The gaming writing itch has settled back in after a month away. Time to scratch it. This entry's pretty long, so grab some coffee and get comfy.
Every so often The Internet gets together and decides to have a fight about whether video games are, or can be, a form of artistic expression. Unfortunately, that debate always devolves into a debate over the definition of art itself. While that is, in fact, a necessary discussion to have, the net's master debaters tend to overlook that that exact discussion has proven inconclusive for all of mankind since the Renaissance.
Roger Ebert raised the ire of gamers when he categorically said that games aren't art. There's not total authorial control, therefore they aren't art. He truly made a solid argument, even if kids experiencing Internet Rage didn't agree at the time. Ebert said that we, as players, could co-opt what a game auteur wanted you to do. It's true: you could watch Sonic the Hedgehog, controller comfortably sitting out of hand, for hours and hours and Sonic would stand there and not do a damn thing until you did something with him. At the most essential level, nothing unambiguously
forces you to watch Sonic's progress. I'll share what I really think of Ebert's opinion later on, but for now I'll say that I think he does the most inspired, grandiose virtual worlds - Liberty City in GTA4, or Azeroth in World of Warcraft - a great disservice.
Since the definition of art itself quickly grinds game-related discussion to a halt, I agree with those who sidestep the issue and say that games can be a medium of artistic expression, in the same vein as TV, film, and radio before it. Sure, much of what we get is mindless drivel, whether on TV or on Xbox, but the
potential for art is there, just like The West Wing is much better than a reality TV show and like The Legend of Zelda is better than the latest Shrek game.
As a gaming evangelist, presenting games to the outside world, I take the common shortcut of putting games' value in economic terms. Given the time and money spent on creating and playing games in this day and age, how are we
not to take them seriously? How can there not be a
de facto cultural impact of something that takes up so much of our attention?
So suppose the evolution in creative mass media goes like this: radio, then TV and film, followed by video games here at the current peak. Those who explain the "medium" of video games in terms of TV and film, as often happens, are doomed to describe the medium in too constricting of terms. What about a competitive, strategic multiplayer game like Halo? What about the "demoscene," the subculture of hackers who create digital, non-interactive scenes that make you go 'ooh' and 'ahh'?
Games can give a compelling experience without narrative, to the point where games become more like jacking into the Matrix than watching a story with a pigeonholed genre. Game publishers like Microsoft get this idea, but their marketing departments are at a loss for words to describe what you actually do with games, so they resort to calling everything an "experience."
Which brings me back to Ebert: I think The Internet is quick to brand him as this jealous "old guard" of That Which Can And Cannot Be Art, but I think he's just innocently basing his conclusions on ideas that are on the brink of going out of style.
Using the existing conventions of film - or music, or literature - games have the unique luxury of crossing boundaries. A single game can use a close-up camera shot, a tense musical cue, and textual metaphor near simultaneously, which is something that a movie, symphony, or novel can't do. But games get even better, because interactivity is inherent to the form. And interactivity - like any other artistic tool like the close-up and so on - vivifies the experience.
Take Metal Gear Solid 3. At the game's end, you're finally confronted with the baddie you've been hunting since the game started: The Boss, a deadly female agent with innovative combat tactics - and your one-time mentor who speaks with a motherly tone. At the game's start, she defected to the Soviets, and your character, Snake, is the only one with the potential to track her down behind enemy lines and dispose of her. The fight's dialogue is a jarring mix of her familiar motherly tone with an almost forced "bad guy" line here and there - "Finish your mission! Kill me!"
Once you win the fight, she's not dead. She lays silent, barely moving. Snake is locked in place, posed at The Boss's feet, gun in one raised hand, barrel pointing at her head. Suddenly, none of the controller buttons work. You can't open menus, pause, change weapons, or move. The only button that works is the one that pulls the trigger.
There's no escaping it:
you kill The Boss.
We've seen dramatically significant killings in movies tens of thousands of times, but no matter how spectacular the method, no matter the relationship between killer and victim, film is simply incapable of conveying this act in the second person.
Thanks to scenes like that one, I strongly believe that games already are art, and that games might even expand what we consider to be art, if certain Matrix-esque, psychological experiences are poignant enough to warrant it. Either way, we would be wise to be spending our time establishing the conventions of the video game form. I've already written
60 pages on the topic, but that's just a rough idea from one guy. Imagine what an industry full of game designers and writers could do with such a concept.
