What’s at stake when we view games as art?
We’re in an interesting moment for video games as a medium. Systems designed to play them are in many homes, whether they’re used for games or as an entertainment system (I haven’t owned a stand alone DVD player in over a decade, and I assume I’m not alone there), and systems that are able to play games are literally everywhere: laptops, desktops, Apple TVs, and of course, smart phones. My mom doesn’t think of herself as a gamer, but she’s logged more hours on Candy Crush than I have on most games this year. Esports is rapidly becoming a major entertainment industry, and is being discussed as a possible event for competition by the IOC. The IOC unfairly pegs games as being violent and mind numbing, but that’s another topic of conversation. The point is that video games are everywhere, and a broader conversation about their place in our lives is vital.
I have always advocated for broadening categories rather than tightening them. I made my way through a Bachelors in English largely pushing to add more things to the canon, as opposed to several of my classmates’ desire to gatekeep and trim off authors they didn’t like. Some people wanted to remove authors they found to be overrated or problematic (I’m looking at you, Shakespeare and Hemingway) but the problem with that approach was that is misunderstood what the literary canon was for: the canon was not a list of very good books, it was a curriculum of texts that broadly told the story of the development of literature.
I had the same issues with people who wanted to keep out genre fiction. While the group in the paragraph above thought that the point of the canon was to maintain a list of books we all liked, this group thought that the point of the canon was to preserve a list of serious, literary texts. It’s disingenuous to try to cut science fiction, fantasy, mystery, and horror from the canon (to say nothing of romance, erotica, westerns, and the endless subcategories of every genre), because aside form the fact many books in these genres are very good, they are also important developments in the history of literature.
The same can be said about English. Few things have brought me as much joy as the episode of Lexicon Valley in which John McWhertor dissects Strunk and White’s The Elements of Style. Aside from the fact that I have very strong beliefs about language policing being racist and classist, I also think that self-proclaimed “defenders of the English language” are setting out to create a vision of language which is deeply boring. English, like all languages, evolves, and it’s many permutations are beautiful and fantastic, and should be welcomed into our discourse rather than destroyed.
All of these problems have something in common that relates back to the topic of this essay: people defend the canon they were taught to defend. They were taught that the canon is a list of books that are very good, so when they encounter one they don’t think is very good, they want to cut it. They were taught to think literature is one thing and is not something else, so when something else comes along, they defend against it. They were taught there is a certain way of speaking, so when someone challenges that by speaking in a way that is internally coherent, but which is different from how they learned to speak, they try to belittle the unfamiliar thing.
People who say that video games cannot be art in the way that film is forget that they benefit from decades of film as an established art form. Those who, when film was still young, thought it couldn’t be an art form in the way novels are, benefitted from centuries of novels as an established art form, when they were initially viewed as distractions from real literature like Epic Poetry.
Art evolves, and as it does, technology reveals new avenues for expression. Film takes much of what is good about novels, loses some things (audience imagination, depth of thought, the many tangents novels are able to entertain, a certain level of detail) and gains something else: visuals, sound, a shared vision with other members of the audience. We go from reading about a sly smile, or the artful evocation of a gun shot, to being moved by the actor’s subtle grin, to seeing the muzzle flash and hearing the report ourselves.
Video Games lose something that films have, namely a sense of firm direction. When the audience can skip through scenes or avoid them entirely, or when they spend seven hours doing middling side quests while the story patiently waits for them, the piece loses a sense of pacing. But what they gain is sublime: a collaboration between artist and audience. We now decide when the character smiles. We cause the gun to fire, we react to it’s firing. We affect the piece. We are, in a small way, the artist. Even in more linear games, we are experiencing the events of the plot through an avatar. In some games, we decide what the story is in the first place. Some of my Skyrim playthroughs are not stories about being the chosen one at all. They are stories about rebel soldiers, highwaymen, travelling priests. I make those stories in the world provided for me. I am a collaborator.
This is not new territory, but I have found that this question has continuing relevance, and not just in the attempt to bring esports to the Olympics or to convince your mom that you aren’t wasting your life on gaming. Video games are vital cultural currency, and they have a role in politics. Here’s where we get into what’s at stake: if video games are art, they can be political, and that’s why there are large segments of the alt-right dedicated to seeing video games only as entertainment.
This has it’s ties to gamergate. Enough has already been written about that that I don’t need to recap it here, but one thing that gets lost in some of the conversations around the harassment of women, people of color, and especially women of color, is the argument that gaming outlets were favoring certain games because they were better works of art than others. Much of the hand wringing over Depression Quest was that it was not as fun as some shooters, and certainly lacked their cutting edge graphics. There was a belief that games were primarily entertainment (a view that still crops up from time to time) and should therefore be judged on their technical qualities, or whether the mechanics were good. Games should be judged on how fun they are, not whether or not they make us think. That this is a short-sighted goal should be obvious.
As I write this, Polygon is in the midst of their top ten countdown for GOTY 2017. In a move that will be upsetting to some, they have listed Wolfenstein II at number 10 and Everything at number 9. Everything is an interactive art piece, a work of digital meditation, and a game that plays itself. Wolfenstein is deeply polished AAA shooter. I haven’t played it so I don’t know if it’s better than Everything, which I adored, but I do know that many will take issue with the listing. Polygon, Waypoint, and Kotaku are all outlets that, to varying degrees, respect games as art and treat them with respect. These are also some of the most hated outlets by those who espouse that video games are only for entertainment, but they have encouraged me to think deeply about what games mean.
The truth of the matter is that video games, like all art and media, are inherently political. The narrative that developers insert political values into games to sway an apolitical populous is obviously baseless and absurd. What’s an apolitical game? Is Call of Duty apolitical? More often than not, what these people see as “apolitical” gaming are in fact just games that reinforce the politics they already have. It’s the same thing that causes people to describe a same-sex couple on a TV show as “political,” it’s a worldview that is at odds with your own.
Taking politics out of games means ensuring that games don’t challenge traditional ideals and values, especially about violence. We need to take the conversation about games as art seriously to work against this, to demonstrate that we don’t want video games to uphold the status quo, but to allow their unique lens to challenge it. This means opening up vital critical conversations, like whether or not Wolfenstein is still valuable even though it reduces most player interactions to violent confrontations with faceless enemies. Or whether or not Shadow of War’s questions about agency and slavery ring hollow when enslaving orcs is a main game mechanic.When these questions come up, there is always a chorus waiting to diminish the issue, to minimize the question and try to get us focused back on the fact that games are entertainment. But games are something I am very passionate about, and something I think can be life changing. What is at stake when we talk about games as art? Is it a new method of discourse? Is it a new form of expression? Is it a new tool to confront nazis? What is at stake is the ability to experience new worlds, and new perspectives. What is at stake is a medium that can actualize empathy and change the way you view the world.