Are Video Games an Art Form?

And with that I am done. I hope I have in some way added to your enjoyment of the game. If you came to this exercise thinking that ICO, despite its rich
atmosphere, is rather thin in story, and I have helped you change that opinion,
I should deem the exercise a success and be most content. I wish however to
warn you against the opposite error. That is, I don't want you to get the
idea--not from me anyhow--that this unassuming fairy tale is a masterpiece of
Shakespearian proportions. Throughout the exercise I have invoked great works of literature to illustrate some aspects of the game, but the comparisons were to show how ICO draws from similar principles, and never to suggest that its merits rival those masterworks'. *For its medium* ICO is very unique, very sophisticated, and I wish there were more games like it. I have not seen a video game tell a story so skillfully and seamlessly. Thus ICO's brilliance as a work of fiction is, to a fair extent, comparative--it shines because the storytelling in other games is so dull. I have scrutinized it as I have never scrutinized another game because it is the only game I know that even warrants that sort of treatment. Before ICO, I had seen stories in games that were entertaining as diversions, but they never made me want to study what made them entertaining. They did not have enough for a study, unless one meant to study bad storytelling.

Now, just about every person who is deep into gaming seems to believe that
video game is as competent an art form as any. If he is a fan of ICO, he may
point to it as his proof. Some people who share a similar view have even paid
*me* compliments along the line of "I'm glad someone is finally treating video
games with respect they deserve" or "It's great that you take your games so
seriously." I am not and I do not. My regard for ICO is a very poor indicator
of my opinions on video games in general. I think most video games, even those that boast beautiful visuals and grand epic themes, are severely awkward as art works--lacking any kind of unifying mandate apart from their all-important pursuit of "fun," which seems to me no more artistic than baseball or poker. I have often heard video games validated as art in words like these: "Video gaming is art because any creative human activities, especially those not essential to the immediate necessities of survival, can find artistic expression. Why should games be any different?" And that is right of course. But I wonder if we are asking the right question to begin with. By the most generous definition of art we are almost constantly surrounded by art and doing things with artistic implications. Even a silly doodle scribbled in a notebook during a boring lecture counts as art. But surely we knew this already? Surely the question we ought to be considering is not "Is it art?" but rather "Is it good art?" Let me recast the question in a different mold. None will deny that poetry is an art, and a much respected art. But is there such a thing as bad poetry? Of course there is. In fact an enormous portion of it is unreadable. So when we declare poetry an art form we are not really paying poetry as a whole any compliment. Like most creations art can be wonderful or terrible or merely mediocre.

And that is my problem with all this heated debate over whether video games
constitute an art form. People speak as if they were bestowing some great
honor upon games by calling them art. But art is a value-neutral term. When
we say "This pottery is a work of art" we are not praising the pottery; we are
stating a fact. The pottery may be a sublime work of art, or it may be an
execrable work of art. Of course, should we be moved to exclaim "My goodness, this pottery is a work of art!" then we most certainly are praising it. But that is only because we are all along meaning to say it is a *good* work of
art. We have merely left "good" unspoken--unspoken but clearly implied by
the tone and the context.

The game industry has not produced many--if any--sublime works of art or it
would not be struggling so much for respectability. Literature and music are
better received as art forms because those fields have produced across
centuries numberless masterworks whose enduring beauty and relevance have been tested and proven; works which allow the audience into the profoundest depth of the human genius. Until video games do the same, and I am not sure it will happen, the genre will continue to suffer the stigma of low-grade entertainment.

Look at popular comics for instance: it has been around for a century and has
been far more successful than video games in cultivating its distinct brand of
artistic integrity, but it fares only slightly better in finding acceptance as
a meaningful art form. Recent popular comic artists have tried to improve its
reputation by a number of tactics--rendering superhero comics in classic media like oil and pastel (some examples of which are quite skilled), injecting
philosophical and social commentary into the drama, waiving two-dimensional
heroes and villains in favor of rounded characters, shifting from flagrant
optimism to increasingly dark and "mature" outlooks, and so on. All these have made popular comics more interesting, but where earning greater artistic
validation for the genre is concerned they were more or less doomed to failure
from the beginning. A tragic, complex, philosophical, photorealistically
rendered BATMAN is still BATMAN--the exploits of a handsome young billionaire who protects the streets of Gotham by nightly donning a skintight bulletproof outfit, a cape and a mask with fake horns so he can go about manually beating up criminals. If there is a difference, it is that this reinvented BATMAN expects the kind of respect which the series' own nature denies, so that where it was merely silly before it is now pretentious. I often perceive the same pretentiousness when a gamer declares his pet title artistic or profound--as if grand pantheistic talks about a planet's life force saves it from being a role- playing game whose goal is to equip your characters for better combat moves, as if cramming a game full of religious and metaphysical allusions makes up for its being similarly crammed full of giant fighting robots and fetching sex symbols, as if turning the story into a treatise on some philosophical theme excuses the poor storytelling.

Some people may object that the flaws listed above do not really fall under the
criteria of the so-called gaming art. Gaming art, I have been told by some, is
about the ingeniousness of gameplay. I could not understand what this gameplay was and tried looking it up. None of the dictionaries I owned had the word. So I gave up on defining gameplay, but from what I have learned since it has to do with the cleverness, depth, and enjoyableness of the rules that make up the game. Superior gameplay makes the fun more enduring and rewards the skills of the player. Just a few weeks ago I saw a footage of someone completing a whole SUPER MARIO game in a matter of minutes. He did not make a single mistake. He blazed through the levels like a tiny 2-D god, killing all the enemies and getting all the points and making all the jumps at exactly the right times and not slipping or getting hit even once. It was like seeing a Karate master who so clearly saw through the opponent's moves that he was impermeable to them. It was impressive. So that's what those SUPER MARIO fans were always telling me about, I thought. (I had played the game myself and knew how hard it was.) I wondered if this might be what they mean by gaming art, and if this sort of gameplay indeed has artistic merits.

To explain the answer I came to, I want us to consider an illustration that may
at first seem odd. I want us to consider ballet and gymnastics. Both words
call to the mind the image of petite graceful young ladies in form-fitting
attires. Both disciplines use the human body as the vehicle of their ideals.
Both a ballerina and a gymnast spend year after year in rigorous training to
achieve the utmost grace and efficiency of movement. Both must possess passion and commitment as well as talent in prodigious degrees if they are to succeed. We call ballet an art and categorize gymnastics under athletics. Now would you not say this is a most unfair distinction? What doe the gymnast lack against the ballerina that she is labeled an athlete but not an artist? Does she lack training, competence, zeal, even beauty? No; she uses the same medium for her skills and works just as hard if not harder. In fact if you are at all like me you probably find gymnastics much more spectacular than ballet. So why the distinction?

The reason is in the nature of the disciplines. Ballet pursues beauty, while
gymnastics aims at nimbleness. Physical agility of course contains an element of beauty. Naturally some gymnastic competitions include artistic dimension as a part of the evaluation criteria. But every gymnast understands that her work is first about pushing the body to the limits of agility and second about expressing beauty. Consequently we say, and rightly, that the gymnast
*demonstrates* and the ballerina *performs*. A gymnastic demonstration can and should have an artistic aspect, but that is not where its focus lies.
If by gaming art we mean no more than a very clever and efficient way of
yielding pleasure, a kind of mental gymnastics as demonstrated by the Super
Mario expert--well, that may or may not be art, but one thing is for sure: if
it is art, it is a kind of art that will be taken seriously by none save its
own devotees. Any art in SUPER MARIO or TETRIS, or even in go or chess, is doomed to enjoy no recognition outside their circles of fans, however global
those circles may be. For it is the mark of the great arts to be *relevant* to
some essential aspect of what it means to be human. That is why they always find a broad audience to acknowledge, even if they do not fully appreciate, their value. I appreciate ICO because, much more than any video games I know, I find it full of that worthwhile and pleasurable relevance which I have found in good literature, music and paintings. But a gamer who praises the art of ICO, or the art of any other titles for that matter, ought to remember that far superior art of similar kinds abounds outside the field of gaming. Else he may risk the nearsightedness of a child who thinks himself a fine poet because he is versed in nursery rhymes.