I am not a gamer. If anything, I tend to be overwhelmed by and fearful of the addictive
immersiveness of video games. But the first time I saw this game Monument Valley, I was
completely and utterly mesmerized. By its spare beauty, its M.C. Escher-like sequence
of pathways and structures and ladders that this quiet little person deftly navigates
and unlocks.
I was not just entertained, I was moved. It was poetic, challenging, metaphorically resonant.
How was my experience of this game in any way lesser than my encounters with other forms
of art? And what else out there was I missing?
This is the case for video games.
Video games have a rich history, beginning before you think they did with proto-computer
games like Tennis for Two in 1958. But they really kicked off in the early 1970s with
the explosion of arcade games, and the dawn of home consoles, with minimalist wonders
like Pong and an impressive variety of plastic boxes with faux-wood details.
And there have been a huge range of kinds of video games since, of varying quality and
popularity. Video games are not a passing fad. They are a multi-billion dollar industry--I
mean seriously, as big if not bigger than the film industry--and it sees growth every
year, evolving as the world and technology evolve, and as developers and corporations
and gamers respond to those changes.
It’s hard to talk about video games as being one thing because they perform varying functions
and address differing needs. I mean, some games are primarily about pattern recognition
and spatial reasoning, like positioning Mario above a pipe, or dodging bullets, or fitting
blocks into an allotted space.
Other games are educational, either vaguely or strategically, imparting history, or math,
or engineering. Sometimes you can choose whether or not you want the game to be educational.
But video games can teach and test your coordination and rhythm, alone and of course with friends.
Competition is at the core of many games, but so is collaboration, allowing you to work
together with others toward a goal, whether your teammates are in the same room or on
a different continent.
Now it may obvious but worth noting that video games are almost always about strategy and
problem-solving. You can learn the rules of sports, and play them with less risk of injury.
You can simulate potentially real world situations, and also not- real world situations.
Video games allow you to build worlds, evolve worlds, and explore the amazingly intricate
worlds that others have created. Who doesn’t want to turn into a cat and jump through a
tree or discover a new planet… a planet that admittedly no one else will ever see
in this vast and lonely universe.
The quality of CGI in games has improved significantly over the years, offering up immersive, cinematic
worlds, and almost-but-not-quite naturalistic reproductions of human beings. We’re still
in the uncanny valley, folks, and we likely will be for some time. Developers have brought
in actors you know and love to voice characters in a number of games.
Peter Dinklage: I'm a ghost actually.
And some games feature footage of real live actors, like Her Story, in which you explore
a video database of fictional interviews of a woman to try to uncover the truth of what
happened.
Video games are really good at telling stories, letting a narrative unravel over time. Like
a good novel or movie, they’re paced, alternating periods of fast-paced action with slower moments
allowing for exposition and character development.
Movies are actually a really good point of comparison here, as they’re also a more
populist, accessible art form. Some are considered “high art” or “film”
and others that are, well, SUPERBABIES: BABY GENIUSES 2.
And like our taste for movies, sometimes we want something fun and easy, and other times
we feel like something super challenging and intense. Likewise for the kind of art you
see in a gallery or museum.
One day you might want to gaze at a captivating landscape, whose equivalent in gaming might
be something like Firewatch. Another day you want to stand before Picasso’s Guernica
and feel the pain and misery of the Spanish Civil War, an experience closer to something
like playing This War of Mine, about a group of civilians trying to survive in a besieged city.
Now there’s been plenty of work assigned to the realm of “visual” or “fine art”
that has involved video game technology. Like Cory Arcangel’s 2002 work Super Mario Clouds,
for which he modified the code of the original 1985 Super Mario Brothers, erasing all sound
and all visual elements except the sky and the clouds that scroll across it.
Video games have also been collected by art museums, like Jenova Chen and Nick Clark’s
flOw, and Jason Rohrer’s Passage, a five minute game where a character moves through
the stages of life and dies only once, at the end.
Both of which were acquired by The Museum of Modern Art. (But for what it’s worth,
they also have The Sims.) There are a number of creators making games who work between
disciplines, not confining themselves to one field or another.
Actually opera might be a more fitting point of comparison for video games, in particular
the idea of the total work of art, or gesamtkunstwerk, propounded by German composer Richard Wagner.
Rather than all the arts existing separately in their own silos, Wagner wanted his own
works to synthesize music, drama, dance, costume, set design, and everything else into one harmonious
whole.
Similarly, video games are consolidations of the creative output of many-- writers,
designers, programmers, composers, concept artists, modelers, directors, sound engineers,
and many other roles-- all brought together into one package. The creation of video games
is largely a collective enterprise, but there are plenty
of individual artists and auteurs who are credited as the visionaries behind given games.
Like Shigeru Miyamoto, creator of classics like Mario Bros. and The Legend of Zelda,
and Hideo Kojima, the lead behind the Metal Gear series. But while most popular games
are truly team efforts, there are still lone wolves out there, like Eric Barone, the single
developer behind Stardew Valley, one of the top selling titles of 2016 on Steam, who created
the game by working on his own ten hours a day, seven days a week, for four years.
Like any artist, a game developer begins with a relative blank slate. They have a particular
set of skills and technologies at their disposal, and a knowledge, either thin or deep, of what’s
been done before. Whether working alone or with gobs of money and a team of folks behind
them, developers build complex, many-layered macrocosms for others to investigate and decipher
and explore.
And that’s what really sets video games apart: they need you to complete them.
All art is interactive to some degree. If a painting hangs in a forest and no one sees it, is it
really artwork? Sculpture and installation require you to walk around them, to take them
in in full.
More and more works of art assume and necessitate viewer involvement, but very few as inherently
as any video game. They not only respond to you, but adapt and offer diverse experiences
depending on the choices you make. This extreme interactivity makes it so that you, at least
to some extent, become the co-author. You are the artist, too. You can try to understand
what the developer might be trying to say or accomplish, and you can also bend the experience
to embody or project how you see the world.
There are genres of video games, just as with other forms of art. You’ve got your first
person shooters and role-playing games and platformers. But also like other forms of
art, the expectations and rules for every kind of game have been stretched and broken
and intentionally subverted. Zelda: Breath of the Wild allows for open-ended gameplay,
enabling you to navigate the world in an unstructured and nonlinear way.
Some titles completely discard the idea that a game needs a clearly defined objective,
like… What am I supposed to be doing on this island exactly? Or maybe the developers
completely throw away the idea of a cutscene, pioneered way back in PacMan, and make the
entire game feel like a single unbroken tracking shot. Or maybe... the game's objective is
to take care of a fish-man-thing? Not every new idea is a winner people.
But video games require much more than coordination. Whether solo enterprises or social undertakings,
they challenge players to think critically about not only the world of the game but also
the real world around them. The game The Last of Us, in which a smuggler has the
job of escorting a teenage girl across a post-apocalyptic, zombie-fied United States,
sparked discussions about what it means to be a father and the dynamics of father-daughter
relationships.
Games like Life is Strange tackle difficult problems head-on, like online harassment and
depression. Life is Strange 2 follows teenager brothers of Mexican descent who are dealing
with the traumatic death of a parent and citizenship and racism and religious extremism.
One first person exploration game, Gone Home, follows a young woman as she returns to her
Oregon home in 1995, finds it empty, and pieces together that her family fell apart after
her parents found out about her younger sister’s lesbian relationship.
Video games can provide a platform for many underrepresented voices and stories, like
Never Alone, which was developed in collaboration between game makers and Alaska Native storytellers,
and is based on a traditional Iñupiaq tale.
U.S. Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia ruled in 2011 that video games deserve First
Amendment protection, just like books, plays, and movies, writing: “video games communicate
ideas — and even social messages — through many familiar literary devices (such as characters,
dialogue, plot, and music) and through features distinctive to the medium (such as the player’s
interaction with the virtual world).”
Of course, you don’t have to look far to find a game that will offend you, no matter
who you are. But that’s true with any art form.
There are big issues with gaming, but I’d argue they’re not baked into the medium.
As Seth Schiesel argued in 2018 “It’s not the content; it’s the culture.” The
online gaming culture, that is, where bigotry, bullying, sexism, and all sorts of toxic behavior
have run amok and ruined the enjoyment for many.
It can be hard if not impossible to separate these issues from the games themselves, however
they certainly aren’t exclusive to the gaming community. Video games have always been a
reflection of their times, and these are indeed the challenges of now.
Whether you play them or not, gaming culture extends far beyond screens and headsets, and
is no longer confined to virtual space. But it never was, really.
Arcades were physical places where human bodies shared proximity. LAN parties in the early
aughts were actually real parties.
Playing Wii together and Guitar Hero and Dance Dance Revolution aren’t merely virtual experiences,
and neither is getting into a car accident trying to catch Pokemon.
Video gaming, like much of modern life, blends online and offline experience. And it’s
firmly part of culture and cultural memory, whether you consider it high art or low.
In his 2005 book “Everything Bad Is Good for You,” Steven Johnson reminds us that
there is nothing trivial about game play.
When negotiating various worlds, young and old alike practice patience, delay gratification,
and negotiate complex social relationships.
Gaming, according to Johnson, is "about finding order and meaning in the world, and making
decisions that help create that order."
The more I learn about video games, the more my respect grows for those who routinely fling
themselves into the unknown of a new game.
Armed with knowledge of past games, sure, but up for the challenge of finding order
and meaning in a new world. Ready to confront unforeseeable futures, failure, death.
It reminds me of the bravery required to walk into an art gallery, where you’re unsure
of what you’ll find or what will be required of you, but are nonetheless open to whatever
the artists have in store.
When it comes to video games, there is still so much left to be done, so much territory
to conjure and explore, so many more perspectives to offer, on the part of developers as well
as players.
It’s an outstandingly elastic medium, receptive and also susceptible to all the best and worst
we humans have to offer it. Video games shape our understanding of humanity just as they
are shaped by it. Oh and… they’re also really... fun.
Special thanks to our director, editor, and lifelong gamer Brandon Brungard for his help
advising on this episode and bringing it to life.
Also, before you go, did you know that this channel is called the Art Assignment because,
along with exploring ideas about art and art history, we also give out assignments?
Not the kind where you have to buy paint or stress out about your inability to draw, but
the kind that ask you to use your phone, or bits of materials you have lying around, to
make your life more fulfilling.
My book, You Are an Artist, gathers together some of the assignments presented on this
show plus a bunch of really good new ones. It’ll be out on April 14, and is available
for preorder right now.
Thanks to all of our patrons for supporting The Art Assignment, especially our grandmasters
of the arts Tyler Calvert-Thompson, Divideby Zero Collection, David Golden, and Ernest Wolfe.