I feel symbolist art lends itself quite well to videogame worlds, especially in regard to emotional tone. Many times, I feel, videogames have been too heavy-handed and obvious in conveying emotional tone. It can be very effective to evoke an emotion rather than spell it out in vivid color. The symbolist era of the late 19th century coincided with Sigmund Freud and the beginning of analytical psychology, although symbolist art concerned itself more with religion, ritual magic, mysticism, and sexuality, it is nevertheless a wellspring of psychological content as well.
Both a videogame and symbolist art deal with symbols. Symbols provide a kind of shorthand to convey complex emotions. The choice of classic themes, with a disturbing religious, sometimes sexual, undercurrent, lends itself well to our current psychological state. Today one of our primary modes of expression is through videogames. It is a way of working through our angst, the horrors beneath the surface. The effectiveness of a gameworld depends upon the players immersion into that world. If it resonates on a deep level, that will keep the player involved. Sometimes for a gameworld to truely resonate it must seem important to the player in a way that goes beyond entertainment. The overall tone of symbolist art is solemnity. This art is to be taken seriously, which is conveyed in its formality. There is an underlying tone of emotional distress, sadness, grief. The world the viewer enters when contemplating a symbolist painting is literally a magic circle, purposefully created by the artist, as a magical evocation. The same thing can be achieved with a videogame. However if, as a game designer you wish to create a gameworld which conveys the same sense of portentous, somehow disturbing, yet exhilirating, magical sexuality that symbolist art conveys, be prepared to be considered decadent, and perverse. Symbolist art taps into a disturbing area of the human psyche, the perversity (if, in fact, that is an accurate assessment) that lies within our subconscious.
In order to convey the symbolist emotional tone, pay close attention to choice of color, rich and sensual, but never losing the solemn formality (all symbolist art fits in well in a graveyard). Faces are full of emotion, but it is sometimes restrained. There is always a sense of something Biblical in importance going on, as in the book of Revelations. Give the gameworld a sexual undertone by paying attention to what is not revealed, while nevertheless drawing attention to it, with skillful use of nudity or near nudity which is not overt, but quite formal, and filled, of course, with anxiety.
Convey your gameworld as an epic event, all is large, archetypal, and often beautiful. For musical inspiration, listen to Wagner. This is an eternal, magical realm, but for your gameworld to be true to the emotional tone of symbolism there has to be something definitely wrong with your world. That wrongness is conveyed with subtlety, by use of facial expressions which show unease, by depicting nature in a way that suggests an approaching storm. Something wrong could be shown by depicting sensual scenes in a way that suggests being satiated and bored, instead of being in ecstasy. The attraction of symbolist art is a fatal attraction (is it any wonder that many of the artists were drug addicts?). There is a sense of depravity here, by the use of compelling images, which are somehow, in a way which is hard to articulate, forbidden, and therein lies it's attraction. If that tone of "entering the forbidden world to satisfy one's perverse desires" can be conveyed in a videogame world, it will work magic on the player, addicting them to that world, which seems to have many occult meanings, but none of it is explicit.
For example, if you were to create a videogame world depicting World War One, a symbolist artistic approach would work quite well. This was a time which, at the time, felt apocalyptic. The events were epic events, dark, and filled with dread, but also darkly beautiful in it's majestic, Biblical, scale of carnage. The world had never seen anything like it before. If you look at the propaganda posters of the time they have much in common with symbolist art. World War One seemed the fulfillment of the dark portents of the symbolists. The Old European world was ending in an orgy of violence, and our world is it's legacy.
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