Oh look, it’s someone else trying to take part in the “Are video games art?” debate. I know this subject gets talked about a lot at the moment so I will try and stay away from ground that has already been tackled. I will not be trying to answer if games are art or not, whether they can be art, what games prove or disprove this or any similar topics. Today, for the sake of argument, I want to discuss something that separates our industry from some more commonly recognised art forms and what problems it poses for games as art. The problem, as you may have already worked out from the title of this piece, is the (traditionally) five year console refresh cycle.
You all know how it goes, for as long as we have had home consoles gamers have been focused on the future. We want the newest tech, games that push the envelope as far as possible and this often requires the industry to adopt the newest technology. Unlike PC’s which can be upgraded as and when new technology becomes available, home consoles need completely replacing every 5 or so years if you want to keep playing new games. This is something unique to video games that brings up some interesting issues for us to tackle.
Firstly, games become obsolete far more quickly than any other comparable form of art. Assuming we only think about examples of art that you are not already an established long time fan of (in an attempt to remove any bias that nostalgia may bring to the table), video games do not age as well as music, books, paintings or films. While I could go back today and read a novel from the early 1900′s today on a subject that interests me and it would still read as well as a book on the subject made today. If I play a video game made 30 years ago that I don’t have a nostalgic connection to, I doubt it will have stood the test of time nearly as well as the book. I might even just go back 5 or 10 years and find that a critically acclaimed game from the time is near unplayable today. Ours is the only industry that has a notable jump in the available tools and final experience every 5 or so years and that can really cause a jarring effect that stops our greatest achievements as an industry from surviving the test of time.
Another effect is that having such short creative cycles means developers spend a good chunk of a systems life chasing to reach the top end of its graphical abilities. Pushing the limits of a system is very costly and as such makes doing so a high risk investment. The high risk nature if this reduces the developers ability to take artistic risks with their games, and slows the artistic growth of the medium. This is not a problem for other types of artist as their mediums are much more gradual in the way they advance. You can enter at a low level and gently build up your level of investment before keeping up with advancements as they come little by little. You don’t have to keep playing catch up with the top end of the scale.
The constantly updating technology of the industry also increases the barrier for entry for the medium. While as an author you can just buy a computer with a word processor and you are finished, or a band can buy a recording deck and some mics and is ready to record, games developers have to learn to develop games, then within 5 years all of your technology and all of the skills you have learnt start to become obsolete. This makes it much harder for someone starting out to create something that while not perfect, pushes artistic boundaries.
In summary, whether you think games are art or not, I hope you will agree that the five year console cycle at the very least makes seeing games as an art form a little more difficult. It prevents games from having lasting artistic merit, it reduces the risks taken and creates a higher barrier for entry. While there are games that are not effected by this, I think that once the uncanny valley is crossed and gaming hardware improvement slows it should be much more common for games to be considered art.
What do you think? Are games already art? Can they be art when they become obsolete so quickly? IS there something bigger preventing them becoming art? Let us know your thoughts in the comments below.
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2 Comments
The special effects of a film can seem dated and silly decades later. Alien went from being a horrifying film to what many youth view as silly due to some it’s effects, not all of course however. Games have reached a point where the technology isn’t laughable by any standard, films and television when they were in their infancy had a lot of things were far from the “Art” people view them as today. Video games can be art despite the technology cycle in the same way SFX don’t make a film utterly dated today
The videogame ageing problem is not an inherently insurmountable problem, although it’s also not one that every game should endeavour to overcome either.
It’s my firm belief that great works of art transcend boundaries, including generational gaps. This should be true whether we’re talking about historical generations or hardware generations.
As an implication of this, a game that aims for high artistic value should avoid attempting to push the technical limits of a system and instead aim to provide the full artistic vision within the limitations of the hardware.
In other words, if you look at the game and you think “This could look better on a good PC or a next generation console”, then it’s probably (but not necessarily) an indication that the designer wasn’t aiming for artistic value in the first place.
One reason that this is interesting is that you don’t often see this in any other form of media. No serious writer ever decided that they wanted to push the limits of books by including animated illustrations in the pages of their book that you have to flick through to see – not even before television and cinema – because that would be kind of stupid.
Yet in videogames, we gladly accept a game that aims for photorealism, despite the fact that none of the hardware on the market today is capable of producing anything that comes even close to being mistaken for reality.
Games like Journey and Limbo are good examples of how this can work to positive effect. In ten or twenty years, will new hardware make these games look worse or devalue the experience of playing through them? Probably not so much.
On the other extreme, you have games like Call Of Duty, which are both critically and commercially highly successful, yet few people expect that we will still want to play Modern Warfare 3 in five years from now.
The thing is, the vast majority of games are designed and produced the latter way – especially the biggest and most popular games from major studios and publishers who have the most resources to try and push hardware limits. I’m not suggesting that there’s anything wrong with that. They’re just different types of games aimed at satisfying different needs and desires. Both types of games are successful at what they aim to accomplish.
This issue isn’t one that’s specific to gaming either, as all forms of media suffer to some degree. There is plenty of throw-away pop music on radio and block-buster movies in cinemas that no-one will remember in a year or two from now, whilst the truly artistic stuff still often linger from many decades ago.
The trend seems to be that the more demanding a field of work is, the worse the ratio becomes for artistic work vs. popular throw-away material. Music and writing is relatively accessible to many people, whereas film and games are not so much. Likewise, there are less artistic films and even less artistic games compared to those that will be soon forgotten compared to music and books.
To be fair, I think the real reason that we’re having this discussion now is because it’s only the most recent generation of gaming hardware that has sufficient ability to enable a wide variety of artistic visions to be fully realised without being compromised by technical concerns. For all of it’s simplicity, it’s difficult to imagine that Journey would have held up quite as well had it been released as a PlayStation 2 game, and certainly wouldn’t have had the same impact before that.
That’s not to say that we still don’t have some way to go, as there are still many artistic games that have been limited by technical problems that could be resolved in future generations, particularly those with real-world settings like Heavy Rain.
On the other side, there are also a number of games from previous generations that have aged well in many respects, though not all are necessarily of high artistic value (after all, creating a work of art is much more than just creating something that ages well). Nintendo games seem to age fairly well because they tend to work within the hardware limits rather than pushing them, though their games are designed more as toys rather than art.
Well, that went longer than I intended. For the record, I enjoy playing all kinds of games, although I do enjoy seeing more artistic and thought-provoking games and I do hope to see more in the future. That won’t stop me from enjoying the likes of Killzone 3 though. :)