The Fight to See Games as Art Is a Fight to Protect Games From Censorship and Mindless Regulation

Having once made the statement to a higher place, I have declined all opportunities to enlarge upon it or defend it. That seemed to exist a fool's errand, especially given the volume of messages I receive urging me to play this game or that and recant the error of my ways. Still, I remain convinced that in principle, video games cannot be fine art. Perhaps information technology is foolish of me to say "never," because never, as Rick Wakeman informs us, is a long, long time. Allow me merely say that no video gamer at present living volition survive long enough to experience the medium as an art form.

What stirs me to return to the subject? I was urged by a reader, Marker Johns, to consider a video of a TED talk given at USC by Kellee Santiago, a designer and producer of video games. I did so. I warmed to Santiago immediately. She is bright, confident, persuasive. Simply she is mistaken.

I propose to accept an unfair reward. She spoke extemporaneously. I accept the luxury of responding after consideration. If yous want to follow along, I urge you lot to watch her talk, which is embedded beneath. It'due south only 15 minutes long, and she makes the time laissez passer quickly.

She begins by saying video games "already ARE art." Yet she concedes that I was right when I wrote, "No i in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great poets, filmmakers, novelists and poets." To which I could have added painters, composers, and so on, only my bespeak is clear.

Then she shows a slide of a prehistoric cave painting, calling it "kind of chicken scratches on walls," and contrasts it with Michelangelo's ceiling of the Sistine Chapel. Her point is that while video games may exist closer to the chicken scratch end of the spectrum, I am foolish to assume they will not evolve.

She then says spoken language began as a class of alarm, and writing as a form of bookkeeping, merely they evolved into storytelling and song. Actually, voice communication probably evolved into a form of storytelling and song long earlier writing was adult. And cavern paintings were a class of storytelling, perhaps of religion, and certainly of the creation of beauty from those chicken-scratches Werner Herzog is even at present filming in 3-D.

Herzog believes, in fact, that the paintings on the wall of the Cavern of Chauvet-Pont-d'Arc in Southern France should just be looked at in the context of the shadows cast on those dark walls by the fires built backside the artists, which suggests the cave paintings, their materials of charcoal and ochre and all that went into them were the fruition of a long gestation, not the beginning of something--and that the artists were enormously gifted. They were great artists at that time, geniuses with nothing to build on, and were not in the process of condign Michelangelo or anyone else. Whatsoever gifted artist will tell you how much he admires the "line" of those prehistoric drawers in the dark, and with what economy and wit they evoked the animals they lived among.

Santiago concedes that chess, football, baseball and even mah jong cannot exist art, however elegant their rules. I agree. But of course that depends on the definition of art. She says the most clear definition of art she's found is the one in Wikipedia: "Art is the process of deliberately arranging elements in a style that appeals to the senses or emotions." This is an intriguing definition, although as a chess player I might argue that my game fits the definition.

Plato, via Aristotle, believed art should be divers as the imitation of nature. Seneca and Cicero substantially agreed. Wikipedia believes "Games are singled-out from work, which is usually carried out for remuneration, and from art, which is more than concerned with the expression of ideas...Key components of games are goals, rules, claiming, and interaction."

Simply nosotros could play all day with definitions, and find exceptions to every one. For case, I tend to call up of fine art as unremarkably the creation of ane artist. Yet a cathedral is the work of many, and is it non art? One could retrieve of it every bit countless private works of art unified by a common purpose. Is not a tribal dance an artwork, all the same the collaboration of a community? Yep, only it reflects the work of individual choreographers. Everybody didn't first dancing all at once.

One obvious divergence between art and games is that yous can win a game. It has rules, points, objectives, and an outcome. Santiago might cite a immersive game without points or rules, just I would say then information technology ceases to be a game and becomes a representation of a story, a novel, a play, trip the light fantastic, a moving-picture show. Those are things you lot cannot win; you can but experience them.

She quotes Robert McKee's definition of good writing as "being motivated by a want to touch the audition." This is not a useful definition, because a great deal of bad writing is also motivated by the same desire. I might argue that the novels of Cormac McCarthy are then motivated, and Nicholas Sparks would argue that his novels are so motivated. But when I say McCarthy is "amend" than Sparks and that his novels are artworks, that is a subjective judgment, made on the basis of my taste (which I would fence is better than the taste of anyone who prefers Sparks).

Santiago now phrases this in her terms: "Art is a way of communicating ideas to an audience in a manner that the audience finds engaging." Still what ideas are independent in Stravinsky, Picasso, "Nighttime of the Hunter," "Persona," "Waiting for Godot," "The Beloved Vocal of J. Alfred Prufrock?" Oh, you can perform an exegesis or a paraphrase, but and so you lot are creating your own art object from the materials at hand.

Kellee Santiago has arrived at this point defective a convincing definition of art. But is Plato's any better? Does fine art grow better the more information technology imitates nature? My notion is that it grows better the more than it improves or alters nature through an passage through what we might call the artist's soul, or vision. Countless artists take fatigued countless nudes. They are all working from nature. Some of there paintings are masterpieces, nearly are very bad indeed. How do nosotros tell the deviation? Nosotros know. It is a matter, yes, of taste.

Santiago now supplies samples of a video game named "Waco Resurrection" (above), in which the player, as David Koresh, defends his Co-operative Davidian compound against FBI agents. The graphics show the protagonist exchanging gunfire with agents according to the rules of the game. Although the player must don a Koresh mask and inspire his followers to play, the game looks from her samples like one more brainless shooting-gallery.

"Waco Resurrection" may indeed exist a great game, but as potential art it still hasn't reached the level of chicken scratches, she defends the game not as a record of what happened at Waco, but "equally how we feel happened in our civilisation and society." Having seen the 1997 documentary "Waco: The Rules of Engagement," I would in dissimilarity laurels the game a Fail in this category. The documentary fabricated an enormous appeal to my senses and emotions, although I am non proposing it as art.

Her next case is a game named "Braid" (above). This is a game "that explores our ain relationship with our past...you encounter enemies and collect puzzle pieces, but there's one cardinal divergence...you tin can't die." Y'all can go back in time and right your mistakes. In chess, this is known every bit taking back a motion, and negates the whole discipline of the game. Nor am I persuaded that I can learn about my ain past past taking back my mistakes in a video game. She also admires a story told between the games levels, which exhibits prose on the level of a wordy fortune cookie.

We come to Example iii, "Blossom" (to a higher place). A run-downward city apartment has a single flower on the sill, which leads the actor into a natural landscape. The game is "well-nigh trying to notice a residuum between elements of urban and the natural." Naught she shows from this game seemed of more decorative interest on the level of a greeting card. Is the game scored? She doesn't say. Do y'all win if y'all're the first to detect the balance between the urban and the natural? Can yous control the blossom? Does the game know what the ideal balance is?

These three are just a small-scale selection of games, she says, "that crossed that purlieus into artistic expression." IMHO, that boundary remains resolutely uncrossed. "Complect" has had a "great market impact," she says, and "was the elevation-downloaded game on XBox Live Arcade." All of these games have received "critical acclamation."

Now she shows stills from early on silent films such equally George Melies' "A Voyage to the Moon" (1902), which were "every bit simplistic." Obviously, I'm hopelessly handicapped because of my love of movie house, only Melies seems to me vastly more avant-garde than her three modern video games. He has express technical resource, only superior artistry and imagination.

These days, she says, "grown-up gamers" promise for games that achieve higher levels of "joy, or of ecstasy....catharsis." These games (which she believes are already being made) "are being rewarded past audiences by high sales figures." The only mode I could experience joy or ecstasy from her games would be through profit participation.

The iii games she chooses equally examples do not raise my hopes for a video game that will deserve my attention long enough to play it. They are, I regret to say, pathetic. I repeat: "No one in or out of the field has ever been able to cite a game worthy of comparison with the great poets, filmmakers, novelists and poets."

Why are gamers then intensely concerned, anyhow, that games be defined as art? Bobby Fischer, Michael Jordan and Dick Butkus never said they thought their games were an fine art form. Nor did Shi Hua Chen, winner of the $500,000 World Series of Mah Jong in 2009. Why aren't gamers content to play their games and just savour themselves? They have my approving, not that they intendance.

Practise they require validation? In defending their gaming against parents, spouses, children, partners, co-workers or other critics, do they want to be able to look up from the screen and explain, "I'm studying a dandy form of fine art?" And so allow them say it, if it makes them happy.

I allow Sangtiago the last word. Toward the end of her presentation, she shows a visual with 6 circles, which represent, I gather, the components now forming for her brave new world of video games as fine art. The circles are labeled: Development, Finance, Publishing, Marketing, Instruction, and Executive Management. I rest my case.