Dear Player: Playing with Paint
Splatoon 2 gets dirty.
Anyone remember the turpentine and the trolls?
Paint is messy, irresistible, poisonous and alchemical stuff. It can be liquid gold or the pulverised bones of the dead; titanium or so much squid ink. I'll give you one guess as to what gave 'mummy brown' it's deathly pallor well into the 19th-Century... Paint is the paradox of a beautiful stain. Fundamentally it's a thing people play with - it transmutes the everyday into something Other, and this makes it an excellent material conceit for games. You don't need gallons of turps to uncover the history here - and we need look no further than Splatoon 2's recent success to see the sticky appeal of digital paint. The contemporary release of 'Passpartout: The Starving Artist' has been a small streamer hit, but there are also myriad manifestations from the recent past. What follows is a little survey art history of games about the messy stuff of painting.
“Water and stones. Those are the unpromising ingredients of two very different endeavors... painting, because artists’ pigments are made from fluids... mixed together with powdered stones to give color... and the other is alchemy, the stone the ultimate goal. ”
We can think of paint's presence in games in terms of three broad categories, the very same we might apply to other themes and materials translated into digital play: painting as simulation, paint as mechanic, and paint as style. An itchio game like Joy exhibition lets the player spray paint to their heart's content, generating fictive paintings in an effort to communicate with an alien audience; Unfinished Swan uses paint as a mechanical means of exploration where you give body to your environment by dousing it in ink; while on the purely aesthetic level we have this game of pong in a Mondrian, or that Oblivion level where you dive into a canvas. What interests me are the first two categories - paint as an active substance, not a textual premise or stylistic frame - and I believe the articulation of paint in games can speak to its playful alchemical roots.
The Triumph of Textures over Geometry
Layers of Fear (2016) uses the liquid nature of paint to dissolve its environments, letting interiors beautifully bleed and decay. It even plays on some ancient greek myths of mimesis for good measure (with 3d fruit spilling out of Caravaggio still lives), but paint remains, intentionally, at the surface.
“Painting as simulation, paint as mechanic, and paint as style.”
In Splatoon players compete to cover the most ground with their team's colour.
To a paint-junky like me, one of Splatoon 2 's greatest aesthetic improvements on its predecessor lies in the depth of paint, it's impasto. Goopy clumps of surface tension pockmark the battlefield, while sparkling artefacts glisten within, suggesting the magical depth of a puddle that can swallow you whole. Unlike the dry and desiccated paint of Layers of Fear, which are all the more disconcerting when they melt before your eyes, Splatoon trades on fresh paint in its protean state. Splatoon's paint is the stuff of the future, the stuff of potential. Slick, and shiny, everything inkling is malleable, shifting - for a sequel that sticks close to its original, everything looks 'new' ('fresh' in the native tongue). If paint can convert dead matter into living colour, this newness, the lick of transformative paint is one of its most powerful tropes. In Splatoon, everything refreshes - no hair colour is constant between its snappy renewal of even snappier matches, we metamorphose between squid and human on the fly, we enliven machines and infrastructure with paint even as we ourselves are composed (and recomposed) of paint. While the enemy colour means a literal and slow death, ours is the stuff of protection, acquisition and swift swimming over all surfaces in our path. Splatoon 2 has substantive style, and trades, mechanically, on the affordances of perpetually wet paint as we compete not to kill but to colour in. Here paint allows a 1:1 correspondence between mechanic and aesthetic as painting space becomes a pure goal.
Splatoon is all about the ebb and flow of fresh paint.
“To an artist, a picture is both a sum of ideas and a blurry memory of ‘pushing paint,’ breathing fumes, dripping oils and wiping brushes, smearing and diluting and mixing.”
Okami is a game of pure ephemeral gesture.
This is not to say, however, that Splatoon does not trade in ambiguity - this fusion embodies the paradoxical nature of paint as a substance both living and inanimate, material and representational, water and stone. Even in its final seconds, a match's winner can be hard to spot as our brains try to wrap around a comparison of messy surface areas. The ebb and flow of battle is constant, but the stains it leaves behind seem just as unresolved - they still bear the energy of a two-dimensional painting. Harold Rosenburg coined the term 'Action Painting' to describe Jackson Pollock, and in the after-match map of a Splatoon Turf War we have exactly this - a painting which is significant because of the activity taken to produce it, not just as a finished object. Something like Okami embodies this to the full, where a motion-controlled brush casts vanishing shapes onto the screen in order to effect the environment. But Splatoon's paint (and Pollock's canvases too) is also more than action painting, it is the ephemeral end of all our efforts - players trade in what they can paint by any means necessary, there are no bones left on the battlefield, only the last splatters to touch it. Splatoon deals in the traces of a frenzied application of material. Paint is fast and liquid but for the unwary traveller it can be hard and sticky; Paint is surface to the enemy and ocean to the ally; Paint is the ring of an explosive blast quickly blurred into new configurations. Even the inkling itself, which lives and dies by the stuff is an odd fission/fusion monster - a weresquid. For James Elkins, perhaps the chief historian of the materiality of paint, this is all part of the alchemy of the stuff, painting is about messy and constant transformation of a solid-turned-liquid-turned-solid.
The only lasting images in Splatoon, the only point at which it simulates the image-making function of paint, is in its social-space posts, the inheritance of the Miiverse. Here monochrome ink slapped on through the touch screen creates a dynamic iconographic discourse between players, which the games uses to populate fictive screens and graffiti inside matches - traces of discontinuous and sometimes opaque conversations circulating through a world of paint. The act of painting-as-expression, however, is something which Passpartout: The Starving Artist reflects on more deeply as a dedicated, though no less light-hearted, painting sim. In this game a single player paints to survive, paying off wine and baguette debt with the products of an MS Paint emulating tool. Like Splatoon and Joy Exhibition, players are confronted with the push and pull of paint as an act of translation, with critics constantly passing obscure judgement upon their work. This is a game of constant experimentation and minimal explanation as we try to define the hidden desires of NPCs. As we iterate, we flesh out the secret algorithms of value by working through pixel-y paint - one patron might respond to a cool palette, another riotous colour, and neither may care for the cats we've been endlessly picturing. On one level, then, this is a game about distilling 'taste', and cutting through nebulous language - perhaps 'your work lacks energy' means 'your work lacks multiple jagged lines?'; perhaps 'you need to attend more to the craft' means 'paint exclusively with hues which are contiguous on the spectrum'?. As an indi game, it's unlikely it's NPC critics can even see a cat.
How does he even know?
You may never know, and more interestingly, you may persist with a false model of 'taste', never understanding that an accidental feature was what won over your audience. Hidden rules in a condition of open play (Paidia in Callois' terms) - this is magical stuff of any medium. As a player we can do anything, but to progress we must reflect on the limits of what we can do, and think cannily about what these hidden rules can track - perhaps colour and surface area is all that it records. Perhaps colour and surface area are the only essential qualities of the medium of paint itself? For Clement Greenburg, to understand and excel in a medium you needed to strip it back to what was specific to it - and flatness and colour were these very essentials. But this is also the logic of a min-maxing player - an efficient player is always looking to distil rules of play, to seek optimal actions, to strip away the decorative and inessential in pursuit of the exigent and economical. Within game design itself, even, the medium wrestles with this idea of exigency and specificity - ludo-narrative dissonance version 'n' - perhaps the best game is one which focuses on what the medium can do that no other can? But what this forgets is that every medium is a paradox - paint is solid and liquid, material and image. Auerbach made oil paintings powerful because they were thick and solid, Bernini made marble sculptures impressive because they were thin and flowing. As in games, sometimes victory comes from achieving something despite the limits, not by conforming to them. In Passepartout, we can do whatever we like, and we can paint for ourselves, for our twitch audience, for our friends as much as our computer critics, at a register distinct from the quantifying metrics of the game's hidden mechanics but forever entangled with them.
Painting as Language
Joy Exhibition (c.2015) frames the act of painting as one of ambiguous communication. Spray-painting canvases for an alien audience we can't understand, paint here is an attempt to convey universal meaning - but as the viewers circulate around our work, we question what exchange is actually taking place...
You may never know, and more interestingly, you may persist with a false model of 'taste', never understanding that an accidental feature was what won over your audience. Hidden rules in a condition of open play (Paidia in Callois' terms) - this is the magical stuff of any medium. As a player we can do anything, but to progress we must reflect on the limits of what we can do, and think cannily about what these hidden rules can track - perhaps colour and surface area is all that it records. Perhaps colour and surface area are the only essential qualities of the medium of paint itself? For Clement Greenburg, to understand and excel in a medium you needed to strip it back to what was specific to it, find its core - and flatness and colour were these very essential rules. But this is also the logic of a min-maxing player - an efficient player is always looking to distil the limits of play, to seek optimal actions, to strip away the decorative and inessential in pursuit of the exigent and economical. Within game design itself, even, the medium wrestles with this idea of exigency and specificity to this day - ludo-narrative dissonance version 'n' - perhaps the best game is one which focuses on what the medium can do that no other can? But what this forgets is that every medium is a paradox - paint is solid and liquid, material and image. Auerbach made oil paintings powerful because they were thick and solid, Bernini made marble sculptures impressive because they were thin and flowing. As in games, sometimes victory comes from achieving something despite the limits and constraints, not because of them. In Passepartout, we can do whatever we like, and we can paint for ourselves, for our twitch audience, for our friends as much as our computer critics, at a register distinct from the quantifying metrics of the game's hidden mechanics but forever interestingly entangled with them.
“Every medium is a playful paradox.”
Sometimes the medium gives us both a mechanical rabbit and an aesthetic duck - but, y'know, in a good way.
All these games are beautiful, messy experiments with meshing mechanics and aesthetics. Some, like Passepartout, revel in the gap between means and ends/substance and appearance, while others focus on the frustration and resistance of paint to play or meaning, such as Layers of Fear and Joy Exhibition. There are games which take paint at surface value, and others which allow it murky depth. In many ways Splatoon is the most playful of my examples, but that doesn't make it the least serious reflection on the stuff of paint, nor the most superficial reflection on what a medium means. Splatoon addresses all these issues, and embodies paint as simulation, as mechanic and as aesthetic in a deeply coherent way. If artists must always wrestle with the relationship of means to ends, of material to meaning, then game designers are no different. In Splatoon, its theme is its mechanic and its mechanic is its theme - style and substance are dizzyingly one, like an optical illusion. In this fusion, I argue, it has something very important to teach us: every medium is a playful paradox.
Dr Merlin Seller