Artistic Intent versus Mechanical Cohesion

Thrills of Frills?

The game, the game; the beautiful game! Often has it been said that at the end of the day, when the chips have landed and the goose is cooked, within the world of games there is no more senior a position than gameplay. The divine right of developers to directors to publishers to shareholders all rely on the power of strong core gameplay to trickle down it's bounteous rewards, pretty much in that order of beneficiary. But what of the all important king of creativity across the entertainment medium? Artistic Intent? Why, the artistry of creation is the lifeblood behind it, and failing to really hone in on that beating heart of intent can spell the difference between Apple TV's 'Luck' film and Dreamwork's 'Puss in Boots: The Last Wish.' One treads the well-worn steps of successful previous properties, the other dances with it's heart in it's hand throwing a twirling fiesta in the name of love, life and spectacular animation. I don't... you don't need me to say which is which- right?

When it comes to the world of game design, the question of where artistic intention ends and mechanical cohesion begins is not an easy one to answer. I know because I literally spent last week trying to get an answer out of actual game designers from more personal studios to conglomerates like Sony, and the resounding response was a middling "it's a balancing act". Because at the end of the day, sure, if you can make a game that is true to it's artistic principals and the intent of the narrative themes alongside being robust, intuitive and fun; then well done, you've reached peak perfection as a video game designer. But... well... that's not going to be where the majority of people land, now is it? Perfection is a slithering writhing snake weaved of the finest sand, that squeezes through the cracks in your fingers the tighter you grasp. So you end up doing the best that you can. Compromise. Balance.

But I don't like that answer. It seems... incomplete to me. Of course, there's no way to write a perfect consensus that will cover every scenario dictating times when the art needs to peel away for the good of the mechanics- but there's got to be a better consensus then 'I'll go with my gut'. I always hated the games that attempted to try and rationalise the concept of respawning by somehow working that into the narrative. Bioshock's resurrection chambers make any character's death patently meaningless thus undermining the sanctity of death as a narrative device, and Borderlands' New-U-Station attempts to be both an in-game joke and apparently non-canonical mechanics system. The latter of which literally clashes between the teams who make the games where no one can seem to decided whether or not they need to bend over backwards to explain why Handsome Jack deregistered himself the network (because there was an off-hand joke in the first game about it causing irreversible infertility and Jack wanted a daughter) or just ignore the fact that Scooter definitely would have been linked up to one. (You know, considering his entire 'Catch-a-ride' enterprise functioned out of various New-U-Stations!)

Is the solution just to ignore the collision? I've always looked at that to be a sacrifice in immersion. Sure, maybe if you have a protagonist who doesn't speak that can allow the player's voice to inhabit the hero's head, but when your player stands silently in the middle of 4 way conversations that omission can start to grate at the senses. Or even a little thing like how in Hogwarts Legacy, being a game set in school, people are constantly introducing themselves to you and simply don't expect the same in return. You have no pithy short-hand catchphrase they can call you, you're not the 'Boy who lived' or 'The Dragonborn' or 'Courier Six'; your just a student with a name that the player wrote out, thus the game can't feasibly repeat it. Perhaps these are the lesser examples of art clashing with mechanics, but the dissonance rumbles nonetheless.

As always whenever we get into diatribes about topics like this, I find myself coming back to the eclectic work of Miyazaki and his now legendary Souls series, which championed artistic intent in marriage with robust mechanics throughout most of his catalogue. There was, however, one famous instance of a clash that I can recount. The final confrontation of the final Souls game was famously changed from the difficult 'Pontiff Sulyvahn', sometimes still called the hardest boss in all of Dark Souls III, to the relatively simpler but thematically resplendent 'Soul of Cinder'. Whilst mechanically and balancing-wise there really is little doubt that Sulvahn provides the more dynamic challenge, designed specifically to ingrain a playstyle in the player that he then immediately undermines with his next phase, the narrative impact of what the Soul of Cinder would come to represent, the conjoined efforts of every souls player who ever played the games, and then of the returned Lord of Cinder himself in that iconic second phase, is irreplaceable. Artistry, in this instance, trumped mechanical soundness. 

And to take matter back to one of my own favourite games of all time, who remembers the iconic ladder scene within Metal Gear Solid 3: Snake Eater? Itself existing within a transitional cell that moves the player from a jungle environment to the desert-like mountain tops, and as such could easily have been covered by a single cutscene- as is utilised later when Snake climbs from the underground tunnels up onto the tarmac of Groznyj Grad. Instead Hideo Kojima decided to give players a conceptually dull task of climbing the ladder in real time, with a fixed camera angle, from the bottom to the top. A task enriched only by a ghostly, acapella rendition of the title song, Snake Eater to fill the monotony. A scene that exists to offer no gameplay benefit to the player whatsoever, but simply to reinforce the artistic intent of creating a game narrative indistinguishable to the film making techniques of a James Bond movie, which would typically invoke musical overtures during transitory sequences. 

Of course, the examples I just pulled up were from auteurs for their craft, and just as leaning into your intent can be transformative to the overall experience, it can sometimes be a detriment as well. Forspoken is a game built to incur the same sort of emotions and responses as Joss Whedon written dramas. Imagine Buffy or the Avengers; that's the kind of audience the game was hoping to secure. And yet, giving up the agency and immersion in the game world to constantly have a witty and stake undermining back and forths between Frey and her talking magical Cuff drove a wedge between players and how they wanted to experience the world, making it difficult to take anything seriously in all but the most dire moments. In this way the artistic intent ended up harming the overall presentation, and such is just the most modern example from a slew of examples likewise.

When it comes to nailing that idea of balance, I think that as simple and lame as it sounds the missing ingredient is understanding. Understanding of the exact effect the decisions and changes made will have on an audience. And perhaps that understanding can come from a sudden or supreme insight of consequence, or deferred from the repeated opinions of others; but until you've reached that point of knowing what liberties can and cannot be taking without diluting the whole product, you are pretty much developing in a total vacuum with a blindfold on. I am a firm believer in the sanctity of artistic intent, but I recognise how the fanciful whims of the artists can trail off into inanity, and the other extreme can languish in a mire of obsequiousness. Balance, as ever, is a process of iteration.