throws you in. You, the player, are the one experiencing that unease. You feel uncomfortable, and hated, and afraid. You are the one struggling to survive. A film can show that to you, and literature can describe it in a way that is nearly real. Because you interact with Quake, that setting can influence your emotions much more directly.
It’s channeled to the player through the game’s incredible feel. The movement is perfect, and you run so fast that you might as well glide. Your speed allows the game to throw hundreds of monsters at you, to rain grenades from hidden alcoves, to impale you with spikes from mounds of flesh bound to the walls. A good Quake session will make you jump in fear, tense up in anticipation, and slump back in your chair with exhaustion.
Horror fiction reaps obvious benefits from such power, but other games have done it too. When Aeris dies in Final Fantasy VII, you are not just losing a character in a story: you, the player, have lost a valuable lifeline. Aeris is a useful healer, and losing her shakes the player’s sense of confidence. That feeling connects you with the emotion of the game’s story in a way that merely showing it to you cannot.
So when someone asks “are games art?” Quake is a surprisingly good example. Its graphics are poor by modern standards; even at the time, its groundbreaking 3D visuals were more an advancement in gameplay possibilities, rather than realism.
But if art is designed to be an emotional experience, than Quake succeeds magnificently. “True” horror games like Resident Evil borrowed little from Quake’s mechanics, but a lot from its presentation: a world of hostility, danger, and uncertainty that can only be appreciated when experienced rather than merely seen.
Perhaps the real question is not “are games art?” but rather “are we good artists?”
Quake is available on Steam and GOG, and can run on virtually any computer. I recommend playing with Quakespasm, a “source port” that helps the game run on modern computers.
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