One of my occasional musings: do video games, or could they, count as art in the same way that painting, poetry, music, theater, film, and so on, do? If so, what are the aesthetic criteria of video games? Are the more like film or more like novels? That is, is the aesthetic value found in the changing and player-manipulable visual beauty of certain games, or rather in the investment in story and character that some games invite? How does the player interaction itself figure into this? Is the player creating the artistic experience, making her or him a momentary artist, or is she or he more of a viewer of the game-designers pre-made creation?
There are, fortunately or unfortunately, a lot of ways to look at the issue. I have not by any means worked out a way of thinking about it. But today I was looking around the web to see what other people thought, and stumbled across an article from 2005 in Contemporary Aesthetics by Aaron Smuts, a philosopher at Temple University. I thought it might interest others.
Smuts thinks that the answer is: yes, video games can be art; although they have not yet achieved that status -- I'll go into why later. He considers the counter-argument that, no they could not, here, and responds:
One might respond that although we may find ourselves rooting for a fictional character in a novel, play or film, this experience is far different from that of rooting for our own success in a game. The objection may conclude that being involved in a competition precludes aesthetic experience; however, this objection is beside the point. We should not confine the audience of video games to players, since often games are played with an audience. There is no radical difference here between video games and dance contests or poetry slams. Although playing video games usually involves a smaller audience-to-competitor ratio, there is no reason why the audience watching someone play a game must be smaller than the audience of non-competitors at a poetry slam.
Nevertheless, we should not ignore the aesthetic experience of the performers of art works. The video game player can plausibly be considered a performer in a larger video game performance. Since the primary goal of most game design is to enhance such aesthetic experiences, it would seem that we have good reason to evaluate games as art works. Unfortunately, the philosophy of art and aestheticians appear oblivious to the aesthetic experience of performers of art works. However, we must ask, does not even the amateur musician have aesthetic or artistic experiences?
But Smuts is here missing the point. If video games count as art only if dance competitions (as opposed to dance) or poetry competitions (as opposed to poetry) do, then video games are doomed. But the essense of video games is not competition, I would argue; it is immersion.
Another point I disagree with: Smuts describes the situation of the game-being-played as one of the player as artist and the onlookers as audience. From there, he wonders whether the audience could be said to be enjoying an artistic experience. As a side note, he points out the player, if taken to be an artist, could be said to having an aesthetic experience, too.
But that's not the best way to look at it, I think. Better to take the game as a work of interactive art; with the game-designer as the artist and the players as the audience, although a participating audience. The idea of interactive or participatory art is not new. Certain sorts of sculpture invite the viewer to touch, manipulate, or even walk around inside them. Some theatrical productions involve interaction with the audience.
Later, though, Smuts takes this possibility into consideration, and goes into I think some really interesting musings.
Advances in computer technology over the last 40 years provided the means whereby artists could attempt to solve a recurrent problem at the heart of modernism: How to involve the audience in the art work? Those working in theater and performance arts experimented with happenings and participatory theatre, trying to bring the audience into the performance. However, the problem was more difficult for artists working in film and literature, where we find novelistic experiments such as Cortazar's Hopscotch struggling with the limitations of the medium. Video games allowed artists to tackle a more difficult sub-problem facing non-performed arts, the problem of how to involve the audience in mechanically reproduced art.
In the last chapter of Principles of Art, Collingwood complains that mechanically reproduced art is essentially flawed because the medium of transmission prohibits art works from being "concreative." Collingwood argues that in mechanically reproduced art:
"The audience is not collaborating, it is only overhearing. The same thing happens in the cinema where collaboration as between author and producer is intense, but as between this unit and the audience nonexistent. Performances on the wireless have the same defect. The consequence is that the gramophone, the cinema, and the wireless are perfectly serviceable as vehicles of amusement or of propaganda, for here the audience's function is merely receptive and not concreative; but as vehicles of art they are subject to all the defects of the printingpress in an aggravated form."[12]
-- snip --
We often hear it said that films can "break the fourth wall" through techniques such as directly addressing the audience, but the wall remains. It is ontologically impossible for the audience of a film to break the wall. Video game technology has allowed artists to experiment with solutions to the problem of how to make an interactive movie: Video games are the first concreative mass art.
This is much more promising. Taking the video game to be a peculiarly modernist or post-modernist art form, and furthermore a way of solving the problem of audience presence in a world of mass-produced recordings, seems like a way to take video games seriously as art. There's a lot that could be done with that line of thought.
Smuts ends his article, though, with a lament. He writes that while video games may indeed constitute an art form, they as yet have no masterpieces on the level of masterpieces produced in other art forms. The problem, he seems to be saying, is that there is no video game equivalent to Hamlet, the "Moonlight Sonota," "Nude Descending a Staircase #2," and the like. As such, it will take a long time for the form to be recognized as belonging among them. Smuts seems to think that advances in graphics are key, here.
I disagree. I tend to think that if video games are ever considered by the larger culture as constituting an art form, that culture will look back and recognize early games as art. Just as in every era, it is not always known at the time what artworks future generations will see as worth preserving. Voltaire's Candide was pop lit at the time, no expected to last. But it has survived the centuries. It may be that J.K Rowling will be remembered for longer than Saul Bellow. Who knows?
So, by way of starting an argument, if nothing else, here are some games and whether I think have any chance of being known as early masterpieces in the video game genre, by future generations who recognize the form as an art form.
Pong: no.
Space Invaders: no.
Breakout: yes. Abstract and lovely; valued for pure imagery.
Missile Command: yes. Visually beautiful. Evocative and terrifying in a way no game previous accomplished. A hint of narrative arc. Culturally relevant to the cold war. The creators of the game felt the fear themselves:
The escape from reality could sometimes have frightful consequences. The horrifying subject matter of Missile Command had an impact on the developers. Dave Theurer: "It was pretty scary. During the project and for six months after the project, I'd wake up in a cold sweat because I'd have these dreams where I'd see the missile streak coming in and I'd see the impact. I would be up on top of a mountain and I'd see the missiles coming in, and I'd know it would be about 30 seconds until the blast hit and fried me to a crisp."
Steve Calfee: "Everybody I know who really got into the game had nightmares about nuclear war." The game was nearly shipped with a name that carried the message of the end of the world . . . Armageddon. Steve Calfee: "We had this big thing about the name of the game. From the beginning, it was called Armageddon. The management, themselves, didn't know what the word meant and they thought none of the kids would. Then we went through this big thing of naming it. Engineering loved the name Armageddon, and we always wanted to call it that. From the very top came the message, 'We can't use that name, nobody'll know what it means, and nobody can spell it.'"
Donkey Kong: no.
Adventure: Yes. Amazing investment in fate of dot. Exploration and story arc. Sometimes lovely visuals (invisible maze). Tension.
Zaxxon: Maybe. First attempt at a 3d game. The engine isn't actually 3-d, though, and the visual is probably too ugly.
Zork: Yes. Groundbreaking text-only game. Total immersion for the player. Narrative arc, evocative setting, lots of humor.
Super Mario Bros.: No. Too much of an aesthetic mash-up.
Doom: Yes. First fully successful 3d game (excepting perhaps Castle Wolfenstein 3D). Engages player with real tension and sense of, well, doomed progression. Investment in character; player is looking through the eyes of the main character, not looking at him, but becomes remarkably invested in Sarge's fate.
Tomb Raider: Yes. First (as far as I know) fully successful 3d 3rd-person point of view game. Evocative and haunting settings. Narrative arc with progressive plot and tension. Real investment in Lara's survival. Lara is a more fully-realized personality in her own right (rather than mere extension of the player) than previously accomplished in video games (I think?), creating new aesthetic possibilities.
Silent Hill: Yes. Simply, and this is crucial, more frightening than even the best horror movie ever made. The player interaction with the horror-story is fully realized and indicates possibilities of empathetic investment in visual fiction heretofore unknown.