Art, Video Games, and Other Synonyms
Roger Ebert, along with probably lots of other people, once argued that video games cannot be art, at least for the foreseeable future of the medium. His argument mostly revolves around the fact that game mechanics should not themselves be considered art, and I don’t know if I really disagree with that. The fundamentals of his argument, though, aren’t at all interesting to me.
What’s far more worthy of discussion isn’t whether video games conform to some arbitrary definition of art — they may or may not—but if video games are occupying the same space and doing the same cultural work that recognized works of art are doing.
People who enjoy arguing that video games are art tend to focus a lot on a few examples, mostly from very recent memory. Irrational Games’s Bioshock, released in 2007, I think is perhaps the greatest of these contenders for the status of “real art.” Like all games, it relies on play mechanics, but it also has atmospheric environments (read: set design), engaging characters (read: acting), a gripping story (read: screenwriting), and an overall tone that lasts well beyond the game’s end — we’ll credit game director Ken Levine for that one.
Bioshock’s greatest credit as a work of art is probably its meticulous and well-constructed rebuttal against individualistic, libertarian attitudes of governance. A quick search yields hundreds of results declaring Bioshock the definitive answer to Ayn Rand’s philosophy of Objectivism. A work that engages, entertains, and makes a singular statement is one that’s hard to ignore.
For every Bioshock, though, there are a hundred versions of Tetris — games with no ostensible message or artistic considerations that rely entirely on mechanics and can be played competitively. While games like this are probably not art, I could argue that the Transformers movies might very well not be art either — and Ebert certainly took the time to review those.
But I won’t argue that. I think the focus on individual games as works of art is a false one, and one that betrays games as a whole. A better focus is on the medium itself.
For centuries, people have gone to the theater to watch other people perform plays, musicals, opera, and so on. For nearly all of history, this seems to be the natural artistic medium: people spend all of their time around other people — fraternization was necessary for everything. All stories of the time should have been and were ultimately human-centric.
Movies were just a slight deviation from this. Sure, they were recorded, but they also tended to feature humans performing engaging or relatable activities. For most of movie history, you had to watch those with other people as well. You went from a crowded workplace to crowded restaurants to crowded stores to a crowded theater before reaching your only escape — home.
Today, isolation isn’t just an option; it’s a theme. A human being could now be totally self-sufficient without ever leaving the house, and computers allow that very person to stay socialized, well-informed, and entertained in the process.
Marshall McLuhan famously stated over and over again that “the medium is the message.” The theater is a social space for a social age. You go with humans, sit with humans, watch humans because earlier in the day you worked with humans, commuted with humans, and talked to humans. Now we work on computers and many get paid to work solely with computers alone. The distance between individuals has never been greater — a digital medium is the only one that reflects that.
We live in an age where politics is no longer decided by people arguing but by data-driven advertising algorithms. We can order food on our phones without every looking anyone in the eye. We can work an entire career from our bedrooms, and there’s hardly a reason not to. Because our age is defined so fully by digital interaction instead of human interaction, the most effective artistic medium is one that responds to that phenomenon.
I love movies, but it’s a form that feels increasingly out-of-touch. Going to the theater is not a visceral experience — it’s an escapist one. Even watching a movie on my computer feels weirdly disingenuous; I can’t help but be aware of all of the physical interaction that had to go into its creation. Interacting with digital creations now feels, well, like the default.
For art to be effective, it has to speak to its viewers. live a digital life. I write on my computer, I communicate on it, and I’d struggle to get by without it. It’s a facet of my daily existence in a way few other things are, and, ironically enough, I’m not alone in this. Simply by virtue of its digital medium alone, video games are speaking to millions of additional people every single year. Whether specific games do the same is just an afterthought.
