In this article, we will talk about what exactly makes games an independent form of art, what tools developers use for this, and how game projects will change in the near future.
About the author: Ivan Sidorenko, Head of Brand Management Department, Astrum Entertainment.
The global video game industry is growing rapidly. According to Statista , in 2024 its volume will grow by 13% compared to the previous year and will amount to $282 billion, overtaking the music and film industries. According to forecasts, by 2027 there will be about 1.5 billion players worldwide. Despite the relatively young age of the industry (the first computer game was released only 66 years ago), video games have already become a unique phenomenon in culture and have significantly transformed over the past decades. If previously they were perceived exclusively as entertainment for children and teenagers, today many games can easily stand on par with films, books and even works of fine art in terms of plot depth, emotionality and visuals.
Why do games need interactivity?
Nowadays, many games are a synthesis of various forms of art, such as cinema, music, and literature. However, most of them have one unique component: interactivity. Unlike regular cinema, the player decides what exactly his character should do. Over time, a separate genre has emerged in this industry that takes the gamer’s interaction with history to a new level: interactive cinema: in such works, a person can not only follow the plot, but also influence its development.
For example, in the game Detroit: Become Human, the player controls several androids, each with their own story and motivation. The project provides the player with a unique experience of participating in the creation of history, because their decisions affect not only the ending of the entire game, but also the fate of the characters and the ending of each scene, the options of which can sometimes be more than twenty. Another example is The Quarry , a horror project from Supermassive Games , the creators of Until Dawn and the anthology The Dark Pictures . The gamer takes control of a group of teenagers who must survive the night at a summer camp. The decisions made by the player can change the development of the plot and the relationships between the characters, while each of the nine characters during this night can die for a dozen different reasons. The gamer becomes a full-fledged co-author of the plot, which sometimes requires strategic skills, and sometimes – lightning-fast reactions. It is the nonlinearity and the ability to influence the course of game events that are a kind of calling card of interactive cinema, which is designed to expand the classical perception of art in general and cinematography in particular.
However, in order for the immersion in the gameplay not to be disrupted, such projects must have a perfectly honed narrative. For example, Detroit: Become Human creator David Cage spent more than two years writing an unusually extensive script. It is worth understanding that the approach to working on a video game script is fundamentally different from a movie.
Narrative Features of Video Games
While in traditional art forms the author has complete control over the development of the plot, in video games some of this power is transferred to the player, which poses a non-trivial task for scriptwriters – to create a gripping plot that can change depending on the player’s choices.
Let’s consider a game scenario using the example of the project ” The Witcher 3: Wild Hunt ” – a game with a large open world and free movement. The developers from CD Projekt RED took into account that they would not be able to control the dynamics of the plot development themselves, so they gave it to the players. Wherever the gamer goes, he will definitely find himself involved in the story, which can be either an independent small quest or a small part of a larger plot.
And here the scriptwriters often resort to a knot design: the gamer, being at a certain point in the narrative, receives several completely different clues or tasks that are guaranteed to lead him to the next knot. Each of these points will lead the player further along the plot, while the process itself will be as non-linear as possible for the gamer himself. For example, he can ignore all the side quests and go along the main plot, or he can be distracted by each side quest. As a result, he will still get to the end of the game, but this path and his knowledge of the lore (lyrical content) of the game will differ significantly.
It is the concept of knot design that gives players the illusion of decision making. In such games, all nonlinearity is thought out and written in advance. However, some developers go further, intentionally leaving players room for creative play.
Full immersion into the game world
It is clear that nonlinearity and interactivity are inherent to one degree or another in many games, but what happens if we put these two features at the forefront? In this case, we are talking exclusively about mechanics – dialogues and character development are not so significant in this case. Games designed for creative passage are usually allocated to the conditional genre of immersive sim.
This concept was highlighted by game designer Warren Spector, who first used the term immersive sim in relation to his game Deus Ex , although this project is not considered the first game of the genre. According to Spector, an immersive simulator should create a feeling of complete immersion and presence in a virtual world. Such projects do not rely on scripted scenes and pre-planned events. And even on the contrary – the gamer can go through them in a way that the developers did not plan.
Warren Spector at the 2023 Game Developers Conference (GDC) (Photo: flickr.com)
The main thing that should be in an “immersive sim” is the ability to resolve the game situation in different ways. A great example of such a project is Dishonored . The game takes place in the fictional city of Dunwall, engulfed in a plague epidemic. The main character is falsely accused of murdering the empress, and in the course of the plot he tries to restore his honor and take revenge on his enemies. The game offers several ways to go through, each of which will directly affect both the entire gameplay and the endings. We are talking about the so-called chaos levels. For a low chaos level, the gamer will be forced to go through the entire campaign as stealthily as possible, and the game will encourage him – the city will have clear weather, there will be fewer infected and rats, and as a result, the player will get the best possible ending. A high chaos level works exactly the opposite – the player can act as noisily as possible, arranging shootouts and neglecting stealth. The world of Dunwall will respond to the gamer with changes corresponding to his actions – the weather will get worse, there will be many more enemies, and the ending that the player will receive in this case can hardly be called even slightly positive.
Creating a unique world where everything is connected
Projects that are thought out to the smallest detail always stand out from their less thoughtful competitors. There are very few products in which the plot, the surrounding world and the gameplay are incredibly tightly connected to each other, and each of these cases is something unique.
Even a detailed environment can contribute to the overall atmosphere. For example, Rockstar Games , the developers of Red Dead Redemption 2 , set a goal to create a world in which all elements of the landscape would play a special role. American artists, in particular landscape painters representing the Hudson River School, helped Rockstar in this. Albert Bierstadt, William Turner and Charles Russell skillfully showed the connection between man and the majestic North American nature in their paintings. They often took large open spaces as a basis, and it was their canvases that inspired Rockstar designers. This applies to the choice of color palette and the use of specific graphic tools. The game world is perceived very naturally: for example, more distant objects do not look as saturated as the space surrounding the player – this creates the necessary depth of the picture.
Landscape in Red Dead Redemption 2 (Photo: rockstargames.com)
The developers paid special attention to the sound design, and there are three types of music in the game: narrative (played during story missions), interactive (played in the open world), and ambient music (played by characters). Composers Bill Elm and Woody Jackson recorded all the compositions in stem format, which are multitracks whose individual components can be played independently of each other. Thus, the player received a kind of interactive sound: throughout the game, the musical accompaniment adapts to the events taking place on the screen.
Game design in the postmodern era
Some developers go even further, and Atomic Heart is a great example . The game allowed gamers to immerse themselves in the world of an alternative Soviet Union and managed to revive the hits of past years, while remaining an excellent first-person shooter. Why did the project become one of the most high-profile releases of 2023?
According to the developers, their main sources of inspiration were childhood memories of life in the USSR and the works of the Strugatskys, Lem and Harry Harrison. By mixing the Soviet Union with fantastic technologies and robots, they got Atomic Heart. And this symbiosis turned out to be incredibly successful – even in heavily modified scenery, the gamer will definitely feel the spirit of the USSR. Thanks to this, the game can be safely classified as a bright representative of classic retrofuturism.
One of the most important details of the perception of this game is the music. Of course, all domestic gamers are familiar with the songs that sound in Atomic Heart. “Harlequin”, “Komarovo”, “Grass at home” and other famous compositions of those years have undergone interesting changes: some of them received phonk remixes, some – slowed & reverb versions popular among meme lovers. In a word, the composers skillfully refreshed the classics. At the same time, Atomic Heart also has original compositions – they are made in the same style as the Doom soundtrack by Mick Gordon, and this is done due to a certain similarity in the gameplay.
Having collected all the details together, the developers received a complete and stylish project that won the hearts of gamers around the world. But what happens if there is a conflict between the gameplay and the plot?
Ludonarrative dissonance: how to avoid it
The term “ludonarrative dissonance” was first used by Clint Hocking in relation to BioShock . According to him, the game reveals the theme of self-denial and helping others, but at the same time the player himself is absolutely selfish in any version of the game. However, the best example of ludonarrative dissonance can be Uncharted .
The main character of all games in the series is Nathan Drake, a cheerful treasure hunter who is always ready to help his comrades. At the same time, throughout the story, Drake, under the control of the gamer, kills thousands of people. Yes, most often his victims are villains, but sometimes among them there are those who were simply unlucky enough to be on the other side of the main character. This is where the dissonance arises: according to the plot, Nathan is a good-natured person, but in the gameplay he turns out to be a cold-blooded killer.
Naughty Dog , the studio responsible for Uncharted, understood this perfectly well, and they managed to solve this problem in their other project, The Last of Us . The game immerses the gamer in a cruel world in which there is no clear good and evil, and every murder committed here has a good reason. In the end, the survival of the main characters is at stake, one of whom is a teenage girl who cannot stand up for herself.
The Main Gamedev Trends Right Now
Of course, the development of technology could not but affect the gaming industry. Modern games are becoming so large and sophisticated that developers often have to resort to procedural generation technology. It allows you to automatically, based on specified algorithms, create a huge part of the content: nature, cities, NPC appearance, etc. And the developers only have to check and adjust the result of its work. For example, with the help of procedural generation, huge worlds were created in Minecraft and No Man’s Sky , the plot, NPC lines and even game rules. It also contributed to the development of one popular genre – roguelike. In such games, the entire gameplay is built on the fact that you will try to pass levels over and over again, constantly dying. It is because of this that the environment is generated anew each time so as not to bore the player.
However, this approach is often used not only in roguelikes – in the already mentioned third “Witcher” they used procedural generation to create a huge game world. With the help of so-called brushes, the developers created all the game’s biomes, teaching the algorithm to take into account the landscape features. For example, in the valleys the generator grew a much denser forest than on the mountain slopes.
It is simply impossible to imagine modern open worlds in games without procedural generation. With the right use of algorithms, studios can achieve decent results – for example, the environment in Horizon: Zero Dawn or Marvel’s Spider-Man was largely made using this technology. There is only one downside to this approach – monotony. A great example here is No Man’s Sky, at the start of which players constantly encountered very similar planets and locations.
The main trend of our time — artificial intelligence — has also found its place in the gaming industry. For example, in early 2024, NVIDIA introduced ACE (Avatar Cloud Engine) technology, which is designed to bring NPCs to life. Using neural network algorithms, it generates realistic character lines and voices them, controls facial expressions and interactions with the player. Moreover, ACE allows the player to communicate directly with the NPC through a microphone, and the characters will react to the player based on their character traits, knowledge of the world, as well as the mood and tone of the gamer’s speech. This technology is currently being actively developed, and in the near future, ACE may become a real game changer in the gaming industry.
At the same time, AI influences not only the development process. Perhaps one of the most popular areas of its use can safely be called marketing. AI helps in working on creatives and in processing large amounts of data.
Despite its rapid development, AI today cannot perform tasks without human assistance. However, in the future, this technology will become an important tool in the gaming industry. For example, Epic Games has already added the MetaHumans AI tool to its Unreal Engine 5 game engine , which allows generating realistic human faces, and the developers of the Unity engine have introduced the Muse technology , which allows even users unfamiliar with the principles of the engine to generate desired objects, levels, mechanics, and entire games based on text queries. The development of such technologies can lower the entry threshold into the gaming industry and help those who want to focus on creativity, continuing to develop games as an art form.
