Why Video Games Are The Total Art of Today but not Tomorrow (Part 1)
Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk Realized in Heavy Rain
The Provocation
This essay is Part 1 of a two-part series. In Part 1, I establish why games qualify as total art. In [Part 2], I explore what games cannot do - and why that points toward theatre's next evolution.
Picture this: It's 1913 at the Arts & Letters Club in Toronto. Roy Mitchell has just staged Maeterlinck's Interior—a short symbolist play where an old man and a stranger arrive at night to tell a family of the death of their daughter. They hesitate, unwilling to destroy the peace and happiness they can see of the family through large windows. The critics are divided. Some call it inaccessible, pretentious, not "real" theatre. Others recognize they're witnessing something revolutionary.
Now fast forward to 2025. I'm about to make an argument that will likely provoke similar resistance: The Last of Us Part, Red Dead Redemption, and Heavy Rain are legitimate art forms of the highest order. Not "art for video games" or "surprisingly artistic despite being games"—but total art in the most complete sense that term has meant - at least until now.
And here's the paradox: Understanding why games achieve this will help us see why the next evolution of live theatre matters more than ever and what direction theatre can take to define the next generation of fiercely human shared experience.
The resistance is always the same. Theatre was repeatedly banned and outlawed. Film was considered a low art form compared with theatre. Games still face it. And now AI faces it - perhaps for slightly different reasons. The 'not real art' critique always comes from those invested or existentially attached to previous forms. But here's what matters: it is the human - an idiosyncratic existence and product of the time - that in interacting with any art, creates meaning
As all the arts become increasingly democratised, blended, abused, and commercialised, it's worth stepping back from the breathless pronouncements of change and examine what Games have to tell us when it comes to the next stage of live and meaningful experience. Wagner gave us the vocabulary to understand what's actually happening.
The breathlessness comes in large part from the advancement in AI. AI is removing apprenticeship and the results of slowly won mastery. Master Artists of the past often ran studios where students were trained and eventually allowed to paint or sculpt sections of the final piece under the direction of the master. The artist in this case was a master trainer and prompter. The challenge, as we shall see in part 2, is how to curate the next generation of artists in a realm in which AI can’t compete.
Gesamtkunstwerk: Wagner's Total Artwork
In the 1840s, Richard Wagner coined the term Gesamtkunstwerk—the "total artwork." His vision was opera that didn't just combine arts, but unified them into something new. Not music plus drama plus visual spectacle, but a synthesis where he believed each element was incomplete without the others.
Wagner believed ancient Greek tragedy had achieved this unity. Medieval pageants and mystery plays had glimpsed it. But the specialization of art forms in modernity had fractured what should be whole.
His solution: Opera as the synthesis of:
Music (orchestra, voice)
Poetry (libretto, meaning)
Visual arts (costume, set design, lighting)
Drama (performance, character, narrative)
Architecture (the space itself, Bayreuth's revolutionary design)
Each element serves the unified whole. Remove any one and the experience collapses.
Wagner was right about the principle. He was wrong about opera being the final form.I also differ in believing the elements of total art should be able to stand on their own outside of the whole.
Video games are the digital Gesamtkunstwerk Wagner couldn't imagine—because they add the one element even he didn't conceive: the audience becomes co-author - with procedural animation co-revealing the world at the direction of the player, for example.
Within digital media, games achieve total art as completely as synthesis can be achieved.
But Wagner imagined something broader than digital synthesis. He imagined living total art - performers and audience in shared space, completing the synthesis together. Games achieve half of that vision magnificently. However, let me now outline what that accomplishment reveals about what's still missing.
A Scene From David Cage/ Quantic Dream “Heavy Rain”. Total Art in Action
I use a scene from Heavy Rain, (2010, Quantic Dream). not just because I have 1st hand experience of acting in the game, but it is arguably the game that brought interactive narrative beyond the confines of pre-existing game demographics.
THE SHARK (Video HERE)
It's October. Rain pounds Philadelphia's streets. You play Ethan Mars, an architect whose son Shaun has been kidnapped by the Origami Killer—a serial murderer who drowns children in rainwater and leaves an orchid and origami figure with the body.
You've been forced through a series of brutal trials to prove your love for your son. Cut off part of your finger. Drive the wrong way down a highway at high speed. Each trial breaks you further—physically, psychologically. And now you've arrived at "The Shark": Kill a man to get the next clue.
The Origami Killer has given you a name, an address, and a gun: Brad Silver, drug dealer. The trial is simple. Murder him. Photograph his corpse. Send proof. Receive the next location where Shaun is drowning.
You arrive at Brad's house. Rain-soaked suburban street. Normal neighborhood. You check the gun with shaking hands—you've never killed anyone. You knock on the door.
Brad Silver answers. He's in his undershirt, suspicious. He sees your battered face, your nervous trembling, and assumes you're there to score. "What the fuck? You trying to buy at my house? Get the fuck out of here!"
You pull the gun.
Brad backs up, hands raised, trying to talk you down. "Easy, man. Easy. Whatever you think you're doing—"
You hesitate.
In that moment of hesitation, Brad punches you and grabs a shotgun hidden behind the door.
And the house becomes a warzone.
Brad fires. You run. Through the living room, shotgun blasts destroying furniture. Down the hallway. Into rooms. He's screaming outrage and aggressive. You're dodging, running, your gun still in your hand but you can't get a shot.
The chase drives you into a child's bedroom.
Pink walls. Stuffed animals. Two small beds.
Brad runs out of shells.
You both stand there, breathing hard. Your loaded gun pointing at him. His empty shotgun useless.
Brad's hands go up. The aggression drains out of him. He's just a man in his daughter's bedroom, about to die.
"Please," he says. "Please don't. I got kids. Sarah and Cindy. Look—" He grabs a photograph from the dresser. Two little girls. "I just want to see them again. Please. Please don't kill me."
And you, the player, must choose.
Press the indicated button: Shoot this man. Complete the trial. Get the next clue. Save your son.
Walk away: Spare him. Fail the trial. Lose the location where Shaun is drowning.
Both of you are fathers. Both of your children are at stake.
Let me break down what's happening as Gesamtkunstwerk:
Architecture: Suburban America as Moral Space
The developers scouted real Philadelphia locations. Brad Silver's house isn't just a setting—it's a psychological trap. Normal neighborhood. Normal house. This could be your neighbor.
The architecture tells you everything: Drug dealers don't live in neon-soaked nightclubs. They live in apartments, with maintenance fees, a sofa with crumbs between the cushions. The horror of the trial isn't that you're killing a monster in his lair—it's that you're bringing murder into a home.
And then the chase drives you into the child's bedroom.
This isn't "using architecture." This is architecture as living document, as emotional landscape, as historical preservation, as narrative space—all simultaneously.
In Heavy Rain, the child's bedroom—pink walls, stuffed animals, two small beds—becomes the moral center of the trial. The architecture itself accuses you. You cannot shoot Brad in this room without seeing what you're taking from Sarah and Cindy. The space makes your choice unbearable.
This is total art within digital space - architecture synthesized with narrative, creating psychological reality, perhaps physically enlarging the effect of mirror neurons. But it's architecture experienced through a screen
Music: Normand Corbeil's Adaptive Score (Spotify link HERE - listen while you read?)
Composer Normand Corbeil created an orchestral score that dynamically responds to your choices. At Brad's door, the music is tense, quiet—strings holding a single sustained note as you knock. When Brad answers, suspicious, the music tightens.
You pull the gun. The score swells with terror at what you're attempting.
Brad punches you, grabs the shotgun—the music explodes. Percussion like gunshots. Strings screaming. The chase through the house is orchestral chaos mirroring your panic.
Then you reach the child's bedroom. Brad's out of shells. The music drops to almost nothing. Quiet. A few sustained notes. Your breathing. His breathing. The choice is hanging between you.
This isn't film scoring. Film composers write for predetermined action. Game composers write systems that generate appropriate music for infinite variations of player behavior.
As I mentioned earlier, I believe Total Art is to look at whether individual art forms become repurposed to stand in their solo light. This is perhaps more evident when it comes to music.
Real-world impact: Chinese developer miHoYo hired Norwegian singer Aurora to perform music for Genshin Impact. Game music is now played in concert halls worldwide. Like film music before it, "video game music concerts" are moving out of their niche. Either way, the music stands as a serious composition worthy of philharmonic treatment - whether or not it is to your taste.
However, in that child's bedroom, as a part of the game, Corbeil's score isn't just accompanying your decision—it's participating in creating the impossible weight of choosing between two fathers' children. The music played in a live orchestra setting brings with it the feeling of the original game. As we will see though this is different from the feeling of “Superman” or “Star Wars” music - for those who experienced emotion through a feeling of lived agency. It is worth being reminded here that the audience for videogames exceeds that of theatre and film. So the emotional draw, the re-experiencing of the feeling of the game in a shared live context can be stated as the result of total art. But for people who have never played or been exposed to the game, they should have a similar experience - just as the music for “The Mission”, for example, can stir people who never saw the movies.
This is adaptive music - responding to your choices within predetermined possibilities. The system generates appropriate emotional response for variations it was designed to handle. But it cannot respond to YOU specifically, yet - your breath, your presence, your heart rate - the particular energy you bring.
Acting: Brook's Empty Space Meets Interactive Drama
Peter Brook wrote: "I can take any empty space and call it a bare stage. A man walks across this empty space whilst someone else is watching him, and this is all that is needed for an act of theatre to be engaged."
Motion capture performance is Brook's empty space.
When Pascal Langdale (yes, me) performs Ethan Mars at Brad's door, I'm in a motion capture suit in an empty studio. No house. No gun. No terrified drug dealer (I can’t actually recall there being another actor…!) Just my skeleton, tracked by cameras, physically embodying psychological reality.
I learned that my performance must be so authentic that it reads clearly when reduced to pure motion data.There’s no smoke and mirrors in capture. Performance artifice can easily remain through each stage the data goes through.
I performed the full sequence:
Checking the gun with shaking hands — actual trembling, not performed trembling. The physical state of preparing to kill someone for the first time.
The knock on the door — the tentative approach, the body wanting to flee, forcing myself forward.
Pulling the gun — the awkward grip of someone who doesn't know weapons, the physical commitment to threat.
Running through the house — full sprint in the mocap studio, emotional exhaustion affecting the movement, panic in every stride.
Standing in the child's bedroom, the gun pointed at a pleading man (The assistant director I think) - the physical battle between pulling the trigger or walking away. Hands shaking. Breath ragged. Every muscle asking: can you actually do this?
Then - and this is where interactive games depart from traditional linear acting I performed both outcomes:
Shooting him: "I'm a father too." The trigger pull. The immediate collapse. Vomiting. The body's rejection of what I've done.
Sparing him: "I'm a father too... but I'm no killer." Knocking him out. Walking away. The physical relief and the weight of failure.
This moment in many ways is what theatre should be filled with - for this is a superposition of choices - the very definition of “live”. Mocap is unsparing - the technology captures exactly what my body is actually doing - in an empty space, with nothing but my imagination to deliver what will make sense when the total art is put together.
Then YOU make the choice.
I perform Ethan's possibilities as selected by the narrative director (David Cage), the man who kills and the man who walks away. But I don't choose which one he becomes. The player does. My performance gives you both psychological realities. You complete it with your moral agency.
This is the principle differentiator of videogames: The audience is no longer witnessing transformation—they're enacting it and this is an opportunity to create stories where the audience experience the result of their choices.
This is performance captured at its most authentic - pure physical truth translated to digital form. But its truth was captured in 2008, rendered and shipped. No matter when you experience it, you're witnessing a recording and a narrative “on tracks”, not a living response to your presence.
This distinction between recorded performance and live response becomes crucial in [Part 2], where I discuss our 2014 experiment bridging games and live theatre in Faster than Night and what that means now in the age of AI.
Writing: Moral Architecture
Game writing spans from haiku-like indie precision to epic literary scope:
Indie precision: Disco Elysium (2019) features some of the most sophisticated prose in any medium. Your character's internal monologue—24 distinct "skills" that argue with each other about what you should do is Dostoevskyan in psychological complexity. It won the BAFTA for best narrative.
Epic scope: The Witcher 3 contains roughly 450,000 words of dialogue—longer than Tolstoy's War and Peace. Every side quest is a complete short story. Every character is designed with coherent motivation.
Environmental Storytelling: Games like Bioshock and Horizon Zero Dawn use the environment to tell the story in a virtual world that is updated in front of you as you move through it. In Horizon Zero Dawn you can actually visit specific places and see an overlay of what they used to look like before the era in which the game was set. This isn't failed storytelling—it's interactive historiography as narrative form.
Fan literature: The Last of Us has generated over 15,000 fan fiction stories on Archive of Our Own - 37 Million copies of the game have been sold. So it’s natural that players become writers, extending the narrative, exploring moral implications, creating alternate outcomes. The game story - having had its effect as a piece of total art, generates literature like a fractal.
Back to Heavy Rain…
In "The Shark" trial, David Cage constructed something deceptively simple: minimal dialogue, maximum moral weight.
Brad's plea isn't complex:
"Please don't kill me."
"I have kids. This is Sarah and Cindy."
"I just want to see them again."
Ethan's response isn't elaborate. Just four words that encompass everything:
If you shoot: "I'm a father too." (Then he vomits from the horror of what he's done)
If you spare him: "I'm a father too... but I'm no killer."
The same words. Opposite meanings. Your choice determines which father Ethan becomes.
This is writing as moral architecture. Cage constructed a trial where:
The goal is clear (kill Brad)
The reward is clear (next clue to save your son)
The cost is clear (become a murderer)
Both choices destroy you
Kill Brad: You save your son but carry the weight of executing a pleading father in his daughters' bedroom.
Spare Brad: You preserve your humanity but may have just killed your own son by failing the trial.
The writing doesn't explain. It doesn't justify. It presents the choice and lets you live with it.
And the final image—the camera panning over the photograph of Brad's daughters Sarah and Cindy—regardless of whether their father is alive or dead. No commentary. Just consequence.
This is branching narrative at its most sophisticated - moral architecture that lets your choices determine meaning. But the branches were written in advance, the variations finite. The story adapts to your choices within designed possibility space, but cannot truly emerge from spontaneous interaction.
Visual Art: Animation as Cultural Language
This is where games reveal their deepest artistic range—and where I need to map unfamiliar territory for those who don't play.
Photorealistic Naturalism: The Last of Us - particularly Part II (2020), used performance capture to create near-photographic human animation. Facial capture is benefiting from AI on top of existing machine learning to get ever closer to the actors' facial actual performance - or improve it. This isn't rotoscoping or keyframe animation—it's a translation of embodied human behaviour, through a team of creatives to deliver a performance which is the result of a collaboration of multiple artists.
Stylized Movement as Cultural Grammar: Contrast this with the Hades franchise (Supergiant Games)—characters drawn in bold graphic novel style, animated with exaggerated impact frames and motion smears. The animation style referencing Greek myth and imagery and contemporary comic art. It's not "realistic"—it's expressive, prioritizing a world established truth over physical accuracy.
Movement Design as Philosophy: FromSoftware's Dark Souls series uses deliberately weighty, committed animation. When you swing a sword, your character follows through completely—you cannot cancel mid-animation. This isn't technical limitation. It's a statement: Choices have consequences. Commitment is required. Your body has physical reality that must be respected. This can be frustrating for some, but as one gamer puts it “..its not button mashing. Once you commit to a combo, you cannot cancel.”
Contrast this with most other Role Playing Games such where there are infinitely cancellable moves, anti-gravity combos, impossible aerial mobility. This isn't "unrealistic"—it's operatic. The movement design says "style and flair matter more than physical law." Both approaches are artistically coherent - within different imagined worlds.
Environmental Art as Narrative: Journey (thatgamecompany) famously used art direction to create an emotional landscape. You traverse ruins buried in sand dunes. The architecture suggests lost civilization. The color palette (gold, red, white) evokes both desert beauty and spiritual pilgrimage. This can equally create emotional “inscapses” seen in Endless Night (Little Guy Games) where you “Step into Jake’s mind… Endless Night: The Darkness Within, a psychological Metroidvania.” and “...explore a glimpse of surreal dreamworlds.. fluid platforming, and battle early shadows of his inner darkness.”
Much less, if anything is explained in words. The visual design tells you everything: In Journey this world was great and has now fallen. You are on a sacred journey through the aftermath. Beauty persists in decay. Endless night hints at a similar journey but from within a dark psychological state.
Pixel Art as Contemporary Validity: Celeste (2018) is just one of the more extreme examples of a game that uses retro pixel art not as nostalgia but as aesthetic choice—the limitations force clarity of design. Every sprite must communicate character through minimal detail. This isn't regressive. It's discipline. Like the most constraining of poetic or storytelling forms, this is constraint generating depth through limitation.
UI/UX as Art Form: Interface design in games can also be an artistic medium. For example, Persona 5's menus are explosive graphic design—anime-influenced, jazz-inflected, spatially dynamic. The interface itself becomes an expression of the game's themes (youth rebellion, style as resistance). How different from “Watch Dogs: Legion” that shares a similar rebellion but through a “Play as anyone” game mechanic that uses more regular graphic reality UI.
Then there’s Dead Space's “diegetic UI” where almost all information is displayed on the character's suit and within the game world. An alternative to overlays of Heads Up Displays. No breaking fourth wall. This isn't convenience—it's an aesthetic commitment to spatial immersion.
The Synthesis at Brad Silver's House
All of these elements converge in that Brad’s child's bedroom:
Architecture creates unbearable moral pressure (normal suburban house → family home → daughter's bedroom with pink walls and stuffed animals)
Music responds to each phase (tense approach → explosive chase → quiet horror of the choice)
Acting gives you Ethan's full physical and emotional range (checking gun with shaking hands → being punched → running in terror → standing with loaded weapon pointed at pleading father → either killing or walking away)
Writing distills the impossible choice to four words: "I'm a father too"
Visual design uses the photograph of Sarah and Cindy as final image regardless of choice - a silent witness to consequence
Animation captures every physical state (trembling → violence → exhaustion → the final choice's physical weight)
UI used the haptic vibration of the newly available Sony controller to transfer an immediacy and stress to choices that must be made, or responses to the impacts the character suffers.
And you must choose.
Not watch someone choose. Not read about someone's choice. Embody the choice in real-time with consequences that ripple through the rest of the game.
If you kill Brad:
You get the next clue (memory card hidden in the gun's butt)
Ethan immediately vomits from the horror
You carry that photograph—Sarah and Cindy without their father
The trial is complete
If you spare Brad:
You knock him out and walk away
You fail the trial
You don't get the next location
Your son may die because you couldn't pull the trigger
But you're not a killer
Both choices destroy something essential.
This is Wagner's Gesamtkunstwerk achieving what he could only have imagined: within digital media, the synthesis isn't just observed—it's experienced through the audience/player's moral agency.
For recorded experience, for digital synthesis, this is total art achieved.
But Wagner's vision wasn't limited to recorded synthesis. He imagined living performers and living audiences completing the circuit together. He imagined synthesis happening in the moment, not played back from recording.
Games show us how far total art can go within digital media.
What they can't show us is how far it can go beyond it.
In Part 2, I'll show you what we discovered when we tried to bridge games and live theatre in Faster than Night…
Conclusion: Total Art Achieved … Within Digital Synthesis
Wagner imagined synthesis of all arts serving unified experience. Opera couldn't achieve it fully. Film couldn't either.
Video games have got the closest.
Within the bounds of digital media, games achieve Gesamtkunstwerk as completely as it can be achieved:
Architecture as psychological space
Music responding dynamically to behavior
Acting captured in physical truth
Writing as moral architecture
Visual art from photorealism to abstraction
The audience as co-author through interactive choice
Standing in Brad Silver's daughter's bedroom, gun pointed at a pleading father, you don't witness choice. You make it. The synthesis completes through your agency.
This is total art for digital experience.
But Wagner's vision was broader than digital synthesis. He imagined something that couldn't be recorded, captured, or replayed. He imagined living total art - performers and audiences in shared space, the synthesis emerging from their interaction in unrepeatable moments.
Games achieve total art as far as recorded synthesis can go.
They cannot show us where live synthesis can go.
In 2008, I performed Ethan Mars in a motion capture studio. In 2025, you play the recording. The interactivity is real. The moral weight is real. The artistic synthesis is complete within what digital media can provide.
But something else is absent. Something games cannot provide no matter how sophisticated they become.
Wagner imagined total art that exists only in the moment of its creation. Synthesis + interactivity + liveness. The circuit completed between living performers and living audiences.
Games showed us synthesis + interactivity is possible.
What comes next is synthesis + interactivity + liveness.
That's not total art replaced. That's total art completed.
In Part 2, I'll show you what we discovered when we added the missing piece - and why that makes live theatre not the past, but the future.
About this series: These blogs are preparation for members' talks at the Arts & Letters Club, building toward a proposal to revitalize our theatrical tradition…
