Guest Column: Gaming And The Aesthetic Of The Interactive Space

Punchdrunk’s Tunnel 228

Video games are thoroughly digital, mass-produced objects. Yet they cannot be consumed passively. To consume a game is by definition to experience it, from moment to moment, as a gradual encounter with a space and a set of ideas. And the art form they most resemble in this respect is one that came to prominence at almost exactly the same time as the first mass-market video games: installation art.

One of the world’s finest, and most staggeringly successful, spaces for such art is the Turbine Hall of the Tate Modern museum in London. With 3,400 square meters of floor space and five storeys of height, the Turbine Hall is one of the most striking settings for art in the world and, since it was opened in 2000, has hosted installations including: huge stacks of white boxes, a gigantic crack in the floor, a indoors weather system complete with mist and sunshine, and a series of giant steel slides, which visitors were encouraged to use. It’s easy enough to see the analogy with a video game, here—a realm is delineated as distinct from the rest of the world, as a kind of playground for the senses and the mind. And it’s each individual’s gradual experience and exploration of this space that conjures up its artistic meaning.

It would be daft to push this analogy too far. Yet, increasingly, the road between video games and other important, real-world forms of art is becoming a two-way street. Take one of the most talked-about British theatrical ventures in recent years: the Punchdrunk theater company, who have staged several hugely popular and critically acclaimed shows in which the audience, rather than sitting passively in front of a live show, are themselves forced to discover the performance they are attending by exploring a particular building or location.

The idea of audience “interaction” is hardly a new but, in the hands of Punchdrunk, it has taken on an entirely different dimension. Their 2009 show Tunnel 228, for example, simply abandoned its audience in a subterranean network of cellars and caverns beneath London Waterloo station with little sense of direction or clue as to what is going on. Industrial machinery and disturbing fragments of performance art were scattered around, together with elliptical private codes and clues that most of the audience would never even discover. But the experience was, deliberately, a combination of puzzle, treasure hunt and survival horror.

It’s theatrical immersion of the most disturbing, gripping kind. And, as Time Out features writer and critic (and sometime Punchdrunk groupie) Peter Watts observed in his own writings on the topic, it’s also, well, more than a little like a video game. All the tropes are there. They had “a sinister, self-enclosed world; atmospheric sound and light; the freedom to explore a vast Tardis-like world within tightly-defined borders; the concept that you have a central ‘mission’ to fulfill, but also the liberty to ignore it if the mood strikes you; the secret doors and curtains concealing hidden treasures, imaginatively created.”

Tunnel 228 is an experience of a kind that’s becoming increasingly common: one that, if not directly inspired by video games, nevertheless shares with them an aesthetic that—like cinema a century ago—has begun to seep out of its original context into art and society as a whole. This is the aesthetic of the interactive space: the audience-generated narrative, the careful mixing of freedom with constraint into a new kind of performance.

It’s become an increasingly common practice in recent years to dismiss the worst and most vacuous kinds of art in other media—in cinema, on television, even in books—as “like video games.” What’s usually meant by this is a mindless kind of frenzy: anaesthetizing, undifferentiated action involving metal, muscles and guns. Some games do look like this from the outside, and the worst ones play like it, too. But this is a brand of criticism that couldn’t be further from the truth. The frenzy isn’t a sign that games are debasing all other arts to an unprecedented creative depth: it’s a sign many filmmakers, producers and publishers have little concept either of what makes the best games so great.

Fortunately, audiences increasingly aren’t falling into the same kind of error. And I for one can’t wait to find out what meeting the best of their future expectations may mean.

Tom Chatfield is a British author, tech and cultural commentator, game writer, and game theorist. You can read his thoughts on all things gaming over on his website or in his book Fun Inc., which looks at the debates surrounding video game violence and games as art, while exploring how games are a cultural force and barometer of 21st century life. He’s also recently published Summer of Unrest: Activism or Slacktivism?, which looks at how the internet affected the global protest movements that took place over the past year.