Can video games be art? Part I

 

I. The Background Story 

Well, can video games be art? To this Roger Ebert recently replied 'never' on his blog and consequently found himself wearing out the remains of his aging eyes peering over every last one of what has amassed into a torrent of three-thousand comment replies (I also happen to be guilty of this). Had we not known what ground was being fought over, one might have expected it to be a topic of great consequence. But no, politics and ethics take a back seat when it comes to video games and their aesthetics, both of which the blogger himself and most of his readers admittedly have no clear definition or concept to begin with. But setting aside the muddleheaded-ness, why would there be an audience for this sort of debate? On the motivations of Mr. Ebert, I don't really want to conjecture because his only contribution thus far has been to light the fuse. On the matter of his opponents, there appear to be far too many young adults invested in a life-style that they wish to be accepted as aesthetically meaningful, if not simply meaningful with the aesthetic component as validation. Anyhow, both sides have their reasons for being thoroughly engaged in the arguments. Yet for a question that I find genuinely deserving of serious discourse, I hate the fact that it has been tackled inadequately and in such poor spirit.

My stake in the issue, as will be fully elucidated in this essay, is a firm conviction that there is great potential for serious art in a medium that would otherwise be dismissed by people such as Mr. Ebert as being subsumed under the derogatory classification of 'video games'. The medium I shall be discussing and defending against Ebert's 'never', will be one of interactive internet browser-based games. The reason for selecting this medium for discussion relates both to my passing interest in emerging mediums for art in the technology age as well as with my long-running enthusiasm with innovative (and free) internet games (often in the Flash format). Those interests, as well as provocation by Ebert's blog post, led me to go searching for some good examples of where they are headed. And voila, Feed the Head fell into my lap.

Designed by artist Patrick Smith under the name of his company Vectorpark, Feed the Head is without exaggeration the Lamborghini equivalent of a flash game. Stylishly crafted to go along with a taste of the absurd, the game provides the 'player' with an interactive two-dimensional blue head (see above). Handed down some elementary clues about how to interact with it (but no tutorial), it's up to the user to explore what to do with the head, if 'explore' is the goal at all. And aside from obviously “eating”, what the head can do is plenty. The gravity, movements, and expressions are all extremely detailed despite the abstractions. The head’s eyes follow the cursor, squint, and even cry as you interact with the head. The experience, in perhaps ten minutes or so, turns out surreal, engaging, slightly extended in depth, and most deserving of a few lighthearted chuckles. If you can spare the time or deserve some relaxation, please try it out yourself. It’s good fun and is anything but like those video games that have given electronic gaming a bad name.

Patrick Smith's Migration, 2005, oil on canvas

Now, here comes the big question: "but, is it art?" Since the reader has perhaps just played the game, I will leave the question momentarily open to whatever tender opinion he/she might have formed. We will return to this later. Instead, first I want to tackle the main question itself: 'can video games be art?', and explore what we mean by art. I won’t here pretend that I have any answers to this, but merely hope to give whatever it is I have to offer. And in order to get into the details of my position I shall address some of Ebert's arguments against video games as art and his understanding of what counts as art (arguments derived strictly from his aforementioned blog post). I find these important and worthy of response because these tend to reflect general misconceptions of video games and games simpliciter that will nevertheless be propounded by many like-minded detractors of video games as art. And before we pester ourselves to death with what exactly constitutes a 'video game', we can simplify the primary question into 'can games be art?' while preserving the essence of the problem by setting aside details that can be dealt with in time.

The form of my argument will be as follows: I shall try to show that from our working concepts of what is a game that there is no evidence of any essential quality that separates games simpliciter from a general concept of art. Quite simply, it is false that games and art are fundamentally incompatible and exclusive of one another. In the process, I shall fashion a provisional criteria of sorting out art from pseudo-art capable of sustaining basic problems as well as counter-examples. I shall then point out that the possibility of games as art cannot alone establish a concrete position if certain aesthetics grounded in taste can be used to argue that the possibility is nevertheless wholly unrealizable. In response to this, I shall then argue that we cannot construct aesthetic grounds strictly in terms of taste, which can then be used to exclude games as art or defend a restricted view of what constitutes art on a subjective basis alone. I shall then conclude by arguing that some sophisticated interactive flash games such as Feed the Head point us in a direction beyond the mere possibility of games as art but towards a concrete realization of an exciting emerging medium.

Link to Part II.