On Games-As-Art

What is Meant By Games-As-Art, and What is This Blog Really Trying To Do?

When I first started this blog, I was look­ing for a quick way to sum­ma­rize what it was about.  “It’s a games-criticism blog,” is pretty accu­rate, I sup­pose, but what I wanted to con­vey was that mostly, this blog is less invested in whether or not a game is fun (though I like fun, don’t get me wrong), and more invested in whether or not a game is good art, and “games-criticism” didn’t quite con­vey that for me.  I set­tled on “games-as-art,” and I real­ized the other day that I’d done a bad thing by not prop­erly defin­ing my terms.

Games-as-art as a phrase is hardly unique to me, but when I first used it, I was think­ing of the way philoso­phers use the Latin word qua.  Qua lit­er­ally trans­lates to “as,” but it’s used in philo­soph­i­cal (and other aca­d­e­mic) cir­cles in a slightly more speci­fic man­ner.  Qua, in phi­los­o­phy, means some­thing more like “in the capac­ity of,” such that to talk about a chair qua chair is to talk about how a par­tic­u­lar chair func­tions in the capac­ity of chair­ness.  Thus, to talk about games qua art is to talk about how games func­tion as art– to talk about a par­tic­u­lar game qua art is to put aside how it func­tions as enter­tain­ment or escapism, and talk entirely about how it works as art.  So when I talk about “games-as-art,” that’s effec­tively what I mean.  I left out the Latin because I fig­ured we were already approach­ing dan­ger­ously high lev­els of pre­ten­sion as it was.

Thus, to talk about games-as-art is to talk about games through a fil­ter– a fil­ter which empha­sizes games’ artis­tic qual­i­ties and down­plays their other qual­i­ties.  This is why when I talk about Gears of War 2 through the lens of games-as-art, I tend to speak very harshly of it even though it’s one of my favorite games.

This is because there are plenty of other lenses one could use.  One can talk about games-as-games, and focus entirely on the func­tion­al­ity of their mechan­ics and ease of use.  One can talk about games-as-rhetorical-devices, and focus on games’ unique abil­i­ties to com­mu­ni­cate ideas through processes.  One can talk about games-as-fun, and focus entirely on how much peo­ple tend to enjoy a game.  One can talk about games-as-cultural-artifacts, or games-as-microcosms-of-reality or any num­ber of other things.

While I said above that to talk about games-as-art is to talk entirely about how games work as art, the bar­ri­ers between these lenses are a lit­tle vague.  Art is fre­quently rhetor­i­cal, and is usu­ally sup­posed to be at least a lit­tle bit of fun, etc.  Further, no one of these lenses is the “right way” to look at games.  Games are all of these things.  But what pri­mar­ily inter­ests me (though I’m inter­ested in all of the above) is games-as-art, so that’s mostly what I talk about here.

So, what is it to talk about games-as-art?  It is to look at games and look for expe­ri­ences of beauty, for social com­men­tary, or for ideas about the nature of the world.  It is to come to games with­out pre­con­cep­tions– not “this is what I want to play,” but “what do the artists want to show me?”  It is to engage seri­ously with the ideas behind every facet of game­play, and gen­er­ally to eval­u­ate them with cri­te­ria sim­i­lar to those that define the Meaningful Game.

The idea behind this blog is that it is a place for peo­ple to engage in seri­ous, in-depth, intel­lec­tual dis­cus­sion about video games, while still hope­fully remain­ing leg­i­ble to the layper­son.  The ques­tions I want to address here are “How do games work as art?” and “How can we make them bet­ter art?”

But those ques­tions, how­ever valu­able, raise another ques­tion that I have to address before I can deal with them.

Why Do We Care if Games Are Art?

One of the first things you’ll see in any forum dis­cus­sion about games-as-art is a post ques­tion­ing why we even care.  Why does this mat­ter?  Why are we so worked about it?  Why does it mat­ter what a bunch of non-gamers think about video games?  Can’t games just be fun and still worth­while with­out also being some sort of pre­ten­tious, “art?”

There are a num­ber of answers to this ques­tion, and like most ques­tions, there are nor­ma­tive and descrip­tive answers.  Why folks like me and my friends do, descrip­tively, care about games-as-art may not be the same as why we should, nor­ma­tively, do so.  So I’ll attempt to give two descrip­tive answers for why a lot of peo­ple prob­a­bly do care, and then move on to at least one good rea­son why we should care.

Answer One: We Seek Societal Legitimacy

One of the first rea­sons many gamers are so quick to leap to the defense of games-as-art is that we feel a psy­cho­log­i­cal need to jus­tify our behav­ior as some­how mature, worth­while, and, per­haps most impor­tantly, adult.  As the phrase “video games” still, in many folks’ minds, means “chil­drens’ toys,” those of us who are adult gamers want to dis­tance our­selves away from the image of child­ish­ness.

Many of us gamers spend a great deal of time play­ing video games, and we are not just 15-year-old layabouts or basement-dwelling col­lege dropouts, either.  Plenty of hap­pily mar­ried mid-30s folks with respectable jobs and 2.3 chil­dren play a lot of video games in their spare time, and no one wants to be seen as the weirdo who still plays with toys.  We seek legit­i­macy, the abil­ity to say “I’m a gamer” with­out being shunned, and so we argue that games aren’t sim­ply toys or enter­tain­ment, they are art.

If video games are art, then by play­ing 25 hours a week of World of Warcraft, I am not just screw­ing around or play­ing with imag­i­nary friends.  I am engaged in artis­tic activ­ity.  In fact, you should be impressed, just as if I spent 25 hours a week read­ing lit­er­a­ture, or 25 hours a week going to art shows.  If games are art, we feel that our behav­ior, our hobby and our lifestyle can be some­how legit­imized.

This is silly and dis­hon­est.  Games don’t have to be art to be worth­while.  Plenty of art isn’t very worth­while, and plenty of games that don’t much seem to be art are still widely regarded as excel­lent uses of one’s time.  Furthermore, the same per­son who dis­ap­proves of your 25-hour part-time job play­ing World of Warcraft isn’t likely to be impressed by the dis­tinc­tion.  He or she would prob­a­bly find you “weird” if you spent 25 hours a week read­ing high lit­er­a­ture, too.  An argu­ment for games’ legit­i­macy as valu­able and worth­while expenses of time and money does not require that games can be art, and the two dis­cus­sions ought to be kept wholly sep­a­rate.

Answer Two: We Want to be Different From Those People

The blood of a great many pix­els has been spilled of late to power dis­cus­sion sur­round­ing the term “gamer.”  Some folks think the term should go away, argu­ing that it serves as an arti­fi­cial line divid­ing “nor­mal peo­ple,” from “gamers,” and these folks argue that the word per­pet­u­ates neg­a­tive stereo­types about peo­ple who play games.  The stereo­type to which they refer is that of the socially-inept, vio­lent, aggres­sive, younger guy who does naught but play video games all day, who will never amount to any­thing or con­tribute any­thing to soci­ety.

There are many of us who play a lot of video games who would really prefer not to be asso­ci­ated with that stereo­type, the more so because there are a lot of very vocal peo­ple who seem to fit it to a T.  Anyone who has ever spent much time on the Internet or in an actual online game, knows that there are a myr­iad of obnox­ious, foul-mouthed, appar­ently vio­lently racist and/or homo­pho­bic and/or sex­ist folks out there that call them­selves gamers.  These are the sorts of folks that threat­ened Courtney Stanton’s life when she went after Penny Arcade, the sort of folks that have gamertags like xXl337FagKillerXx.  These are the sorts of folks that try as hard as they can to alien­ate and harass every sin­gle other per­son in the cha­t­room or server.

And those of us who aren’t that obnox­ious really, really, really want noth­ing to do with them.

So, we try to use every tool at our dis­posal to draw a line between us and those peo­ple.  We try to get rid of the word “gamer.”  We try to cre­ate places for intel­li­gent dis­course of games, where ram­pant trolling and hate speech isn’t allowed.  We try to openly and vocally behave like decent human beings.  And we try to use games-as-art to act as a divid­ing line.

See, xX1337FagKillerXx up there isn’t ter­ri­bly likely to care about games-as-art.  He plays games for any num­ber of rea­sons, but they usu­ally are more about dom­i­nance or aggres­sion or escapism, and not so much about mature nar­ra­tive or beauty.  So, we try to talk about games-as-art to draw a line in the sand, and to hope­fully iden­tify our­selves as the sort of peo­ple who care about that sort of thing.  We’re man­darins, we say, as we sip Chardonnay, read sec­tions of Dostoyevsky and then play BioShock.  We play games as art, not as enter­tain­ment.

This is under­stand­able.  But there are two prob­lems with this: in the first place, the way to deal with xXL337FagKillerXx is to ban him from your forums and ignore him when you can’t do that.  Actively try­ing to wall off an area for him and his ilk is bad because there is sim­ply no place where behav­ing like a child­ish brat is accept­able.  This leads me to the sec­ond prob­lem: there is noth­ing wrong with play­ing games for rea­sons other than their artis­tic merit.

To sug­gest that the smart peo­ple play games-as-art is to sug­gest that only the imbe­ciles play games-as-entertainment or games-as-whatever, which is a prob­lem, because there’s noth­ing wrong with play­ing games for enter­tain­ment pur­poses.  The same per­son who can truly under­stand and appre­ci­ate the com­plex nar­ra­tive of Torment or the philo­soph­i­cal ques­tions raised by BioShock can also really enjoy play­ing a round of Super Smash Brothers or Gears of War.  And that’s how it should be, for the same rea­son that a real cinephile can truly appre­ci­ate the great works of film while still enjoy­ing a good old sum­mer block­buster.  To draw ran­dom lines in the sand is point­less and more than a lit­tle elit­ist.  The point about games-as-art is not that it gives mature gamers some­thing to talk about, it’s that games can be art.

Answer Three: We Want To Experience Better Art

We ought to care about games-as-art not so we can feel bet­ter about our­selves or dis­as­so­ci­ate our­selves from repro­bates, but so we can fos­ter the devel­op­ment and growth of a new artis­tic medium.

Stripped of all the crit­i­cism, all the fan­dom, all the soci­o­log­i­cal stud­ies, art is beau­ti­ful, fas­ci­nat­ing, and worth our time.  We want to expe­ri­ence art, and to encour­age its cre­ation and devel­op­ment.  We should care about soci­etal recog­ni­tion of games-as-art because it will allow game-developers the resources and respectabil­ity nec­es­sary to pro­duce truly great works of art.  The devel­op­ment of art does not hap­pen in a vac­uum, and the devel­op­ment of video games tends to be very, very expen­sive.

It is very hard to con­vince a com­pany to sink an extra $5 mil­lion into a game to make it bet­ter art unless there is good rea­son to believe that the com­mu­nity cares about the qual­ity of a game’s art.  This isn’t self­ish­ness or vice or greed, it’s per­fectly rea­son­able.  The best way to show com­pa­nies and artists that we want them to make more and bet­ter art is by talk­ing about games-as-art.

Art needs crit­i­cism and dis­cus­sion to flour­ish.  Some have sug­gested that the whole pur­pose of art is the changes it makes in the observer, the dis­cus­sions that it engen­ders between friends and col­leagues.  So, why should we keep car­ing about video games as art?  Why should we talk about them so much?

Because we want to encour­age the artists to make bet­ter works of art.  Because we want to expe­ri­ence good art.  Because we have seen in video games the oppor­tu­nity for new and excit­ing ways to com­mu­ni­cate beauty and enrich our knowl­edge of the human con­di­tion.

Conclusion

Games can be art, and dis­cus­sion of games-as-art will help both the medium and our­selves.  If we crit­i­cize, poke, prod, inves­ti­gate, talk about and think about games, we will help the medium develop, help it flour­ish and grow into some­thing truly won­der­ful and truly respectable.  This, in turn, will allow us to expe­ri­ence bet­ter and bet­ter art, enrich­ing our own lives and mak­ing us bet­ter peo­ple.