TLDR: Progress Quest is Good

So I've been thinking about video games lately, as I am wont to do, and I've been paying particular attention, thanks in no small part to the conversation we've been having about Quick Time Events, to the phenomenon of how the player understands his role in the game world via the actions he is permitted to perform, and what it would mean to subvert it.

In an arcade there is often little to no overarching logic behind many of the games, yet the player is able to construct purely from context what his goals are supposed to be. By playing Space Invaders, a player, through experimental interaction with his controls, should quickly deduce that he is supposed to move some sort of artillery back and forth while firing on the "Space Invaders", and if he succeeds, he'll do it again, but with a tighter time constraint, and if he fails, the game will ultimately end. He doesn't need to question why it is that he's shooting down Invaders, nor does he have to consider what it is that his avatar represents, he simply tests the limits of his powers as encoded into the game, and coming from his own ability, and concludes that he is supposed to shoot all the Invaders down.

Most of us here, having played all sorts of video games, have compiled a set of expectations regarding different kinds of games. We probably no longer need to experiment with controls and rules for long before we settle in to the role intended by the designer, and then spend our time focusing on achieving the goals appropriate to the role. We approach games as being a member of a genre, which entails certain expectations, and we quickly understand our relationship to the game without necessarily ever questioning it.

These expectations are sometimes subverted, The Longest Journey and Chrono Cross come immediately to mind as games that rely on the player's preconception of their role in the game, and then betrays it in a plot twist which should cause the player to reflect on why it is that they were so blinded by convention that they couldn't predict this inevitability.

One thing I think games could do to become art is to explore this idea more fully; to take that set of expectations we've built up regarding games and then force us to reflect on what they mean. To borrow from the list of RPG cliches, why do we accept all rumors as true in games? Why do we essentially steal from other people under their very noses? Why do we accept certain weapon and armor choices for our characters as being practical? How can we maintain contradictory attitudes toward death, with the notions between "in-battle" death being so different in impact than an "in-cutscene" death? Granted there are games that include false rumors and practical weapons and meaningful deaths, but I think those games simply avoid the issue just as completely as games that rely on the cliches, so why not make a game that is about answering these questions? Progress Quest, I think, is a good example of something like this. It's essentially a (non) game that addresses the somewhat mechanical and ultimately meaningless process of "leveling up". When one considers what it means to be a high level in PQ, I think one should likewise consider what it means in any other game.

Just some thoughts.