This was once part of a longer work, but was deemed irrelevant to the larger argument being made. Since I spent a while on it and I hate to just toss it out, here it is in all of its first draft glory.

   It's not uncommon for the highest forms of artistic praise to come in the form of comparisons to an entirely different medium. Michael Stipe once said of R.E.M. that "the music we've always done has been described -- outside the band -- as being extremely filmlike." The film O Brother, Where Art Thou was described as having "the sunstruck luminosity of an Andrew Wyeth painting." Gerald Grow wrote in his "Writing and Multiple Intelligences" that "… it does not sound odd to describe good prose with musical terms like 'counterpoint' and 'harmony.'"

   Videogames can be described in a number of these ways as well; like films, videogames are a blend of images and music on the surface, frequently combined with storytelling in some form. Given this fact, videogames can claim at the very least a marginal, roundabout artistic status. After all, one can hardly argue that if a game contains at the very least beautiful imagery or a haunting score-and many do-then it's nothing more than irrelevant fluff. While the true artistic power of videogames does not necessarily lie in those surface elements which are passively experienced, many a retailer knows that these are the aspects of gaming which will initially hook an audience.

   The earliest example is, of course, Super Mario Brothers. Some quick explanation: in computer terms, a moving part of the two-dimensional board such as an enemy, an item, or your hero, is known as a "sprite." In the early days, the amount of Most games before this had lacked either the inspiration or the technology to do more than put its protagonists onto a blank, black screen with no more decoration than that necessary to delineate the playing field. Super Mario Brothers, on the other hand, presented the player with not just a board but a whole world. Smiling clouds dotted the blue sky and the background featured hills, trees, and bushes. Furthermore, each foe Mario encountered had something of a personality evident in the graphics; mushroom-like Goombas were soft and easy to dispatch; the shiny armor of a Buzzy Beetle telegraphed a more difficult obstacle; and the Hammer Brothers' ability to walk on two legs as well as use their hands for lobbing deadly projectiles at Mario made them the most dangerous of all. It would not be for several more years that Mario's in-game appearance came close to matching his engaging character design, but even the relatively crude graphics in the original showed Mario to be an unlikely hero: the pudgy, unattractive plumber was the antithesis of more conventional musclebound types.

   Super Mario Brothers began two important trends in videogame aesthetics: first, the need for a standout hero to control rather than a faceless, heartless blob on the screen; and second, an emphasis on fantastic, otherworldly design for the hero's world. Games in this style include: The Legend of Zelda, in which an elf explores the caves and dungeons of the land of Hyrule, based on its creator's boyhood journeys through forests; Castlevania, which let players control a vampire hunter through locales taken straight from famous horror stories on a quest to destroy Dracula; Mega Man, about the adventures of a humanoid robot protecting a futuristic world from his rogue counterparts; Sonic the Hedgehog, featuring the fastest videogame hero yet created in a sylvan world designed specificially to highlight his speed; Metroid, concerning a bounty hunter's mission to eradicate a malevolent alien species from the planet SR-3788; and many more up to today's beautifully done Klonoa, which takes the novel step of inventing not only a hero and world but an entire fictitious language in which its characters speak. It is perhaps significant that each of these games, grounded in a strong hero and fully-developed world, has grown into a highly successful franchise.

   As time went on and the hardware behind the games became more powerful, the graphics improved almost exponentially. A Mario game for each of Nintendo's three systems was released on the same day that the system came out; to see images of the three games (Super Mario Brothers, Super Mario World, and Super Mario 64) side by side and know that they were each created five or six years after the last borders on the unbelievable.

   Today, the technology has advanced enough so that vastly different styles of graphics are possible. Sega's Jet Grind Radio takes 3D models and, in a process known as "cel shading," colors them in such a way that they appear to be remarkably fluid cartoons; the visuals combined with the game's high-quality hip-hop soundtrack make the player feel as if he's controlling the hippest animated story ever made. In contrast with this is Konami's Metal Gear Solid 2, perhaps the most photorealistic game ever made, where every Eastwood-esque squint of the hard-bitten protagonist's eyes is visible. The two-dimensional sprite style is still popular, as in Capcom's rather long-in-the-tooth Mega Man series, where the faster processors power more colorful and lavish onscreen characters than ever before. Then there are the new twists on 2D: Parappa the Rapper and Paper Mario both take place in 3D environments, but the characters are rendered as polygonal models with no depth so that they move as paper cutouts would.

   Due to both technological constraints and the dominance of anime style in Japan, where most videogames are produced, most videogames have cartoonish visuals. But some games, such as the Metal Gear Solid series or Vagrant Story, feature not only realistic-looking characters but also some of the most innovative "camera" work there is. Since the stages and actors are entirely virtual and rendered in realtime (as opposed to prerendered computer graphics, also common in videogames) the creators may move the camera wherever they wish, including places that would be impossible to shoot from in real life.

   One such sequence near the end of Metal Gear Solid places the camera a set distance behind the hero, Solid Snake, as he moves silently through a corridor. As the end of the corridor gets nearer, the player is able to see more and more clearly what lies in the warehouse-sized room beyond. As Snake prepares to enter the room, the camera quickly swoops from its position at Snake's back to a following worm's-eye-view at his heel, dramatically contrasting Snake's size with that of the now visible three-story war machine. After Snake actually enters the storage facility, the camera leaves its position on the ground to a set track against the back wall of the facility, which keeps Snake centered in the frame, but does not follow him in terms of "depth" as he moves in and out of the 3D environment. However, once he ventures far enough into the room, the camera moves up to the ceiling to get a top-down view of the action as he maneuvers around the girders and weapons of mass destruction. At no point in any of the preceding does the camera "cut" to anything, as a Hollywood story would be forced to in order to accommodate physical realities; it is all one fluid motion that never requires the player to reorient himself or herself regarding Snake's position in the room.

   While finely orchestrated camera movements such as this are a recent introduction to games, movies in some form or another have actually been present for quite some time. One of the earliest examples is seen in the 1989 NES platformer Ninja Gaiden. While nothing more really than simple pans across a static image, the combination of moving pictures and dialogue that advanced the game's story in between bouts of gameplay served as an early form of one of gaming's most controversial current elements: the cutscene. As defined by Lucasarts for their PC-format adventures, a cutscene is a short sequence which the player has no control over. It could be as simple as two character sprites standing around while comic strip-style word balloons express their dialogue, or it could be something as accomplished as the magnificently rendered non-interactive movies of Square's Final Fantasy series.

   What makes them controversial is their unplayable nature. With more and more cutscenes appearing in videogames, some have suggested that they have no place in an interactive medium and ought not to be included. As Ernest Adams stated in his essay "Dogma 2001," "The secret desire of game designers to be film directors is deleterious to their games and to the industry generally. This desire must be stamped out." There's a grain of truth to be found here, but were all designers to take Adams seriously, the form would likely be lost as a valid narrative medium.

   What Adams ignores is the ability of cutscenes to involve the player more heavily with the game, to help him identify with its characters and world. An example is Square's 1995 game Chrono Trigger; as in many videogames, your goal is to stop the world from being destroyed. But the cutscenes in Chrono Trigger established the heroes are likable and their world as one you want to save. Without the benefit of cutscenes, Chrono Trigger would have been just another game; with them, it stands out as one of the classics of its genre.

   Not all movies and cutscenes in games add to the experience, of course. For a thankfully brief time around the advent of compact disc media in gaming systems, filling up a CD with grainy video of live action and making an "interactive movie" was in vogue. These "games" (including Night Trap, which launched a Senate investigation into titillating games) were almost universally awful, with gameplay no more challenging than the old Choose Your Own Adventure books for children.

   Another element of games that has only in recent times been able to stand up to more traditional art forms is its music. By now, most early 1980s-era game music is painful to listen to, and even the best usually has little to recommend it other than its catchiness, a quality it shares with the most annoying TV jingle "music." (There are exceptions, such as the energetic themes from the first few Mega Man games, but they remain exceptions nonetheless.)

   The state of gaming music got a little bit better in the early 1990s, with the epic scores of such games as Final Fantasy on the Super Nintendo, but the limited size of cartridge-based games made it difficult to produce lifelike instrument samples, leading to above-average or excellent composition with unfortunately subpar instrumentation. However, this was the moment when CD-based gaming systems such as the Turbo Duo and the Sega CD began to appear. Faced with a gigantic amount of extra storage space, game designers were at a loss on the best way to use it. Coding richer, lusher graphics would have taken more time and effort, but the nature of compact discs lent itself to an obvious method of enhancing the music. For the first time, games began to feature what is known as "redbook" audio, songs encoded in the same format that normal audio CDs use.

   Redbook audio had its problems. Due to each song's large file size and the comparatively tiny amounts of RAM that the systems had, all non-music parts of the game had to fit into the system's memory while the music streamed from the disc. Then, once the song finished, there was a slight delay while the laser searched for the beginning of the track again. However, the benefits far outweighted the drawbacks: redbook audio led to the most fully realized expression of the composer's talents yet seen in games.

   The most notable game to make use of this technique was the 1990 Turbo Duo game Ys Book I & II. Yuzo Koshiro, one of the few musicians able to wrest an impressive performance from the SNES hardware, composed the score, which Falcom's in-house JDK Band performed. While the final result still bears more than a passing resemblance to the same fare found in other contemporary game soundtracks, it's notable in a few important ways. First, the sample quality is much higher-not surprising, since the JDK Band is playing real instruments. This is also the cause of the second point, which is that the very sound of a real band playing real instruments, no matter how good, inevitably sounds different and more natural than precisely timed computer-generated bleeps. Finally, the authenticity of the music allowed the JDK Band to venture out into some different musical styles, including a couple of pieces that border on surf rock, without sounding silly or forced.

   By now, game systems have evolved to the point where redbook audio is no longer necessary. Better compression routines have let games such as Tony Hawk's Pro Skater or Wipeout XL include not just programmed tunes on a loop, but entire CD-quality popular songs. While this approach is still comparatively rare, sampling technology has progressed to the point where scores as found in games like Chrono Cross or Skies of Arcadia may as well have been performed by live symphony orchestras. Just as the games' artists are free to experiment with whatever visual styles they choose, so too are game composers now able to write songs with the knowledge that the final result will closely match what they hear in their heads.

   And just as the unrealities of the game world are taking cinematography to previously unattainable places, so too are videogame tunes beginning to take advantage of the medium's nonlinear possibilities. Harry Gregson-Williams' score for Metal Gear Solid 2 was written in the traditional way, and converted as normal into an electronic music format, but the game itself features certain cues and flags which have an effect on the tempo and pace. For instance, if Solid Snake is walking down a corridor in no danger, the music may be quiet and just a little tense, but should he be spotted the very same theme will take on a much more urgent tone to better reflect what's going on in the game. Traditional composers have a preset story worked out either in their minds or in a script, and can plan their music accordingly, but in a game no one but the player can guess what will happen at any given moment in a tune.

   Music in games usually falls under one of two categories: music as enhancement of the general mood and atmosphere of the game, and music as a dramatic highlight to the game's story. The latter sort of music is usually found most often, naturally enough, in games with a very strong narrative element. Such games tend to feature a number of non-playable cinematic scenes, some of which begin and end at precise moments and thus are able to be scored in the traditional way.

   Much more commonly featured is music as mood enhancement device, and it is this sort of music which varies most wildly from game to game. Action games, usually known as "shooters" whether third-person or first-person, feature soundtracks designed to stimulate the player into peak awareness. While this doesn't necessarily mean simply cramming the CD full of heavy metal or propulsive techno, these are by far the most frequently found styles of music in such games. The more whimsical "platform games," in which the action is less explicitly violent, generally employ bouncy, carefree tunes to help cement the game's sense of fun and wonder. There are too many genres of games to list accompanying modes of soundtracks here, but music can be a powerful and integral part of the story. Consider Silent Hill, a horror adventure throughout which the music imitates the shadowy, hidden demons which have infested the city. Most of the time, the music is either faintly audible or nonexistent. When the game's protagonist becomes threatened, however, the music roars into life with a clanging, jarring start, serving as your enemy's ally in making the player feel ill at ease.

   As there are two modes of music in gaming, so are there two general functions for a narrative. In one form, the narrative is thin and serves only as a framing device for the real objective of the gameplay. Super Mario Brothers features a princess trapped by a dragon, but this fact is irrelevant when it comes to simply enjoying the game. Similarly, the popular action game Doom casts the character as a member of some futuristic armed force, stranded on an alien planet where the only escape is to destroy what stands between you and the exit. Here, too, the player's role and objective are secondary to the visceral thrill of blasting monsters into goo.

   Where the first sort of story is a means to the end of gameplay, the second sort is exactly the reverse: the gameplay is a means to the end of the story. The two most common genres to feature this sort of narrative are adventure games and role-playing games. ("Role-playing" is one of gaming's shakier genres, as one could be said to play a role in any videogame that exists. For purposes of this book, though, it has a very definite and concrete meaning, namely that the player has only the most indirect control over what happens and gameplay primarily revolves around manipulation of statistics rather than manipulation of an onscreen object.) In both of these genres, the actual enjoyment derived from the simple motions of playing the game is comparatively low when placed beside more action-oriented genres. The fun of the game comes from finding out what happens next and, in some rare cases, making meaningful decisions that affect the story's outcome.

   Games are still a young medium, and stories within games that stand up on their own merit as stories are still few. Some of the more notable game stories are Final Fantasy VIII, in which a romance is played out against the backdrop of a quest to eliminate a threat to all history; Metal Gear Solid, which uses extrapolations on current technology to build a near-future story of the arms race and human nature; and Suikoden II, which examines the politics and personal motivations behind a world war. Because the way games tell stories is such a critical aspect of their appeal as literature, several of these examples will be discussed in more detail later. For now, it suffices to draw what should be an obvious conclusion: games with artistically handled elements by all rights ought to count as an art form.

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