→ ↓ ← → B (A Response to Roger Ebert)

As tends to happen, my recent fantasturbation session has led to significant guilt levels, along with the need to justify this blog by posting at least semi-intellectual content. This might be taking things too far in the other direction, but I suppose that's my own dirty-minded fault.

Some number of years ago (I can't find the origin of the comment), Roger Ebert made the assessment that video games are not art, and furthered the statement by commenting that this non-art will never be art. That's a pretty bold move--these are gamers we're talking about, here. The kinds of people who will perceive even the most innocuous comment as a dig against their mothers. So making any sort of negative remark about video games is essentially the equivalent of passing out steel-toed boots and taking an open, wide-legged stance: you're asking for it.

Remember, by their standards, this is normal human interaction.

I would like to start off by defying anyone, Ebert included, to play Robot Unicorn Attack and call it not-art. The character design. The color pallets. The music! But this leads us to the first (possibly insurmountable) obstacle: defining art. As this argument has developed, a variety of sources have been cited, from Plato to Wikipedia. One of the definitions getting thrown around has to do with arrangements intended to appeal to emotions. This is problematic--when I yell at my dog for snacking on poopsicles mid-winter, I'm arranging my voice and posture to provoke a particular emotion: shame. (And possibly a gagging reflex.) But that doesn't really mean it's art. Ebert wisely points out that we could circle around definitions ad infinitum. I'm of the mind that "art" is far too subjective a term to universally define; rather than trying to see if video games fall into the art section of your local Costco, let's judge Ebert's argument on its logic, and video games on their own merits.

Ebert's latest statement considers a presentation by Kellee Santiago, which can be found here. Her presentation argues that the forms we consider high art started out as simplistic, non-artistic modes of communication. Painting has been around some 30,000 years, which is literally about a thousand times longer than video games. In that context, judging the artistic quality of video games seems like betting on Mike Tyson in a fight against your three year-old--sure, both will use their teeth, but Tyson's probably had years of training/steroids. If little Bobby's been using steroids longer than a year, I'll be surprised. (So will his first girlfriend, but not in a good way.)

A major comparison used by Santiago contrasts video games to other competitive events (e.g. sports, board games). She argues that the latter are not examples of art; Ebert is quick to jump on this to further his interactive-means-not-art theory. Okay, but what about performance art, which involves public interaction and a preponderance of naked people? Conventional? No. But it has "art" in its damn name! That'd be like having a product called Something Crackers and not actually be crackers!

Damn you!

Here's one issue with the debate: other art forms have been studied as art for a very long time, now--long enough to have developed a very specific language about each form. Video games have that language to a smaller extent, but it tends to be more about performance than other qualities: "replay value", "control scheme", "n00bz". And to whatever extent (if any) that video games have been studied as an art form, it is infinitesimal in comparison to the study of video games as entertainment. By contrast, the film medium strikes closer to an equilibrium. So part of the problem is that Ebert has a long history (about 100 years) of film criticism that he can draw on, while gamers are slightly more limited. ("Better than Pong." / "Not as good as Pokemon." / "On approximately the same level as Mario Party 3.")

So there's a lack of developed language. But Mike Tyson can still talk about impressionist paintings without understanding words like "impressionist", or "painting". The problem then becomes what we should talk about. The level design? Controller response? The character's disappointingly small mammary glands?

One of those is never an issue.

Well...yeah! If the problem is that video games are interactive, then we should at least be able to judge what we're interacting with. Again, I'm trying to avoid a conversation about what constitutes art, but I think we can still talk about quality without becoming pretentious. Gamers know when the game being played feels immersive and when it feels cheaply thrown together for promotional purposes. (I'm looking at you, video game adaptations of movies.) Sometimes the elements of games just come together and really make the players feel the world they're inhabiting--and we don't need "artsy" games to do that. Marty O'Donnell's scores for the Halo games are on par with major movie scores; temple designs in the Zelda games feel like they belong in museums; the first time I played the Gamecube port of Resident Evil, I nearly peed my pants in terror and turned off the system before I even encountered my first enemy. How's that for evoking an emotional response? (Focus on that last question, not the preceding statement.) That was possible because creepy-ass soundtracks like this, and creepier-ass settings that look like this:

Yeah. You'd pee your pants too. Er, almost-pee your pants.

The interaction actually contributes to that emotional response. Playing Resident Evil still scares me more than most movies. (Admittedly, most Resident Evil games are better made than most scary movies.) Discounting the entire field because of that interaction is just fallacious. That emotional response--which, granted, is Santiago's definition, not Ebert's--is a form of interaction. Each person will have a different experience with a work of art, just as one playthrough of Ocarina of Time will be different than the next.

I could stretch this out ad nauseam (especially since, at this point, I doubt anyone's still reading), but here's my biggest issue with Ebert's claim: "Art seeks to lead you to an inevitable conclusion, not a smorgasbord of choices." If this were true, the entire interpretive aspect of art would be, if not non-existent, at least irrelevant. I encourage Ebert to go back and read some 19th century American literature for two reasons. 1 - Poe's middle name was spelled "Allan". 2 - Hawthorne was all about ambiguity and interpretation. Perhaps Ebert suffers from his bias as a movie critic, but literature is much more about Prufrock's "overwhelming question" than Ebert's inevitable conclusion. Which makes dismissing video games on those grounds a pretty weak argument.

Ebert may be onto something when he questions why gamers should be concerned about video games' status as art. But gamers and game developers have plenty of reason to argue their case. Again, I call for subjectivity, and if I happen to think that holding right on a directional pad to make an anthropomorphic blue hedgehog run through loops constitutes artistry, you don't have to agree with me. You keep on playing Noby Noby Boy, and I'll keep pressing right.



But seriously. It's Edgar Allan Poe.