A spectacular but frustrating journey into an alien universe
Video Games: Design, Play, Disrupt V&A
No art form (and, yes, it is an art form) is as contentious and divisive as video games. It’s a world you are either obsessively invested in or implicitly hostile to – blaming it, likely as not, for everything from general social alienation to an obsession with sexualised violence among the young.
Britain’s first major exhibition on the subject aims to appeal to both camps, providing enough technical background on classic games to draw in the seasoned gamer, while offering the sceptical but curious outsider a multi-sensory crash-course.
At first sight the show doesn’t disappoint on either score. Eschewing the stereotypical combat games that are all about shooting up baddies in alleys (Doom) or slicing women in half
(Mortal Kombat), it opens with the genre at its most beatific, in Journey,
2012. The game’s cloaked protagonists float through vertiginous landscapes and mysterious cities in an alternative reality in which players are actually encouraged to help each other.
The extent to which games development is dependent on traditional media such as painting and drawing is apparent in a section on the dystopian action-adventure game
The Last of Us. The characters were first drawn in a magazine-illustration style, then cast with real actors, whose movements were digitised to give them the creaky, android look that seems essential even to the most sophisticated video games.
Notwithstanding the presence of Japanese Bloodborne, a highly sophisticated variant on the soloshooter format set in a ruined steampunk city, a great deal is made of games designers’ efforts to provide alternatives to violent stereotypes, whether it’s Nintendo’s Splatoon, in which combatants throw coloured ink, or a DIY maverick such as Jenny Jiao Hsia, whose quirky, faux-naif imagery relates to “serious considerations such as body image and dieting”. Yet from the very simple game we are permitted to play it was difficult to tell what Hsia’s young, female audience is getting from the experience.
Countering the popular prejudice against gamers as socially inadequate, dangerously isolated males, the exhibition assembles an array of formidably articulate games designers and proponents in skilfully edited interviews to discuss the “politics” of gaming and its treatment of minorities. While all are positively messianic about the possibilities of the field, Michael Yang, designer of the “first gay video game”, concedes that most of his favourites involve shooting people in the face.
The show focuses too much on gaming’s politically aware cuttingedge to be a credible reflection of a field which by and large is about providing anaesthetising brain candy. This becomes painfully apparent in massive projections on the Overwatch phenomenon, in which tens of millions participate in the exploits of a sexy space-bimbette.
But the show’s principal failing is that it offers precious little of the thing that makes games what they are: interactivity. The logistics of this are probably prohibitive, but we might at least have been allowed to watch the progress of one of the many multiparticipant games, such as Eve Online, as it unfolds in real life.
None the less, the show provides a mind-opening view into what for many V&A goers will be an alien world. As a games sceptic, I was delighted to have had the experience, and even more delighted to get out.