Fantastic Blognanza!

This is the first in a series of posts about video games as art, with back-and-forth discussion between myself, Greg, John, and others. If anything in this is weird/lame, it’s because I was tired/delirious when I wrote it, and I posted it somewhere else first. Hope you like it, and I’d like to hear your own opinions on the matter, as well!

Video Games as Art

First of all, these are my biases and assumptions:
1. Creation ≠ Art
2. Aesthetics ≠ Art

I don’t have a good definition of either “art” or “video game,” but I have a semi-functional working knowledge of both.

Whenever I’ve finished a Book, I invariably shudder at the end. This, for me, is a sure sign that there is something about what I’ve just read that is amazing and that I’ve probably readjusted my Weltanschauung. It’s happened for me with film and music as well, but never with a video game. I’m not sure why this is, but I could hazard a few guesses:

1. I’ve never played a video game that expresses Emotion (or even the Human Condition, or an aspect of it) powerfully enough to make an impact.

2. I’ve never played a video game that makes anything more than a banal (often cursory, repetitive, and obvious, as well as making the theme explicit so early as to be tedious) commentary or criticism on the State of Things.

There is a single characteristic about video games that I feel would make it difficult to evaluate them on the level of such things as music or literature: they are not reviewable. To recapture any moment of (almost all) video games, it is necessary to play through the entire game up to and through that point, sometimes without even the guarantee that the exact situation you are expecting will occur. The unreviewable nature of video games leads me to make a prescription: MAKE VIDEO GAMES REVIEWABLE. Your entire progress through the game should be accessible (even without beating the game). I don’t know how this should be accomplished, but perhaps by creating some sort of “abridged” movie-like narrative. Certain battles can be cut out, e.g., instead of zooming into the battle as you saw it when you played, you would see your encounter with the enemy and that you won, unless the battle is thematically important, i.e., not a random encounter.

Some video games are more reviewable than others, especially those that run on computers, because the user can take an interest in documenting his/her progress through the game (cf. my picture log of The Secret of Monkey Island and Monkey Island 2: LeChuck’s Revenge). Nevertheless, this is easier after the player has acquired an intimate knowledge of the game, so as to be ready to take a screen capture of pivotal moments. There are, however, obvious problems with this method:

1. Video games are Interactive.
2. The experience of a video game is transitory.
3. Video games have sound.

None of the above three aspects of video games are captured adequately by the screen-capture method. I also can’t think of any way of incorporating 1 into any review method, save replaying the game (which is often immensely time-consuming).

Changing gears… there are three main factors that Shyon Baumann, a sociologist, uses to explain the public acceptance of a cultural product (like video games) as art:

1. Changing opportunity space, i.e., the appearance of competitors and substitutes and the formation of a group of high-status sponsors.

2. Institutionalization of resources and practices of production and consumption, e.g., reviewers, festivals, competitions, etc.

3. Grounding of artistic worth in a legitimating ideology, e.g., cultural capital (prestige) replacing economic capital for producers, intellectualization, etc.

These three factors are from Baumann’s “Intellectualization and Art World Development: Film in the United States;” it reminded me of Greg. You can find it here on JSTOR. I highly recommend it, and it’s not very long.

But anyway: I feel like it might be difficult for video games to accomplish 1, 2, and 3 above. For film, television was an easy substitute. Academies and competitive film festivals for 2. Film Study as a legitimate academic and intellectual activity for 3. I find 1 most difficult to comprehend for video games, since 2 and 3 are more likely to follow once 1 takes place.

What will come to take the place of video games? Will a genre, or a set of genres, or video games be an alternative? Are MMOs distinct enough to form an alternative such that other video games will have a higher status association? Since MMOs cost a lot of money to play, I can hardly imagine them gaining an association with lower classes; at the same time, because they take away so much time from fruitful endeavors (much the same as TV; the lower your parents’ job prestige, the more TV you watch, and the more TV you watch, the lower the prestige of your own job) – my point was, because MMOs take away so much time from fruitful endeavors, like makin’ moneys and readin’ newspapers and stuff, I doubt that they will be associated with the upper-middle classes+, either.

Greg’s initial response to all of this will come Monday, so stay tuned for exciting discussion! Also, I’d love to hear what you think.