Video Games: Art?

Hey all, howza goin? This is my first post on this Dope site. I’ll celebrate by trying to justify the time I pour into my article here by defending video games as not just one of the world’s favorite past times, nay, but as an important and ever burgeoning Art form. So if you will, allow me to bore you for just one second. Or maybe 300. There has been a lot of furor on the interwebs recently about whether video games should be considered as capital A Art or just a higher tech version of Mouse Trap (see Roger Ebert’s blog that recounts most of this back and forth). I just find this to be a little unfair. Of course it depends on what your definition of Art is, but let’s take one of the more common ones: a medium of expression meant to convey a mood, tell a story, or consider an idea. Since video games are such a visual medium, the Art form it has most in common with would be film, and just like film, it has the ability to tell various stories and communicate ideas.

Not only do video games and movies share a lot in the way that they tell stories (cinematic cut scenes, anyone?) but in their evolution as well. Hell, movies received the same treatment during their infantile years, being more or less dismissed as a silly past time for the uncultured outcasts and youth of society.

1910's nerds had less potato chip stains.

The earliest games and movies were rather simple in their premise. For example, movies—more accurately called “moving pictures” during that time—filmed people leaving factories, hopping on trains, throwing snowballs, and performing various other boring, and not to mention BORING everyday tasks. Video games started with simple goals like eat the dots, avoid the yellow dots, and shoot the dots that are shooting dots at you or else explode into a million dots. They essentially served as little digital board games to pass the time. Neither medium was initially concerned with telling any kind of story, but was more like, “HOLY $#&%! LOOK WHAT WE CAN DO WIT DIS STUFF!!!11!!”

Is Your Mind Blown Yet?

The next major phase in film development was—similar to gaming—using the medium as a means to tell a story. Not to say that many of those stories were that good to begin with, but they had to start somewhere. I believe we are all familiar with the damsel in distress:

Versus

Fast-forward to today. After about more than a century of evolving, the movie industry has been and remains one of the most lucrative entertainment businesses in the world, attracting major talent across the board from writers, actors, graphics artists, and so on. Will video games surpass Hollywood’s popularity? Well, according to various studies it already has. The video game industry has even attracted some big names in Hollywood to contribute (a certain Mr. Spielberg comes to mind). You practically know it’s over when your grandma can beat you at Wii bowling.

HAHA! Old People.

Since the mid 70s, video games have certainly come a long way as an art form. No longer are we only stomping on mushrooms to save a princess who is kidnapped every damn year, avoiding ghosts in order as to eat a bunch of dots in a maze, or trying to collect emeralds in order to stop an evil doctor with a giant mustache (not that there is anything wrong with that) but now we can play (or more accurately experience) games that have all the complex characters, moral ambiguity, detailed environments, and epic scope of a great story.

Sure, there is still a lot of sloppy, but at least well-intentioned, writing in video games (to be fair, have you seen a lot of the crap Hollywood is putting out these days?) and some remain as simple time trials, sports, or fighting games, but that does not lessen all the potential that this medium has. With the sort of advent of independent games, we are able to play games that are not solely meant to achieve a certain goal, but rather to revel in a particular world. I’ll say it’s fair to argue that a lot of action games now have all the fun and thrills that a typical Hollywood movie has (think COD4, MGS, or Halo). Even the movie Inception has the structure of a standard action game: learn the rules of the game, go through a series of incrementally difficult challenges that span various environments (translate: levels) until you reach the final challenge that culminates in every test that has been experienced along the way. The key difference between video games and other art forms is that no other medium is as interactive and free. That should not be looked at as a handicap, but rather an advantage. There is plenty of room to grow here.

So video games, I guess all I’m trying to say is that…I like you. I like you a lot.

Links related to this debate:

Roger Ebert's initial blog posting: http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/04/video_games_can_never_be_art.html

His second posting where he basically gives up on arguing with the nerds: http://blogs.suntimes.com/ebert/2010/07/okay_kids_play_on_my_lawn.html

TED talk defending video games: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=K9y6MYDSAww&feature=player_embedded