Two Bits

Up there with the console versus PC debate (a topic I’ve promised not to go into… at least today) is the games as art debate. Are video games art? Even if most of them are not, is it possible for them to be? Usually the argument goes like this: not all games are art but many games are. They have detailed graphics, complex gameplay, and evoke emotional responses. These things (visuals, experience, emotion) are all things most art does. Therefore, they are art.

But to really answer this question, I think we need to consider what art is. In high school, we learned the pat, dictionary definition, usually similar to the one I just talked about for video games. But just about everything fits into that definition, including Picasso’s abstract work, and he went gone on record saying what he did with abstraction wasn’t art.

I don’t think you really need to write a doctoral thesis on the subject to figure it out, though. The drive to create is a basic function of human society. We’ve been doing it since our ancestors drew boars on the walls of caves, and we’re still doing it today. The difference between art and tool in this definition is simply its purpose. Art is there for its own sake; a tool helps us accomplish something. Of course, the two can be combined, such as with an aesthetically interesting car. So games are, in this sense, art. They are creations, not accidents, and to throw them out of human history simply because their primary function is to entertain is a misstep.

But that kind of art isn’t necessarily interesting to think or talk about it. Sure, the cave boars are neat, and Halo is a grand time. But that’s as far as it goes, and we’re really trying to get at something deeper when we ask “Are games art?” . Everyone knows games are creative products, but to really talk about games as art, we need a more restrictive definition, one that allows us to think about games and art in a more significant way. That’s the task of this essay.

One way of looking at art is to say that art has to mimic life. A red square on a green canvas is interesting and tells us something about color, but it’s not really art. But I think we can take this definition a step further. It’s interesting to see a photograph-quality painting, or to run around in a living, breathing, virtual city, but I think those kinds of things, simply recreations, are more compelling on a technical mastery level. It’s amazing how real artists can make things look on a canvas or an LCD screen, but art as simple mimicry is still not a useful definition.

It’s a good start, though, because I think art, or what I might call true art, does mimic life, but it does so in order to tell us something about it. A point-for-point recreation of storefronts in downtown San Francisco is interesting, but if the artist draws rotting corpses in business suits lying on the sidewalk, she’s taken a simple recreation and used it to tell us something (in this case, about the soulless world of modern America). Art is not necessarily mimicry, but mimicry is either involved or is purposefully absent. The more useful definition of art: art is the use of a medium to intentionally communicate something non-trivial about the human experience.

The most important part of the definition is intentional. Art is not an accident. If you splash red paint on a black canvas for no reason, but someone sees it as reflective of murder, you have not said anything and you have not created art. You’ve tapped into the natural tendency of humans to explain things and categorize things, but that doesn’t make you an artist. We see a turtle in the clouds; wind currents are not artists.

Almost every video game falls short of this definition of art. They recreate life, that is true enough, but the majority of the time, this is done to simply create an entertaining experience. Liberty City (Grand Theft Auto) is a stunning recreation of New York City, but it’s lifelike in order to immerse us, and it immerses us in order to entertain*. Neither are games art simply because of their increasingly complex and compelling narratives. A friend of mine nailed it in a conversation when he said that we need to draw a line between engrossing stories and profound looks into the human experience. A story is great, and it may even be deep, but that doesn’t necessarily make it interesting to talk about outside of the context of its gameplay.

This is especially true for the Diablo, Starcraft, and Warcraft franchises, although the potential is there. For example, if you look at the history of warfare in the Warcraft story, particularly in Warcraft III, you can very easily see some parallels between that history and human history. A great many of my men died simply because my hero or theirs thoughts their opponent was some vile intruder, when a frank, five-minute conversation would have cleared up everything. I think you could draw a thematic link between this and wars in our own history. The reason I say that Warcraft isn’t doing that is because I feel like the conflicts in Warcraft exist to provide a context for gameplay. The developers could say something with it, but they don’t. I think it’s there, and I think they know it’s there, but the lack of intentional conversation about these greater themes draws Blizzard’s games away from being true art.

And most games don’t need to be true art, just like a painting on my wall doesn’t need to be. All they really need to do is fit into their role. The former needs to be entertaining, and the latter needs to match my furniture. And certainly, a game’s status as true art has nothing to do with its greatness. Starcraft is one of my favorite games of all time. I don’t think it’s art, but I’m not so pompous that I will tell you I am only interested in art when it comes to playing video games.

But I did say “almost all.” Part of the problem with this debate is that we tend to want to create a definition of art that either includes all video games (or at least all the good ones) or, failing that, excludes all of them. I don’t think we have to go that far. For one thing, the failure of video games to be art, most of the time and up to this point, does not preclude them from pulling it off in the future. The change may even be happening right now, as accessibility to tools expands and it becomes easier and easier to actually create a full game.

So what are the exceptions, then? I think Portal is an exception. I think Portal’s narrative communicates something, intentionally, about our post-industrial society. I think Deus Ex is an exception or the upcoming flOwer. I think Shadow of the Colossus is telling us something about human motivation and our struggle with guilt over the hunt versus the necessity of it. I even think Metal Gear Solid tries to tell us something about the human experience. So it’s not just independent or small titles that pull off artistry. And independence and quirkiness certainly don’t guarantee a game’s status as art either.

One last thing to talk about that I think is important to mention is that although games can be art, they must handle many things that can never be art, or if they were, would simply be ridiculous. Specifically, I mean things like how the game controls, how the user interacts with it, how it’s presented, how the context of the narrative and the gameplay is established. Certainly, these things can be done in such a way as to say something intentional, but a game as art does not necessarily have to. Portal’s gameplay is unique, but is the two-way door saying something about the human experience? And it controls like a standard shooter. Is that intentional too? At a point, I think certain things are done simply because that draws the user into the game world more efficiently. But this doesn’t detract from the argument anymore than having to stamp out words horizontally on cheap paper prevents a novel from being art.

So in a sense, the control scheme is simply part of the medium, part of the delivery. But as poems mess with line and blank space to communicate something, so a game could, potentially, use its control scheme to say something. I imagine a game where the input you can give is limited in such a way that it makes you think about our illusion (or not) of free choice in the world. Would that game be fun? Well – maybe. Maybe not.

In fact, it is possible that the significance of interactivity will one day lead video games to deliver profound insights into the human experience in ways that no other medium has ever been able to accomplish in human history. And we should never worry when they don’t. After all, Michael Crichton may not be saying very many interesting things about the human experience in his novels, but he still shares shelf space in my bookcase with Joseph Heller.

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*I haven’t played through any of the Grand Theft Auto games. They could very well be attempting to say something about modern human society through its look at the criminal life. With IV, I suspect they are even attempting to do this. For the most part, though, my impression is that it’s all part of the entertainment experience.