³ÉÈËÂÛ̳

The video games industry is big business, but is it also breaking new ground in the arts? In What's in a Game? Alex Humphreys speaks to leading video games designers, composers and writers from around the world to ask if their craft should be appreciated as a form of art.

Here are eight games that, in their individual ways, fit the bill…

In What Remains of Edith Finch, which won the 2018 BAFTA for Best Game, you play as Edith, returning to explore your colossal abandoned family home and the surrounding wilderness to try to figure out why you are the last member of your family left alive. Creator Ian Dallas says it’s a game about the sublime, and what it feels like to be in a place that's beautiful but also overwhelming. A large inspiration for the game was his own experience of scuba diving as a child; specifically looking at the ocean and seeing it slope away into an infinite darkness…

In Bloodborne you control a character called The Hunter, traversing a gothic city and fighting beasts as you attempt to find and stop the source of an indiscriminate, blood-borne plague. On the surface, for people who aren’t familiar with video games, it can look like it’s falling into the traditional trope of high fantasy violence – but the notoriously difficult gameplay tells a different story. Great skill and competence is required to create such challenging combat, and the sound, complex world design and plot have all contributed to Bloodborne’s reputation as an artistic masterpiece.

Everybody’s Gone to The Rapture is a story-based game that takes place in a small English village whose inhabitants have mysteriously disappeared. Perhaps the most striking thing about this adventure game is not what you see, but what you hear. The stunning theme tune, Finding the Pattern, has echoes of Vaughan Williams or Elgar but was actually composed just a few years ago by Jessica Curry. This moving and melancholic piece of music with sweeping strings and piercing choral singing won her a BAFTA.

In Journey, developed by Thatgamecompany, you traverse a beautiful, otherworldly desert and forge silent relationships with complete strangers along the way. As you wander the peaceful landscapes you’ll encounter other players on a similar pilgrimage. Your goal is reaching a distant mountain, forever present on the horizon, and so is everyone else’s. But you won’t see your fellow players’ names floating above their head, nor can you talk to them using your microphone. This, along with a serene Grammy-winning score by composer Austin Wintory, makes for an unforgettable experience.

At their best, games are capable of transporting you to a different place and time entirely. And one of the most interesting, challenging and creative games that does just that is World of Warcraft. The online, multiplayer role-playing game is set in an epic, vast, high-fantasy world. In many ways it’s what you expect from a traditional video game – but the art in the game is stunning and this goes to the heart of its appeal. Artist Ely Cannon, whose job it is to decode what this awesome fictional world looks like, sees it as “an illustration that you can live part of your life inside of.” A striking part of the experience and one way in which the game elicits emotion is through the use of colour. Each palette is informed by the type of mood and storytelling that happens in each space. Drustvar, for example, has a story arc about witches, so this zone is flooded with shades that evoke a sense of imminent doom. Deep crimson reds, browns and sunset tones all help to create a feeling of dread about what you will face in the night ahead…

In Lucas Pope’s politically-charged Papers, Please you’re thrust into a world of suffering and injustice and forced to make difficult decisions, which in turn makes you think about real-world politics. You play as a border guard in a grim Eastern Bloc state, and must inspect the documents of people as they shuffle through. Some are citizens, but others are refugees or political dissidents looking for asylum. You can choose to turn a blind eye and help these people, but at the risk of being found out with your character and their family suffering as a result.

Her Story, created by Sam Barlow, is an example of a developer using video games to tell a non-linear story in a way only a game can. Most games look to the conventions of filmmaking to tell linear stories through cinematics, but Barlow rejected this. You’re an investigator digging through a video archive, and you search for keywords that reveal fragmented clips of a woman being interviewed by the police. And it’s completely non-linear, which means every person who plays it will have a different interpretation of the story based on the clips they manage to uncover, and in which order they watch them.

Virginia is a poetic take on the police procedural, telling its story through abstraction and surreal dream logic, with a bold visual style. Developed by Variable State, Virginia is the story of two FBI agents investigating the disappearance of a boy in the rural town of Kingdom, Virginia. It’s heavily inspired by '90s TV shows like Twin Peaks, but with a twist: there’s no dialogue. It tells its story without a script, instead relying on environmental detail, fast-paced cinematic editing, and a stirring score by Lyndon Holland. It’s remarkable how much it conveys, and how emotional it can be, without exposition or conversations between characters. Sometimes a facial expression or a shift in body language is all it takes.