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.
Absolutely amazing, while I have heard other arguments along this vein, none have I heard that were so… eloquent and educated.
I just fixed a shameful amount of typos.