Translator: Jacqueline Lemay Reviewer: Elisabeth Buffard
When we were kids, my big brother and I would compete
to see who would break the most joysticks.
He was the real geek of the family, it has to be said.
I have no memory of my father with a controller in his hands.
He was a reader, a reader of science fiction:
Herbert, Asimov, C. Clarke.
And when he offered us a pong machine or a puck gaming console,
what he gave us was science fiction, that’s what it was.
And for him, as for us, we received something like a piece of the future.
I’m a teenager. Video games are still part of my life,
but it’s now my turn to fall into reading.
I consume everything: I devour Freud, Duras, Tolkien, Stephen King,
everything moving, everything falling.
Video games are there for entertainment,
they’re the medium of my generation.
A student of philosophy, video games take up more and more space.
Moreover, they take up more and more space in computers,
because they have more things to tell,
increasingly bigger stories and more complex worlds.
It gets complicated when I start working.
I lose myself to them.
I spend my nights with them.
There’s a particular game that kept me up on many a night.
An American game called Half-Life.
You play a researcher. Not an electrical engineer,
but a researcher and not a particularly fit one either.
Definitely not a Superman.
And obviously, as in all video games,
there’s an alien invasion.
You can guess what happens next: we need to save the world.
Except that in the game, at one point, the army comes, soldiers disembark
and then, it’s the cavalry.
It’s an American game: we’re meant to be saved anyway.
And not at all.
The soldiers are shooting at you.
In a way, it’s a brilliant betrayal.
The order was given not to leave any witnesses on the research base.
And so, the game betrays us.
It’s quite the betrayal.
I’d never seen anything like it.
It’s probably the first time that a game reflects the human condition.
What brings me to you tonight is the conviction born that night:
behind Half-Life, there was a certain “je ne sais quoi”.
This “je ne sais quoi”, this invisible thing that was there,
concealed and yet still there,
is that video games are art.
One morning in 1879 -
there was no Half-Life -
one morning in 1879, little Maria Sanz de Sautuola
visits the Cave of Altamira, in northern Spain, with her father.
The Cave of Altamira is one of the European jewels of cave painting.
And she stops in front of a drawing and shouts, “Toros, toros!”
It’s not a bull at all, but a bison, it doesn’t really matter, and her father,
Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola, a lawyer and amateur archaeologist,
finally lifts his eyes to the drawing.
Something clicks in his brain.
A click because a year before, at the Exposition Universelle in Paris,
he had seen a drawing just like it engraved on a stone.
And in Paris, this drawing was presented as cave painting.
24 years.
It will take 24 year of hard scientific struggle
for Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola to have the Cave of Altamira recognized
as a jewel of cave painting in Europe.
Which reminds me of this anecdote about the Orsay train station.
I don’t know if you know what the Parisian tour guides
called the Orsay train station in the 1970s.
They called it the ugliest building in Paris.
Today it is one of the top five most visited museums in the world.
So for me, video games -
In a month, I’ll turn 50 and video games still seem to me
to be the ugliest building in the cultural sector.
Why is that?
In 2016, the Ministry of Culture asked hundreds of French people:
“What is culture to you?”
Culture is not just art, but art is culture.
You’ve not been asked this, and neither have I,
but in first place, we obviously have museums and national monuments.
No surprises there.
In the penultimate position, we find video games,
right above reality TV.
(Laughter)
You can laugh, but that’s also right below fishing and hunting.
(Laughter)
Actually, that’s what hurts the most...
(Laughter)
Fishing and hunting.
It’s terrible, it took me a long time to get over it,
2016, and you see, I’m still talking about it.
Video games are not art,
that is, according to historian Ian Lawrence Cesling,
art looks like us.
In the end, we decide what art is.
But he adds that we are more than flint.
We’re more than a computer.
But I think video games are more than just a computer.
They’re worth more than the $100 billion in annual business worldwide.
It’s much more than that.
Video games have a certain “je ne sais quoi”,
they have a “toros”.
Marcelino Sanz de Sautuola had been visiting the Cave of Altamira since 1876.
Three years, three years before little Maria’s shout.
To explain to you what the Cave of Altamira is like,
it’s a cave that’s 300 meters deep.
There are actually many drawings and engravings,
but you can miss them.
But within these 300 metres, there is an 18-meter by 9-meter cavity,
containing at least 250 engravings and drawings.
It’s more visible than the nose on your face.
Marcelino couldn’t help but see these drawings.
And he would visit the cave throughout those three years.
Telling you in 2021 that video games are art, is a bit like yelling “toros”
in a 100 square meter apartment containing 250 great video games.
By the way, there are plenty of brilliant artists
in the video game industry.
Artists involved in imaging, sound, game mechanics, technology,
architects who make all these absolutely incredible worlds.
Museums around the world welcome video games.
The Grand Palais in Paris, the Cité du design in Saint-Étienne, London’s V&A,
The MoMA in New York welcomes Pacman into its permanent collection.
A few months ago, an immaculate, never-opened copy
of Super Mario Bros.
sold for over $ 1.5 million at an auction.
A million and a half dollars for a video game case.
I hope it also contains the game,
(Laughter)
otherwise, that would be worrisome.
NFT technology also promises to create unique,
marketable, non-reproducible games.
NFT technology makes it possible, or in any case, promises,
to be a title of ownership for a digital asset.
In this case, it could be a video game
and suddenly, it would become marketable as a unique work.
But a collector’s market,
even an art market,
doesn’t tell us what we, here, feel about art.
The feeling of art, when we feel it, what is it?
I think that in order to obtain these answers, we must turn
not to philosophers, but rather to artists,
and perhaps look to Marcel Proust’ Way.
Proust died at the age of 51.
He spent the last fifteen years of his life
writing “In Search of Lost Time”,
almost bedridden.
I think it’s worth listening to what a man like him has to say to us,
the people of the 21st century, about his art, his art being literature.
He tells us that only through art can we rise above ourselves.
Thanks to art, instead of living in a single world here with you,
I can live in several of them, a multitude of worlds.
That is what art is.
So, tonight, let me take you into these video game worlds
that you’ll never see again in reality.
First, America at the end of the 19th century.
An America caught between wilderness
and rampant urbanization and industrialization.
It’s kind of the end of cowboys and the end of outlaw gangs.
Now that’s a game.
It’s called Red Dead Redemption 2, a Western simulation game
that can be great fun: you can decide to rob banks.
You are perfectly safe.
It’s like killing aliens, it’s good fun.
But you can also fish, hunt
or just sit back and enjoy watching the wilderness.
You’ll never be this close to a world that has disappeared forever.
But a world does not need to really exist to amaze us, ultimately,
to transport us.
If Red Dead Redemption 2 is a pharaonic game:
800 people over 8 years, that’s the production time that was needed,
that’s one person working over one year - Delphine Fourneau, she’s a Frenchwoman -
The game is called Sacramento.
It tells the story of a woman, or a man, who falls asleep on a train
and wakes up in this poetic world,
painted in watercolors.
And we begin to sail, to go about, to discover, to explore this universe
and then finally, to wake up on the train
and have only one desire: to return to the world of Sacramento.
But a world can also be an emotion.
Inner things.
And why not mourning?
Round about the 2010s,
Ryan Green, an American, found out that his 1-year-old son, Joel,
had incurable cancer.
He only had a few weeks to live.
Alongside his wife Amy, he decided to create a blog,
to include poems, prayers, drawings to tell the story of Joel’s fight.
In 2013, Joel was four years old.
He was still resisting the illness.
And Ryan decided - he’s a computer scientist - to turn it into a video game.
There, too, to tell the story of this everyday life and fight.
Joel died just before his sixth birthday.
The game has been released.
It’s called “That Dragon, Cancer”.
Dragon, that’s the name Joel gave to his illness.
Can video games help us, the living, to say goodbye
to those who leave?
You will tell me that’s a very incongruous question.
We’re now far from Fortnite, Super Mario Kart,
Minecraft, which have been mentioned.
Can’t video games just stay in their place,
and simply be entertainment for us?
Can’t they just stay where they are?
As I was telling you, the Cave of Altamira was known to the inhabitants of the area,
to the surrounding villages,
who saw absolutely no value in it,
or at least, paid little attention to it until the year 1868.
In 1868, Modesto Pérez, a hunter -
we’re back to hunting - a hunter enters the Cave of Altamira,
sees the paintings.
He does not shout “toros”, that’s not quite what he does,
but he intuitively understands that it has value, that it can be sold.
He’ll write to the King of Spain
to sell him the Cave of Altamira, to sell him his pseudo-discovery.
Art is never very far away, or too far away, from money.
Finally, Pacman -
everyone knows Pacman, I won’t be drawing him -
is Pacman art?
In the end, that’s the question.
A game that seems so entertaining, so outdated, so old,
can it be art?
Maybe the artists can also answer that.
There’s a French documentary from the early 80s,
called “Sunless”,
directed by Chris Marker.
And Chris Marker tells us that the Pacman he discovered in Japan
in the early 1980s -
the game had not yet arrived in France,
over there, it was a phenomenon -
he tells us that Pacman is an exact reflection of our human condition.
How does a slice of gluttonous pizza reflect our lives?
Let’s have a look at that glutton in his labyrinth.
He eats pretty well.
A bit like us, sometimes he’s looking for food, sometimes he eats.
Sometimes there are good meals.
There are many moments of fear: we don’t know all the twists and turns.
There are moments of joy, moments of glory,
when you escape the ghosts or when you eat them.
But in the end,
it’s always the same routine: Pacman dies.
Pacman is art.
Video games are art, but they’re art in the style of “je ne sais quoi”,
in the style of “toros”.
Thank you.
(Applause)