Art + Video Games = Yes
Interpretation of art is always something that has frustrated me. I used to -and usually still do- greatly enjoy poetry, but some poems I quite enjoyed were ruined for me through constant breakdown and discussion of meaning. I feel that interpretation should be up to the person reading. Sure some poets or authors have specific meanings in mind, but from experience and hearing the words actually come from the author/poet’s mouths, others create with no intention of meaning.
So with that being said, it is always somewhat difficult for me to discuss meanings of things. Simply because I know what they mean to me, and even after discussion as to their “proper” meaning or interpretation, they will rarely change meaning. It’s also difficult for me as an avid gamer not to see video games as a form of art. I have played video games since I first got Pokémon Red for my Gameboy in first grade. The video games I am familiar with playing now are quite different from what they were 15 years ago, and far from earlier games I have seen and played -video and arcade games are now 42 years old!
Video games no longer include just one or two players interacting repetitively in the exact same way, they have added more players and more visual effects (as well as much more, but I’m sure I don’t need to detail everything). Most large scale games (and a lot of smaller scale ones) now include cinématics and large musical scores. In comparison to a movie or television series, I feel as though they can be comparatively similar. In the Halo series, the producers employed an orchestra for almost all of their music in the game and cut-scenes. Some games will also include cinématics within the game that are almost indistinguishable from real life or movies, and many games now use live-action for advertisements (Halo 4 also had a short-film released alongside it, Forward Unto Dawn).
The introductory quote in Ian Bogost’s How To Do Things With Video Games by game developer and philosopher, Jim Preston, sums up most of my views, “To think that there is a single, generally agreed upon concept of art is to get it precisely backwards” (qtd. in Bogost, 9). He later goes on to say that, “…the very idea that ‘art’ means something monolithic and certain is absurd…” (10). As I have almost always felt, meaning completely depends on the person’s experiences and feelings at the moment they witness an artistic piece. When I listen to a symphony, I will most certainly hear and feel different things from those around me. Sure, there are certain aural and visual experiences that are supposed to make us feel a specific way, but the only constant thing about humans is that nothing is ever constant for all of us.
As Bogost says, “Art has done many things in human history, but in the last century especially, it has tried to bother and provoke us” (11). Other good examples of games with large artistic value would be any sort of game with an outcome that makes you really think about a certain topic and the experience you have just had. BioShock: Infinite is one such game, but as I don’t want to ruin anything for anyone this early on, I won’t discuss it. Limbo is another game which makes you think about everything you have just spent the past 3 or 4 hours accomplishing without speech or written plot at any point. It then kind of breaks your heart at the end *Highlight for Spoiler:as you are doomed to repeat your adventure forever since you are, after all, in Limbo. The Walking Dead interactive mini-series of games is another game that requires you to make a choice and then deal with the consequences later on (a more common theme in gaming at present). You can save the girl, or save the farmer’s son. In Fallout 3, you can destroy a small village with a nuclear bomb for a large amount of money, or have that town help you much later down the road. Ico places you in a world with very little spoken -or understandable- language where you have been exiled to a castle for your physical differences. You must escape or lose your soul, while seeing almost everything without music or speech and only your own personal emotions. In the Mass Effect series, all of your choices are carried across 3 games of about 100 hours of playing time and wind up effecting who comes to help you in your personal finale. Games like these invoke morality within the player and allow us to explore both options of a potential future –the ability to save and reload your life are not present in reality. Both Arteroids and Deviant: The Possession of Christian Shaw involve provoking the player to think deeply about the interactions that are taking place in front of them –to destroy poetry with poetry as we saw in class, or to simply believe the general story of a devious little girl who wanted to play fiendish pranks on the people around her.
While I do object to Roger Ebert’s claim that video games are not a form of art, I can see and understand the points he makes. However, chefs and dancers are both considered to be artists in their own way, yet the way they create is quite different from that of a writer or a sculptor. Maybe the easiest way to explain my feelings about the subject is that I think video games are an amalgamation of many art forms such as music, scripts, and visual creativity. If someone objects to something as being a form of art, then they have disrupted the true meaning of art in itself.
Ryan
-Comments and arguments welcome! 😀
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