A Critique of Video Games

To say that there’s a debate on whether or not video games are art is rather disingenuous. There are those who feel that video games are not, but I think it’s been demonstrated that they don’t know what the hell they’re talking about. The very question of “Are video games art” doesn’t make sense. One doesn’t ask if drawings or film are art, these things are a medium through which art can be expressed. Anything can be a medium through which art is expressed, but that doesn’t mean that everything created using that medium is art. I doubt that Mr. Ebert would deny film being a viable medium for art, but he’s not exactly advocating the artistic merits of American Pie either.

And so we could discuss what the qualifications are for artwork, but I could make an entire blog devoted to that. The reality of the situation is that those types of decisions are made by consensus of the art critic community. We currently have a lot of game reviewers, who are paid money to play games and essentially tell the world if those games are worth paying for. This is only a valuable service only insofar as you can trust the integrity and opinions of those reviewers. Likewise, this service could be performed by a community, but is only useful insofar as you can trust the opinions of that community (and if the community is primarily composed of the idiots you find on XBL making various homophobic references, I don’t have a whole lot of faith in that). This is, however, not the same thing as evaluating the esprit of the game, as a work. And this is an area where things get a little fuzzy.

I’ve written before about the separation between an action which is highly addictive, and an action which is personally satisfying. These things are metabolically separate functions within humans. Unfortunately, they are often confused, and this is evidenced by a lack of clear distinction in this concept within the language (i.e. A game is simply “fun”). Case in point: N’Gai Croal chooses desktop tower defense in Slate’s Gaming Club game of the year.

Is obsession a valid selection criterion? I’d say so. It’s certainly one that I apply to other art forms. Whether I’m thinking about my favorite song, album, movie, TV show, novel, or play, I generally pick the one that I’ve responded to the strongest, the one that I can’t stop thinking about.

- N’Gai Croal

We don’t have accepted vocabulary that marks the difference between an experience that stays with you after you leave it because of the profound implications it has (For a film example, Memento) or because the experience was psychologically addictive (Spiderman 2). My point is, you can do both (The Matrix, the first one anyway).

Popularly, Jonathan Blow has seized upon this idea and seems to have emerged as the apologist for the concept. Unfortunately, I don’t feel many people seem to understand what he’s saying. In the same Slate Gaming Club article, Seth Schiesel talks about how Blow hates on Bioshock because it pretends to be an emergent Sandbox, when really it’s a constructed reality. I don’t really think that’s the point. While Blow does seem to prefer the Will Wright-esque emergent concepts that arise from atomic game rules, that’s only because of the satisfying experience it can provide. What he is essentially saying is that most games feed upon artificial scheduled rewards - the drug pathways, in my lingo - while very few provide a meaningful take-away.

What Blow is really asking is this: If we are going to make meaningful art, what is the mechanism that video games afford art that are not done through film, painting, poetry, or music? In his mind that mechanism is the structure of gameplay; the rules of the created world, and the exploration of those rules, should be the source of a certain profound satisfaction. I would call this a ludological art fundamentalist viewpoint. Certainly I can’t think of better contender for what the core of that experience would be, but I would take a more moderate viewpoint. Much as film is a unique medium from stage theatre, to say that the essence of the art in film is only in the cinematographer is disingenuous as well. Much of what makes a truly great film overlaps what makes a great play. So it is with video games.

Blow criticizes Bioshock for creating a non-authentic satisfaction. He argues that Bioshock’s marketing makes the claim that the game is about morality and choice, but this is not evidenced in the gameplay constructs (because your choice is irrelevant). I would say that Bioshock’s marketing as a game about choice is really quite brilliant. The game is not about choice, but rather the illusion of choice (Would you kindly agree with me). The fact that rescuing or saving the little sisters makes little difference in the stable state reinforces this concept, and it does it through gameplay.

Beyond that, I think the game is also a very powerful exploration of Objectivism, and one gets to literally explore the implications of that philosophy. Instead of through narrative and watching it occur, as one experiences in Atlas Shrugged and The Fountainhead, Bioshock literally allows you to explore the aftermath of an environment which had adopted that philosophy, through the use of audio diaries and your experiences with the characters in the game. Those are not strictly ludological concepts, but are borrowed from film, which is perhaps why Blow doesn’t account for them. That Bioshock is able to do this, and at the same time make it relatively straightforward to bypass if you’re interested solely in entertainment shows that this game is a shining star of entertainment and art fused together. No, it’s not perfect, but art rarely is.

I don’t think that many people have explored the dynamic of using the gameplay, devoid of artificial rewards, as this satisfying experience, and that may be why it’s difficult to discuss it. I also think that adopting only the use of gameplay would make a game far more sterile than it could otherwise be. There are parallels between film and video games, and while it is ultimately to our detriment to make games that are trying to be films, ignoring the lessons learned in that medium serves no purpose either.

That said, I think Blow has gone somewhat overboard (which would make sense, considering this fundamentalist position). People who are interested in meaningful, authentically satisfying material will seek it out, and if it’s not available in the medium of video games, it is available in other fashions. Most people are not interested in being enlightened, and seek only entertainment. Having the entire industry produce nothing but games designed to be fine art will only result in the abandonment of the medium, for that exact reason. How many of the novels sold every year are truly profound? How many pieces of cinema leave concepts that dance in your mind as you drift off to sleep?

Daniel Radosh may be hungry for real food, but the rest of the world is clamoring for whatever cheap drugs they can find. This is not new, nor is it a sign of the times. This behavior is endemic of our species, and frankly I suspect it is a requirement for a stable society that most people not be interested in that which is profound. Ultimately most people will continue to make that which is entertaining, and occasionally a visionary will create a profoundly meaningful game. Those games will appeal to a much smaller set of people, and typically have much smaller budgets (would Citizen Kane have been even better if it had a $200 million dollar budget?). That doesn’t mean that AAA titles should not continue to push the boundaries of what is possible to make in video games, to explore the possibility space of what can be done with games, but I don’t think we need to get really whipped up about whether or not our games are art.