Although videogames have been around for some time now (long enough in a rapidly expanding, adaptive culture to have mutated beyond anything that people could conceive in the days of Pong and Frogger – indeed long enough that museum retrospectives like the Game Masters exhibition recently held at the ACMI in Melbourne, Australia are starting to emerge) – timeline-wise, we in the gaming sphere are still in what, comparatively, was the black-and-white days of film. Games are still just taking their first thrilling steps into exploring the boundaries of their communicative potential, testing how far they can push in any one direction and still be considered a game:
‘Hey, that looks like one enormous, tedious cut-scene.’
‘Nope, it’s Heavy Rain.’
‘Hey, that looks like a gigantic fully-realised Lego play box alive with limitless potentialities.’
‘Nah. Minecraft.’
‘Hey, that makes my heart sing. I feel that I am being bathed in the raw unfiltered majesty of creative potential. I weep uncontrollably, but my soul is emblazoned with newfound life, ascending to a state of purity beyond space and time. ‘
‘Yes. It’s Petz Pony Beauty Pageant for the DS.’
‘…Hold me.’
Sure, at the moment (and perhaps for some time onward) games are still hampered by processing limitations that can stifle creative decisions in a manner not quite as evident in film; but just as in the early days of cinema (look at Metropolis, or The Maltese Falcon, or Charlie Chaplin’s work), in these burgeoning years of this new medium we are seeing some exceptional examples of creators working within the limitations of their technological canvas to communicate extraordinary works of Art.
I think in many ways there is value in thinking of the current state of gaming as analogous to the paintings in the Lascaux Caves in France.
If you’ve not seen them before, they are considered to be the earliest surviving recorded images made by human beings. They are tucked away in caves so dark that they required their artists to bring firelight with them in order to even see what they were painting - and they still remain utterly, stunningly splendid.
Sure, in theory, before you look upon them, it’s easy to dismiss these Palaeolithic images as mere scrawl on a wall, but if you actually let one of those visuals wash over you, the effect is truly sublime. You realise that on every possible level, these paintings are aesthetically and communicatively exquisite. You look at the coiled calligraphy of those horses hooves, their rotund proud haunches, that soft delicacy of their manes peppering the length of their neck. There is a solemn gracefulness to the bulls; while the unflinching menace of their horns, like unsheathed sabres, remain ominously erect. The trammel of thunderous footfalls seems to thunder from out of a stampede.
In every image the grace, the artistry, the respect for subject matter with which these images were brought into being, swells them over with meaning. Indeed, it’s why Picasso drew from these very cave paintings, inspired by them to try and fuse primitive expression with modern technique in paintings like Guernica (1937), and his many (perhaps rather too many) images of bulls. …Really, what was it about him and the bulls?
I would – without the slightest hesitation – call these images on the walls of the Lascaux caves ‘Art’. Indeed, in many ways they are the purest Art ever conceived. They are a vision of the world produced and communicated by an artist who understood his/her subject matter, and who was able to deftly render an experience to the viewer (whoever that might eventually turn out to be) – fashioning it in the most compelling manner he/she could with the tools he/she was able to utilise.
Some (no doubt videogame nay-sayers like Roger Ebert), might revolt at me likening the burgeoning brushstrokes of humankind’s attempts to render life with the advent of the double-jump, but really, I see striking similarities. Human beings express themselves in any number of adaptive ways, and just because videogames may at first appear superficially crude (particularly in these early years when we see developers taking their first experimental steps, stretching the limits of what this medium can convey) this does not discount them from consideration. I have laughed and wept at a videogame (in a totally manly way); I have felt pride and achievement at a videogame (look it was a very emotional game); I have been swayed by the elegance of a game’s mechanics (hey, you would have cried to if you’d played that game); and lost myself in its alluring design (and I had something in my eye… okay, I don’t need to be judged by you right now).
Videogames may struggle with depicting sex-scenes that aren’t laughable, realistic eye movements, or the incalculabilities of character interaction, but when they are at their best they capture pure human expression, inviting their audience to invest wholly in an experience. And that is the very foundation of all that is Art.
And I firmly believe that video games are capable of communicating such human experiences in ways that no other medium can. Indeed, with videogames, like no other Art form, we actually get to exist within the text, to react to it, to engage with it. It invites us to participate in the way in which the text itself makes its meaning; we can help charge it with purpose if we decide to buy into what it is attempting to express.
Often videogames therefore attempt to convey triumph or success: they show characters overcoming obstacles; they invite us to use lateral thinking to expand our comprehension; to fight tenaciously; to become lost in a vast, dangerous worlds of creeping horrors; or to dress like a plumber in a racoon suit and save a princess from a mutant dinosaur who heavilly invested in castle real estate. …Yeah. Okay, some are more abstract. Like Dada.
But in every case, if the game has performed its intended purpose, it has transported us into an experience. Although the definition of what can be Art is sometimes dauntingly vast, it is almost always communicating a human truth, in many cases, one that could not be said in any other way; and games most certainly do what no other medium can with such visceral immediacy.Whether something is good or bad Art, however, is an entirely different question…
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7 Comments
A truly exceptional article. I’ve never been a big fan of gaming, and own only a few PS2 games… but you are right. Best article I’ve read on here in a while.
Excellent article. I whole-heartedly agree. I feel that games are a mass of untapped potential in this way. Games can, unlike most mediums really, truly involve us in the worlds that they create. This is the exact reason that I think games are closer to theatre than film or literature.
While the article raises interesting points, I would posit that videogames cannot be art simply because videogames are not created solely for the purpose of art but commerce and therefore lack artistic integrity. There can be artistry in the creation of the game but the intent behind the creation is to move units and not edify gamers about axioms of the human condition.
I find that gamers attempt to argue for the artistic merits of videogames because they feel the need to justify spending so many hours on what is essentially entertainment. Rather than argue that games can be art, gamers should just admit that it’s just fun times and leave it at that. Until games become art for arts sake no aesthetician will give them serious consideration.
Hi, Voice of Reason, and thanks for the comment.
I’m not sure what it is that you are trying to imply with the term ‘art for arts sake’, however. Indeed, the simplest way to respond to such a statement would be to point out that there are very few artistic mediums and works of art (indeed, almost none) that operate without a commercial component in mind.
Casablanca was made by a movie studio in an effort to draw people into the cinema and pay for a ticket; Shakespeare did quite well for himself, knowing and tailoring his work to his audience’s tastes; Michelangelo was commissioned to paint the Sistine Chapel. If you start arbitrarilly dismissing a medium because there is a financial aspect to its delivery you will literally have no art left to express anything.
…Well, maybe a mime or two. And we can’t have that.
It can be argued that all artists work within the parameters of such monetary constraints, that they must struggle to be commercially viable, but not to let the desire for profit taint the message of their work – and in that sense you may have a valid point to direct at gaming’s big budget, mass market blockbuster affairs (much as people might scoff at Transformers 4: Return of the Robonaut), but to simply dismiss all possible expression in such a blanket, prejudicial manner is highly misleading indeed.
And please, the patronising ‘gamers-just-want-to-justify-wasting-time’ argument is tediously outdated. It is an argument that has trailed back through civilisation, from graphic novels, to popular music, to cinema, to novels, to theatre, all the way back to Plato scoffing at Ion for winning a poetry prize.
Any new medium gets attacked for being ‘beneath’ serious consideration, merely trivial ‘entertainment’ that is a silly waste of time. Consequentially its earliest years are malligned and ignored by voices such as yourself until the mass culture realises that it’s not going away.
But in truth that’s what all art has always been: a beautiful, magnificent waste of time that thereby reflects something profound about us as human beings back to ourselves.
Touche. Allow me to extrapolate. What I should have clarified is that, at the moment, video games aren’t conceived out of an artistic impulse but a commercial one. So the distinction I’m making is that, currently, nobody says “I’m going to make a grand artistic statement by making a video game” mainly because of the sheer volume of work and technology involved. All the other mediums you listed above do allow for the genesis of “I’m going to make an artistic statement by writing a novel, making a film, etc.” because the tools of these mediums are more readily available.Hence, art for art’s sake. Mercenary monetary considerations fuel the creation of many examples of these forms but the possibility for pure artistic intent is there in a way it isn’t with videogames. Will this change in the future? Perhaps. Which is why the article is intriguing. At the moment, no.
While it might be artistic to some degree to render worlds, textures, and artificial humans within a video game, they themselves are not art in my opinion.
Why? Because art should and does teach us something about the world and the human condition. It moves us, provokes our thinking ability, and allows us to ponder larger and more profound questions.
Video games almost do the opposite. They force the user to react only to stimulus (largely through the eye). They do not (at least, not yet) tackle larger issues of human existence. They are almost all first-person shooter games and horror games about monsters. Can that really be art? Does it really teach us about ourselves or allow us to ponder our world?
Perhaps the technology might change. But, as it’s being used right now, I’d say that the art is solely contained in the skill it requires to build a world to blow up.
Thanks for the clarification, Voice of reason. I do see what you mean, and although clearly I view this from a very different perspective, I can appreciate where you are coming from.
I guess for myself I believe that such a reading might be more indicative of the curious place that videogames as a medium find themselves in at present. As a wholly new field of expression, they are unfortunately still trapped within the anachronistic terminology of traditional media – categorisations within which they do not really fit.
Much like when we move from talking about plays (where we celebrate the author who wrote the work) to speaking of cinema (where we speak of the director who brought the work into being), the general public have not yet gotten to terms with how to slot games in that more familiar paradigm of the auteur expressing a singular vision.
But in truth many games (not all, certainly, but many) are indeed crafted in such a way, with Lead Designers who have distinctive visions they are seeking to bring into being. Frequently we don’t hear of them – instead speaking only of publishers, and production companies – but one need only look at the work of designers like Tim Schafer (whose work has been a critical darling, but not always commercially triumphant) or Michel Ancel (everyone everywhere ever should play the sublime Beyond Good and Evil), to see that they are offering unique aesthetic and thematic expressions in an interactive medium.
I would however still most certainly disagree with the suggestion that no game designer starts with the intention of making a definitive artistic statement. Works like Phil Fish’s Fez, the creators of Journey and Flower, even Notch’s Minecraft, all have particular visions that are brought into being through their craft, often (but not always) with the guidance of other professional artisans working toward bringing their vision to life.
And @ Ray DeRousse: with respect, you may want to try some other games. While it is true that shooters and survival tales spattered with gore tend to achieve the most press (much like in cinema, frankly) there is a wealth of other more transformative, elegant material out there that has more profound things to say. Each of the games I’ve just cited are anything but indiscriminate traditional violence and rote tests of reaction speed; they create experiential worlds, many of which are quite beautiful indeed.