I have heard this question repeated in podcasts, random rhetoric, online articles and in conversations amongst friends. This is very much an open ended and debatable question to which has equal amounts of proponents on either side. On the one hand you have your traditional neo-classical intellectuals who maintain that in order to appreciate art, it must be in a traditional medium which can be appreciated and explained. On the other hand stands the Avant-garde of modern media, casually referred to as gamers, who believe that their everyday hobby is something to be appreciated as more than just a series of noughts and ones.
What is Art?
A predictable start would be to define what art is. Immanuel Kant once defined art as:
“a kind of representation that is purposive in itself and, though without an end, nevertheless promotes the cultivation of the mental powers for sociable communication”.
Other traditional advocates of art might define it as:
Human effort to imitate, supplement, alter, or counteract the work of nature.
My personal definition of art is that it is a means to which an individual can create and express himself, his ideas or his emotions to people. That is my own personal opinion and whatever your definition of art can ultimately sway you in one direction or another in this little debate of mine. Therefore the next logical step is to argue, can the creator of a video game really express himself through this medium? Can he “promote the cultivation of the mental powers for sociable communication”? Can he “imitate, supplement, alter or counteract the work of nature”? Well in my opinion, I don’t see why ever should he not.
However to compare video games to “art” is almost like comparing David Beckham to American Basketball or Metallica to Opera. I think the easiest means to do a comparison is if I relate specifically to the medium of traditional physical art like paintings and drawings as well as to more modern forms of art such as film and the cinema.
There are no meaning or emotion to Video Games
Supporters of traditional art will argue that there is no meaning or emotion in video games. What you see is what you play in front of you. It is not something that is presented to you like a film or a piece of music but played on controllers, mechanical keyboards and mice. I argue how much meaning and emotion can be elicited from the painting just below of the house on the prairie?
Many people regard this as fine art. They perceive this as a skilful representation of what the artist saw and decided to illustrate. But just how many levels of thought and emotion can be taken from this piece of art if for example no context has been added to it. To me and a good portion of you, this really does just look like an image of a farmhouse and does not elicit any emotion response.
And so I ask you this, do you believe that video games can’t have emotion or meaning to it? If so then allow me to point in the direction of a title that some of you may know called “Flower”. This game was released for the Playstation platform in 2009 and was designed by a Chinese designer called Jenova Chen. If you’ve never seen or heard of the game then have a look at the embedded video of the game in action.
Flower is a game whereby the user takes control of a breeze of wind and the aim really is to explore the environment of the game picking up petals as you go along. Jenova Chen the “artist” of this game emigrated from the urban metropolis that was Shanghai in China over to California and into a rural environment. He’d never experienced the vastness of hillscapes and fields that had now come upon him and in time grew to miss his old life back in Shanghai. The gamer experiences this expression of Jenova’s emotion and so the video game takes them on a journey where like Jenova, you try to find a balance between the two worlds and a means to have the two together. Jenova’s life experiences helped to create a game that was representative of how he felt just as a painter or a composer or a director creates a piece of art to represent the emotions they want to convey. The musical score to the game was composed by Vincent Diamente and was intentionally scored to invoke an emotional response from the player at certain key points in the game. I believe that gamers can be led into an emotional connection with the video game if such a thing is intended.
Going in the opposite direction though, video games can make a gamer react in a negative manner. I take the example from the latest “Modern Warfare” video game. The controversial “No Russian” level of the game creates a situation whereby the player must fight on the side of the Russian terrorists, walk through a busy airport and allows the player to shoot civilian men and women (and possibly children) in order to progress to the next level. The reaction of a lot of gamers to this was to question their own morality and decide for themselves how they felt about performing such actions. The level is designed so that you need not have to shoot a single civilian in order to progress but what it does is it builds an emotional connection to the gamer and puts you right in the shoes of the character you’re meant to be playing. This creation of a guilty emotion and one of moral questioning in the player could be argued is more taxing on a player’s judgement than even the most depressing painting.
But Art spawns movements, Video Games spawn anti-socials
The stereotypical view that all gamers are anti-social adult males who live in the basement of their parent’s house seems to have taken hold in today’s society. I could not disagree more. The inference that you play video games and therefore lack social are simply unfounded. Traditionalists argue that movements such as the Renaissance era or Surrealism art have had a substantial effect on culture both past and present. But then couldn’t video gamers spawn equally as significant a movement as say Picasso or Andy Warhol?
Most of you will recognise all of the images just above. If you come across an Andy Warhol poster in the middle of the street, you could probably recognise it as Andy Warhol or at least the art style that belongs to him. If you saw the mushroom, the space invader or the Pac man above, you’d probably be able to associate them with their counterpart games. Video games have inspired movements of society to where “geek” is the new cool. There has been a huge influx in conventions such as The San Diego Comic Con or E3 for example in the last few years. These trade shows are a celebration of video games and their cultures such as the Tate Modern is a celebration of British modern art. Just because it isn’t formalised in society, does not mean to say it does not exist.
Art required evolution
The early beginnings of any form of art is in my opinion, simplistic and lacking of (ironically) art. How did paintings and drawings start off with? They started in the caves of ancient man with drawings depicting their everyday life. That eventually evolved into the works of Leonardo Da Vinci and Salvador Dali to name but a very few. The first movie to have been shot is recognised to be Louis Le Prince’s “Roundhay Garden Scene” and was recorded at just 12 frames a second and lasted 2 seconds. From this you eventually evolved the medium to create masterpieces such as Donnie Darko and Requiem for a Dream for example.
The gaming industry has really only taken off in the last two decades if even that. While the art world required that it’s tools and instruments to express ones selves had to catch up with us to give us paintbrushes and canvases, so did the movie industry and in their development of sophisticated film cameras and CGI for example. Well so too must video games. We cannot presume that in the future, technology wont be able to create video games that are so immersive that they evoke a stronger emotional connection in the virtual reality world than they would in reality. How are we to say that the better the technology at our disposal, the greater the connection we can make with the gamer?
It’s not original though
That is true. Video games are on the basic level a series of code that becomes translated into something a user can digest. However just because it can be produced on a machine, does that mean that it is not original? The greatest movies ever conceived were done by the innovative minds of the directors and writers of the films. The greatest pieces of art ever to be put onto a page or sculpted into a building came down to the ingenuity of a human mind. The greatest lyrics to the greatest songs were thought up of our of the inspirations of a human mind. Therefore is it so hard to concede that the greatest lyricists, the greatest directors and writers and the greatest artists could have scripted, designed and innovated an idea and a video game for you to play? I don’t see why not.
Innovation I believe does not only lie in the greatest architects to design the greatest buildings but also in the minds of game designers to create game characters and levels that aim to thrill and excite. More and more in video games these days you find big name actors providing their skills to voice the characters of the video games or to act in cut scenes as we’ve seen Kiefer Sutherland do in Call of Duty or Liam Neeson in Fallout 3 or Patrick Stewart in Elder Scrolls. Hans Zimmer (whom I regard as the greatest film score composer of all time) composed all the music to Modern Warfare 2.
Conclusion? It can be.
To say that all video games out there today would be ludicrous. Clearly there is some artistic interpretation to be had about a film such as “House of Flying Daggers” or “Hero” compared to a game such as Space Invaders or Duke Nukem. But what I think I’m trying to say in this blog post is that video games can be regarded as art. There are many instances out there where you simply could not with certainty argue in whole that the infamous Tracey Emin’s piece of modern art is more artistic than the visualisation used in the game “Limbo”.
I’d love to hear any comments or thoughts about these arguments. Clearly I’ve only argued on one side of the debate and to do both sides in full would create a post of epic length so I decided to stick to one side or the other and plus I could ramble on forever about a million and one other points but hey, wouldn’t want to bore you all now would I. Either way I hope you enjoyed reading my post.
