Clint Hocking On Auteurship And Art

Clint Hocking, whom you may know as part of Far Cry 2, wrote a blog post this weekend examining the article that popped up in the New York Times Magazine about indie games. He was interviewed for the piece, and this serves as a retrospective on the piece over all (which includes Jason Rohrer, Jon Blow, Jenova Chen, and many more).

The post starts with the recognition that only a certain subset of gamers really cared about the question of whether or not games can or have the ability to be art. He acknowledges that games are entertainment, just as any artistic medium may be. It is the realization that more and more, major publications are posing such thoughts and questions as well, meaning there is a relatively new medium through which people can experience art, or simply expression.

His issue, however, is how the New York Times Magazine article seems to push that in seeing more art in games in the future, there will need to be auteurs, or a strong authorial intent coming from the side of the game developers.

Hocking succinctly sums it up in this paragraph:

But in some ways, I feel this is the very purpose of games. Every other artistic medium is authored in the traditional sense: the message passes down from author to audience through the medium. But games (as we know) are different. Input is expression, and when players input their expression it passes back into the medium, where it feeds back against predictions the author(s) made about the kinds of things players might express (never reaching the author directly).

The idea is not that developers give us a story and that's it, but that this is a medium through which the player can be part of the formation of the narrative and experience. It is among the reasons I myself enjoy gaming so much; it feels like rehearsals for a play, or the process of writing out a story, poem, et cetera. It allows me not to just experience, but create and share the joy of authorship while making the play completely my own.

Which is not to say I mind strong authorship in games. The old Sierra and LucasArts adventure games hold a prominent place on my games shelf.