Game Theory: A Playwright on the Art of Video Games

Sony Computer Entertainment Amer, via Associated PressA scene from Journey.

So it's the end of 2012, and it feels like gaming is pushing through its creative adolescence. There are glimpses of what it might become. Thus, for games to take their rightful place among other creative works it's important to ask what they do that other forms cannot.

For me, there's a sort of identification with your character that other media will never be able to replicate. A game makes a player its subject, while the tyranny of the director's point of view in film and the author's withholding of detail in fiction both place the viewer as an observer in the world. Of course, in film and fiction emotions are elicited and characters insp ire empathy, but the viewer recognizes  she is following a protagonist that is “not me.” The bridge of empathy comes from the audience bringing their own life experience to the narrative. Gaming can break down that division between revealer and observer, through making the player complicit in and responsible for the choices made. This allows a sense of one single, unseparated narrative, one emotional journey. It is the difference between being told something and coming to realize it yourself.

The finest example this year may be Journey, the follow-up to Thatgamecompany's gorgeous Flower. It is an almost transcendental experience. Though designed as more of a meditation than a competition, it shows what gaming is capable of. Journey allows the player to move through a set of landscapes profound in their audio and visual beauty with no instruction, but with the momentu m, disorientation and hope that emerge from any journey in life. The game captures the emotional experience through play. The choice of subject matter and its rendering would be impossible to translate to film, music or literature, coming as close to game-as-artistic-experience as I have ever known.

A sense of choice and alternate narratives has long been a way that games differentiate themselves from other works. Early PC games were often built around selecting dialogue for your protagonist from a menu, or even asking you to type your own. But this was rarely more than a way to interact with exposition. This year games have been returning to that idea but also granting real effect to those choices, using the technical and creative sophistication the last two decades have brought.

The episodic Walking Dead brilliantly feasts on player's minds by giving them meaningful choice in dialogue and action to produce different outcomes and enhance the sense of peril. It gives this tense, satisfying zombie story a creeping sense of depth and autonomy.

Catherine, an extraordinary Japanese morality game, is just as terrifying but finds its power in the fear of commitment. Catherine, which was released in North America in 2011 before arriving in Europe in 2012, mines the emotional paralysis of a young man trying to choose between leaving and marrying his girlfriend. Its daytime segments allow the player to sit in a bar, choosing what sort of texts to send her, and at night the game turns into a frighteningly well-observed series of puzzle nightmares. It's complex and insightful, though I was shocked at its difficulty. Even experienced gamers might want to start on the easiest setting. But it's worth it. Particularly impressive is a level in which the single-player form changes to include Vincent, the protagonist, and his girlfriend in a fast-paced joint race to solve a puzzle. The change in game-play of suddenly having company and help on the journey, and yet twice the responsibility and risk of failure, so perfectly captures the advantages and disadvantages of being single versus being in a relationship that Catherine tips into the profound and, again, shows what it is that games can uniquely do.

In opposition to this sense of open play and choice, the lauded Max Payne 3 has a more filmic approach and leaves me underwhelmed. The lavish cut scenes, glossy slo-mo and self-important dialogue give the impression the designers are faintly annoyed that the player has to occasionally break into their world to play.

Even the brutally linear Call of Duty franchise embraced choice this year with Black Ops, a game with variation in timeline and narrative depending on certain decisions.

BioShock Infinite was disappointingly delayed, but those seeking a replacement with intense atmosphere and an intricately drawn world could do worse than Dishonored, a sort of BioShock set in a Fable universe, which I'd highly recommend.

I feel Journey is the creative achievement of the year but my personal favorite is the quirky, original Catherine, a unique game which embraces choice in its form while also showing the shadowy, paralyzing underside of our moral decisions in its content. Plus, it's a rare game that has the guts to ask what gamers are really afraid of. Zombies? Aliens? Terrorists? Or relationships?

The British playwright Lucy Prebble is the author of “The Effect,” now playing in London, and “Enron.”