Art is the process or product of deliberately arranging elements in a way to affect the senses or emotions. It encompasses a diverse range of human activities, creations, and modes of expression.
Roger Ebert gently and gracefully lowered his gazelle-scented testicles into the lions’ den that is the world of video games a couple of days ago. It’s pretty fair to say that he got a reaction. But was it the one he was after?
His contention was that “Video games can never be art”. A strong opening hypothesis. One which has been debated amongst gamers many a time too, with little agreement on the subject. Some feel that yes, games can be art, others feel that no, games can not be art – yet. There are very few people I know who are interested in the world of games – whether or not they think there is currently any evidence of artistic creativity in the medium right now – who would stand up and proudly announce that their chosen form of entertainment will never be art. As Ebert points out in his own article, Rick Wakeman once reminded us that “never is a long, long time”.
So how is Ebert, a respected film critic, so sure on this subject? Well, of course, he’s played some games to back this up, right?
Given the substance of the article, I’m not entirely convinced. He certainly talks about a few games – specifically Waco Resurrection (which I’d never heard of), Braid and Flower. I can’t comment on Waco, having never heard of this game until today, but Braid and Flower are both games that I have played and enjoyed, and I take exception to the manner in which Ebert responds to them – or doesn’t, as the case may be.
When discussing Braid, he mentions the game’s unique selling point – the time rewind mechanic. He even cites the justification for it – the thematic concept of “what if you could go back and fix your own mistakes?” He then spectacularly misses the point by comparing it to cheating in chess… or rather, “negating the discipline” of chess. I agree that taking back moves in chess is counter-productive in developing your own skills, but Braid is a game that is designed around that whole concept. Rather than being a sore loser’s way out, the time rewind mechanic in Braid is a key part of the experience. More to the point, it’s not used purely as a way of avoiding death, as he seems to believe. Instead, use of time and your past self is key to solving the puzzles in Braid, making apt and clever use of the main theme of the story in a practical sense.
It’s his comments on Flower that got me, though. It’s immediately apparent that he hasn’t even played the game at all from this:
We come to Example 3, “Flower”. A run-down city apartment has a single flower on the sill, which leads the player into a natural landscape. The game is “about trying to find a balance between elements of urban and the natural.” Nothing she shows from this game seemed of more than decorative interest on the level of a greeting card. Is the game scored? She doesn’t say. Do you win if you’re the first to find the balance between the urban and the natural? Can you control the flower? Does the game know what the ideal balance is?
“Can you control the flower?” Seriously? I would have thought that a respected critic would bother to actually experience the things he is commenting on before judging them. Flower is one of the most unique experiences there is on a games console – love it or hate it – and it eschews most traditional game mechanics in favour of being a piece of experiential entertainment. The experience you have playing Flower is entirely what you make of it. If you want to play it as a “game” and try to beat the levels as quickly as possible, you can. But most people who have spent any time floating on the wind and listening to that game’s gorgeous soundtrack will agree that there is definitely a sense of narrative to the whole thing. But unlike most games, this sense of narrative is entirely personal to the person playing it. I played it feeling enormously melancholy, feeling an inexplicable sense that someone or something had died. Nothing on the screen suggested that, but that’s what I felt while playing, to an almost overwhelming degree. Others have taken the rather more simplistic – but just as valid – interpretation that “flowers hate steel”.
The problem with Ebert’s comments is that they smack of condescension and arrogance. Ebert is a respected expert in his own field – justifiably so, I might add – and he clearly knows it. Therefore he seems to feel that this gives him the right to judge something which he very obviously knows very little about and has very little interest in pursuing further thanks to his own preconceptions.
Are games art? I don’t have an answer for you, but Justin McElroy’s excellent response to Ebert’s piece raises a very good point – the medium of “games” has evolved so much in such a short space of time that to call the diverse experiences we have with our computers and consoles today simply “games” is a complete misnomer. We interact with these pieces of electronic entertainment for a variety of reasons. Sometimes it’s escapist fantasy. Sometimes it’s role-playing. Sometimes it’s wish-fulfilment. Sometimes it’s a social activity. Sometimes it’s competition. Sometimes it’s to feel an emotional response.
There are as many reasons to “play” as there are “games”, so to damn the entire medium with a blanket statement – “games will never be art” – is misguided and short-sighted. They may not be art now in the eyes of some people, but that is not to say that they will not be in the future. If you take Wiki’s rather broad definition of “art”, listed at the top of this post, games (or whatever you want to call them) are already there.
I will leave you with two tweets from Cody “NintendoTheory” Winn, whom I think sums up the problem with debating this whole question pretty succinctly in the space of 280 characters:
