Can Video Games Be Art?

PaPo-Yo-5

 
The internet’s been aflame and atwitter and afacebook with Anita Sarkeesian’s latest video about sexism in video games. She’s depressingly but inevitably gotten death threats and heaps of abuse, and that’s what most of the discussion has focused on.

One of the things she’s saying that has somewhat gotten lost, though, seems to be that video games can be art, or should be thought of as art. She talks about a game called “Papo and Yo” in particular as an example of a game with more aesthetic ambitions than the general shoot em up. I’m not very versed in video games, alas, but I’d be curious to hear people talk about what games they see as (good) art, if any.

We’re had a couple posts on this topic; Isaac Butler wrote about the virtues of the Walking Dead and Emily Thomas wrote about new text adventure games. So…what do folks think? Any other contenders for video games as art?

42 thoughts on “Can Video Games Be Art?

  1. I find the way this question is asked to be troublesome because it assumes the base mode of a video game (a work crafted by many people for entertainment purposes) is not already art, it goes back to the movie thing I am in the camp that if one is art than all must be art because they are all looking for the same thing.

    As for a single example Super Metroid would be my choice, a atmospheric science fiction mystery with no script and just such a perfectly designed space to explore and find the secrets of, with production that holds up to today.

  2. While I too generally agree with the idea that “it’s all art” – I don’t think there have been any games that are “good” or thought-provoking art yet.

    Plenty of games had an opportunity, but like superhero comics, tend to recapitulate the problematic themes of the genre.

    I would LOVE to play Papo y Yo, however, but I have an X-Box not a PS3 and don’t play games on my PC.

  3. I don’t know about thought provoking, but I think both Tetris and Zork are good art. I think Tetris is sublime and arguably kind of sinister in those geometric shapes falling, falling, falling, forever…there-is-no-escape-argh.

    Zork obviously isn’t highly sophisticated or anything, but it was breezy, quirky fun — not great art, but over the line into good, I think. On par with the Giffen/Dematteis Justice League, maybe; good light-hearted adventure fare.

    The video games Sarkeesian showed seemed better than superhero comics for the most part. Trying to be slick competent delivery systems for sex and violence, and more or less succeeding, unlike superhero comics which try to be slick competent delivery systems for sex and violence and mostly fail.

  4. I vote for Pac-Man as good art.

    Video games are the first stage in a plan for machines to help the human race, the only plan that offers a future for intelligence. For the moment, the inseparable philosophy of our time is contained in the Pac-Man. I didn’t know when I was sacrificing all my hundred yen coins to him that he was going to conquer the world. Perhaps because he is the most perfect graphic metaphor of man’s fate. He puts into true perspective the balance of power between the individual and the environment. And he tells us soberly that though there may be honor in carrying out the greatest number of victorious attacks, it always comes a cropper. — Chris Marker

  5. Video games aren’t — or aren’t yet – art. But that judgment may be the result of a category error.

    Specifically, the forms of artistic merit we currently deploy when asking the aesthetic question are only marginally applicable to video games as an art form per se. For example, video games usually employ some of narrative — a story of a hero, an invasion, an excursion, etc. — but the stories they deploy and how they deploy them are often deadly dull and/or merely an excuse for — or the boring space between — the moments of “action.” Cut scenes are boring and poorly written, but even if they weren’t, they might still make for terrible gaming, because they bring the *gaming* part of gaming to a halt. Unfortunately, very few games — if any — have figured out how to find a form of narrative that works *within* the art of game-playing itself. (“Heavy Rain” is a notable, not-quite-successful exception.)

    Tom Bissell has written quite a bit, for instance, on how gaming and story-telling are often at cross purposes, putting temporal and spatial strictures on what kinds of narratives one can tell. As Bissell puts it, sometimes you can only add as much story in a shooter as can fit into the time it takes to traverse a “hallway” from one fighting arena to another.

    Therefore, if narratives (as an art) are judged in terms of their complexity, their subtlety, their emotional depth, the quality of their expression, then video games will almost always fall short. And those games that try to achieve something “bigger” will almost always start to feel like they have stopped being very interesting games (see the excruciatingly boring “Metal Gear Solid 4,” the inane stand-and-talk stories of “Skyrim,” and poor man’s PDK mishmash of “Bioshock: Infinite”). Simply put, video games seem still to be trying to figure out what kind of narrative art they can be.

    So perhaps we need to judge games according to a different set of aesthetic criteria — a set of *experiential* criteria that are unique (or more appropriate) to the act of gaming.

    Maybe these experiences will be somehow related to an abstract “building up” of skills and interactions, the processes of increasingly and minutely “adding” one pieces of a story or a skill onto another. (Think of how you slowly “master” a game.)

    Maybe these experiential aesthetics will be meditative in nature, connected to the kind of psychological states that video-game playing can produce. Think of the ways in which visual and muscle memory start to blur together in bullet hell games.

    Maybe the aesthetics can be uniquely interactive — in a way that would put the so-called interactivity and open nature of comics and prose fiction to shame. This may arise from more profound developments in AI within games, making the reactions of the game, its characters, and its environments more unpredictable, more link to a game-based “consciousness.”

    And finally, the aesthetics may be — may all be — reflective on the odd nature of video games themselves, which are some “open” and “closed,” so “interactive” and so “programmatic,” so “representational” and “abstract,” at the same time. Perhaps there is a form of gaming aesthetics that are are devoted to getting one to experience the nature of gaming itself — to encounter and reflect upon the experiences that gaming provides.

    I’m not sure games have risen very high in any of these areas. But here are some video games that produced interesting game-based aesthetic experiences in me:

    Accretive experiences: DARK SOULS.

    Immersive Meditative experiences: IKARUGA; sections of SUPER MARIO GALAXY 2.

    Experiences of consciousness: JOURNEY (and its amazing multiplayer mechanics. I’ve written about this in HU comments before).

    Experiences of Space and Time: THE UNFINISHED SWAN; PORTAL 2

    These are not even my “favorite” games necessarily, and the list leaves out other experiences that I have had, like simply riding around on horseback in the deserts of RED DEAD REDEMPTION. But it might be a good start in any investigation of what exacting “video games art” might be.

  6. It seems implicit in the question that “being art” is something that all activity should strive for. I think it’s perfectly OK for something to not be art. For instance, most acts of masturbation does not seem to want to be interpreted as art.

    And I think playing video games has more in common with masturbation than, say, looking at a work by Jenny Holzer. The video game itself may “be art”, but kinda beside the point…

  7. I apologize for writing the above without watching the linked video. (I will do so now — and hope that it doesn’t make the above thoughts completely pointless.)

  8. Lars, bad art is just about always linked to masturbation. It’s interesting to see that done in a positive rather than a negative way, but I still don’t find it very convincing as an argument. Games are a stylized symbolic and narrative form of communication. That works as art for me.

    I don’t think all activity should strive to be art. I do think that things which are art can be judged on aesthetic criteria (and that would include games.)

    Peter, it’s interesting that you’re argument (we need new aesthetics) parallels comics-centric arguments re art, doesn’t it? That is, comics proponents will argue that you can’t judge comics by other media’s standards.

    I don’t know that I buy it…like I said, Tetris and Zork seem like they can be judged pretty easily as art. They’re not great, but they’re not horrible either. Every medium is different, but if you can talk about music and architecture as art and apply aesthetic criteria, not sure why video games would be an exception.

  9. I’ve actually played and finished quite a number of the games Sarkeesian reviews and the violence against women is certainly much more disturbing when removed from the experience as a whole. I think part of this is down to the close editing, juxtaposition, and the level of interaction since the degree of violence against women in computer games *pales* in comparison to movies, TV and even comics.

    Like the snippets from Watch Dogs – the seediest scene might be the sex slave auction but you probably would get much much worse in a single season of CSI: Las Vegas. Some players might never get to see the spousal abuse scenes in the game since you get more “marks” for eliminating the criminals before hand. In any case, in the context of the game, it’s quite clear that the person you’re playing is a borderline sociopath (and he’s one of the good guys!).

    Still, I think the video is a good exercise. Almost all action video games are about the worst aspects of human behavior but without the horror of reality. One of of these days, they’ll have to get that right. In relation to this, games almost never extract a price from players for being “good”/moral – the one famous exception which has stuck in my mind is probably a sequence in Fable 2.

  10. I don’t think at this point anyone needs to argue in favor of videogames as art, but I think one of the most interesting things about games is that they can elect to use Sport or Utility as base modes instead.

    If I had to pick one game it’s gotta be Shin Megami Tensei: Nocturne (Lucifer’s Call in the UK). It’s visually inventive for the duration, especially architecturally which gives it this insane, unrelenting sense of place. The raw gameplay is outgunned by the Nocturne’s myriad prequels/sequels/spinoffs, but when it came out it introduced the wrinkle that’s powered everything in the series since (“Press Turns”) and it’s interesting enough on it’s own if you haven’t done the newer ones first.
    In a lot of areas SMT:N’s cousin Persona 4 is a better game (maybe the best game) but P4’s themes and characters are a bit too archetypical (even if the point is to reverse their archetypes) and the plot’s continual revision through adaptations and remakes has only underlined the bits where the philosophy underpinning it is underformed, even if the writing otherwise has the muscle to do things like use Train Arriving At a Station to summarize the game for an audience that will never recognize that reference.

  11. Hi Noah,

    My point was that we probably need to develop aesthetic criteria for video games that fit the world and experience and limits of video gaming. Yes, we can talk about architecture and music as an art, but it would be odd to critique a building for its paucity of character development, or to judge a song for its extreme lack of visual composition.

    For video games, the difficulty is that, yes, they do involve narrative, and music, and visual form, and pretty much everything, including the experiences of interactivity. But without the last of these criteria, it isn’t really a game at all. And, indeed, the need for — and demands of — interactivity are so extreme and all-encompassing that they tend to diminish the “art form”‘s ability to engage the other aesthetic aspects to an adequate degree. (This was my point about video games and narrative.)

    So, again, my point was not that we cannot talk about video games as art or apply aesthetic criteria. My point was that there might be form-specific reasons why even the best video games fall short when those criteria are applied — and that video games might become better if they can better realize their own limits and strengths.

  12. “I think part of this is down to the close editing, juxtaposition, and the level of interaction since the degree of violence against women in computer games *pales* in comparison to movies, TV and even comics.”

    This is a very good point, especially when considering the countless hours one might put into a simple video game.

    Sarkeesian would probably argue that even, say, 1% or less of the playing time is too much because of the stakes involved. seems to be saying that violence against women is so horrendous and such an important real-life issue that it shouldn’t be used at all. So murder, theft, destruction, and general mayhem… okay. But leave a topic that is so painfully real to so many women out of the mix completely.

  13. I don’t know that she’s saying leave it out…more like address it thoughtfully if it’s going to be there.

    Interesting point about it being relatively little part of game experience given the running time. Better than TV/comics/film isn’t necessarily high praise, but still….

  14. You’re right, Noah. I should should have said, “leave it out unless you are prepared to….”

  15. I don’t play video games much, but for some reason I read quite a few video game reviews. Especially when reading video game reviews in mainstream (i.e. non-gamer) media, I get a distinct feeling of cultural cringe. The reviewers spend much of the time recapping “the storyline”, and then dashes off a few paragraphs about game play. Sort of aping book reviews.

    It’s perhaps a way to try to convince the audience that video games are art (“look! there’s a storyline! just like in a movie!”) and is therefore worthy of being written about in a newspaper.

    But gameplay is what’s usually important in most video games. Imagine reviews of mini golf courses being written in the same pleading way?

    I guess what I’m trying to get at is that there’s quite a lot of important (and trivial) things that don’t seem to fit into the “art” category, but are still interesting to read critiques of. And if the critic tries to hard to look at them as art, the interesting things about them are diminished.

  16. See, that sort of review doesn’t sound like it’s trying to treat video games as art. If you’re thinking about a game as art, you’d talk about themes, compare it to other art, try to think about it in terms of culture and beauty and so forth.

    Reviews like you’re talking about sound like they’re mostly concerned with letting you know whether to purchase or not. Lots of reviews like that in all mediums; they’re geared towards the fandom and potential purchasers. Nothing wrong with that, but doesn’t have much to do with thinking about product as art (IMO.)

  17. Hah! I think I’ve seen that review before, but it’s great. It has words arranged in sentences, and is about as long as I expected. And I didn’t have to pay for it.

  18. I don’t think this is really a matter of videogames becoming art, it’s more of a case of the definition of art being expanded to include video games, it’ll happen in the end, I mean it would just be weird and confusing if video games were the only piece of modern media that never happens to. So far as the quality of contemporary video games it’s a pretty mixed bag and I don’t think I know enough to really discuss it fairly, I also feel like a lot of people in the art world also do not know enough to discuss it fairly.

    I mean if you see the face of the comics world it looks like a big steaming pile of shit with a few decent things like Watchmen or the occasional Grant Morrison shining through the sludge, but if you actually know anything about the industry you know there are a lot of very thought provoking and good comics around too (though this has become less true as good comics receive more exposure, etc etc). The video game industry is in a similar state; you occasionally run into something that’s high budget and pretty good (such as a Bioshock or The Last of Us) but most of it is just entertainment, and those “worthy” high budget games tend to be off a type, sort of like oscar bait films, they’ve got some substance but a lot of the time they rely on very high craft and an “important” subject matter. The really good stuff is in the indie scene where people actually try to experiment and are allowed to think of what they’re doing as art, because there’s not the heel of business preparing to crush them if they exclude their audience.

    The types of games I would put in that category are
    Papers Please – http://www.giantbomb.com/papers-please/3030-41931/
    a game where you work as someone at passport control in a soviet-like state
    Lullaby – http://www.ludumdare.com/compo/ludum-dare-30/?action=preview&uid=18575
    an abstract game where you use the dials on an oldfashioned tv to switch between different world to solve puzzles, you also see really odd abstract imagery and shapes, I don’t really know what to make of it but I like it.
    Journey – http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Journey_(2012_video_game)
    Probably the best known of these, your a cloaked figure who wanders through a vast desert occasionally solving puzzles and wandering through ruins, you also meet other travelers (who are actually other people playing the game at the same time as you) who you can’t really communicate with beyond a sort of singing to each other.

    I think what is key in whether video games will be looked at as “art” is the critics. There are not a lot of game critics and reviewers who really get into the actual artistic merit of a video game or try to extrapolate that games place in the broader art world and history. I’d be interested if a sort of TCJ equivalent sprung up for the indie game scene I could see it happening pretty soon, I think.

  19. I went cold turkey on electronic games a few years back for personal reasons, but until I did, one game I loved (probably well beyond its merits) was a Dungeons and Dragons spinoff with the doltish title of Planescape: Torment. It was packed with convoluted fantasy-worldbuilding exposition and steampunkish artsiness. I regarded it as a smart game, designed for smart people, that respected its audience.

    Then I found the original proposal for the game online :http://www.rpgwatch.com/files/Files/00-0208/Torment_Vision_Statement_1997.pdf

    Some key quotes:

    “We gots Gold, Glory, Power and Hero Worship. Why save a world you know nothing
    about and have absolutely no attachment to? F*** that. We know what you really
    want to do – you want to run rampant in a world where you are a god. You want
    the power to change your environment, slaughter all who stand against you, and
    be a hero worshipped by the masses – everything you don’t get pushing
    paper or suffering through school 40 hours a week.”

    and

    “Sure, you may be a fat dateless loser in real life, but in Last Rites, you get
    the women and respect you’ve always craved.”

    and

    “We will work hard to try and include positive relationships within the game –
    relationships that the player may not have in real life or may desire from
    watching movies. The player can have buddies that will lay down their life for
    the character, Betsies and Veronicas/Gingers and Mary Anns fighting over his
    affections, mentors, loyal servants, and so on. They will thank the player for
    his help or fawn for his attention, giving the player additional ego-stroking.”

  20. I’m the proud owner of the original art for this Rick Trembles review of the movie Doom which completely ignores the movie in favor of discussing Rick’s video game fixation. I particularly liked the stuff about rationalizing the shabbiness of his surroundings by comparing it to creepy atmospherics in horror games.

    http://www.snubdom.com/MPdoom.htm

    The Motion Picture Purgatory radio show (archived in podcast form and available wherever you get your podcasts) episode 8 expands on this and argues that something called Fatal Frame 2: Crimson Butterfly is of interest.

  21. Ico was the first big “games as art” AAA title, right? That’s a really beautiful game. The castle you have to find your way out of looks like the Cathedral de Seville and the game is really good at capturing the way things look when they’re flooded with bright sunlight. You fight shadow-enemies too… the game is all about architecture, light & shadow, and not letting go of the princess’s hand.

    There are a lot of beautiful indie games with abstract themes that are more about putting you into the flow state and keeping you there than any abstract objective. You could probably make the case for some of those as art… I don’t play enough to tell you what those are though.

  22. Wow, two very large subjects for one comment thread.

    Most TV shows, movies, etc. that traffic in violence against women at least make some effort to frame it as “bad” even if the treatment is salacious. Not so much in the world of video games, seems like. Then there’s the issue of agency. Women characters in video games rarely have it. In fact, calling them “characters” seems like a stretch. The representation is very flat.

    But anyway, of course video games can be art. For a wide variety of reasons, there simply aren’t yet that many creators approaching the medium with artistic ambitions.

    I recently profiled a video game artist (and am gearing up to write about video games as art elsewhere), and I remember that guy telling me how he feels like the narratives that have been praised in indie games in particular are super unsophisticated compared to, say, novels. Interestingly, his own game–like Tetris and other puzzle games–doesn’t have any narrative at all.

    The art world has arguably already embraced video games as art, though the terrain surrounding curation, collection, and commoditization holds challenges. MOMA established its video game collection in 2012. They approached their selections from a design perspective. Narrative only tangentially figured in.

    Also worth noting: video game design of course requires the skill of coding, which until very recently has been taught (and thought of) in terms of utility. That, too, is changing.

  23. “I’d be interested if a sort of TCJ equivalent sprung up for the indie game scene I could see it happening pretty soon, I think.”

    I saw someone express this sentiment at another site…except they said HU rather than TCJ. It was pretty gratifying (though very much a minority opinion, I’m sure.)

  24. So…if we did a video game roundtable at some point, would people be into that?

    Maybe it’d get me to actually play a game (other than Tetris…though writing about Tetris would be pretty funny…)

  25. People all the damn time conflate two distinct questions — (1)the categorical question, whether video games are art in the first place, or something else entirely; and (2) the evaluative question, whether — supposing they are a kind of art — they’re good, or whether at least some of them are, or might be, good art. And Peter’s pointed to a third question — (3) are there aesthetic properties unique to video games, and how do they relate to aesthetic properties in other media.

    So dissing the narrative complexity and characterisation of a video game only shows you that it’s not good art; it doesn’t address the question of whether it’s art tout court.

    Aaron — Sigil represent! Torment is great. That document is depressing, but I don’t think it disqualifies the game for two reasons — first, there’s a big difference between how you originally pitch something and where it ends up; and, second, that document was, what, an internal pitch to Interplay management? So it doesn’t necessarily reflect what the designers really had in mind, so much as what they thought their bosses wanted to hear…

  26. If Tetris and Zork are good art (and why not?), then plenty of video games are good art, as long as one is willing to look beyond the borders of today’s big budget console games and free-to-play mobile games, both having squandered all their potential in their pursuit for profit.

    For criticism, one go-to place is Critical Distance, which collects articles every month. There have also been some web zines by good critics.
    http://www.critical-distance.com/

    If I’m to name ONE game as an example for an art experience, I wouldn’t suggest Papers, Please or Journey. I’d recommend “dys4ia”, Anna Anthropy’s short game about her experience with hormone replacement therapy.
    http://www.newgrounds.com/portal/view/591565

  27. “…a work crafted by many people for entertainment purposes…”

    This perfectly describes the very opposite of art.

  28. All video games are art. Art is not a value judgement or a quality judgement. Art doesn’t necessitate positive aesthetic attributes nor does art imply anything beneficial to humanity.

    However, it is fun as HECK to taunt gamers with “video games aren’t art” because they’re so guileless that they lose their composures immediately. Fair revenge for those same gamers’ aggression toward women.

    But yes, obviously video games are entirely an artform. Sheesh~

  29. Ayo, you’re right. But then obviously *your* version of the “Are video games art” question isn’t the one anyone was asking. I doubt Noah, et al., were concerned about whether or not video games were human-made, which seems to be your definition — as in, “artifice” or “artificial” (not “natural”).

    Perhaps you are trying to say that there is no “Art” vs “art” distinction — no good art/bad art or (using older terms) high art/low art distinctions — getting rid of them in the way we discarded the distinctions between “Culture” and “culture.” (There are no higher and lower cultures. Just cultures.)

    But taking this next step — implying there are no grounds for aesthetic evaluation, because it’s all just “art” — is more like a leap.

  30. I actually agree with Ayo, more or less. Art as a genre is going to have blurry boundaries, but video games seem like they quality pretty easily (less blurry than something like a baseball game, for example.)

    Now, whether a given game is good art is a different question….

  31. That “Lullaby” game up there sorta reminded me of what we used to tinker with in the late 80s. I was part of a group of guys who made “demos” for oldee-timey computers. The main purpose of a demo is to show something awesome new technical capability that nobody knew these underpowered machines could do.

    Lots of sprites on the screen! Scrolling text in a novel way, backwards and swirling! You know, whatever is impressive to us.

    Of course, watching these demos was pretty dreary. If you showed them to people outside the milieu they absolutely didn’t understand what was so amazing about them. They’d seen better computer graphics on TV. “But it’s made on this cheap machine…”

    One night I suggested to the others in our little group that perhaps we could spruce things up a bit if our demo had either some sort of narrative, or said something. Everybody agreed. And then we tried to think of something that we wanted to, like, say, and … nobody could come up with anything.

    So we made an even twistier text scroll.

    Anyway, did we “make art”? I mean, we made stuff that made sounds and showed stuff happening on the screen. So by Ayo’s criterion we were making art. But that’s not what the impetus behind it was. We were tinkering. And we didn’t have anything we wanted to express by our tinkering, I think. So trying to judge what we did as art would probably be pretty futile.

    “Not being art” isn’t an insult.

    That “Lullaby” game may come from the same impulse. Just “make something”, and then string it together. But obviously more thought has gone into it than with our stuff.

  32. Noah – I think that the video game version of HU could just be HU, given how diverse the site is. I was just thinking of how TCJ was kind of comics community talking about comics in a literary or academic sense.

    Lars – I think that you were absolutely making art, I’ve been in dozens of art-making workshops where the impetus was on playing with the media and interacting with others with it. Maybe your personal project didn’t quite resolve itself into a final piece, but it was definitely art to my mind.

  33. “Especially when reading video game reviews in mainstream (i.e. non-gamer) media, I get a distinct feeling of cultural cringe.”

    Charlie Brooker, on his time as a professional video-game reviewer:

    ” I do remember having a couple of experiences where I’d be at a party or something and people would say ‘what do you do?’ ‘I…I…I review… videogames.’ And they’d look at you like you’d said, ‘I do colouring in. I colour things in. I’ve got these colouring-in books, and I colour things in.’”

  34. I was watching some buddies play papo & yo yesterday. looked like a neat little puzzle game.
    Personally I think all games are art, not just video games.

  35. there are plenty of bad video games but that doesnt mean it isnt art. it just means its bad art.

  36. @ADD
    is it not art because its a collaborative effort or because its intended to be an enjoyable experience?

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