Are Video Games Art?
When answering that question, a lot of people seem to want to compare video games to movies, but I’m increasingly convinced that the most comparable medium is actually comics, which occupy a peculiar place in the pop-art canon somewhere below cinema, but certainly ahead of, say, professional wrestling or reality television: thought of primarily as pulp by many but often (though not always) respected by those in the know, widely known but not really widely read, a great pop art that produces timeless properties but rarely fosters transcendent individual works. Comics are a medium with a lot of filler and a few genuine classics — a medium that, even in its best incarnations, has trouble breaking beyond self-imposed boundaries of tone, style, and subject matter. The same, I think, is true of games. My suspicion is that video games will end up far more popular than comics in terms of the number of people who regularly play them (in fact, this has probably already happened), but that they’ll come to occupy a roughly similar place on the pop-art totem poll.
Two thoughts:
(1) Video games lack the one thing that comic books had going for them when they were adopted as a legitimate art form, namely, a natural critical establishment. In comics’ case this was provided by the culture-studies-everything-can-be-art crowd, who found heros in guys like Moore and Gaiman and provided them with legitimation. No obvious critical class exists for video games outside of those who are already writing reviews, whose main concern is playability. (See below.)
(2) Video games are naturally hobbled by the fact that there is an inverse relation between how entertaining they are to play and the density of the narrative they can develop. That is, we like games to be as open as possible, and the fun that comes from that feeling of freedom, but by doing so we make it more and more implausible that they should develop into lively stories with coherrent character developement, plot tension, etc. All of those things require restrictions on action, so the capacity of developing them in a narrative direction is limited. Comics and movies faced no such hindrances; their entertainment values is usually correlated to their narrative quality, at least outside of the action genre.
— H.C. Johns · May 31, 10:25 PM · #
While it’s true that openness in games has been the most striking development in recent games, it’s not true that openness has become something that every game demands. There are still a lot of great games that offer an on-the-rails experience; for instance, Bioshock.
But it may prove your point that there’s an inverse relationship between openness and narrative. On the other hand, Mass Effect remains both a fairly open game and an incredibly rich and compelling narrative.
— Chet · May 31, 10:46 PM · #
Everything what stimulate our senses should be art according me. So also some video games should be considered art
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— JolenaPhillo · Jun 1, 12:15 AM · #
Certainly, games can be art. They already are. First example that comes to mind: Tetris. Is there some way that game could be better?
What makes the discussion controversial—and this is perpetuated by the movie comparison and not helped by the comics comparison—is the assumption that “art” is equivalent or dependent upon narrative. This is particularly inapt approach to take to games, for the reason that the earlier commenters have stated: interactivity and narrative counteract each other. This is not to say that you can’t or shouldn’t weave them together, but it’s just that: a weaving of two threads, moving in opposite directions, one surfacing when the other is receding.
We don’t expect every painting or sculpture to have a story (although some do), so why do we expect games to, in order to be “fine” art? Of course, it’s a matter of definitions, and here (if anyone cares) are mine, in short form: Art is a thing that is well made. A game is an interactive experience. The interactivity is the crucial part. It can be implemented in any number of ways and combined with any number of other elements, including narrative. But a game that fulfills its promise of engaging the player with the interactive choices it presents is probably a good game.
All that is not to say there aren’t things to learn from the comic books analogy. As a form of entertainment, a large segment of the video games that are made are targeted at a relatively small audience, the hard-core gamer. These are your Bioshocks, Half-Lifes, Assassin’s Creeds, etc. In many ways, I think this market is like the comic book market, and it’s still a big part of the industry, number-wise. But there’s a fast-growing segment of “casual” games for everyperson. Perhaps they’re like comic strips as opposed to comic books. They’ll be the bread and butter of the industry soon enough.
— Chris Floyd · Jun 1, 01:50 AM · #
Why do we assume that video games, if they are going to be art, have to be narrative art? The fact remains that video games aren’t great at narrative, precisely because they’re so open-ended: you can only tell a meaningful story to the extent that you restrict the gamer’s choices, creating a tradeoff between story and gameplay. This is only a problem for games-as-art if we assume that a game’s artistry resides in its story. If we accept that gameplay is an art form in its own right, then we have the means to appreciate games for themselves, plus we can start to think about the way that story actually contributes to gameplay-as-art, instead of assuming that the story is the art.
Of course, we have almost no critical vocabulary for thinking about gameplay in this way. It’ll take a while to develop it.
— JS Bangs · Jun 1, 01:54 AM · #
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— Chris Floyd · Jun 1, 03:26 AM · #
I think that’s right, to a large extent, which is why I made the point in my piece that what games have really excelled at is not storytelling, but world creation. Fallout 3, which I think is about as close to a masterpiece as I’ve seen from the gaming world, offers an interesting set of overlapping stories which more or less add up to something, but the real triumph is the environment and the interaction it allows.
— Peter Suderman · Jun 1, 03:50 AM · #
Picking BioShock and Grand Theft Auto as the representative of modern game design is rather like using summer blockbusters to represent modern cinema, especially when there are examples just as well known in the mainstream (Bejeweled, The Sims) that don’t easily fit the film comparison.
Video games are clearly much closer to architecture and music, rather than film: Tetris is much closer to Jazz than Film-Noir. Halo is as much about the architecture of the space as any narrative. Or, to use the example above, Fallout 3 and its world-creation.
And I’d argue that a critical vocabulary does seem to be developing, albeit slowly. There is a conversation going on, which sometimes even filters out to the rest of the world. For example, the closest things to art-house games have gotten coverage roughly equivalent to art-house film: Passage getting coverage in Wired and the Wall Street Journal, for example.
— gremlin · Jun 1, 04:01 AM · #
One of the designers working on the new Bioshock, Steve Gaynor, had a post a few months ago that similarly compared comics and games. I’d actually forgotten about the original, I just heard about it on a Brainy Gamer podcast.
Worth reading the whole thing, but here’s his conclusion:
“As they are now, games will remain marginalized and juvenile like comics. I believe that only the rarest developers will be able to exploit what makes games unique and powerful, and the rest will remain flashy male power fantasies, selling but lacking significance. The development and publishing community at large are not trying to change this, and the audience does not seem to want it. Without addressing serious barriers to entry and core design philosophy issues, I do not believe that games will be accepted and respected as a valid medium of expression, ever. Video games have the potential to say great things, but they currently do not have the means to say them to very many.
The odds are stacked. I say games are never going to grow up. Care to make a wager?”
(Sorry to not have that properly blockquoted. Still learning textile.)
— Greg Sanders · Jun 1, 04:09 AM · #
Greg — thanks for that link. Wish I’d seen that before writing the piece.
— Peter Suderman · Jun 1, 04:11 AM · #
Of course they are. What a silly question!
— Tony Comstock · Jun 1, 10:58 AM · #
You’d probably need the current gaming audience to grow a lot older before you get games that resemble art. Culturally they’ve gone from childhood to mid-adolescence.
— Ali Choudhury · Jun 1, 06:42 PM · #
Perhaps this is a naive question, I have not played most of the titles mentioned in the comments, but where do things like MMORPGs fit into this? They have the world creation quality, they beckon immersion and they are quite open ended. There are some obvious problems: Human players break the gaming fourth wall by not behaving by the environments rules (I.E. A fantasy world in which trolls sound like teenage boys, because they are. It makes it hard to immerse.) and the narrative problem, since as far as I can tell there is no genuine narrative arc that propels the game forward, rather a desire to get the best stuff/be most powerful, etc. All that aside, as the prevalence of broadband rises and people spend more time online than ever, it seems that a big breakthrough in gaming will come when the unscripted encounters of MMORGs can somehow meet with the gaming experience propelled by narrative or even world architecture.
— c.t.h. · Jun 1, 08:23 PM · #