Video Games and Art

[benlehman]

So Roger Ebert said once more that video games aren't art. And there has been a big tizzy about this. This is silly. Clearly, for the trivial definition of art, video games are art. But Ebert, sometimes (he shifts his goalposts constantly) means "not art" in a different sense than formal definition: he sometimes means it in the critically dismissive sense, and in that case he's pretty close to right on target.

What do I mean by "critically dismissive?" Well, for instance, imagine a Hallmark card with a nice painting of some lilies on the cover. It's clearly art in the trivial sense: paintings are pretty much the only thing which are defined culturally as honestly %100 bona-fide art without asterisk. But in another sense it's "not art:" in that it has no redeeming social or aesthetic value. Indeed it pretty much exists to be inoffensive and non-noticeable.

In terms of the basic question: are video games art? clearly the answer is yes. But in terms of the question "is there any worthwhile art in video games?" the answer is much hazier. I think that the answer is yes, but there's still a surprising dearth.

When I think about video games that have personally affected me about as much as a pretty good movie or nearly any book, I can count them on one hand. If I remove the games where it was some non-game aspect of the work (I'm looking at you, FFTactics) that affected me, it drops even further.

When I think about video games that have caused me to dramatically re-examine and rethink my life, the number drops to zero. (compared to a handful of movies, a few role-playing games, a great many books.)

In terms of things which have actually honestly changed my life, it's really just books and may...be a tabletop role-playing game (although I bet if I was a movie buff it'd have some movies too: I've seen this amongst my friends.) Video games aren't anywhere close to this.

So, once we've dismissed the obvious, there's a pretty important question there: why the dearth of decent art in video games? I think that, as a generation of video game players and designers, we need to confront that question, not shun and avoid it.

Comments

[benlehman.livejournal.com]

1) I dunno. If we date video games from the invention of pong, video games have been around for 38 years. Consider where film was 38 years after its invention, or photography. Also, given the way that the artistic psyche works, I'm pretty sure Ebert's statements are going to spur the development of good artistic games, rather than detract from them, becoming a self-negating prophecy.

2) The same is true of film, novels, etc, although clearly to different degrees. I don't think commercialization is an insurmountable barrier, and I'm not sure it can explain the discrepancy I'm seeing.

[nekoewen.livejournal.com]

I don't know that Pong is a good place to start in terms of measuring video games as an art form. I mean, video games literally can't get much simpler than Pong, and I think we had to get quite a bit later in their history than 1972 to get to a point where they game developers really had tools to express themselves except in relatively rudimentary ways. Atari 2600 cartridges topped out at around 12 kilobytes of data if I remember correctly. I would liken video games of the early 70s to the very earliest of black and white silent films, when it took people a while to realize that, unlike with a play, there was a camera that could be pointed in different directions.

Another important factor is that even today people regard video games as a kind of toy for kids. Gamers have grown up, but there's a sense that the likes of GTA are for "adult kids," with little need to aspire to be art. While there are plenty of people within the gaming industry who talk big about games as art, I think the vast majority of games released belie a "games as toys" attitude.

[icecreamemperor.livejournal.com]

Here is a very vague statement: It seems to me that the economic circumstances of video games' 'youth' are substantially different from film in some way that helps explain this. I feel like video games got to the 'Hollywood' (modern, derogatory Hollywood) stage a lot faster, which means you now have to wait for the post-Hollywood stage instead of getting to enjoy all that pre-/parallel-Hollywood European development which existed in film but appears remarkably absent from video game design & production.

There's also some things about the medium itself, the interactivity maybe, and the focus on competition, that seems to make it less likely to be seen as art by both creators & consumers. And since 'we think it's art' is one of the better definitions of what makes something art... I don't think very many people have tried to make art with video games, compared to the amount that tried to make art with film or photography or painting in their respective historical eras.