The Banner Saga is a turn-based strategy game set in a fantastical world with vikings, horned giants (also known as Varl), and obsidian monsters (also known as Dredge) that are hell-bent on destroying said vikings and giants. The game revolves around a few main characters who are tasked with leading innocent civilians through these apocalyptic times with a combination of resource management, dialogue choices, and turn-based combat. When playing the game, one has to juggle the conflicts that arise within your traveling caravan whilst simultaneously fighting off the constant threats posed by starvation, bandits, and the Dredge pursuing you. If you slip up in battle or you trust the wrong person, people will die as a result. It’s pretty heavy stuff.
Much of the game is spent watching your caravan traverse the beautiful scenery of the world while listening to the haunting sound of the Nordic-inspired score.
The Banner Saga’s credits are a good place to begin searching for the game’s artists. There you have the team who developed the game, Stoic, along with the various visual artists, musicians, writers, and actors that make the game what it is. Becker would argue that this conglomerate, as an entity, would be the artist for The Banner Saga as a work of art. However, Sharp’s definition of Artgames points to something deeper when specifically defining The Banner Saga’s artist:
“Artgames use the innate properties of games- among them interactivity, game mechanics, and player goals- to create expressive play experiences that explore metaphysical questions around life, ethics, and aspects of the human condition.”
One of the most important and unique aspects of games as a type of art is that, as Sharp notes, the player interacts with the game. The player has an important part to play in crafting the “expressive play experiences” that Sharp talks about. In The Banner Saga, that level of interaction and player involvement in determining the game’s narrative firmly places the player as the most important artist. Every dialogue choice and battle outcome affects the story and characters, making the resultant play experience unique because of the choices you made. In this way, The Banner Saga is a collaborative artistic process between the conglomerate of people who created the game and the player.
Through dialogue, the player makes their own story.
The way The Banner Saga places the player as the primary architect of his play experience highlights one of the most important strengths of videogames as an art form. It is one thing to watch a movie or see a painting and feel the emotions or ideas that the artist was trying to convey to you as the viewer. It is another thing entirely to be given the tools, in this case as a game, and to be told to paint something yourself with those tools and to live with the choices you make.
Sometimes people really die in battle. It’s not easy to deal with, but neither is anything else in this game.
There were definitely a few times when I made a poor choice that cost me a character’s life or robbed me of the supplies I needed to keep my people from going hungry. The urge to go back to the last save point and rewrite that poor choice in favor of a better choice was omnipresent. However, The fact that I knew this was my story meant that I wanted to accept whatever consequences came my way. Not that these consequences didn’t haunt me at night as I wondered what could have been if I taken a slightly different path, but they were my screw-ups and I needed to take responsibility for them. However, that is this game’s biggest strength. The Banner Saga is almost as stressful as ‘real apocalypse’ would be, and I wouldn’t want it any other way.
References
Becker, Howard. “Art Worlds and Collective Activity.” In Art Worlds. Berkeley: University of California Press, 2008: pp. 1-39.
Sharp, John. Works of Game: On the Aesthetics of Game and Art. Cambridge: MIT Press, 2015.
Video Games and/as Art 
I like that as the player you have the ability to change the game. I also like that this game is not a violent killing game, those for me are not appealing, yes characters do die but it’s not violent as most games. As Sharp wrote that the player in interacting with the game, I would say that is defiantly true in this case.
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Yeah. The theme kind of make violence a main part of the game, but at the same time you are only really being violent in order to save the characters that you grow attached to. It’s still violence, but I guess you could say it is violent for a good cause. It’s a way for the game to give the player agency in what happens during the story that is directly tied to their skill, rather than picking the correct dialogue choices to keep people alive.
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Really well written, and good job with presentation from the title to the images. I’ve little to say to extend this, so I’m just going to point out that the agency you express as the player/artist is exactly what Ebert protested as being against games being considered art.
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Would you argue that a game like this, where interaction is the key element, is similar to a game like Sims? The main difference between the two is that this game has a goal of survival where as Sims has no true goal.
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That’s an interesting question. I wouldn’t say this game is simply about survival, as there are plenty of open-world games where you can do whatever you want and your peripheral goal is to not die while you are doing stuff. The Banner Saga has a set story in some ways, in that you interact with characters through specific dialogue choices and those dialogue choices affect how the story plays out. I would say that The Banner Saga has some similarities to the sims in that interaction is a key element,as two people playing either the Sims or The Banner Saga are unlikely to experience the exact same things within the game. However, I’d say where they are most different is their ending, or The Sims lack of one. The Banner Saga does have an end, but it isn’t necessarily the goal of the game as it is not even really clear what will end the game. Thus, I would say that the Sims and The Banner Saga are different, even though interaction is a main part of both games, but they share some of the same element when it comes to one’s experience playing the game.
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