 It was a surprising moment, but made all the more beautiful because of it. This level in Uncharted 2 places you in a serene, idyllic village, nestled in the shadow of the Himalayas, and you are left to interact with this space however you see fit. You can speak to the locals, play around with the children, but mostly, taking the atmosphere of the sanctuary amidst the heavens. In a game of explosions, witty dialogue, and cinematic flair, the strangest thing about Uncharted 2 was that this was one of its most memorable scenes. It comes right after the train sequence, the set piece that pushed what the PlayStation 3 was capable of, and so its plotting pace was particularly noteworthy. Players seem to love it as well, but what's interesting about it is that it was inspired by a game called the Graveyard, an experience that was not quite as warmly received when it first came out. The Graveyard is an art game developed by Belgian developer Tale of Tales in which the player assumes the role of an elderly woman walking through a graveyard. It was a startling departure from gameplay form at the time, relinquishing fun longevity and strategy for contemplation and reverie. You simply walk through the graveyard and the game ends with the woman either leaving the space or dying of natural causes. Serving as something of a progenitor to walking simulators and reflective walking segments in games, the Graveyard was simple but deeply influential. In an interview in Gamma Sutra, the designer Richard Lamarchand outlines how the graveyard, which was viewed with confusion at its launch, actually inspired the village scene in Uncharted 2. It's funny how when a novel idea is presented in a more familiar context, we rejoice at the creativity. He states, Some people at Naughty Dog didn't think that this scene would work, as we couldn't allow the player to run, jump, or climb. I had just played a game, however, that made me feel that it was definitely going to work. I thought that in the same way the Graveyard had created a space for me where I could reflect, so could our village. This is the importance of the avant-garde in games, of having people pushing the boundaries of what constitutes form, convention, and expression in the medium. Tale of Tales consists of a two-person team, Aurea Harvey and Michael Salmon, who are artists who came from outside the medium to push games in new directions. With their projects, they claim that they aren't actually making games, but interactive experiences that challenge how we think. At Indicate a few years ago, Aurea gave a speech where she outlines many of their inspirations and design goals when crafting games, games that have received into the mainstream without anyone even realizing. In this speech, she gets into another one of their games, The Path, which is effectively Little Red Riding Hood in interactive form. The twist, however, you have to break free of the implied goal structure to explore the real path of the game. Like the Graveyard, the path challenges many of the conventions we have about games, the idea we should tacitly accept goals, and was similarly dismissed as pretentious when it first came out. Now, with the proliferation of genres like walking simulators, and mainstream games like Death Stranding, these avant-garde practices seem prescient, not strange. The inspiration of the avant-garde can even be seen with games like Braid, which took cues from Rod Humble's The Marriage and Jason Rohrer's Passage to craft its obscure narrative about regret, change, and redemption. Each of these experimental games explores meaning through mechanics. In Passage, you are forced to walk the linear path of time, accumulating points, but if you find a partner, your points increase faster, but also make obstacles harder to navigate, showing how marriage is both fulfilling and burdensome. In The Marriage, we see the divide between the blue object's desire for freedom and the pink one's want for intimacy, all conveyed through mechanics. Braid explored themes like love, change, and hope using its mechanics as well, but presented it in a form that was more palatable. For example, one level has you solve puzzles that has movement and space corresponded time, crafting interesting puzzles. The blow also called this level time and place, signifying how we associate temporal memories to physical places, and this was presented in the context of a love story. Games like The Marriage, Passage, The Path, and The Graveyard are now being seen as the first line of the avant-garde, and it is fascinating to see how ideas incubated in art circles seep into games of all kinds. What is the avant-garde in games, though? For that, we need to turn to the work of Brian Strank, in the form of his book Avant-Garde Games, and his dissertation Play Beyond Flow. In both, his primary claim is that the avant-garde is about challenging the form of the medium, whatever it is, so that we can push towards new frontiers of creativity. He states, The term avant-garde points to many people and many kinds of work that span continents, decades, and technologies. It constitutes the critical art ensemble, not art of the 90s, cyborg art, video art of the 60s and 70s. In Fluxus, the situation is Palak, Brakht, Dada, the futurist, Russian formalist, to trace a history. Video games advance and change the historical avant-garde by transforming or opposing gamer culture. In his work, Brian crafts a framework to help us understand the different aspects of the avant-garde, drawn along two axes. There is the radical and complicit axis, and the formal and political, which generates four quadrants. The first is the radical formal, which are artists that challenge the conventions of the medium by trying to deconstruct it from within. The graveyard and the path both fall here. They challenge the idea of fun, objectives, and optimization in games. The passage and the marriage do this too. They do away with conventional narrative and force a distributed set of ideas. The second is the radical political, which deconstructs the political, economic, and cultural forces that permeate games. A core sacred cloud that they attack is the magic circle. The idea that games can somehow be separated from the real world and be exempt from politics. An example of this can be seen in September 12th, a game that critiques interventionist foreign policy, challenging its separateness by getting us to see how killing enemies leads to more mayhem, destruction, and death. The third is the complicit formal, which is not about deconstructing the form of games, but showing how games can blend with other mediums, how they are just a part of a web of media formats. In Mary Flanagan's project Giant Joystick, she positioned a giant controller in the middle of an exhibit, which invited people to try and play games on a screen. However, this required collaboration between players, which people would promptly do, creating a kind of improvisational theater out of the elements of play. The complicit political tries to blend games of reality, challenging people's ideas of how to play, and how culturally contingent the forms of play are. In Jane McGonagall's game, players are tasked with using the real world in a game where they invoke random acts of kindness in public as a way to assassinate other hidden contestants, unbeknownst to people in public. The historical analog here is the Dada movement, showing the lineage between play and artistic subversion. Brian goes into much more depth in his work, but the general idea is that there are many dimensions across which games can challenge the status quo, and breed new creativity into the medium. Avongard games can be seen as progenitors of the indie revolution, the casual revolution, the inception of walking simulators, thematic games like Journey, alternate reality games, as well as the politically charged imagery of Spec Ops to line, the subversive metatactual elements of Bioshock, the deconstructive language of Shadow of the Colossus, and the formal challenge to open world games in the Legend of Zelda Breath of the Wild. Avongard games live in the background, sending ideas into the collective unconscious of our medium, all while facing the brunt of ridicule when they first come out, not familiar enough for the sensibilities of the masses, not used to divergences from the conventions of the past. A healthy medium, and one with any artistic merit, has an Avongard that pushes us into new frontiers, and lives silently in our subconscious, challenging us to confront our view of design formalism, the bounds of our medium, and the politics therein. When we celebrate scenes like The One and Uncharted 2, it's wise to remember that there was probably a game that came before it, laying out a path for others to follow.