Have videogames reached artistic status?
Posted: Sat Dec 10, 2005 12:08 am
I don't know how many of you go to Roger Ebert's website (rogerebert.com), but apparently he's received quite a lot of flak lately for making some criticisms of games not being up to the standard of other artforms such as literature or film. He's received many responses of all different viewpoints in said argument. Below are several of the comments I found most interesting.
I have been playing video games since I can remember. I have a college education and work in the computer field…. The video game business is a multi-billion dollar industry with many well known and reputable learning institutes offering BA degrees in the video game field. You have NO idea what is involved in actually developing a video game. “Final Fantasy VII” and “Castlevania Symphony of the Night” are just a few games that set standards for all future games to come, and with technology evolving, games will continue to offer great story content, amazing cinematic sequences and quality music.
Movies like “Field of Dreams” and “Glory” have a great story line and presentation. Games like “Metal Gear Solid” have a great story line and presentation, and actually allow you to take the role of a character, which in doing so allows the user to become emotionally attached to game content. This is an experience that a movie cannot offer because a movie allows you to watch a role of a character as events unfold, unlike with a game, where you actually take the role of a character and make decisions which determine how the story unfolds. Games like “Metal Gear Solid” display the amazing talent that is equipped by the game's developers which consist from story to game play to graphics and much, much more.
software developer,
Saul Ortiz
---
I'm an associate producer at one of the larger game companies and I came upon the article by reading some bloggers' responses. I figured I would write directly to you, however, because I believe you're absolutely right.
My favorite film is Kurosawa's “Ran,” and no -- no video game has come anywhere close. Why not? There is the industry: the game industry is adverse to exploration and experimentation (much more so than movie studios); there is no formal system in place for recognizing and developing upcoming talent; and arguably, games cannot capture real truths of the human condition because nobody over 40 makes them.
Then there are the challenges of the medium: games cannot be didactic, because they offer choice and interactivity. Many games have a "story," but this is either a story set in stone, and nothing you actually do changes it (thus rendering player participation mostly pointless), or it allows you to see one of, say, three different endings, each of which has to be as plausible as the other. I don't think a real solution to this has yet been found.
Which is not to say that I don't think games could eventually grow into
their own as a real artistic medium... but no, it has not happened yet.
---
From a column by Joe Keiser at Next Generation, headlined “Why Ebert was Right”:
… I would argue that the issue is based more on the structure of game creation and the overarching belief in genre – that stories currently told in games are not being told for the sake of telling them, and are instead simple tropes that exist as one required piece of an established genre.
It’s important to note that most games, as a result of not actually existing to tell a story, give up some authorial control to the player. This is not structural; this is a choice on the part of the creators to, say, emphasize visceral thrills or strategic thinking. Many movies do this too, though the nature of film forces a greater amount of story upon them….
A storytelling game should give the illusion of control, the idea that you can do anything, while at the same time putting the idea in the player’s mind that they want to do a specific thing. The artful game creator can use the mindset of the player as a tool to make a story progress in an exacting manner. The advantages of telling a story in such a way can be great – many people feel that the interactivity, the mentality of “being there,” can make a story more impactful to them, and I’d go as far to say that this interactivity can help mitigate the tiny structural losses that can occur to player. It can create a close, almost schizophrenic relationship between the player of the game and the protagonist of the story – an extremely interesting relationship that cannot be reproduced in any other medium.
While the results are not up to par at the moment, there is no inherent inferiority here. There are no structural problems, no loss of control. What is there is potential to speak to people who are not spoken to by great drama or great literature – anyone who’s gone to high school knows that there are a great many people like that. Video games are a young medium, and there are people working every day to work out the problems like the one Ebert is concerned with, but to write it off at this point is to not give it a chance.
---
Please don't delete this right away, once you read the first paragraph and think, “Aw no, another badly spelled series of base insults.”
Two quotes, and a few lines, that's all. First quote, a really recent one:
"I did indeed consider videogames inherently inferior to film and literature. There is a structural reason for that: Videogames by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control." --Roger Ebert
Second quote, made half a year ago:
"It's bemusing why games are always compared either film or the novel, as if they were the only art-forms worth mentioning. Why aren't games compared to -- say -- dance or architecture, which are equally accepted as art forms and don't operate anything like the silver screen or the printed word?
This form of inferiority complex has always been endemic in any new cultural form. Last year, I finally got around to reading Aristotle's Poetics and was charmed to discover that large sections involve Ari discussing the relative merits between the new-kid Tragedy versus the established form of Epic Verse. He cites other critics who argue that Tragedy, featuring vulgar elements such as singing and creating works of hugely less scale, is a lesser form than the traditional Epic Verse. Aristotle plays it cute, arguing what they've analyzed as weaknesses are in fact strengths, allowing Tragedy to move people in ways Epic Verse simply can't.
I think he missed a trick in his determination to prove one superior to the other, however. Rather than being a competition where one must triumph, the real situation is that Epic Verse succeeds in different things in different ways than does Tragedy. That's all. In other words, things in ancient Greece were exactly as they are now. The new forms are judged according to the standards of the old forms, and found wanting, until someone notes that while the new form may not excel in one area, it far exceeds the old in others." -- Kieron Gillen ( http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/1/7 )
Please sir, don't be too focused, and try and look outside your medium. Games might not be so good at being a totally audience-passive thing, but film is not as good at being a cooperative event as games (not just videogames) are. Film might be better at telling a set narrative than sculpture, but film fails totally at being a real, three dimensional, solid, tactile object as sculpture can be. Film might be better at visualizing a world than novels, but fails at allowing the viewer to go inside the character's head as well as prose does. No medium combines space and time as well as sequential art does.
There are merits and limitations to any medium. And art is an abstract concept where no one can totally agree on with anyone else in the same way.
And at the end here, I can't resist this one quote by Douglas Adams:
“Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”
Oh, I'll skip the bit about how most movies these days aren't exactly art by anyone's opinion.
Simon van Alphen
---
All this hullabaloo about video games. I play them. I enjoy them. They have their place as a form of entertainment, more like sport than art.
This is not to say that the people who create the projects are not artists. But the experience of playing a game is more about fast twitch muscles and the speed of your neurons.
One thing of note that must be said. In “Gamers fire flaming posts, e-mails...,“ the point is brought up several times (and I’m paraphrasing here) that “games are a billion dollar industry” or “they make more money than movies” etc. When did we start measuring merit in dollars? To be fair, one could ask the movie industry the same question. But honestly, there is another billion dollar industry in the United States that I wouldn’t consider art: pornography. Although, I guess the case could be made that it is an interactive form of entertainment as well.
Phil Thompson
Fort Collins, Co.
---
I hold a Ph.D. I am a professor of philosophy. I have also played videogames since Pong, and have played most of them on most of the systems over the last 30 years. I still adore them and spend too much time playing them. I am about to play one now. But to call them art along the lines of literature, architecture, dance, theater, movies, sculpture, photography, or any other generally accepted art form is risible.
The level of writing and number of solecisms in the letters of the defenders of videogames (VGs) should serve to as a prima facie vindication of Mr Ebert's view. Moreover, the defenders of VGs doth protest too much, methinks. But we can say more.
Videogames may be difficult to make, requiring great thought, skill, planning, and care, but so is an armoire made of okra. That doesn't make either one art. VGs may be entertaining, escapist, enjoyable, and absorbing, but so is masturbation, and that doesn't make either one art. What art does that VGs do not, and probably never will, is edify and ennoble (even in the form of subversion). Moreover, and as a result, art endures. We are reading Cervantes and Goethe, performing Shakespeare and Moliere, and listening to Mozart and Beethoven hundreds of years after their works were created, with no end in sight. We aren't playing NES games 20 years after their creation. Indeed, they weren't being played 5 years after their creation. My garage is full of old videogame systems that will never be turned on again simply because new and better systems have come along. By contrast, when you buy a Chagall painting, you don't throw away your Van Gogh.
Videogames, as the name vaguely suggests, are GAMES. Games are not art, unless tennis, chess, bridge, and Monopoly are art as well. So why don't we just enjoy the great games out there and not try to make them into something they're not just to assuage the guilt we feel for letting them take up so much of our time, or to aggrandize ourselves for engaging in such a putatively lofty pursuit?
Best regards,
Dr Barton Odom
Adjunct Professor of Philosophy
Tarleton State University
Stephenville, TX
---
Just to chime in late on the gaming/art debate, I should point out that gaming might actually be compared to some forms of contemporary poetry. The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, for instance, denied that it was necessary for the author to control the semantic exchange that is ostensibly inherent to literature, and developed increasingly challenging ways of undermining the communicability and emotive value of language and literature. In a lot of contemporary poetry, then, it is not a representation of beauty or feeling that is meant to motivate reading, but rather the realization that a reading and a mis-reading are equally possible and equally valid.
Contrary to Roger Ebert's suggestion that real art is predicated on "authorial control" (which can never be complete, and always leaves room for resistance), several of fiction and poetry's most stirring and provocative recent works have denied the possibility of such control altogether (with varying degrees of success, of course). The inability of any medium and any communicator to ever have true authorial control and prevent his/her audience from playing with their meanings as if their art were a video game is, in fact, one of the most basic conclusions that follows from Derrida and deconstruction.
I would also hasten to add that, in a rather humorous inversion of the suggestion that video games need to take inspiration from the art forms of literature or film, several excellent poets write poetry that draws from or is based on video games -- Charles Bernstein, Christian Bok, and Darren Wershler-Henry come to mind immediately.
Neil Shyminsky
Toronto, Ontario
---
I personally have mixed feelings in this discussion. On one hand, games are often much more imaginative than films, simply because they aren't confined to reality. Developers can take any implausible idea, and make it work within a game. You're never going to see Katamari Damacy made into a movie, because it just wouldn't work.
But despite the level of creativity found within the industry, I still don't think games reach the emotional level that both film and literature do. I'm sure games could reach that level, but it would be pointless for them to do so. Games are only about entertainment. That's the sole reason behind their creation. As long as they can keep you entertained with whatever tasks they've given you to accomplish, that's all that matters. Film and literature are passive artforms. They're not necessarily created to entertain, nor are they necessarily made to benefit anyone but the people who created them.
Normally, game developers who desire to make story a more integral part of their games -- such as Kojima -- are still forced to do so using cinematic conventions. Does plot or character development usually occur within the game itself? No. It occurs through cutscenes and other non-interactive methods instead. Half-Life is one of the only games I can think of that completely immerses the player in its world and story in a way that's only possible in games (at least as far as interactivity is concerned).
Another reason I think games fail at being art is because the media is constantly evolving, even moreso than movies have over the years. Developers seem more concerned with the technical possibilities of game creation, rather than artistic possibilities. Developers seem to believe that player-immersion in games comes more from photo-realistic graphics than it does from well-developed characters and storylines. This is largely the reason why games do become so outdated over such a relatively short period of time.
Well, that's my opinion. Now if anyone else has an opinion they'd like to express, let me hear it.
I have been playing video games since I can remember. I have a college education and work in the computer field…. The video game business is a multi-billion dollar industry with many well known and reputable learning institutes offering BA degrees in the video game field. You have NO idea what is involved in actually developing a video game. “Final Fantasy VII” and “Castlevania Symphony of the Night” are just a few games that set standards for all future games to come, and with technology evolving, games will continue to offer great story content, amazing cinematic sequences and quality music.
Movies like “Field of Dreams” and “Glory” have a great story line and presentation. Games like “Metal Gear Solid” have a great story line and presentation, and actually allow you to take the role of a character, which in doing so allows the user to become emotionally attached to game content. This is an experience that a movie cannot offer because a movie allows you to watch a role of a character as events unfold, unlike with a game, where you actually take the role of a character and make decisions which determine how the story unfolds. Games like “Metal Gear Solid” display the amazing talent that is equipped by the game's developers which consist from story to game play to graphics and much, much more.
software developer,
Saul Ortiz
---
I'm an associate producer at one of the larger game companies and I came upon the article by reading some bloggers' responses. I figured I would write directly to you, however, because I believe you're absolutely right.
My favorite film is Kurosawa's “Ran,” and no -- no video game has come anywhere close. Why not? There is the industry: the game industry is adverse to exploration and experimentation (much more so than movie studios); there is no formal system in place for recognizing and developing upcoming talent; and arguably, games cannot capture real truths of the human condition because nobody over 40 makes them.
Then there are the challenges of the medium: games cannot be didactic, because they offer choice and interactivity. Many games have a "story," but this is either a story set in stone, and nothing you actually do changes it (thus rendering player participation mostly pointless), or it allows you to see one of, say, three different endings, each of which has to be as plausible as the other. I don't think a real solution to this has yet been found.
Which is not to say that I don't think games could eventually grow into
their own as a real artistic medium... but no, it has not happened yet.
---
From a column by Joe Keiser at Next Generation, headlined “Why Ebert was Right”:
… I would argue that the issue is based more on the structure of game creation and the overarching belief in genre – that stories currently told in games are not being told for the sake of telling them, and are instead simple tropes that exist as one required piece of an established genre.
It’s important to note that most games, as a result of not actually existing to tell a story, give up some authorial control to the player. This is not structural; this is a choice on the part of the creators to, say, emphasize visceral thrills or strategic thinking. Many movies do this too, though the nature of film forces a greater amount of story upon them….
A storytelling game should give the illusion of control, the idea that you can do anything, while at the same time putting the idea in the player’s mind that they want to do a specific thing. The artful game creator can use the mindset of the player as a tool to make a story progress in an exacting manner. The advantages of telling a story in such a way can be great – many people feel that the interactivity, the mentality of “being there,” can make a story more impactful to them, and I’d go as far to say that this interactivity can help mitigate the tiny structural losses that can occur to player. It can create a close, almost schizophrenic relationship between the player of the game and the protagonist of the story – an extremely interesting relationship that cannot be reproduced in any other medium.
While the results are not up to par at the moment, there is no inherent inferiority here. There are no structural problems, no loss of control. What is there is potential to speak to people who are not spoken to by great drama or great literature – anyone who’s gone to high school knows that there are a great many people like that. Video games are a young medium, and there are people working every day to work out the problems like the one Ebert is concerned with, but to write it off at this point is to not give it a chance.
---
Please don't delete this right away, once you read the first paragraph and think, “Aw no, another badly spelled series of base insults.”
Two quotes, and a few lines, that's all. First quote, a really recent one:
"I did indeed consider videogames inherently inferior to film and literature. There is a structural reason for that: Videogames by their nature require player choices, which is the opposite of the strategy of serious film and literature, which requires authorial control." --Roger Ebert
Second quote, made half a year ago:
"It's bemusing why games are always compared either film or the novel, as if they were the only art-forms worth mentioning. Why aren't games compared to -- say -- dance or architecture, which are equally accepted as art forms and don't operate anything like the silver screen or the printed word?
This form of inferiority complex has always been endemic in any new cultural form. Last year, I finally got around to reading Aristotle's Poetics and was charmed to discover that large sections involve Ari discussing the relative merits between the new-kid Tragedy versus the established form of Epic Verse. He cites other critics who argue that Tragedy, featuring vulgar elements such as singing and creating works of hugely less scale, is a lesser form than the traditional Epic Verse. Aristotle plays it cute, arguing what they've analyzed as weaknesses are in fact strengths, allowing Tragedy to move people in ways Epic Verse simply can't.
I think he missed a trick in his determination to prove one superior to the other, however. Rather than being a competition where one must triumph, the real situation is that Epic Verse succeeds in different things in different ways than does Tragedy. That's all. In other words, things in ancient Greece were exactly as they are now. The new forms are judged according to the standards of the old forms, and found wanting, until someone notes that while the new form may not excel in one area, it far exceeds the old in others." -- Kieron Gillen ( http://www.escapistmagazine.com/issue/1/7 )
Please sir, don't be too focused, and try and look outside your medium. Games might not be so good at being a totally audience-passive thing, but film is not as good at being a cooperative event as games (not just videogames) are. Film might be better at telling a set narrative than sculpture, but film fails totally at being a real, three dimensional, solid, tactile object as sculpture can be. Film might be better at visualizing a world than novels, but fails at allowing the viewer to go inside the character's head as well as prose does. No medium combines space and time as well as sequential art does.
There are merits and limitations to any medium. And art is an abstract concept where no one can totally agree on with anyone else in the same way.
And at the end here, I can't resist this one quote by Douglas Adams:
“Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.”
Oh, I'll skip the bit about how most movies these days aren't exactly art by anyone's opinion.
Simon van Alphen
---
All this hullabaloo about video games. I play them. I enjoy them. They have their place as a form of entertainment, more like sport than art.
This is not to say that the people who create the projects are not artists. But the experience of playing a game is more about fast twitch muscles and the speed of your neurons.
One thing of note that must be said. In “Gamers fire flaming posts, e-mails...,“ the point is brought up several times (and I’m paraphrasing here) that “games are a billion dollar industry” or “they make more money than movies” etc. When did we start measuring merit in dollars? To be fair, one could ask the movie industry the same question. But honestly, there is another billion dollar industry in the United States that I wouldn’t consider art: pornography. Although, I guess the case could be made that it is an interactive form of entertainment as well.
Phil Thompson
Fort Collins, Co.
---
I hold a Ph.D. I am a professor of philosophy. I have also played videogames since Pong, and have played most of them on most of the systems over the last 30 years. I still adore them and spend too much time playing them. I am about to play one now. But to call them art along the lines of literature, architecture, dance, theater, movies, sculpture, photography, or any other generally accepted art form is risible.
The level of writing and number of solecisms in the letters of the defenders of videogames (VGs) should serve to as a prima facie vindication of Mr Ebert's view. Moreover, the defenders of VGs doth protest too much, methinks. But we can say more.
Videogames may be difficult to make, requiring great thought, skill, planning, and care, but so is an armoire made of okra. That doesn't make either one art. VGs may be entertaining, escapist, enjoyable, and absorbing, but so is masturbation, and that doesn't make either one art. What art does that VGs do not, and probably never will, is edify and ennoble (even in the form of subversion). Moreover, and as a result, art endures. We are reading Cervantes and Goethe, performing Shakespeare and Moliere, and listening to Mozart and Beethoven hundreds of years after their works were created, with no end in sight. We aren't playing NES games 20 years after their creation. Indeed, they weren't being played 5 years after their creation. My garage is full of old videogame systems that will never be turned on again simply because new and better systems have come along. By contrast, when you buy a Chagall painting, you don't throw away your Van Gogh.
Videogames, as the name vaguely suggests, are GAMES. Games are not art, unless tennis, chess, bridge, and Monopoly are art as well. So why don't we just enjoy the great games out there and not try to make them into something they're not just to assuage the guilt we feel for letting them take up so much of our time, or to aggrandize ourselves for engaging in such a putatively lofty pursuit?
Best regards,
Dr Barton Odom
Adjunct Professor of Philosophy
Tarleton State University
Stephenville, TX
---
Just to chime in late on the gaming/art debate, I should point out that gaming might actually be compared to some forms of contemporary poetry. The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, for instance, denied that it was necessary for the author to control the semantic exchange that is ostensibly inherent to literature, and developed increasingly challenging ways of undermining the communicability and emotive value of language and literature. In a lot of contemporary poetry, then, it is not a representation of beauty or feeling that is meant to motivate reading, but rather the realization that a reading and a mis-reading are equally possible and equally valid.
Contrary to Roger Ebert's suggestion that real art is predicated on "authorial control" (which can never be complete, and always leaves room for resistance), several of fiction and poetry's most stirring and provocative recent works have denied the possibility of such control altogether (with varying degrees of success, of course). The inability of any medium and any communicator to ever have true authorial control and prevent his/her audience from playing with their meanings as if their art were a video game is, in fact, one of the most basic conclusions that follows from Derrida and deconstruction.
I would also hasten to add that, in a rather humorous inversion of the suggestion that video games need to take inspiration from the art forms of literature or film, several excellent poets write poetry that draws from or is based on video games -- Charles Bernstein, Christian Bok, and Darren Wershler-Henry come to mind immediately.
Neil Shyminsky
Toronto, Ontario
---
I personally have mixed feelings in this discussion. On one hand, games are often much more imaginative than films, simply because they aren't confined to reality. Developers can take any implausible idea, and make it work within a game. You're never going to see Katamari Damacy made into a movie, because it just wouldn't work.
But despite the level of creativity found within the industry, I still don't think games reach the emotional level that both film and literature do. I'm sure games could reach that level, but it would be pointless for them to do so. Games are only about entertainment. That's the sole reason behind their creation. As long as they can keep you entertained with whatever tasks they've given you to accomplish, that's all that matters. Film and literature are passive artforms. They're not necessarily created to entertain, nor are they necessarily made to benefit anyone but the people who created them.
Normally, game developers who desire to make story a more integral part of their games -- such as Kojima -- are still forced to do so using cinematic conventions. Does plot or character development usually occur within the game itself? No. It occurs through cutscenes and other non-interactive methods instead. Half-Life is one of the only games I can think of that completely immerses the player in its world and story in a way that's only possible in games (at least as far as interactivity is concerned).
Another reason I think games fail at being art is because the media is constantly evolving, even moreso than movies have over the years. Developers seem more concerned with the technical possibilities of game creation, rather than artistic possibilities. Developers seem to believe that player-immersion in games comes more from photo-realistic graphics than it does from well-developed characters and storylines. This is largely the reason why games do become so outdated over such a relatively short period of time.
Well, that's my opinion. Now if anyone else has an opinion they'd like to express, let me hear it.