Video Games as Art: A Proposition

At the end of the post I did a month ago on video game addiction, I left an opening for future posts on the subjects of whether gaming is healthy and whether games are art. As it happens, this past week has presented an ideal context to address the second question, as famed film critic Roger Ebert posted a substantive rebuttal to a talk claiming the mantle of art for gaming. Ebert's critique builds off of an earlier exchange on the topic between himself and Clive Barker (yes, the one you're thinking of), and his position is stated boldly in the title of his latest post: video games can never be art. I won't link to any of the responses from gaming press and enthusiasts, but suffice it to say they range from polite engagement to petulant dismissal and none (that I've read) agree with Ebert.

I do agree with him, and I think that it would benefit the status of gaming as a cultural phenomenon immensely if more people immersed in gaming did, too. The essence of Ebert's case against gaming as an art form rests on two related observations. The first, which invokes the tradition of auteur theory in film criticism, notes that video games as an experience are not generally the product of a singular creative vision (i.e. there's no 'artist' whose work one can be said to be taking in while playing a game). The second observation, which is connected to the first one, is that games are ill-suited to producing emotional or intellectual insights about the human condition, which he states most explicitly as part of his 2007 reply to Barker:

(T)he real question is, do we as their consumers become more or less complex, thoughtful, insightful, witty, empathetic, intelligent, philosophical (and so on) by experiencing them?

Ebert openly admits that the vast majority of ostensibly artistic works, including those in his favored medium, fail to clear this bar, but contends that for the reasons summarized above, no video game will ever make the cut.

The typical response to Ebert from gaming aficionados usually centers on two points: (a) the subjectivity and malleability of how one defines"art" and (b) the fact that gaming is in its relative infancy and no one can tell what the future of the medium will hold. I'm not going to engage these contentions because I find (a) to be tedious and pedantic and (b) to be impossible to discuss in any informed way, because time, not argument, will settle the score.

In fact, in agreeing with Ebert, I'm going to sidestep the particulars of the debate entirely and instead attack the underlying assumption behind it. As a jumping off-point, I want to expand on a point Ebert makes in the closing paragraphs of his most recent post:

"Why aren't gamers content to play their games and simply enjoy themselves? They have my blessing, not that they care. Do they require validation? In defending their gaming against parents, spouses, children, partners, co-workers or other critics, do they want to be able to look up from the screen and explain, "I'm studying a great form of art?""

To put it simply: pretty much. I'd venture that the average adult hardcore gamer who feels that he (or possibly she, but let's be real about the demographics here) has skin in the "are games art" debate is motivated at least in part by defensiveness over a lifetime of having their enthusiasm dismissed as childish. I think this is more of a human trait rather than something specific to gamers, although male nerds of all stripes seem more susceptible to it - consider the type of person who insists he's reading graphic novels, not comic books. There's a very strong, but mostly unspoken, rule in our culture that things which we do to Improve Ourselves are fundamentally superior to things we do just because we like to. The definition offered by Ebert that I excerpted above pretty much states that art and self-improvement are inseparable from one another, and all semantic debates aside, I think that tracks fairly well with the views of most people.

This idea regarding the preferability of Improving Ourselves, when filtered through the intense moralistic streak that somehow manages to simultaneously be both one of American culture's greatest strengths and one of it's greatest weaknesses, inevitably comes out as the idea that we should constantly be Improving, and should never consider passing on the opportunity to do so. Ask a gamer if any of these statements sound familiar:

"How can you waste the day inside playing video games when it's so beautiful out?"
"Why would you play Guitar Hero when you could be learning how to play real guitar?"
"Why don't you get together with your friends and do something, instead of just playing video games?"

I've played a lot of video games, and barring some sort of thumb incapacitating incident in the near future, I'll probably play a lot more. To answer Ebert's challenge, no video game has given me any sort of experience that has expanded me intellectually, emotionally, or culturally. I am perfectly OK with this, because I never picked up a controller expecting anything like that. I have many other sources of acculturation and learning in my life that more than compensate. What's more: with the time I've spent playing video games, I almost certainly could have learned another language, read more great literature, and cultivated a unique and interesting hobby of some sort. I chose to play video games instead, and I'm not sorry about that. I like playing video games, and that's a good enough reason for me to do it. It ought to be a good enough reason for anybody to do anything in their leisure time.

I understand the impulse to go on the defensive and try and stick games with the tag of "art" thus marking them as something with the potential to fulfill the holy task of Improving Ourselves, but it's the wrong path. Instead, I want to see some pushback against this idea that there's a moral obligation to maximizing our exposure to things designed to Improve Ourselves and that we should feel guilty about choosing to do things simply because we find them pleasurable. I want to be clear that this isn't about making different choices - we pretty much wind up doing the things we find pleasurable regardless of how anyone feels about them - but about consciously stating that our choices in entertainment, whether they be video games, watching pornography, or knitting, don't need to be transformative or Important to be worthy of respect. And I think we should get started on this before somebody decides to fuck around and try to make the Un Chien Andalou of games in an attempt to prove Ebert wrong, because I definitely don't want to play that shit.