Volitions Advocate on 17/12/2012 at 05:28

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Videogames Can be Art

Roger Ebert famously said that video games can never be art. It is a statement that he has been lambasted for by many avid video gamers who have tried to change his mind. Mr. Ebert is certainly not the only person with this view nor is he the first, but he is adamant enough about his position that he decided to follow it up with a blog post explaining his thoughts. I do not intend to address his arguments point by point, but he does assert things that can be debated. Indeed, it is possible attack his rhetoric with specific examples of art criterion, and I wish to discuss a few of his points, as well as other assertions that have been made against video games, in order to show that videogames can be art. Art categorization is rife with proscriptions, it always has been. The list against videogames as art varies in size depending on the critic, but there are a few key points that I would like to discuss. There are systemic roadblocks for video games that block their ability to be critiqued as art. Issues arise because video games are still in relative infancy compared to other art forms. Classic art is usually regarded as being monodisciplinary where modern forms of art encompass many disciplines (and sometimes many people) that most critics believe it cannot be a regular art form. The interactive element is problematic in that the artist / viewer relationship changes, and forms of art are most often described as non-utilitarian, meaning it has no useful function, it simply is, and it is so that viewers can react to it thoughtfully and emotionally. All of these topics will be explored.

Art criticism is an important part of the art community. Critics gather together to analyze a new piece of art for their respective publications. They give critical responses to the piece of art and speak to its merits and how it affects them. Video games do not have these types of critics. When a new video game is released it is reviewed by many different publications, mostly online. These reviews do not necessarily speak to its artistic content, but rather its ludology, graphical impact, and sometimes plot. These invariably end in a score of some sort out of ten or a number of stars. These reviews are not conducive to understanding videogames as art, and videogames, if they are to be taken seriously, need to be critiqued rather than reviewed. If a framework of theoretical discussion can be applied to videogames then it would “provide players of these games with the theoretical tools with which to think critically about them... well articulated theories can give critics a way of discussing these issues.”1 That would be beneficial to the “videogames as art” cause.

Mr. Ebert responded to a piece of criticism where a reader admonished him for using the word “never” since never, Ebert admits, is a very long time, and things can change. His response however, was not necessarily a concession, as he said that “no video gamer now living will survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form.”2 In his assertion, he solidifies his opinion, but simultaneously gives ammunition for the other side of the debate. Video gaming is most certainly in its infancy compared to other forms of art. The medium is less than sixty years old if we look at the first videogame ever made, (Tennis for Two:1958), long before the industry was in full swing. “Every time a new technology provides a fresh medium in the art world it is met with a lack of respect, indifference, or indignation, and must go through an acceptance process by the art world.”3 This statement says that eventually, new art forms are accepted by the community. Acceptance in a community is not the only factor in the matter, and does not preclude it as an art form, but at least this illustrates that if history repeats itself, video games may eventually have the same treatment in the art community that photography and cinema now enjoy.

Art has many disciplines, videogame design is an umbrella discipline that contains many forms of art. A development team must have pragmatic trades like programmers and marketing teams, but the art direction, sound design, level design and writing are all art forms themselves. Most art, whatever discipline it is, usually has a celebrity artist (Van Gogh, Beethoven). Videogames have a disadvantage in this respect since videogames today are developed by teams. In this case the development studio or corporation becomes the celebrity author rather than a single person, which is problematic for the critics, but “this is more of a challenge to interdisciplinary openness than a problem”4 It would be logically unsound to classify an activity that involves so much deliberate art as un-artful. “Videogames compile all of the art world's tools into one medium; drawing, painting, sculpting, design, architecture, creative writing, computer and video art, and acting all come together”5.

Another one of Ebert's arguments is that in a videogame “you can win.”6 Of course one of the main aspects of any game is its ludology, the pleasure one gets from mastering the mechanics of the game play. Many, not just Ebert, think this is the main problem. Art is supposed to be articulated by the artist and pondered by the one who consumes it. Videogames throw this paradigm out of the window and allows the art viewer to change the experience. What this argument fails to address is the existence of a very real art form that is practiced by many artists and is most prolific at universities, that of interactive art installations. These take many forms and have some sort of a feedback system that informs the viewer / participant of how his or her actions affect the installation. The 2-way communication is a key aspect of the interactive art. “the element of interactivity is important to capture the spectator's actual intention and represent it accordingly.”7 Does this sound like mastery of a system? It could, perhaps, even be considered ludic behaviour to interact with these art installations. “This enables the spectator to feel in control of the art itself... will feel the sensation of the art.”8 All of this technology and interactivity, and yet the art critics consider it to be a serious form of art. “Interactive art maintains its creativity to project itself as a piece of art representation with the help of technology. It has transformed into a new world of creativity involving the spectator...”9

Art, should be for the sake of art. One of the main ideas behind much of what is considered art, is that it has no utility. Art is for ponderance and should not have a use. It is my assertion that utility does not preclude something from being art. Diane Ackerman's poem collection in The Planets: A Cosmic Pastoral, are very beautiful poems that are descriptive and informational with regards to the “appearance of the planets, their behaviour, their position in the solar system. The poems are no less beautiful for being scientifically accurate.”10 They are still considered art even though they are educational. This debate extends to disciplines like architecture. Obviously the parliamentary building in Ottawa is a building with uses, but Calvert Vaux probably had strong artistic motives when he designed it.

Art is emotive. It should evoke emotion and introspection in the people who view and consume it. A novel or a movie usually has a theme, some sort of assertion the author wanted to share with their audience. In a novel especially, this theme may take the form of a single sentence somewhere in the final act of the story. Literary works are considered art and this idea of theme is exactly that, an idea. An idea that the viewer should ponder. Sculptures are an interesting case in this regard, they do not contain words and do not explicitly contain a theme, “you cannot always distill the content of sculpture into a declarative sentence.”11 This is the beauty of a sculpture. In the eyes of many art critics, a sculpture can induce a varied array of emotions. Videogames can have this effect as well to a great degree. The idea of a sculpture can be contained in different expressions when you start to talk about it in terms of digital media, and I will go into detail later on about a specific and powerful example. In the meantime, it will suffice to say that videogames, like any other art, has a capacity to incite an emotional response, or drive players to ponderance of a theme. Tom Bissell describes his emotional response to Mass Effect in his book Extra Lives.
“It is the sensation that the game itself is as suddenly, unknowably alive as you are... It was a full-body experience. I felt a tremendous sense of preemptive loss and anxiety... To say that any game that allows such surreally intense feelings of attachment and projection is divorced from questions of human identity, choice, perception, and empathy – what is, and always will be, the proper domain of art – is to miss the point not only of such a game but art itself”12

Certainly, videogames can cause as much emotion as any other art form.

Look closely, for example, to the game Deus Ex: Human Revolution. On the surface it is a science-fiction videogame set in the near future where you take control of an ex-SWAT police officer named Adam Jensen, who is now working as the head of security for a technology firm. The firm happens to be a world leader in “human augmentation”, the technology that replaces human limbs with mechanical ones, and Jensen, after failing to thwart a terrorist attack on the laboratory of his employer managed to lose not only his own arms, but also his lover in the attack. You begin the story six months after his ordeal, equipped with his new mechanical arms, and begin the search for the perpetrators. Okay, so its a kickass game where you're a bionic dude who can shoot guns and punch through walls, lets get killin'! Ludology would agree. If you examine the sub-text of the game (like you would a finely crafted novel), you'll realize it is full of moral debates. People are choosing to amputate their limbs in order to upgrade their abilities with augmentations, rich corporations are keeping the price of essential drugs too high for the lower class to afford them which would keep their augmentations functional. And there's Jensen, a broken man who had augmentation forced on him and who is regarded as a professional failure.

I'd like to examine a section of the game in two ways. This section is Adam Jensen's apartment, an area you encounter after a lengthy introduction to the mechanics of the game.

A player who is playing for the ludic experience would probably rush into the apartment, and rummage in the boxes in Jensen's kitchen to find the hidden assault rifle stashed there, as well as the one in the bedroom stashed behind another cardboard box. There is a secret stash behind his television but the player needs to find the code on his computer to open it, at which point he will ransack the loot and grab the third rifle from the coffee table before leaving the apartment for good, having stripped it clean.13

Of course there can be little art or emotion involved in this interaction. It is no wonder that a critic seeing a player interact this way would find no artistic value. Unfortunately, the player missed the realization that he was actually walking through a virtual sculpture within the game world, and missed all of the important parts.

Another player heads to Jensen's apartment and takes the time to look around. We already know that Jensen was either comatose or in rehabilitation for the last six months so his apartment is half full of cardboard boxes, like someone was packing up his life in case he never woke up. The blinds slowly open as the music starts, shedding thin beams of light on his hermitage. There are dirty dishes in the kitchen, and kids cereal in the pantry. He has military books and self help books on his bookcase and even a copy of Harry Potter. He enjoys building clocks and astronomy judging by the telescopes and components on his worktable, and the book on his coffee table. His computer contains the code for his hidey hole, but it also contains an email from an acquaintance letting him know she put his dog down when he was in a coma. There are get well cards on his dresser with paternal support like “Life is Hard” on the cover, and a picture of his dead lover nearby. The mirror in his bathroom has been smashed. All the while the music plays in the background to evoke a very solemn mood. Jensen is a very sad individual and you can walk through his life in this apartment and feel his pain.14 A virtual sculpture to ponder that can incite emotions.

We can see that videogames can be very poignant and emotional. To exclude them from the realm of art because of a large majority of games being more ludic than artful, is a disservice to the medium as a whole. “The problem may be distinguishing between games that are art, games that sell well, and games that are simply poor.”15 Like any other form of media. Videogames can be art, even if not all videogames are.



Bibliography

Adams, Ernest W. “Will Computer Games Ever be a Legitimate Art Form?” Videogames and Art. Edited by Andy Clarke and Grethe Mitchell. The University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2007

Bissel, Tom. Extra Lives. Random House of Canada Limited: Toronto, 2010

Ebert, Roger. “Video Games Can Never Be Art,” Roger Ebert's Journal (blog), Chicaco Sun Times, April 16, 2010, (http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/04/video_games_can_never_be_art.html)

Martin, Brett. “Should Videogames be Viewed as Art?” Videogames and Art. Edited by Andy Clarke and Grethe Mitchell. The University of Chicago Press: Chicago, 2007

Rockwell, Geoffrey. “Gore Galore: Literary Theory and Computer Games.” Computers and the Humanities, Vol 36, No.3 “A New Computer-Assisted Literary Criticism? (Aug., 2002), pp. 345 – 358

Wong, Chee-onn, Keechul Jung and Joonsun Yoon, “Interactive Art: The Art That Communicates.” Lenoardo, Vol. 42, No. 2 (2009), pp 180 – 181

Deus Ex: Human Revolution (PC version). Developer: Eidos Montreal / publisher: Eidos Interactive, 2011

demagogue on 17/12/2012 at 07:37

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Personally I'd put special games more in the category of religious ritual than art. (I mean the special ones, not just any game). Art is something you appreciate from a distance that someone else was inspired to make. Maybe it was a spiritual ritual for the artist, but by the time it gets to the viewer, their job is to just feed off the inspiration of the artist and maybe make some special connection looking at it, but still detached.

But with games, the whole point is the viewer participates and makes their own meaning out of it, which is closer to the actual ritual the artist goes through making a creation to begin with, not the appreciation after the fact. cf. the whole "Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" argument ("machine copied art is soulless because it breaks the connection between the artist creating and the viewer appreciating"). That argument has lost its force now that games have come out on the other side where the machine isn't robotically copying creation anymore, but is now the space for authentic creation itself. I mean games can allow a viewer to create meaning out of it through the practice of playing it is what opens up that space, and it's at the intersection of the acting player and that space, not appreciating it from afar.

That's my kneejerk take. I'll see if I have time to comment on your paper.

demagogue on 17/12/2012 at 12:28

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The two best arguments you have in your essay IMO are, first, the fact that making video games indisputably involves artistic practices... You have art direction, artists, modelers, animations, sound direction, music, voice acting, readables and narratives, cut-scenes, world building & blocking, NPC scripting, etc... How could you have a medium full of domains that are indisputably artistic that's not itself artistic? (You didn't really emphasize that point, but a some lines in that direction made me think of it and I thought it was a really strong point).

And the second is the whole last part about the state that playing a game actually puts people in, giving rise to all sorts of emotions, and that's it's purpose, which has always been associated with artistic enterprises ... and not like just the emotions of "winning" (which sports shares), but emotions of being human, whatever the PC is put through, grief, fear, joy, desire, wonderment... That's something art does that sports doesn't.

Like you say it was sort of short and not filled out much, but you made a solid case AFAIC.

Gryzemuis on 17/12/2012 at 13:25

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The confusing part is that 90% of all games are utter crud. That makes people believe that games can not be art. But are movies art ? Ninety percent of all movies are utter crud too. Are books art ? Ninety percent of all books are not worth to be read. In fact, (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sturgeon%27s_Law) ninety percent of everything is crap. Games are not different. The bad ninety percent of games do not determine what the good ten percent are or can be.

A related feeling is that people think that when something is "bad", it can't be art. Like people expressing "my 4 year old can do that", when watching modern paintings. The fact whether it is good or bad doesn't impact whether it's art or not. There can be lots of bad art, and it's still art. Again, I believe ninety percent of all art is utter crud.

Usually when people think of art, they think of a lone painter, in his studio, sweating for weeks to make one painting. Or a writer sitting in his attic behind a typewriter, lonely, typing page after page. Art is made by individuals. But movies are art too. And they are made by big teams. With big budgets. So the fact that games are made by teams does not prevent it from being art.

Art is a tool by which an artists shows others his view on the world. Well, modern art is. He doesn't show reality. He shows his own view. His own feelings. His own impressions. He tells his own story. Through his eyes. Games can do that same thing. Games can be art.

SubJeff on 18/12/2012 at 01:29

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What about art that make you feel other things?