Happy Holidays and Video Games = Art?

A holiday video treat from Peanut and a special guest!

 

My friends often debate the merits of gaming over email, and recently we've been talking about this article from the London Review of Books.  Are video games an art form?  Where is the video game industry going, and how might it parallel the growth of other media like movies?

My friend responded with this opinion:

[quote]     Video games are not an artform.  They may possess artistic elements--such as design and environment--but they will never stimulate the human mind and capacity as other true artforms, like painting, music, or dance.  These artforms possess the capacity for true creativity and expression, which video games will never possess.  I'd also like to point out, on an unrelated note, something that was said by this author:

     "And what do they want? The same thing the audience for any new medium always wants: they want pornography, broadly defined. They want to see things they aren't supposed to see. This is why video games, in general (and away from the world of Miyamoto-san) are so preoccupied with violence - it's what young men want to see. (Pornography in the sexual sense is less of an issue: they can get that from the internet, any time they want.) Their rule-bound, target-bound educations and work lives leave them with a deep craving to go and commit imaginary crimes - as well they might."

     I think the crucial problem is within these lines.  He, like so many others, assumes that regimented society is what is encouraging young people to find outlets for their "craving" for imaginary crimes, but this is impossible!  Historically it is completely untrue.  We live in a less-regimented and goal-focused society than ever before, yet people are angrier and more willing to commit violence.  Why is this true?  It's complicated, but I would venture that a large part of it has to do with the fact that people are being exposed to activities which promote cycles of violent thinking and destructive behavior.  Obviously it is difficult to establish a correlation between the child who plays GTA and the child who stabs a peer at school with a knife, but I have no doubt that this choice subconsciously becomes more attractive because of prolonged exposure to what this author has so charmingly described as "pornography".[/quote]

I thought for a while about this, and here was my response:

     I'd like to take up the point that society is less regimented and goal-oriented than ever, and yet people are angrier and more violent, perhaps because of cultural influences like violent video games.  This is a radical oversimplification of the way human civilization has changed, and even if we are only referring to the small percentage of the world that can afford to play video games and enjoy "art," it seems to overly focus on Western society to exclusion of the East.  Americans and Europeans game a lot, it's true, but it's nothing compared to their counterparts in East and Southeast Asia who spend 12+ hours a day playing computer and console games and have to go to rehab camps to be weaned off of gaming addictions.  I don't think there's any debate as to whether or not Eastern collectivized societies are more regimented and goal-oriented than Western individualistic societies (they are), nor is there a debate as to whether or not Eastern countries tend to have more violence than Western societies (they don't).  There are over 30,000 internet cafes in Seoul alone where the main activity is gaming, and yet Seoul is one of the safest cities I've ever lived in.  Of course, in Korea people aren't allowed to own handguns, but my main point is that you can't necessarily correlate violent gaming with the level of violence in a society in general.  Korea also has its share of violent movies and imports all the latest Hollywood blockbusters.  Why is it then that a skinny, 21-year-old girl can walk around by herself at night down dark alleyways in the most urbanized region of the country without being afraid of a violent encounter?  There are just way too many cultural factors involved, and there is no strong correlation between gaming and general level of violence internationally (in addition, correlation does not imply causation).

     People have been exposed to cycles of destructive behavior all throughout history.  Slaves were routinely abused in all ancient societies, and culturally-rooted caste systems codified irresponsibly violent behavior on the part of the haves to the detriment of the have-nots.  War is not a new phenomenon, and until the 20th century war was seen as a healthy, catharctic, masculine activity by most of the Western world.  Domestic violence used to go completely unreported or was even sanctioned by law until relatively recently, and let's not forget those romanticized stories of Billy the Kid and other folk who essentially lived off of destructive behavior and were celebrated for it.  I'd argue that violent behavior is less glorified now than ever in history.  There may even be less violence now in first world countries than ever before, but it's difficult to tell because violence is highly publicized now in an unprecendented way through all the different kinds of media available to us.

    Do video games consitute an art form?  My mind is not entirely made up on this score, and part of it has to do with the fact that gaming combines notions of high art with notions of entertainment (largely considered non-high art) in an entirely new way.  To me, one of the fundamental ideas behind "high art" is its non-interactiveness - the author, artist, or filmmaker creates a complex work that is subject only to his/her whims and arrives before the public to be appreciated in an immutable form.  The public then judges through its passive experience of the art whether or not the work has the qualities necessary to count as "high art," with perhaps some input from the creator as to its interpretation.  The creativity involved in "high art" is the reserve of the creator and not the audience.  In interpreting video games as art, a major stumbling block is that the quality of the experience depends not just on the creator of the game but the person/people playing it.  Someone who has the motivation to explore the game and figure out how to stretch it to its limits may be able to encounter layers of complexity that truly indicate artistic genius on the part of the creator, and someone who picks it up and gets frustrated with it after an hour may decide it's trash.  Then there is the vast majority who plays the game for a while and thinks it's fun and valuable for various reasons but may not consider it art; this is comparable, in my opinion, to people who look at a Rembrandt and think "oh, that's pretty" but don't have the motivation or the training to understand all the reasons why that painting is considered "high art" and a painting that took a comparable amount of time and effort to create but isn't all that remarkable otherwise isn't considered "high art."  The major difference is that this person in question will automatically assume that the Rembrandt is more valuable and is "high art" because all of his or her upbringing in affluent Western society has ingrained that assumption into him/her.  Video games are so new that no such comparable set of cultural assumptions exists.

     Why is "high art" more valuable to an art collector than a work that took the same amount of time and effort to create but isn't considered "high art"?  Is it that the collector can spend more time absorbed in the painting's aesthetics and history, contemplating the wonders of the human artistic faculty?  Is it that it's more expensive and is therefore a mark of high social status?  Is it that it was within the collector's price range and just happened to go well with the color palette of the room?  Is it that the collector remembered from Art History 101 that this particular work exemplified the genius of the era and he/she really liked that class so he/she jumped at the chance to acquire the painting/sculpture/collage?  Is it that the collector just really likes large-scale depictions of unicorns used as metaphors for the human condition?  The question of the true nature of "art" or what makes something "art" have been around for centuries or maybe millenia, with many arguments over whether or not a particular work or the works of a particular artist consitute art.  There are tons of examples of works we now consider high art that were considered trash when they were created, or at best very good examples of lowbrow entertainment (several of Mozart's operas spring to mind).  The same may be true for video games, but the difference with video games is also that the question of whether video games are "art" cannot be resolved with time and cultural agreement in the same sense that examples of traditional art forms have in the past.  Because of gaming's interactivity, it challenges the assumptions we hold about art versus entertainment in a totally different way.

     Let's look at Photoshop.  With Photoshop, normal people can create images that some would consider art, which makes Photoshop similar to the painter's brush or the sculptor's chisel.  The brush and the chisel are not considered art in and of themselves because they are so simple and do not require a great deal of skill or ingenuity to create.  Photoshop, however, is a piece of software that took tons of time, resources, skill, and problem-solving ability to create.  Someone with an intimate knowledge of the program can produce incredible images that stretch the limits of human creativity in unprecedented ways to the point of creating "high art," but this creativity depends on the features that were coded into the program and the constraints that the program imposes on the end user - therefore, this expression of creativity and skill owes its existence to another expression of human creativity and skill.  Is the Photoshop software package "art" in and of itself?  It depends on what an artist can do with it that he/she can't do with non-digital means or with other image editing programs.  It depends on what your definition of art is.  It depends on what you consider the "medium" and what you consider the "message," and whether those two categories are mutually exclusive.

     If we revise the definition of "high art" to include works that enable others to create "high art" or that unleash human creativity and engage the human spirit at its highest levels, then I would say that video games can potentially be art.  Time will tell.

 

 

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