Ben Gonshaw: Digital Media Theorist & Game Design Consultant
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ARS GRATIA ARTIS

4th February 2005

Are games Art? This little gem of a question has become quite tiresome over the past few years of gaming. EDGE magazine has been pushing the concept for a long while. I admit to having been swept up in the ideal myself for some time. Let’s ask a parallel question. Are movies Art? The answer, in the great tradition of good answers, is another question, ‘is which movie Art?’. You see, there are many movies that are definitely not Art. Movies like Cellular or Arnie flicks are devoid of any meaningful content, but some, usually budget attempts on the fringe of the mainstream, manage to lift themselves into the realm of Art. Further from that there is Video Art, which is as far removed from the feature film as you can imagine. Full of static and flickering images, bouncing between multiple screens arranged in a cluster. Video Art does not concern itself with narrative progression, nor even lucidity for anyone who isn't an art graduate. That is not to say that moving image Art has to be incomprehensible and dull to the uninitiated. Film Art can still be in the form of a feature film as opposed to strict ‘video art’, with all the mainstream accessibility that goes along with it.

What is it that elevates a work of media into becoming a work of Art? Most games are not even remotely connected to Art. However, the few that claim to be Art often have token gameplay. Not tokenistic (for what is wrong with that?) but instead they have gameplay that is deeply unsatisfying. They must be trying to comment on the futility of human existence. It parallels the futility of searching for the requisite level of basic tactile feedback in these poor attempts. Perhaps they are commenting on the melancholy associated with the fleeting instant of our lives. I often come close to ending it all when confronted with yet another clever recasting of Dadaism as a space invaders clone (replete with soggy controls and unsatisfying responses, unbalanced firing rates and poorly chosen proportions of ship, space, enemy and bullet, that stifle the basic joys of the classic). These pathetic specimens make me feel like I would rather go over the top and take on Gerry than to spend another second mashing my arrow keys, or worse, struggling with my mouse. Why is it that these people feel the need to have a mouse to control my ship? The oft selected method of 'mediated' (read: 'disconnected entirely from my input due to lag') mouse control, especially in vertical shooters that demand precision, is agonising.

Well, apart from that tirade, there are two aspects with Art and games. One is the need for the geek, outcast gamer to feel that their entertainment and the medium that they have invested many of their waking hours in, has meaning. It is the mid-life crisis of the geek, where you wake up and say “What have I contributed to the world and what will remain after I have gone? I’m almost 40 and I’ve spent most of it playing games. HELP.” So in order to legitimise this wasted time, we must find a way to elevate games into a higher form; put some meaning into games, we think, and in a sense we are putting meaning back into our lives. Ok, that was a deliberately obtuse take on the matter, so what I really mean is that for the medium to ‘come of age’ it does not need to sell 40million copies of a single game. When the top rated TV shows are empty reality-based voyeurism you come to understand that volume acceptance does not legitimise a medium. Rather, in order to reach the legendary status of acceptance within the literati and the cognoscenti, a medium needs to be able to speak volumes. Digital media certainly can do this, but so far, it has done it with very crackly reception and too much interference.

The second, contrasting imperative is that games should be, for me anyway, a fun and interesting pastime. Whether it is because the Artists who use games to make their statements are clumsy with Flash, or whether it is because they have no understanding of the medium they are trying to use, these attempts, as said before, are poor. To look at it the other way, Half Life is certainly not Art, but it is a jolly good romp. To tell you the truth it would be spoiled by pontificating and more cut scenes. Action is what it is and action is what it does very well indeed. So there is no need for Art in games, in fact so far, Art ruins games.

Really what we need within gaming is an understanding that there is a place for Art in games so long as it says hello nicely, takes its shoes off before it comes in and agrees to abide by the house rules. If Art is house broken, then Art can take part and embrace the medium. If it continues to crash the party and crap all over our honed mechanics while our backs are turned, then so be it. Art that does that will be shunned by Art critics and gamers alike. It’s the smell you see, that stench of garbage just puts people off.

 

Take a look at some arty games yourself. Tell me, were they any good, I mean really?

http://www.smileproject.com/farklempt/v/1/

http://www.iconoclastgame.it/home_eng.html

http://www.selectparks.net/modules.php?name=News&file=categories&op=newindex&catid=5

http://www.untitled-game.org/

Now examine these experiences, ones where Art sits down for tea and engages the host Mr. Control Mechanisms in polite converstion. This is art with a small 'a', and it's all the better for it, even if they might also be games with a small 'g'. They do however show the potential for moving the industry forward in new directions.

http://www.experimentalgameplay.com/
Student projects programmed in one week.

http://www.sixmilliondollarsoftware.com/rj/
Read more about it on Gamasutra.

 

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