Edge Online, recently resurrected website of the top-notch videogame magazine Edge, brought to my attention today an interesting videogame-related art installation by John Paul Bichard.

It’s based around thoughts on ‘first-person shooter’ games, like Doom, Halo, and Half-life. As Edge say; “The [blood] splattered corridors of first person shooters never really seem to reflect the bloodiness of what goes on in them. In most cases, the buckets of guts spilled on the floor seem uncannily able to clean themselves up, melting into antiseptic invisibility before you’ve had time to squeeze off another round.”

What John Paul Bichard’s Evidência #000 (link to view it here) attempts is to imagine what the scene would really look like after a game is over. When a deathmatch between four or five players has been completed, and the players have moved on—what are the consequences? What would we see if the police arrived on scene, cordoned the area off, and set up an investigation? What evidence would be left, and how would it make a viewer feel?

Obviously, Evidência #000 is a pretty sensationalist piece of art, calculated to shock with it’s realistic gore and fashionable association to the world of gaming. It bring up some interesting points though. If videogames continue to strive for realism in terms of visuals and physical systems, surely they will start to strive also for more realism in terms of continuity, both within the gameplay and outside of it, in the surrounding game ‘world’. How long until we see a game where the scene shifts from a frantic shootout to it’s aftermath? A game where the player must deal with the consequences of his actions, or at the very least be exposed to them for a period, rather than being magically whisked off to the next level?

Alternatively, what if this posits a possible direction for game franchises to expand horizontally, rather than continuing their current inexorable vertical path from sequel to sequel? Imagine a second game set in the the Half-Life world, where rather than playing the main protagonist again, you play the part of a forensics expert, assigned to the scene of a shootout. It would be a puzzle game, a murder-mystery, a thriller … with the player hot on the trail of another player who is playing the original Half-Life game somewhere else on the internet (because we’re all connected now anyway, right?) Maybe I’m getting ahead of myself there, but I think the concept is valid. Various genres of game, set in the same game universe, with the same characters appearing, and the same overarching plotlines. A true, broad-based franchise opportunity, rather than the staid plodding from one episode to the next which we’re stuck with at the moment.

Art is supposed to make you think. I guess Evidência #000 is more successful than I first realised.