Art Evolves: Interactivity as the New Frontier 2


Art has expand­ed and evolved over time. Paint today has vir­tu­al­ly noth­ing in com­mon with paints of yes­ter­day; paint is defined by its func­tion, not its chem­i­cal make­up. Sculpture hap­pens in dif­fer­ent media from iron to ice to SPAM. Art has never been lim­it­ed by requir­ing it to resem­ble that which came before it: indeed, the most cel­e­brat­ed art is that which delib­er­ate­ly escapes the pre­vi­ous trap­pings of the medi­um.

More impor­tant­ly, art expand­ed to incor­po­rate new tech­nolo­gies and prac­tices that required the devel­op­ment of new tools and prac­tices to imple­ment. Music was once hand-clapping and singing, and expand­ed to include drums, sim­ple wind instru­ments, and so on. As new forms evolved, new artis­tic roles came with them. With the advent of these devel­op­ments, new vec­tors of analy­sis and inno­va­tion became pos­si­ble.

One of the sup­posed obsta­cles to acknowl­edg­ing video games as art is that art is tra­di­tion­al­ly not ‘won.’ Bill’s answer to that, that many good video games are ‘fin­ished’ in a fash­ion more akin to a good novel than they are ‘won’ in a man­ner like a round of bowl­ing, is appro­pri­ate, but I think the orig­i­nal accu­sa­tion implies a stronger prob­lem: the con­cept of inter­ac­tiv­i­ty.

Before explor­ing this more care­ful­ly, I do want to point out that any enjoy­ment of art is inter­ac­tion. Looking at an object is a com­plex psy­cho­log­i­cal event that involves a great num­ber of phys­i­cal, psy­cho­log­i­cal, and cul­tur­al events. The view­er brings her own vocab­u­lary of con­cepts to an art art object and nar­rates and under­stands it based on that vocab­u­lary. While many view­ers in an inter­pre­tive com­mu­ni­ty will share a broad swath of con­cepts (“This is a paint­ing of a red square on a white can­vas.”) the diver­si­ty of ways to nar­rate a work quick­ly make it clear that art objects are not bound to a sin­gle inter­pre­tive method.

With that out of the way, we can think about inter­ac­tiv­i­ty. This, I think, is what is real­ly at stake when crit­ics claim that video games can­not be art because you don’t ‘win’ art. That iter­a­tion of the objec­tion is a lim­it­ed instan­ti­a­tion of a greater claim. Rather than being tied to a spe­cif­ic por­tion of inter­act­ing with an object, such as defeat­ing an Ancient in Eternal Darkness, I think that the crit­i­cism is real­ly more con­cerned with all the deep inter­ac­tion that the play­er has with the game, such as play­ing through the sto­ries of the 12 dif­fer­ent char­ac­ters who com­pose the nar­ra­tive of that game. While look­ing at art is an active, inter­pre­tive activ­i­ty, the depth and vari­ety of inter­ac­tion one has with a video game is far greater.

Video games present an almost entire­ly new type of inter­ac­tiv­i­ty to artis­tic crit­i­cism. While look­ing at a paint­ing is, aca­d­e­m­i­cal­ly, ‘inter­act­ing’ with it, video games require a degree of inter­ac­tion not shared by any other artis­tic for­mat. I sug­gest that this is the excit­ing inno­va­tion that video games bring to art, rather than call­ing it an obsta­cle to over­come.

Art has not tra­di­tion­al­ly been heav­i­ly inter­ac­tive. Theatrical per­for­mances require actors, builders are con­struct­ed by enor­mous crews, and musi­cal per­for­mances require pianists and singers, but these are all par­tic­i­pants at the level of cre­ation, not at the level of enjoy­ment or con­sump­tion. Musical per­for­mances may invite the audi­ence to sing along or dance, and a few movies invite more audi­ence inter­ac­tion, but, in gen­er­al, obser­va­tion has been the prin­ci­ple inter­ac­tive activ­i­ty for the con­sumer of art.

This new dimen­sion is basi­cal­ly what the entire his­to­ry of video games has been about refin­ing. How do you immerse a per­son in a story? What kinds of visu­al events can be made fun and excit­ing by adding rules and con­trols? What inno­va­tions can expand the ways in which we inter­act with our art? As gam­ing has devel­oped as an indus­try, dif­fer­ent stu­dios have con­stant­ly exper­i­ment­ed with dif­fer­ent visu­al styles, con­trol schemes, and game­play mechan­ics that expand what video games are capa­ble of deliv­er­ing to the audi­ence.

While I expect that there will be many arti­cles here dis­cussing nar­ra­tive, I think it’s a good place to start as an exam­ple of how we can ana­lyze how an ele­ment of inter­ac­tiv­i­ty in video games shapes the use of tra­di­tion­al art ele­ments and molds the expe­ri­ence of the play­er. New ques­tions are pos­si­ble in video game inter­pre­ta­tion. How do you strike a bal­ance between main­tain­ing a sin­gle coher­ent story with­out con­fin­ing the play­er to a plot on rails? Do you need an in-game nar­ra­tive to tell a story? Is it more impor­tant to pro­vide a means of con­sis­tent char­ac­ter­i­za­tion of your pro­tag­o­nist, or to pro­vide a rich­ly detailed world where you have more free­dom of action and a more vague­ly defined char­ac­ter?

Creating games that fall on every end of this spec­trum is an impor­tant part of the video game mar­ket. I love clas­sic adven­ture games despite the plots on rails for the same rea­son I enjoy watch­ing my favorite movies and re-experiencing the nar­ra­tive. I love explor­ing Vvardenfell for its own sake, engag­ing the cul­tures of Morrowind with­out touch­ing the main plot, because the rest of the writ­ing and design of the game is sim­ply much bet­ter than the core plot. Exploring the styles and bound­aries of inter­ac­tive ele­ments is the chief inno­va­tion of video games as an artis­tic for­mat.

Beyond nar­ra­tive, the phys­i­cal meth­ods of inter­act­ing with games is some­thing almost entire­ly unique to the medi­um. Games change as you press but­tons, swing your arms, and speak into your micro­phone. While it is true that the Pieta changed after a ham­mer and chis­el were angri­ly swung into it in 1972, this was not exact­ly viewed as an appro­pri­ate means of inter­act­ing with it. Video games are defined by their inter­ac­tion above any­thing else, and I expect it to be a major sub­ject of reviews to come.

Painting explores how we process visu­al ideas, writ­ing explores nar­ra­tive ideas and the bound­aries of lan­guage, and music explores how we under­stand sound. because they com­bine so many of these expe­ri­ences, video games explore the syn­the­sis of our sens­es. They are near-complete imag­i­na­tion engines, and the inter­ac­tive dimen­sion is what keeps them from being cat­e­go­rized as movies, ani­ma­tions, sound­tracks, and nov­els.

Rather than treat this as a bar­ri­er toward them being art, why not explore it as a dimen­sion to extend to other media? Joe Satriani’s “Crowd Chant” is a rock gui­tar piece that requires audi­ence par­tic­i­pa­tion. Rocky Horror invites audi­ences to shout at char­ac­ters and ob toast at the screen. Ayn Rand’s play “Night of January the 16th” requires audi­ence mem­bers to sit on stage as the jury and decide whether the per­son on trial is found guilty or inno­cent. Anish Kapoor’s ‘Cloud Gate’ in Chicago chal­lenges onlook­ers to cre­ate some­thing beau­ti­ful in its reflec­tive sur­faces.

Interaction is anoth­er fron­tier of artis­tic inno­va­tion, and video games are the deep­est explo­ration of it in art.


About Jarrod Hammond

Jarrod Hammond doesn't always blog, but when he does, he does it for the Ontological Geek. He spends the rest of his time gaming on his PC, or apologizing to his wife for spending too much time on his PC. He lives in Kansas City, MO.


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