The Question I Hate the Most
So the question has come back – the one Ebert put in the news a couple years back, and that he’s arguing again: are games art? Or to split hairs, are they high art?
I hate this question. I hate that it’ll never go away. But I’ll admit, it’s a useful late-night dorm bull session question, and a good way to dissect what you expect or don’t expect from the medium that’s sucking away up to dozens of hours of your life every week.
By way of purging, I’m going to put my stake in the ground. Games aren’t art. They’re clearly something other than art. At their best, they’re a hybrid of the Mona Lisa and the telephone. But they’re definitely not high art, and to explain why, I’ll borrow some arguments I’ve heard about jazz music.
The “high art” that’s survived from before the 20th century had to be built like a cathedral. We’ve had millenia of pop culture, centuries of folk music, plenty of folk storytelling – I’m sure when the lute was big, there was a John Fahey of solo lute playing, and he was probably mindblowing. But none of that matters, because none of it survived. To get something that would stay in recorded history, you had to record it and preserve it, which took a lot of effort. The work had to stand on its own – Beethoven’s force of personality is pretty much a footnote now that the work has survived, and Mozart’s own quirks are kind of a trivia question that doesn’t really do much to legitimate his work, Amadeus aside.
Now, in the 20th century, it became easier to record everything. And it became easier to record moments. Jazz has always had a problem where the brilliant men and women who added to the form seem slightly less prestigious than the Bachs and Beethovens of yesteryear, and to some extent, it’s because they rely on the players and the performances for their greatness. Ellington is “the great jazz composer” but his works are incomplete without the signature soloists who performed it. Miles Davis is great for how he managed his bands as much as the music he wrote or arranged. (There’s a management case study in the Cellar Door sessions alone.) Ornette Coleman has written many great pieces, but the improvised melodies in the middle or the interaction with Don Cherry has cemented his stand.
At the same time, jazz has a problem: even at its best, and even with the benefit of the studio, jazz has turned out few “perfect albums.” Sure, there’s A Love Supreme or Kind of Blue, and maybe Black Saint and Sinner Lady and The Shape of Jazz to Come, but I feel like I’m running out here. Rock makes “perfect albums,” but jazz albums rarely capture a start-to-finish masterpiece. That kind of consistency is anathema to the work. If you’re a serious jazz fan, you’ll delve into “the complete sessions of so and so” or “whoever at the wherever, all five nights,” or pick and choose from multiple versions of “My Favorite Thing,” or best of all, catch these people live.
So let’s look at games. An at the same time, let’s look at the internet. All of a sudden, everyone can participate. Everyone can play and contribute, to some extent. There’s a Duke Ellington somewhere, but we’re his team. Games aren’t high art because they depend on the player as much as the software, but not all of the scenarios you give the players are equal. So maybe the great game artists are the people who create the most engaging and thoughtful scenarios – the ones where the players learn the most about themselves (through thought or action). The Jane McGonigals who get people to go out in the streets and do silly things (though whether she’ll be a formative early designer or a mainstream talent – e.g., a John Cage or a Philip Glass – remains to be seen). The best MMO designers who create the most memorable (separate from “the most fun”) virtual worlds.
This is the part of the argument where everyone should just start arguing, about the games they find most artistic or the characteristics and mechanics they find most thought-provoking. (For me, the two best “art games” I’ve ever played are Planescape: Torment – for the way it applied interactivity to its themes and symbols – and Grim Fandango, for its story and its concept of the afterlife.)
Either way, we’re back at a question about the point of art. There are two broad ways to criticize art: by judging the work itself, or by studying the work alongside the artist who made it. I’m with the latter. I want to communicate with the artist. I’m willing to see works of art as imperfect media for facilitating those communications; I’ve tolerated a lot of less-than-genius stuff because I want to know more about the people who make it. It’s actually probably my softest spot as a critic.
I don’t just love games for their own sake, or for the sake of playing them. I love them because they’re the easiest point of participation in the larger conversation that’s going on across the Internet, around the world, and inside our own heads. With the Internet, we have many new ways to share ideas and share ourselves. But games give structure, pleasure and reward to participation. They create spaces where it can happen more easily. And I don’t want to have to defend that process as “high art.” Like so many other works by people who aren’t yet dead, it’s clearly something else.
EDIT: Changed “jazz albums rarely capture an end-to-end session that stands the test of time.” – which is so wrong – to “jazz albums rarely capture a start-to-finish masterpiece.”
John Cage isn’t mainstream?
*creeps back to her Ivory Tower*
Jessica
July 24, 2007 at 11:34 am
I came up with a counterargument or two, but re-reading your article answered each one. Very thorough and well-argued point of view, and a great read to boot.
Mr.Bubbles
July 24, 2007 at 1:08 pm
I always find this topic interesting, because people never agree. I’m not sure that high art is really something to aspire to. As far as I’m concerned high art is only regarded as ‘more art’ because it’s god rich patrons stamping their ego’s all over it.
I’m not entirely sure you mean Jazz isn’t as quality art as classical music, but there are certainly those that do think that. I disagree completely with that, since I love Jazz so much. Jazz is about as close to a classical music, as modern visual art is to Rembrandt. Jazz has many forms and shapes, changes all the time, is still very much alive and active. There are many Jazz albumns that stand the test of time, Kind of Blue is just a premium example of that (there are far less Rock albumns that do that).
Anyway, my personal taste for Jazz is besides the point. Art is fundamentally subjective. In terms of games, I think it can be art. I consider Shadow the Colossus art, not because of the visual style, but because of the pacing, the simplicity, the emotional response, and the depth and significance of ideas that it illicit from me.
It might not match a book like Siddhartha or The Glass Bead Game, but it shows me the direction the medium’s potential is in.
The fact that there are so few games in that league doesn’t mean that the medium is limited, just that the boundaries are yet to be pushed.
It’s just a matter of time that a game matches a Casablanca or a Raymond Chandler novel.
Games certainly aren’t art in the sense we have experienced up till now, but they will redefine how we perceive and experience art.
Just like jazz, cinema, modern novels, pop art, abstract art and sculpture. Art is constantly changing, stretching and expanding, redefining itself, making fun of itself.
Just because games aren’t stamped with the ego’s of the ruling class doesn’t exclude them from being art. One day they’ll give out arts council grants to indie developers.
nectarine
July 25, 2007 at 7:52 am
I shouldn’t have said that jazz records don’t “stand the test of time,” that was pretty poor phrasing on my part. I’m a huge jazz fan, and I hold it up as equal to pretty much anything on this earth. I’m trying, and not succeeding, to explain how rock bands can be evaluated by single finished products like LPs, but by and large that just ain’t the way jazz works. Monk is a great example – he has several really, really good albums but he never turned out a single perfect product like “Kind of Blue” – or “Revolver” – or Beethoven’s 9th. That doesn’t mean his body of work was less than a masterpiece, but he never produced one end-to-end masterpiece. But my use of terms here is crude.
In fact, I’m going to edit the entry.
“One day they’ll give out arts council grants to indie developers.” – That would be fantastic.
savetherobot
July 25, 2007 at 8:41 am
Y’know, I really think that “art,” like anything else, is totally subjective, and things that persist as “high art” do so because a large percentage of popular opinion finds it affecting. There’s some crap at the MOMA right now worth millions of bucks that just look to me like somebody puked on it; yet every parent or older sibling can attest that one little piece of crayon-scrawl brought home by a small child brought tears to their eyes for some very personal reason.
Games keep getting dragged into the discussion because they’re affecting, because gamers feel very strongly about certain titles. Add into that the fact that some of ‘em are getting to look breathtakingly beautiful, and there you go. But games are subject to… well, subjectivity, and the sheep mentality of popular opinion, too. I’m a game writer; I would never be caught dead saying that Gears of War is boring and I never looked twice at it. But there, I said it.
To me, the definition of art is something that tells the story of not only the individual, but the culture from whence it came. I don’t really like, for example, impressionist paintings, but I look at things like pointilism and then cubism and I have to smile at how shocked those old fuddy-duddies must have been that someone would try to paint that way. Just having a “message” or being “affecting” doesn’t seem to be enough, for me. Revolver’s art. Prominent Jazz is art, because they tell the story of a time, a spirit and a movement. Will we look back in twenty years and point out a game that did that? And if that game is 8-bit Mario Bros, does the comparison even work? I don’t think so, personally.
Could art take the form of a game? That’s a little more interesting a question, with the way that games are being used for everything from political commentary to cultural confab and selling stuffed toys.
Leigh
July 25, 2007 at 11:35 am
I love reading about this. It’s really facinating to hear what people think of when they think of art.
All this talk of art and not art reminded me of my favourite piece of irony as art. Which is literally a pile of shit. Piero Manzoni canned his own shit and the Tate bought a bunch of them for £22,300. I quite like the idea.
nectarine
July 25, 2007 at 10:57 pm