Shadow of the Colossus - Video Game 'Art?'

Got my Official US Playstation Magazine this weekend, which includes full coverage of the upcoming release developed by Sony CEA: The Shadow of the Colossus. "Full Coverage" means the mag features an article about its production, a staff review, and a playable level on the included demo disk. I could probably write a comparative analysis about how each of these classes of text represent the game, the different assumptions and methodologies each bring to defining its significance, but that's for another time. I want to talk about the content - the game itself and the claims the writers make about it. As such, I will be treating the demo as truly representative of the overall game experience, though it might not be (as the magazine specifically warns).

The gaming press makes much of the work's status as the next title from the developers of the critically acclaimed Ico. Let me just say at the outset that I've never played that game and know nothing about it. The ubiquitous association of the two titles seems a bald attempt to position both as part of a canon of "artistic" games. That's fine, we do the same thing in every media. A work takes on greater depth, or, at least, greater interpretive possibility, when we can locate it within the ouvre of some author. But, I found the rhetoric of the reviewer, Joe Rybicki, rather defensive, as if we need to appeal to these conventional signifiers of high art to justify taking a video game seriously. The most egregrious example is his description of the beautiful landscapes in the game. He posits that they point to "the designers' priorities: Make it beautiful—make it art—even if it has absolutely no bearing on the gameplay itself." OK, once and for all, aesthetic beauty and artistic value are not equivalent. Thomas Kincade paints some pretty landscapes (he's the painter of light. Light!), but, well, his paintings aren't quite the cutting edge of artistic expression. Call me a snob. Furthermore, in the form of video games, gameplay is a huge part of artistic content. In the reviewer's defense, we don't quite have a well-developed language for talking about the art of gameplay, and the Official US Sony Playstation Magazine is probably not the forum for development of such a language.

How about the game itself? For those unfamiliar with its basic premise, the player controls a humanoid on a quest to kill 16 giant creatures that roam a desolate landscape. The magazine's writers refers to these giants as "bosses," but that seems misapplied. "Boss" implies the end of a sequence of progressively more difficult opponents. In other words, you can't have a boss without lackeys. In Shadow, the creatures are the singular challenge, and they each require sufficiently complex manuevers to bring down that it might be more accurate to call the creatures "levels". But the subversion of these video game conventions is what makes the game interesting.

What makes it breathtaking to play, even in the short demo, is the sense of scale. The creatures tower over your little avatar. Here, I think, we see pioneers of the video game form feeding back to us a shared cultural dream: the slaying of the dragon. Actually, we're in gaming territory here, which comes out of a different cultural tradition, so I better be specific. This isn't the European St. George and the Dragon, vanquishing of the pagan by the Christian kind of thing. The associations that came most clearly to my mind while playing the game were from Miyazaki's Princess Mononoke. Here is dragon as magnificent nature spirit, slayer as heroic and daring, yes, but also modernizing and destructive. The game creates with its story, and supports with its music and cinematographic elements, a very ambiguous moral task for the player. Of course, having only played the demo, I can't speak to how the story unfolds to its end. The review indicates, again apologetically, that the ambiguity is maintained. If so, then that's quite an achievement.

So the concept seems brilliant enough, but how about the gameplay? The review complained of complexity, but that's a pretty relative term. It's hardly flight simulator complex. In fact, I'd say it's as or less complex than most action games. I found it intuitive after a few minutes. In the demo, the camera was very annoying, pulling back to show a preferred framing rather than sticking to the player's direction. Unfortunately, that preferencing of the designer's will over that of the gamer's extends to other parts of the game. As far as I can tell, the game allows only one way to kill a Colossus. In the demo example, I replayed it several times to see if I could find my own way: climb onto the giant's hammer instead of up his leg. It confounded my every attempt, until finally some words came up on the screen to the effect of "you have to climb up the leg first." Directions. Disappointing. They designed so much scale and graphical complexity into the giants, but prescribed a single path for attacking them? I'm also curious about how the progression between Colossi is acheived. Again, despite building a world that seems to allow free roaming, I sensed that getting from one Colossus to the next was a rather linear process. Now, that's a choice by the developers. Not all games have to be open-ended sandboxes. But, from my short experience with this game, I think it would have been a better choice.

Despite those caveats, I'm sold on this title as a valuable addition to the gaming canon. But is it art? Well, duh.