Auditorium

I am stunned by Auditorium. I usually click on whatever Tycho posts because the man has shown excellent taste over the past ten years, but I was unprepared for Cipher Prime's demo. If you haven't clicked the link above, do so now:

PLAY AUDITORIUM

When people who care about such things talk about "games as art," everyone has a different idea of what such a classification would mean. Gamers haul out Aeris's death or Rez's "synesthesia" or Braid's relative maturity or Bioshock's lofty creative ambition spread against a brilliantly realized world, and they say, "Surely, this is art!"*

All of those may indeed be art, although I think there are valid counter-arguments for whether or not some of them are good art: Final Fantasy VII, as a whole, reads like it was written by and for sixth graders; Bioshock is far more shooter and environmental design showcase than anything else, and the Rand-esque story elements feel tacked on, probably because they were added fairly late in the development process. Rez is beautiful art.

Auditorium is nothing less than an interactive poem about the creative process. It is the anti-Roger Ebert. Light spews from a single source, and your goal is to guide the light particles around the board so that they hit these panels, these line stacks. When the line stacks are hit, they cue a small music piece. The boards start simply and build, so by the time you are on the eighteenth stage, you are assembling fairly layered musical riffs.

So you have the notion that the creative process is, fundamentally, composed of very few parts. An individual piano has only eight keys. How many core colors did any of the masters use? It was finite. How many words does it take to form a sentence? The core elements are simple. But only with careful, artful arrangement, only with trial and error, can you finally stumble on that moment when your work, your piece, is made whole.

I know it sounds like overblown praise for the game. Keep my reading in mind when you play it, and see what you think.

Play Auditorium!

*-- The people who have this argument may or may not be concerned with whether or not games SHOULD be art because, dammit, they're fun. While I like pleasure for its own sake as much as any other product of the internet porn generation, and I will NEVER play a game that doesn't entertain me, I think this argument is silly. There are too many horrors and problems in the real, real world that to turn one's eye away from them for mere pleasure, i.e. pleasure that doesn't uplift the spirit through art or competition or social congress, is almost certainly a waste of time. There are many ways to have fun, and many of them aren't self-indulgent artifacts from your most childish self. When I call Auditorium the "anti-Roger Ebert," I am in no way chiding Mr. Ebert for a largely correct perception. There is dreck on the shelves both in the form of poorly constructed entertainment and in the form of wonderful entertainments that "represent a loss of those precious hours we have available to make ourselves more cultured, civilized and empathetic. " Note that I say this in full awareness that I am often guilty of this same form of time wasting. That doesn't mean I'm right, and it doesn't mean the distinction between mere entertainment and art isn't an important one to make.