I am so sorry for taking as long as I did to get this entry out; not only did this entry change course fifty times, I have many other personal projects going on at the moment. So, anyway, here it is:
Color is something we take for granted these days; we go clothes shopping, and we can essentially find any color garment we’re looking for. We decide to paint our homes, and we’re given vast color libraries from which to choose from. But, things weren’t always this way; quests that had sent men and women halfway around the globe had been undertaken in search of color, and innumerable lives had been lost defending it. Of course, what I’m talking about are the rare and natural ingredients that had served as pigment to the various dyes of yore, but, regardless of how mindful we are to the suffering that went into creating color before today’s synthetic pigments, we’re all still aware that color undoubtably still plays an important role in our and every other culture on this planet.
For a time, it was thought certain colors possessed magical, metaphysical properties. The native americans would encrust their bodies with ochre colored paint, believing it had the ability to ward off evil spirits. But, in our modern societies, the ‘magical’ effects once attributed to color have simply been reduced to ‘psychological’ effects. The walls of asylums are coated in a pale blue in an attempt to keep the erratic neuronal signals of its patients to a minimum, and hospitals are often painted white or with very light, desaturated colors, giving the sense of stark cleanliness.
Color is everywhere; our eyes cannot escape it. No matter where we look — at our hands or into space — photons of various wavelengths are wiggling their way through our corneas and tapping our retinas (closing your eyes doesn’t help), and, often times, the colors we see in our man made habitat had much planning behind them. A lot of forethought and design go into the colors that plaster all the various products lining the shelves of every boutique and supermarket and the signage that covers nearly every surface we interact with. Most of the time, colors for things like these are used with hopes of catching our attention, like a flower whose brilliant petals attracts the insects so as to spread its pollen, but sometimes these items are designed with colors whose psychic effects (we think) parallel the kind of actions we take and moods we associate with regards to the item or service.
But, what about the colors used in art that’s intended to be savored, not the art that ends up on some packaged, disposable, single serving wrapper? What kind of thought goes into the use of color there? This isn’t an easily answered question; artists use color for a variety of reasons, and it depends on what they hope to achieve with their art. Not to mention, given our limited comprehension of the brain and the inescapable subjectivity of sense experience, the effect achieved with a given color can end up being completely different than what an artist or designer had intended; but that doesn’t stop people from trying. Game worlds are no exception; the digital spaces we explore are replete with colors of various hues, saturations, and values, though how often are the colors chosen to create something more than a believable and enchanting veneer?
As I write this, I begin to notice more and more that the aims I’d had for this entry about color isn’t so much deviating as it is expanding towards something more along the lines of metaphor and symbolism. I was concerned with trying to discover a reason behind the various colors we see in games; I wanted to know if they meant something or if they were just designed to be visually alluring. But, as I continue to think about the subject matter, I realize I want to know how metaphor is presented in games and how we can go about locating it.
Metaphor is something so powerful, yet so ephemeral. If our eyes aren’t cutting through the words of a novel with the utmost attentiveness or both our ears and eyes aren’t as open as we think while seated in a movie theatre, there’s a good chance we’ll miss any of the metaphor that’s present. Metaphor is what makes the high brow critics of art deliberate if a work is even worthy of being considered ‘art,’ but does the fact that few critics consider video games an art — ahem! Ebert — really mean they lack any metaphor and substance? Do they truly fail at commenting on our curious condition out here in space or in demonstrating a high level of skill in the purposeful crafting of a world and its inhabitants?
Most of us are aware of what metaphors are: a form of figurative language that portrays one object as being equal to an other in some way. Essentially, they compare two things without using ‘like’ or ‘as,’ and the comparison is often between two very different subjects. For example: her apple eyes. (Things can be contrasted, too. For example: time is not a thief.) But, there are many times when novelists don’t make these relationships so apparent. Instead of making an obvious connection through the words of a single sentence, a writer could construct a metaphor more slowly, more meticulously, and more subtly; some metaphors could even take half the book to finally materialize. Most of the time, these delicate mechanisms hinge on description, with the descriptive words — adjectives, adverbs, and prepositions — creating correlations between multiple characters, multiple objects, or both characters and objects. For example: within the words of a scene, an author may describe in detail the beautiful redwood finish of an old grandfather clock and, within the same scene, describe the ruddy complexion of a man. To a close reader, this would establish the first fine thread of a link between the two subjects, the man and the clock (a ruddy, old man would be an even more apparent connection). From now on, any information the author decides to reveal about the clock — its finish or its interior or its history — could suggest that it somehow parallels what’s going on with the inner workings of either the man’s physical body or mind or his own history.
Asking if we see things like this in games is a good question, but we need to keep in mind that games are a very different medium from novels, and, even though things like symbolism, metaphor, and subtext can be created in the same way for games and movies as they can for novels, noticing them requires skills we haven’t necessarily been trained to develop, whether naturally or through education. (Considering how games come in all different shapes and sizes, I think it best for me to clarify what kind of games I have in mind. Even though the simplest of two-dimensional game spaces can be rich enough to be considered art by the less pompous critics, the kind of game world I’m referring to is a fully navigable, three-dimensional, virtual space — the spaces that have had thousands of man hours go into constructing them — the universes with multi-million dollar budgets.)
For those of us trained to close read texts, we’re taught to look for things like repetitions, strands, and binaries, where the repetitions are — quite obviously — words that repeat, strands being groups of words all sharing certain qualities or characteristics, like natural, organic, and earthen, and binaries being words that oppose one another, like light and dark. These words act as the signposts that point us in the right direction; they allow us to more clearly see and understand the various and complex relationships being built by the author, whether intentional or not.
Let’s take a look at how games are currently designed and how they lend themselves (or don’t) to being studied with the methods we’re used to:
