Super Nerd Sundays Presents: Points to Move Past!

It’s been a while since I’ve written anything about the way that games function as art in any explicit context, but recent overheard conversations and bursts of madness and independent thought have pushed me into a place where I want to express how games relate to other fields of art and how, in the grand scheme of things, they form a nascent and combinant artistic medium which, while frequently lacking in quality, is possessed of profound potential rapidly being realized in an expanding independent marketplace. One of the more interesting comments I’ve heard differentiating games from other artistic mediums stemmed from the concept of games as a consumptive good. They’re packaged and sold as products, and often reviewed as products, and as such cannot exist as art.

Let’s break this argument down. Presently films are reviewed in a similar fashion. The majority of film reviewers, spare a handful of interesting writers who assess films as films, review films as products to be engaged with. X-film is worth X-dollars because of X-factor. Its shortcomings can be ignored because it is this kind of a product. Its successes can be dismissed because it is this kind of a product. Genre dictates expectations, and work that violates the rule of genre is derided as violating the compact implied in its labeling rather than celebrated0 for exploring an intersection of genric elements. Books aren’t held to this standard, nor have they been for quite some time. In fact, genric intersection has long stood as a means by which to make unpalatable material more marketable. The first novels were derided as pornographic trash, and thus emerged the epistolary novel, which combined the puerile pursuit of novel writing with the respected literature of correspondence. Books are often praised for playing with conceits of genre. Otherwise poorly constructed books, like House of Leaves, are praised for the way that they question what it means to be a work of literature. Music enjoys a similar critical standard, though conceits of what constitutes “good” music are far more generous than they are in narrative medium, and if we try to hard to engage music as a form of art in this discussion we’ll fast run out of parallels, simply because it isn’t narrative in nature.

I’m really just mentioning it here because all of these mediums share a pattern of consumption that runs parallel to video games. In each case you purchase a physical or digital artifact and, in doing so, are entitled to engage with an artistic work. All of these art forms enjoy a paralleled consumptive pattern with video games, and a price point in line with the majority of games: it’s around $15 to buy a novel, a CD or a DVD of a film. If you buy an indie game (or a major title a few months after release on Steam) you’ll spend a similar amount. There are games with a much higher price-point in place, but the principle of the exchange remains the same. And were you to contend that film, literature or music is not art, you’d be considered a pretentious asshole, if not an idiot, even if your reasoning involved the consumptive nature of these goods.

If you were to further examine this argument, and bring paintings into the mix, we’d find an art form decoupled from a model of populist consumption, but still tied to an older, more isolationist model of consumption based around a system of patronage. Paintings, after all, are at best displayed to be purchased and, at worst, purchased and then later displayed in public or private collections. Access to these collections is either subsidized through public funding (as in the case of certain museum system in more liberal nations) or through a system of donation or admission fees (as in most museums and public art galleries. Best case scenario, a corporate sponsor will make a gallery space open to the public, essentially enabling non-consumptive access to art through the sale of consumptive goods (my personal favorite example stems from an art exhibit funded by Playboy in the Lower East Side of Manhattan, where a nude woman in red body paint has been documented doing post-modern chores in a French garden). Art is always tied to a model of consumptive funding, and that’s always the cruel duality of art and the cause of a great deal of tension between creators and consumers: creators must sometimes tailor their art to meet the expectations of their audience, and consumers, when they are asked to engage with a new or different artist, are being asked to risk funds on something they might not necessarily enjoy.

So there goes that argument. But we haven’t discussed how video games compare to these forms of art as its own medium. So here’s a paraphrase from Mike Krahulik of Penny-Arcade that speaks to where I want to take this discussion: if a project features dozens of artists making art, the outcome of that production is a work of art.

Games combine various mediums, considered to be or described as art, into one giant messy medium. In order for games to constitute something other than artistic works, these mediums, once filtered through a video game, would have to lose their artistic constituency. If this seems reasonable to you, it has nothing to do with reason: there’s a leap of logic present in that calculus of art which should seem kind of wrong. Games are made up of the bits and pieces of other art, they combine aspects of visual art, narrative fiction and music into an interactive format wherein narrative becomes a malleable or participatorally influenced feature of a work. There is a complicating factor, however, a sacrifice of authorship that is made when a narrative is placed within a game and structured so as to permit the input of players upon it. Lara Croft is going to seem a lot less badass when she rams into a wall for fifteen minutes straight. Or if I run around murdering people at random in GTA IV, the pathos that Niko exhibits over engaging in bank robberies and falling deeper and deeper into the grip of the mafia is going to look like absolute nonsense. In the best games, this decision to sacrifice authorship is a determining factor in the narrative, and players have room to either alter the narrative of insert themselves into it in a way that enhances the overall experience. In the worst of games, this involvement within the narrative substitutes for actual narrative or supports a narrative so thin it might as well not be there.

But I’m not claiming that every game is a great work of art, or that games are possessed of the same creative gravitas as other, older mediums. Games as an art form have only really existed for three decades at this point, and they’re still growing by leaps and bounds and discovering new creative frontiers to explore. Some come close to the standards of other mediums, and you could argue that games like Bioshock, Far Cry 2 and the Fallout series deftly weave characters and plots into stories every bit as complex as any novel or film while presenting the player with lovingly rendered visual art and beautiful, evocative music. But that’s not a discussion I want to have here. What I want to do is call attention to the fact that the components of other mediums largely recognized by reasonable people as art compose the various segments of video games as a creative medium. Video games are distributed in a manner very similar to every other medium, spare more conventional, high priced art, and their status as consumable goods exists only inasmuch as it exists for novels, films and albums. To differentiate games from other artistic mediums requires a logical leap, one that people are comfortable making, one that serves no purpose but to erect a barrier against artistic expression. It isn’t the first time this has happened when a new medium emerged, and it won’t be the last, but it remains frustrating to see, and I hope that by picking it apart I can help to, in some small way, dismantle it and elevate the discussion past one of whether or not a genre constitutes art, and into the realm of the impact of that art.